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

into the brilliant patch of fusion fire at the base of the jet.

"Kill her, or I will strip your living brain neuron by neuron."

"Drop dead," Carter said, and switched off his com. The jet seemed to rise up to infinity, a gigantic
sword that cut space in two. The scientist had said that if the pod grazed the edge of the jet, spiraling
magnetic fields would fling it into the sky at a random vector. And the star took up half the skyтАж

Fuck it, Carter thought. He'd been lucky so far. It was time to roll the dice one more time, hope his luck
still held.

He fired attitude controls and aimed the blunt nose of the pod. A menu window popped up in front of his
face. He selected burn and full thrust.

Sudden weight tore at his two-handed grip on the rung as the motor flared. It was pushing a shade under
a gee of acceleration; most humans who had ever lived had spent their entire lives in that kind of pull, but
Carter's fingers were cramping inside the heavy gloves, and it felt as if the utility belt were trying to
amputate him at the waist. The vast dividing line of the jet rushed toward him. Heat beat through his
p-suit. If its cooling system failed for a second, he'd cook like a joint of meat in his father's stone oven.
Or the Fanatic could burn him out of the sky with its X-ray laser, or magnetic flux could rip the pod
apartтАж

Carter didn't care. He was riding his ship rodeo-style toward a flare of fusion light a thousand kilometers
wide. He whooped with defiant gleeтАФ

тАФand then, just like that, the pod was somewhere else.

After a minute, Carter remembered to switch on his com. The scientist said, "What the fuck did you just
do?"
*****

It took them a while to find out.

Carter had aimed the pod at the edge of the jet, hoping that it would be flung away at a random tangent
across the surface of the red dwarf, hoping that it would survive long enough to transmit all of the data
collected by the scientist's experiment. But now the red dwarf was a rusty nailhead dwindling into the
starscape behind them, the bright point of the white dwarf several seconds of arc beyond it. In the blink
of an eye, the pod had gained escape velocity and had been translated across tens of millions of
kilometers of space.

"It had to be the Transcendent," the scientist said.

Carter had repressurized the pod and the cooling system was working at a flat roar, but it was still as hot
as a sauna. He had taken off his helmet and shaken out his sweat-soaked dreadlocks, but because the
scientist's burns made her sensitive to heat, her coffin was still sealed. He hung in front of it, looking at her
through the little window. He said, "I took the only chance we had left, and my luck held."

"No magnetic field could have flung us so far, or so fast. It had to be something to do with the
Transcendent. Perhaps it canceled our interia. For a few seconds we became as mass-less as a photon,
we achieved light speedтАж"