"Antares - 02 - Antares Passage" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

centuries later when they recorded more neutrinos than expected pouring forth
from the star's fiery interior. It was obvious even then that the star had not
long to live. Still, a stellar lifetime is a very long time, and no one truly
expected the end to come as quickly as it did.
At 17:32 hours on 3 August 2512, the star exhausted the last of its carbon fuel.
Within seconds, the old cycle of contraction and heating began again. This time
things were different, however. For now, the star's core was rich in iron, and
iron cannot be fused to produce energy. Rather, fusing iron nuclei rob energy
from their surroundings. With its core hopelessly chilled by iron fusion
reactions, the star gave up its ages-old fight with gravity. The core began its
final collapse.
As billions upon countless billions of tonnes of matter fell inward, they gave
up the potential energy they had stored through the millennia. This "energy of
position" reappeared as heat, causing the temperature at the center of the star
to rise rapidly toward infinity. Some of this heat was radiated into the middle
layers of the star's atmosphere; which, unlike the core, were still rich in
unburned hydrogen. A furious thermonuclear reaction resulted. In the blink of an
eye, the star began to produce as much energy each second as it had previously
radiated away in its entire lifetime.
The end came quickly as the star exploded in the most titanic explosion ever
witnessed by human beings.

CHAPTER 1

It was high noon when the commercial shuttle touched down at Homeport Spaceport.
Even so, the Antares Nebula was clearly visible in Alta's deep purple sky if one
knew where to look. It had been three years since the nova had first burned
bright in the Altan heavens, and while Antares was no longer the eye-searing
spark it had once been, the supernova's power and its relative proximity assured
that it would be visible in daylight for several years to come.
Fleet Captain Richard Arthur Drake unstrapped from his seat and stood to remove
his kit bag from the shuttle's overhead baggage compartment. Around him, four
dozen fellow passengers did the same. Then each man and woman queued up in the
shuttle's center aisle and waited patiently for the landing bridge to be
maneuvered across the shuttle's wing and attached to the midships airlock.
Drake was of medium height, with a lean, muscular figure. His hair, which he
wore in the close-cropped style of a military spacer, was black with a touch of
gray around the edges. A tiny network of worry lines emanated from the corners
of his green eyes, and a whitish scar cut one of his eyebrows into two unequal
sections. As he moved slowly down the aisle, he did so with the smooth motion of
one who has learned to maneuver under widely varying conditions of acceleration
and gravity.
The crowd was slow to disembark. As each passenger reached the storage lockers
just forward of the midships airlock, he or she would stop and sort through the
carry-on luggage, blocking the aisle in the process. Normally, Drake would have
found his patience running short at the continued delay. Not today. After six
months spent breathing the reconstituted effluvium that passed for breathing gas
aboard a starship, he was more than happy to merely stand and inhale deeply of
the virgin air that wafted in through the open airlock.
Eventually, he found himself across the landing bridge and inside the terminal