"Friedman,.C.S.-.Coldfire.2.-.When.True.Night.Falls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Friedman C. S)

by some winged creature that had accosted her while she slept, he
wasn't surprised to hear her bunkmate describe it as a creature
straight out of East Indian mythology. Something that fed on
nightmares, he recalled. Only this time it got carried away, and fed
on flesh as well.

Jesus Christ. Where was it going to end?

Thirty-six dead. That was out of the three thousand and some odd
colonists who had survived the coldsleep journey to this place, to
stand under the light of an alien sun and commit themselves body
and soul to building a new world. His world. Now they were all at
risk. And dammit, the seedship should have foreseen this! It was
supposed to survey each planet in question until there was no
doubt, absolutely no doubt, that the colonists would thrive there. If
not, it was programmed to move on to the next available system. In
theory it was a foolproof procedure, designed to protect Earth's
explorers from the thousand and one predictable hazards of
extraterrestrial colonization. Like rival predators. Incompatible
protein structures. Climatic instability.

The key word there was predictable.

Case looked up at the starless night sky - so black, so empty, so
utterly alien - and found himself shivering. What did a Terran
seedship do when it had surveyed a thousand systems - perhaps
tens of thousands - and still it had found no hospitable world for its
charges? Would there come a time when its microchips would
begin to wear, when its own mechanical senility would force it to
make one less than ideal choice? Or was all this the fault of the
programmers, who had never foreseen that a ship might wander so
far, for so long, without success? Go outward, they had directed it,
survey each planet you come across, and if it does not suit your
purpose, then refuel and go outward farther still. He thought of
Erna's midnight sky, so eerie in its utter starlessness. What was a
program like that supposed to do when it ran out of options? When
the next move would take it beyond the borders of the galaxy, into
regions so utterly desolate that it might drift forever without finding
another sun, another source of fuel? Was it supposed to leap
blindly into that void, its circuits undisturbed by the prospect of
eternal solitude? Or would it instead survey its last available option
again and again, time after time, until at last its circuits had
managed whatever convolution of logic was required to determine
that the last choice was indeed acceptable, by the terms of its
desperation? So that there, tens of thousands of light-years from
Earth, separated by a multimillenial gap in communication, the four
thousand colonists might be awakened at last.

We'll never know, Commander Case thought grimly. The bulk of
the seedship was high above them now, circling the tormented