"Charles Stross - Iron Sunrise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

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 IRON SUNRISE - Charles Stross


accommodation deck, so what was it doing here? A quick once-over of the mounting bolts revealed
another anomaly—a fine wire leading down through a hole in the floor of the duct. It was obviously an
alarm cable. Not the sort of unreliable IR sensor that might be set off by a passing maintenance pig, nor
a nerve garden eyeball sensor to be bamboozled by shadows, but an honest old-fashioned burglar alarm!
She attacked it with her multitool and the compact maintenance kit she'd acquired a few months ago.
Wires were easy—
A minute later she had the filtration hood unbolted and angled up at one side. Dropping an eyeball
through was the work of seconds. Her camera-on-a-thread—disguised as a toy spider—swam in dizzy
circles, revealing a cramped room, locked inner door, shelves with boxes secured to four of the walls.
Purser's office or captain's locker? Wednesday couldn't tell, but it was obviously where they kept the
high-value cargo, anything compact that had to be shipped in a safe under lock and key, accessible for
inspection during the voyage. Deeds. Share certificates. Papers, orders, DNA samples, cypher keys, the
odd rare piece of proprietary software. "Why don't you go look?" a familiar voice prodded her. Herman
blinked a schematic behind her eyes. "Observe: according to this original blueprint this room should he
part of the Captain's quarters."
"Think I'll find any treasure inside?" asked Wednesday, already looking for an attachment point for her
rope. The lure of forbidden fruit was more than she'd ever been able to resist.
Locked doors. A teenage girl going through one of those phases. Modifications to a standard lifesystem.
Stop all the clocks: a star has died. Blue plastic toy spiders. Confidential orders handwritten on dumb
paper. Invisible playmates. Badge dropped down lift shaft. Respiration stops: the universe holds its
breath. And …



THE IRON SUNRISE

IMPACT: T zero
Just outside the expanding light cone of the present a star died, iron-bombed.
Something—some exotic force of unnatural origin—twisted a knot in space, enclosing the heart of a
stellar furnace. A huge loop of superstrings twisted askew, expanding and contracting until the core of
the star floated adrift in a pocket universe where the timelike dimension was rolled shut on the scale of
the Planck length, and another dimension—one of the closed ones, folded shut on themselves, implied
by the standard model of physics—replaced it. An enormous span of time reeled past within the pocket


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 IRON SUNRISE - Charles Stross


universe, while outside a handful of seconds ticked by.
From the perspective of the drifting core, the rest of the universe appeared to recede to infinity,
vanishing past an event horizon beyond which it was destined to stay until the zone of expansion
collapsed. The blazing ball of gas lit up its own private cosmos, then slowly faded. Time passed,
uncountable amounts of time wrapped up in an eyeblink from the perspective of the external universe.
The stellar core cooled and contracted, dimming. Eventually a black dwarf hung alone, cooling toward