"Jay Lake - The Fly and Die Ticket" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

The Fly and Die Ticket by Jay Lake
Slow down, buddy. YouтАЩre all right. Here, have a drink. ItтАЩs a Spican ringstinger. YouтАЩll love it. If you
donтАЩt, no matterтАУby the time youтАЩve choked it down youтАЩll be too drunk to care.
DonтАЩt get any in your eye, though.

Trust me on that one.

Of course I know youтАЩre new here. How many customers you think a place like this gets? Yeah, every
one of us came in on the same ticket.

Me? Ah heck. CanтАЩt hurt to tell it again. Probably about the same as your story. I got the bad news from
a blind-doc on Tremayne Station. Everybody knows the drill. You come off a run a little space sick.
Somebody on your shore leave rotation says, тАЬhey, get your med clearance on the way,тАЭ so you find a
med terminal before you head down to Fat JakeтАЩs or The Spooky Action or whatever the local supra
crew bar of choice might be. One of the self-serve ones, where you slip bearer credits in and thereтАЩs no
one standing around with one eye on the monitors.

Just in case.

In goes your arm, swallowed by that little rubber sleeve lined with antiseptic nanogoop. ThereтАЩs a deep
tissue scan, which is like getting tickled by a sighting laser. It beeps. Sometimes thereтАЩs a needle,
depending on tech-gen and what the terminal thinks it finds and the rules the local healthfare types have
laid on. Then you get a green chit, and you go drinking.

That day on Tremayne, I didnтАЩt get a green chit. Instead the sleeve closed tight and I got a red chit. The
damned med terminal called healthfare on me and left me to choose between the end of my world or
shooting my arm off.

I thought hard, but I couldnтАЩt see it was worth the trouble of blowing away my own elbow.

Not with me going lepto.

#

ThereтАЩs a law out there, with some name like the Space Assets Redevelopment Act of 2457. Who the
hell knows? Everybody calls it Fly and Die.

The benefits of the Rajamurtha drive are obvious enough. If you want to leave any solar system without
having your great-great-great-grandkids waiting for you when you get back, you have to go supraluminal.
EinsteinтАЩs c is not the working manтАЩs friend. So you fire up the Rajamurtha, watch the pretty sparkles as
a measurable percentage of the observable universe turns to glowing tapioca, then shake the shingles out
of your ears at the other end of the ride and tend to business. Everybody gets something out of the
process, except strict causalists, who have been sucking lemons since Bohr and HeisenbergтАЩs 1941
Copenhagen cage match.

On the downside, r-drives emit quantum packets which have no business existing outside of a very strong
magnetic containment field, which means they play their own strange games with the baryonic matter in
the vicinity, inciting leptogenesis in otherwise normal objects through what may be sphaleronic effects. In
simpler terms, normal matter acquires dangerously unpredictable behaviors. You now know as much as
any Ph.D. in human space about what actually happens during the tapioca phase, as supraluminal crew