"Charles Stross - Love me" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

Stop worrying, she berated herself. It's a dumb attack drone, just a million times bigger
than anything we'd build. If it doesn't see us it's not going to come looking. We're fleas, we
can sneak up on it. Or die trying. She had a sudden, ghastly vision: eighty ships launched
into the void with insufficient reaction mass to return and nothing much to go back to
anyway. The enemy ship, listening to the orders of a silent voice, fired up its black-hole
powered drive, squashed atoms into fragments of exotic energy, accelerated outwards.
The eighty ships drifted endlessly out into the Kuiper belt on a long, slow orbit that took
their mummified crews ten thousand years out into the starry night before falling back
sunwards.

Oshi tugged on her monofilament reels, adjusting her position relative to the wall of the
docking bay. The ugly vision receded. She chuckled tiredly to herself and spooled in some
cable, dragging herself round the command module of the spaceship. A spider, dangling
from a fullerene fibre web. The airlock swung into view. She closed in, motors humming
in her suit as she zeroed in on it. Presently the lock turned into a trapdoor, swinging up
beneath her feet to latch into place with a metallic clank.

There was a puff of vapour as the cramped lock chamber flooded with air; snowflakes
glittered briefly in the chill. Oshi waited for pressure equalization, then checked the gas
mix before she opened the inner lock door. Uneasily aware of her vulnerability, she
commanded her wisdom to log all changes to the life-support environment while she was
aboard the ship. Safety in paranoia, she thought ironically. If only there was some other
way ...


file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Stross,%20Charles%20-%20loveme%20(ss).html (24 of 41)4-7-2007 2:25:53
4: Will you still love me ...


The interior of the Bronstein wasn't configured for gravity: under the stress of even half a
gee the hull would concertina like a tube of foil. Still, there was enough volume for one
person to live in for years. Its cylindrical segments were split by hexagonal blue grids with
spidery furniture clipped to them. Storage lockers lined every outer wall, adding to the
shielding thickness of the hull. Oshi made her way to the command module and let the
gentle hammock tie her into place. The main display sparked into life, shifting colours like
a rainbow. She grinned, hollow-eyed before the light that washed across her face.

"List shipboard systems status," she requested.

"Ship personna is not active at present. General status is green for launch level three and
holding at T minus one thousand seconds. Exceptions to status occur in three subsystems
--" the bootstrap autopilot rattled on emotionlessly, flashing through entity-relation
diagrams with faulty nodes highlighted in blinking red. Oshi followed it with half her
mind. Bronstein, she mused; what would you say if you'd lived to see this day ... She'd
learned about him, and the others the ships were named after, under the tuition of the
Superbrights. Lev Bronstein had been in the grave for over fourteen hundred years. An
interesting historical curio, prophet of a religion that exploded from birth to death in less
than two centuries: someone had seen fit to resurrect his memories for this ship. Like the
sister-craft, the Kennedy and the Thatcher and the Hitler ... the entire fleet was named