"M. John Harrison - Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

'Go back to your posts,' she ordered them, 'or I'll have the portholes taken out.'
'We're always at our posts тАФ
'I'm sure we never meant to upset you, dear.'
тАФ always at our posts, dear.'
As if this had been a signal, La Vie F├йerique, running fast upside the local sun, blundered into a
minefield.
The mines, two micrograms of antimatter steered on to station by hydrazine eng: nes etched into silicon
wafers a centimetre square, weren't much more intelligent than a mouse; but once they knew you were
there, you were dead. It was the old dilemma. You daren't move and you daren't stop moving. The crew
of La Vie F├йerique understood what was happening to them, even though it was very quick. Seria Mau
could hear them screaming at one another as the yawl split lengthwise and levered itself apart. Not long
after that, two of the freighters ran into one another as, dynaflow drivers clawing at the spatial fabric, they
broke cover on desperate, half-calculated E&E trajectories. The third slunk quietly away into the debris
around the gas giant, where it turned everything off and prepared to wait her out.
'No, no, this is not how we do it,' said Seria Mau. 'You tubby little thing.'
She appeared from nowhere on its port stern quarter and allowed herself to be detected. This
produced an explosion of internal coms traffic and a satisfying little dash for safety, to which she put an
end with some of her more serious тАФ if less sophisticated тАФ ordnance. The flare of the explosion lit up
several small asteroids and, briefly, the wreckage of the yawl, which, locked into the local chaotic
attractor, toppled past end over end, wrapped in a rather beautiful radioactive glow.
'What does that mean?' Seria Mau asked the shadow operators: ' La Vie Feerique?'
No answer.
A little later she matched velocities with the wreckage and hung there while it wheeled slowly around
her: buckled hull plates, monolithic items of dynaflow machinery, what looked like mile upon mile of
slowly weaving cable. 'Cable?' Seria Mau laughed. 'What kind of technology is that?' You could see
every strange thing out there on the Beach, ideas washed up a million years ago, modified to trick out
tubby little ships like these. In the end, the bottom line was this: everything worked. Wherever you
looked, you found. That was everyone's worst nightmare. That was the excitement of it all. Preoccupied
by these thoughts, she eased the White Cat further in, to where the corpses turned in the vacuum. They
were human. Men and women about her own age, bloated, frozen, limbs at odd, sexual angles, slowly
cartwheeling through an atmosphere of their own possessions, they streamed past her bow. She nosed
between them, looking for something in their expres-sions of dull fear and acceptance, though she was
not sure what. Evidence. Evidence of herself.
'Evidence of myself,' she mused aloud.
'All around you,' whispered the shadow operators, giving her tragic glances from between their lacy
fingers. 'And look!'
They had located a single survivor in a vacuum suit, a bulky white figure windmilling its arms, trying to
walk on nothing, opening and closing on itself like some kind of undersea life as it doubled up in pain or
perhaps only fear and disorientation and denial. I suppose, thought Seria Mau, listening to its
transmissions, you would close your eyes and tell yourself, 'I can get out of this if I stay calm'; then open
them and understand all over again where you were. That would be enough to make you scream like
that.
She was wondering how to finish the survivor off when a fraction of a shadow passed across her. It
was another vessel. It was huge. Alarms went off all over the K-ship. Shadow operators streamed about.
The White Cat broke right and left, disappeared from local space in a froth of quantum events,
non-commutative microgeometries and short-lived exotic vacuum states, then reappeared a kilometre
away from her original position with all assets primed and ready. Disgusted, Seria Mau saw that she was
still in the shadow of the intruder. It was so big it could only belong to her employers. She put a shot
across its bows anyway. The Nastic commander edged his vessel irritably away from her. At the same
time he sent a holographic fetch of himself to the White Cat. It squatted in front of the tank where Seria