"Peter F. Hamilton - The Reality Dysfunction" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

Beezling lurched round violently, drive deflector coils working at maximum pitch, taking advantage of
the momentary blind spot to change course. A second volley of combat wasps shot out of their bays
around the attack cruiser's lower hull, just in time to meet a new salvo fired from the blackhawks.
Peter had barely managed to roll off the acceleration couch where he was sitting, landing hard on the floor
of Alkad's cabin, when the terrible acceleration began. He watched helplessly as Alkad's left leg slowly
gave way under the crushing gee force; her whimpering filling him with futile guilt. The composite deck
was trying to ram its way up through his back. His neck was agony. Half of the stars he could see were
pain spots, the rest were a datavised nonsense. The flight computer had reduced the external combat arena
to neat ordered graphics which buffeted against priority metabolic warnings. He couldn't even focus his
thoughts on them. There were more important things to worry about, like how the hell was he going to
force his chest up so he could breathe again? Suddenly the gravity field shifted. He left the decking
behind, and slammed into the cabin wall. His teeth were punched clean through his lip; he heard his nose
break with an ugly crunch Hot blood squirted into his mouth, frightening him. No wound could possibly
heal in this environment. He would very probably bleed to death if this went on much longer. Then
gravity righted again, squeezing him back against the decking. He screamed in shock and pain. The
datavised visualisation from the flight computer had collapsed into an eerily calm moir├й pattern of red,
green, and blue lines. Darkness was encroaching around the edges.
The second clash of combat wasps took place over a wider front. Sensors and processors on both sides
were overloaded and confused by the vivid nebula and its wild energy efflux. New explosions were
splattered against the background of destruction.
Some of the attacking combat wasps pierced the defensive cordon. A third volley of defenders left the
Beezling.
Six thousand kilometres away, another nuclear- fuelled nebula burst into existence as the Chengho fought
off its solitary hunter's swarm of combat wasps. The Gombari wasn't so fortunate. Its antimatter-
confinement chambers were shattered by the incoming weapons. Beezling's sensor filters engaged
instantly as an ephemeral star ignited. Kyle Prager lost his datavised visualisation across half of the
universe. He never saw the blackhawk which attacked the frigate wrenching open a wormhole interstice
and vanish within, fleeing the lethal sleet of radiation its attack had liberated. The combat wasp closing on
Beezling at forty-six gees analysed the formation of the robot defenders approaching it. Missiles and
ECM pods raced away, fighting a fluid battle of evasion and deception for over a tenth of a second. Then
the attacker was through, a single defender left between it and the starship, moving to intercept, but
slowly, the defender had only just left its launch cradle, accelerating at barely twenty gees.
Situation displays flipped into Kyle Prager's mind. The blackhawks' positions, their trajectories. Combat
wasp performance. Likely reserves. He reviewed them, mind augmented by the tactics program, and
made his decision, committing half of his remaining combat wasps to offensive duties. Beezling rang like
a bell as they launched.
At a hundred and fifty kilometres from its prey, the incoming combat wasp's guidance processors
computed it wouldn't quite reach the starship before it was intercepted. It ran through the available
options, making its choice. At a hundred and twenty kilometres away it loaded a deactivation sequence
into the hardware of the seven antimatter-confine chambers it was carrying. At ninety-five kilometres
away the magnetic field of the first confinement chamber snapped off. Forty- six gravities took over. The
frozen pellet of antimatter was smashed into the rear wall. Long before contact was actually made the
magnetic field of the second confinement chamber was switched off. All seven shut down over a period
of a hundred picoseconds, producing a specifically shaped blast At eighty-eight kilometres away, the
antimatter pellets had annihilated an equal mass of matter, resulting in a titanic energy release. The spear
of plasma which formed was a thousand times hotter than the core of a star, hurtling towards the Beezling
at relativistic velocities.
Sensor clusters and thermodump panels vaporised immediately as the stream of disassociated ions
slammed into the Beezling. Molecular-binding force generators laboured to maintain the silicon hull's
integrity, a struggle they were always destined to lose against such ferocity. Breakthrough occurred in a