"Paul J. McAuley - Rats of the System" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

Rats of the System
PAUL McAULEY
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)

Paul J. McAuley (www.omegacom.demon.co.uk,) lives in London, England. He often writes hard
SF, one of the group (along with Stephen Baxter, Peter Hamilton, Iain M. Banks, and others)
responsible for the hard SF space opera renaissance of the 1990s. He has three collections of
short fictionтАФThe King of the Hill and Other Stories, The Invisible Country, and Little Machines. In
2001, he published two new novelsтАФThe Secret of Life, a hard SF near-future thriller, and Whole
Wide World, a novel of high-tech intrigue; in 2004, White Devils, and in 2005, Mind's Eye, both SF
thrillers. It is evident that in his novel writing he has moved away from space opera, which
characterized his early books.

"Rats of the System" was published in Constellations. It is classic McAuley, good fun hard SF space
opera: romance, and a battle with aliens.

Carter Cho was trying to camouflage the lifepod when the hunter-killer found him.

Carter had matched spin with the fragment of shattered comet nucleus, excavated a neat hole with a
judicious burn of the lifepod's motor and eased the sturdy little ship inside; then he had sealed up his
p-suit and clambered out of the airlock, intending to hide the pod's infrared and radar signatures by
covering the hole with fullerene superconducting cloth. He was trying to work methodically, clamping
clips to the edge of the cloth and spiking the clips deep into the slumped rim of dirty water ice, but the
cloth, forty meters square and just sixty carbon atoms thick, massed a little less than a butterfly's wing,
and it fluttered and billowed like a live thing as gas and dust vented from fractured ice. Carter had
fastened down less than half of it when the scientist shouted, "Heads up! Incoming!"

That's when Carter discovered she'd locked him out of the pod's control systems.

He said, "What have you done?"

"Heads up! It's coming right at us!"

The woman was hysterical.

Carter looked up.

The sky was apocalyptic. Pieces of comet nucleus were tumbling away in every direction, casting long
cones of shadow through veils and streamers of gas lit by the red dwarf's half-eclipsed disc. The nucleus
had been a single body ten kilometers long before the Fanatic singleship had cut across its orbit and
carved it open and destroyed the science platform hidden inside it with X-ray lasers and kinetic
bomblets. The singleship had also deployed a pod of hunter-killer drones, and after crash deceleration
these were falling through the remains of the comet, targeting the flotsam of pods and cans and general
wreckage that was all that remained of the platform. Carter saw a firefly flash and gutter in the sullen
wash of gases, and then another, almost ninety degrees away. He had almost forgotten his fear while he'd
been working, but now it flowed through him again, electric and strong and urgent.

He said, "Give me back my ship."

The scientist said, "I'm tracking it on radar! I think it's about toтАФ"