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

IMPACT: T plus 4 hours, 6 minutes

Two hundred and forty-six minutes after the Zero Incident, the freighter Taxis Pride congealed out of empty space, forty-six degrees out of the plane of the ecliptic, six light hours away from its final destination. Brad Momington, skipper, was on the flight deck, nattering with Mary Haight, the relativistics op. Taxis Pride was a three-point shuttle, connecting Moscow to Iceland Seven station, thence to the Septagonese transshipment outpost at Blaylock B. Brad had made this zone transfer eighteen times in the past seven years, and it was as routine as the mug of strong, heavily sugared coffee that Alex placed by his elbow before the jump countdown commenced, which was just then cooling down enough to drink.

Brad put out the standard navigation squawk and waited for a detailed flight path. In the meantime he pondered the food situation: the kitchen was getting somewhat monotonous, and the downside ferry would give him a chance to stretch his legs and reacquaint himself with clouds and sky again. Taxis Pride was a fast freighter, built to carry time-critical physical mail and perishables. The extremal singularity in her drive core let her accelerate in real space as rapidly as some warships: six light hours was a one-week cruise for her, not the painful odyssey an old hydrogen burner would have to endure. Mary concentrated on a backup star fix — routine, in case the traffic controllers were on strike again, just to keep her professional certification up to date. In her spare moments she was wondering if there’d be time to drop in on an old friend while they were docked for their cargo load cycle.

Then the bridge screamer went off.

“What the — get that!” Brad’s coffee went flying as he scrambled for the comm terminal. Mary jolted upright, whey-faced.

“Got it. That’s not traffic—”

“Hello, this is flight Echo Gold Nine Zero responding to broadcast squawk from, ah, Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, we have handshake. What’s the—”

“Something flaky here, boss—”

Red flashing lights blinked on the conference circuit. There was a thirty-second delay while they waited tensely for a reply.

“Echo Gold Nine Zero this is Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, emergency relay service. Admiralty signal blue four, authentication follows message. This is a systemwide military emergency. Moscow is under quarantine — the whole system is under lockdown, no exceptions. Evacuate immediately. I emphasize, get your kernel spun up and get out of here immediately! Please acknowledge.”

Brad flushed, furious. “This is some sort of fucking joke!” He waved off the authentication code and punched in the waypoint series for Moscow. “When I find the asshole—”

“Brad. Come here.” He looked round sharply. Mary was leaning over the repeater from Wang’s crow’s nest downstairs. She looked sick.

“What is it?”

“Here.” She pointed to a plot that had just shown up. Taxis Pride was a fleet auxiliary, liable for mobilization in event of war: it carried near-military-grade passive sensors. “Gamma plot, classic proton-antiproton curve, about two AUs out. It’s redshifting on us. I got a fix on that relay service buoy, Brad: it’s at the origin point for that … burn.”

“Shit!” The screen swam in front of Brad’s eyes. All of a sudden he remembered what it was like when he was nine, when his father told him his dog had died. “Shit!” Positronium was an unstable intermediate created during some matter-antimatter reactions. Redshifted, it was moving away from the reference frame of the observer at some fraction of the speed of light. Out from the star, it could mean only one thing — slower-than-light antimatter rockets, relativistic retaliation bombers cranking up for a kamikaze run on someone’s home world. “They’ve launched. They’ve fucking launched the deterrent fleet!”

They were a long-practiced team: he didn’t have to tell Mary what to do. She was already bringing back up the gravitational potential maps he’d need for the jump. Brad canceled his half-planned course and fed in the return journey jump coordinates. “Hello Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, this is flight Echo Gold Nine Zero acknowledging. We are preparing to return to Iceland Seven soonest. Can you clarify the situation for us. Other shipping may be in the queue and need warning off. Do you need assistance? Over.” Then he got on the blower to Liz, down in kernel monitoring, explaining to her that, no, this wasn’t a joke, and yes, he was going to overrun the drive maintenance cycle, and yes, it was going to put the Pride in the dock for a month and there was a good reason for it all — “Echo Gold Nine Zero, departure cleared. This is Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, relaying through NavServ buoy six-nine-three via causal channel. Situation as follows: inner system exterminated by surprise attack using weapons of mass destruction approximately two-seven-zero minutes ago absolute time. Your range three-six-zero light minutes considered marginal for survival: the star’s gone. We’re assuming one hundred percent fatalities on Moscow, repeat, one hundred percent. V-force has launched, but we’ve got no idea who did it. As of two hours ago, Moscow system is under complete interdict. Wait—” for a moment the steady voice wavered. “Oh. Oh my! That felt weird.” A pause. “Echo Gold Nine Zero, we’ve just taken a core radiation pulse. Funny, two kilometers of rock shielding outside us. Ah, shit. Off the scale. Neutrinos, has to be. Echo Gold Nine Zero, this is Delta X-ray Zeus Seven, there’s — I don’t think there’s anything you can do for us. Get the hell out while you still can — warn everybody off. Signing off now.”

Brad stared at the comm status display without seeing it. Then he mashed his palm down on the general channel glyph. “Crew, captain speaking.” He glanced at Mary and saw her staring back at him. Waiting. “We have a situation. Change of plan.” Glancing down at his panel he blinked and dragged the urgent course correction into the flight sequence. “We’re not going home. Ever.” Taxis Pride was the first ship to leave Moscow system after the explosion. Another two ships made it out, one of them badly damaged by jumping into the tail of the shock wave. Word of the explosion filtered out: several freighters were saved from jumping into a fiery grave by dint of a massive and well-coordinated emergency alert. Over the next few weeks, the inhabitants of the Iceland Seven refinery station — a mere eight light months from Moscow — were evacuated to Shenjen Principality, and as the shock wave rolled outward, more vulnerable habitats were evacuated in turn. The nearest populated planetary system, Septagon Central, was far enough away to be saved by the heavy radiation shielding on its orbital republics. Meanwhile, years would pass before another starship visited the radiation-scarred corpse of Moscow system.