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

after the charismatic dictators of an historical era. Had they ever dreamed of their heirs
overrunning the galaxy, taking the stars by storm? Oshi blinked and concentrated on the
ship-status readings.

" -- anomaly in flow-rate through coolant circuit three indicative of probable pump fail-
urrre ..." the voice of the autopilot suddenly slurred, like a mechanical transcription device
running down. " Service interrupt: systems coming up. Sentience
will be resumed shortly. Incoming message: hello Oshi."

"You again." Oshi glared at the face in the display tank, relieved that it wasn't a major
systems failure.

"Me." The disembodied head nodded. "Had some trouble with synchronicity; we're living
at a fluctuating timebase in here. There's only a thousand of us drawing unlimited process
time allocation, but the rest of Pascal is a real meat farm. It was never intended to hold a
billion evacuees. Seriously thrashing, halfway to hyperslow time already. We're waiting
for your status, Oshi."

"Oh, that." Oshi rubbed her brow wearily. "The status ..." all of a sudden a flicker of fire
returned to her eyes. "Looks good. Downloads are proceeding: if the tapeworm doesn't
learn to sing in time, well ... I've got a little treat in store for it when we leave. What's new
at your end?" She watched the display alertly.

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4: Will you still love me ...



Boris looked away from her with disembodied eyes. "We think it's turning critical. We're
not sure yet, but we figure we know where the Ultrabright ship's come from. System about
fifty light years core-ward. Anyway there's a bit of inference ... we figure it's getting ready
to listen for something. That's why it's drifting; when it fires up that drive it kicks out
enough hard radiation to obscure an incoming broadcast. It's waiting for a download. A
big download. Real soon now."

"How long?" Oshi asked calmly. Palms sweating, brute metabolism scavenging
excitement from glands and nerves she had long since ceased to pay attention to --

"We don't know." Boris spoke slowly and clearly. "Best guess is within six months. It's in
high orbit around Turing now. It just made an aerobraking pass -- should have seen that
coming. The astrophysics team think it's generating another black hole. They also expect
Wirth to detonate pretty soon. The hole it dropped through Wirth's lithosphere is
evaporating, losing energy through Hawking radiation. When it goes it will release the
mass energy of the last hundred kilotonnes of mass in about a hundred milliseconds.
When that happens, we loose our last assets apart from the colony and Pascal Dreamtime.
We need to launch soon, Oshi."

"Ahh." Oshi watched Boris through half-closed eyes. "Two days should suffice, I think."

"Good."