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

had replaced the photosphere. Not far behind them, a tidal wave of hard gamma radiation and neutrons a
billion times brighter than the star ripped through the lower layers, blasting them apart. The dying star
flashed a brilliant X-ray pulse like a trillion hydrogen bombs detonating in concert: and the neutrino
pulse rolled out at the speed of light.
Eight minutes later—about a minute after she noticed the problem with the flare monitors—the
meteorologist frowned. A hot, prickling flush seemed to crawl across her skin, itching: her vision was
inexplicably streaked by crawling purple meteors. The desk in front of her flickered and died. She
inhaled, smelling the sharp stink of ozone, looked round shaking her head to clear the sudden fog, and
saw her colleague staring at her and blinking. "Hey, I feel like somebody just walked on my grave—"
The lights flickered and died, but she had no trouble seeing because the air was alive with an eerie glow,
and the small skylight window cast razor-sharp shadows on the floor. Then the patch of floor directly
illuminated by the window began to smoke, and the meteorologist realized, fuzzily, that she wasn't going
to buy that house after all, wasn't going to tell her partner about it, wasn't ever going to see him again, or
her parents, or her sister, or anything but that smoking square of brilliance that was slowly growing as
the window frame burned away.

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Charles%20Stross%20-%20Iron%20Sunrise.htm (11 of 305)9-12-2006 0:05:53
 IRON SUNRISE - Charles Stross



She received a small mercy: mere seconds later the upper atmosphere—turned into an anvil of plasma
by the passing radiation pulse—reached the tropopause. Half a minute later the first shock wave leveled
her building. She didn't die alone; despite the lethal dose they all received from the neutrino pulse,
nobody on the planet lived past the iron sunrise for long enough to feel the pangs of radiation sickness.


IMPACT: T plus 1392 days, 12 hours, 16 minutes
Wednesday hid under the desk, heart pounding with terror, clutching a stubby cylinder. She'd seen the
body of the customs officer stuffed inside the darkened kitchen; realized he was dead, like the
handwritten instructions in the diplomatic pouch said. Now the thing that did it was coming for her, and
she wished—
There was a scratching click of claws on polycellulose flooring. I don't want to be here, she prayed,
fingers slipping around the sweat-lubed cylinder. This isn't happening to me! She could see the
hellhound outside, imagining it in her mind's eye: jaws like diamond saw blades, wide-set eyes glowing
with the overspill from its phased-array lidar. She could see the small, vicious gun implanted in its
hollow skull, its brains governed by a set of embedded computers to override its Doberman instincts.
Fist-sized overlapping bald patches, psoriatic skin thickening over diamond mesh armor. It could smell
her fear. She'd read the papers in the strong room, realized how important they must be, and pushed the
door ajar, thinking to leave—yanked it shut barely ahead of the snarl and the leap. Acrid smoke had
curled up from the hinges as she scrambled into the ductwork, fled like a black-clad spider into the
service axis and through the pressurized cargo tunnel and the shadows of the almost-empty dock,
panting and crying as she went. Always hearing a scrabble of diamond-tipped claws on the floor behind
her. I don't exist. You can't smell me!
Herman—as usual, when she needed him most—wasn't talking.
The dog could smell her—or smell someone. She'd tabbed into a public term and watched the dog, or
one of its cousins, stalk across the loading bay like the spectral, elongated shadow of a wolf—something
born in frozen forests beneath a midnight sun, evolved to lope across the cyborg-infested tundra of an
alien world. It had glanced at the hidden camera with glowing eyes, a glow that spun into static as it
locked on and fired. It could sneeze nerve gas and shit land mines, if you believed her kid brother Jerm's