"Peter Watts - Ambassador" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watts Peter)

using raw starlight even without the onboard, but whatever was
after me had never given me the chance. Several times I'd made a
start. The longest reprieve had lasted six hours; in that time I'd
placed myself somewhere coreward of the Orion spur.
I'd stopped trying. Knowing my location at any moment would
put me no further ahead at t+1. I'd be lost again as soon as I
jumped.
And I always jumped. It always found me. I still don't know
how; theoretically it's impossible to track anything through a
singularity. But somehow space always opened its mouth and the
monster dropped down on me, hungry and mysterious. It might
have been easier to deal with if I'd known why.
What did I do, you ask. What did I do to get it so angry? Why,
I tried to say hello.
What kind of intelligence could take offence at that?
Imagine a dead tree, three hundred fifty meters tall, with six
gnarled branches worming their way from its trunk. Throw it into
orbit around a guttering red dwarf that doesn't even rate a proper
name. This is what I'd come upon; there were no ports, no running
lights, no symbols on the hull. It hung there like some forgotten
chunk of cosmic driftwood. Embers of reflected sunlight glinted
occasionally from the surface; they only emphasised the shadows
drowning the rest of the structure. I thought it was derelict at first.
Ambassador 3

Of course I went through the motions anyway. I reached out on
all the best wavelengths, tried to make contact a hundred different
ways. For hours it ignored me. Then it sent the merest blip along
the hydrogen band. I fed it into the onboard.
What else do you do with an alien broadcast?
The onboard had managed one startled hiccough before it
crashed. All the stats on my panel had blinked once, in impossible
unison, and gone dark.
And then doppler had registered the first incoming missile.
So I'd jumped, blind. There really hadn't been a choice, then or
the four times since. Sometime during that panicked flight, I had
given my tormentor a name: Kali.
Unless Kali had gotten bored—hope springs eternal, even
within puppets such as myself—I'd have to run again in a few
hours. In the meantime I aimed Zombie at the binary and put her
under thrust. Open space is impossible to hide in; a system, even a
potential one, is marginally better.
Of course I'd have to jump long before I got there. It didn't
matter. My reflexes were engineered to perform under all
circumstances. Zombie's autopilot may have been disabled, but
mine engaged smoothly.
It takes time to recharge between jumps. So far, it had taken
longer for Kali to find me. At some point that was likely to
change; the onboard had to be running again before it did.
I knew there wasn't a hope in hell.