"Scott Westerfeld - Succession 1 - The Risen Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westerfeld Scott)

down. But the four surviving craft were already beginning to fall.
Marx checked the altimeter's last reading: 174 centimeters. At that height, the craft
would take at least a minute before they hit the ground. Even with its sensor array
furled and main rotor stalled, in a normal-density atmosphere an intelligence craft fell
no faster than a speck of dust.
Indeed, the Intelligencers were not much larger than specks of dust, and were
somewhat lighter. With a wingspan of a single millimeter, they were very small craft
indeed.

Master Pilot Jocim Marx, Imperial Naval Intelligence, had flown microships for
eleven years. He was the best.
He had scouted for light infantry in the Coreward Bands Revolt. His machine then
had been the size and shape of two hands cupping water, the hemispherical surface
holed with dozens of carbon whisker fans, each of which could run at its own speed. He
was deployed on the battlefield in those days, flying his craft through a VR helmet. He
stayed with the platoon staff under their portable forcefield, wandering about blind to
his surroundings. That had never set easy with him; he constantly imagined a slug
finding him, the real world intruding explosively on the synesthetic realm inside his
helmet. Marx was very good, though, at keeping his craft steady in the unpredictable
Bandian winds. His craft would paint enemy snipers with an undetectable x-ray laser,
which swarms of smart needle-bullets followed to unerring kills. Mark's steady hand
could guide a projectile into a centimeter-wide seam in personal armor, or through the
eye-slit of a sniper's camopolymer blind.
Later, he flew penetrators against Rix hovertanks in the Incursion. These projectiles
were hollow cylinders, about the size of a child's finger. They were launched by
infantryman, encased in a rocket-propelled shell for the first half of their short flight.
When the penetrator deployed, breaking free the instant it spotted a target, it flew
purely on momentum. Ranks of tiny control surfaces lined the inside of the cylinder,
like the baleen plates of some plankton-feeder. The weapon's supersonic flight was an
exercise in extreme delicacy. Too hard a nudge and a penetrator would tumble
uselessly. But when it hit a Rix tank just right, its maw precisely aligned to the
hexagonal weave of the armor, it cut through metal and ceramic like a rip propagating
down a cloth seam. Inside, the projectile disintegrated into countless molecular viruses,
breaking down the machine in minutes. Marx flew dozens of ten-second missions each
day, and was plagued at night with fitful microdreams of launch and collision.
Eventually, backpack AI proved better for the job than human pilots, but Marx's old
flight recordings were still studied by nascent intelligences for their elegance and flair.
The last few decades, Marx had worked with the Navy. Small craft were now truly
small, fullerene constructions no bigger than a few millimeters across when furled, built
by even smaller machines and powered by exotic transuranium batteries. They were
largely for intelligence gathering, although they had offensive uses. Marx had flown a
specially fitted Intelligencer into a fiberoptic AI hub during the Dhantu Liberation,
carrying a load of glass-eating nanos that had dismantled the rebel's communication
system planetwide within minutes.
Master Pilot Marx preferred the safety of the Navy. At his age, being on the battlefield
had lost its thrill. Now Marx controlled his craft from shipside, hundreds of kilometers
away from the action. He reclined in the comfort of a smartgel seat like some fighter
pilot of yore, bathed in synesthetic images that allowed him three levels of sight, the
parts of his brain normally dedicated to hearing, smell, and tactile sensations all given
over to vision. Marx experienced his ship's environment as a true pilot should, as if he