"Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCarty Sarah)

the
barnardyssey



chapter one

in which the arrest of a drifter
proves troublesome

The ship had seen hard use over long years; her sides were streaked with burns and gouges, with
dead spots where the hull's wellstone plating had given out, leaving man-sized squares of inert silicon. She
was one of the old starships, no doubt about that: a round needle thirty meters across and seven hundred
and thirty long, capped at either end by a faintly glowing meshwork of blue-green dots: the ertial
shields--essentially a foam of tiny black holes, emitting weakly in the Cerenkov bands. The ship was
otherwise dark, her running lights extinguished. There was no sign of her photosail; the compartments that
should hold it were open to vacuum, their doors torn away. The streaking patterns suggested this had
happened long ago.

But the worst of the damage looked slightly less ancient: a round, meterwide hole punched through the
portside hull of the ship, just in front of the engines, and out again through the capside in a
shotgun-patterned oval large enough to admit an elephant. Interestingly, there were some intact pipes and
ducts visible through the hole, running right through the path of destruction. These were shiny in the
middle, and looked duller toward the hole's edges, as if they'd been grafted in place after the accident.
Structural damage to the hull itself was minimal; the hole edges looked almost cauterized, suggesting the
projectile had been very small and moving very fast--a sand grain flying through at 1% of lightspeed. The
actual damage had been done by heat, and by plasmified hull material entrained in the particle's wake.

The fact that the ship was tumbling end-over-end at 2.06 revolutions per second also supported this
theory. Getting that much mass moving that quickly required a substantial momentum transfer.

"Visual contact," said Bruno de Towaji into the microphones of his space suit helmet. "Running lights and
station-keeping thrusters are inactive, but there are signs of . . . well, perhaps not life, but activity at any
rate. Something on that ship survived the accident, at least briefly. The severed plumbing between the
reactors and deutrelium tanks has been repaired."
Here in the hundred and thirtieth decade of the Queendom of Sol, Bruno himself was aboard the
grappleship Boat Gods, which had its own ertial shield and its own deutrelium reactor, plus gravitic
grapples whose use would be illegal for 99.9999% of humanity. With these, Bruno could grab on to
anything--moons, planets, the sun itself--to pull Boat Gods around the solar system. The grappleship was
tiny as such things went, but its interior was nicely appointed, and filled of course with breathable
atmosphere. Bruno's space suit--actually a set of full battle armor, with high-domed helmet and thick
wellcloth shielding all around--was strictly a precaution.

The starship whirled in his view like a fan blade, like a dizzying wheel of enigma and peril and his own
damned confusion. Irritated by the blurring motion, he switched to a snapshot view that updated every
five seconds. And in one of these frozen views, in bold red letters affixed to the ship's port side in some
ancient chemical paint he read: QSS NEWHOPE. Which made sense on the one hand, for this ship had
come out of the constellation of Ophiuchus, just off the Snake Holder's right shoulder. And Newhope
was the name of the ship that the Queendom of Sol had launched, long ago, to Barnard's Star, which