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

The huge slab of sooty ice shuddered. A jet of dust and gas boiled up beyond a sharp-edged horizon,
and something shot out of the dust, heading straight for Carter. It looked a little like a silvery squid, with a
bullet-shaped head that trailed a dozen tentacles tipped with claws and blades. It wrapped itself around
an icy pinnacle on the other side of the hole and reared up, weaving this way and that as if studying him.
Probably trying to decide where to begin unseaming him, Carter thought, and pointed the welding pistol
at it, ready to die if only he could take one of the enemy with him. The thing surged forwardтАФ

Dust and gas blasted out of the hole. The scientist had ignited the lifepod's motor. The fullerene cloth shot
straight up, straining like a sail in a squall, and the hunter-killer smashed into it and tore it free from the
clips Carter had so laboriously secured, tumbling past him at the center of a writhing knot of cloth.

Carter dove through the hatch in the pod's blunt nose. Gravity's ghost clutched him, and he tumbled head
over heels and slammed into the rear bulkhead as the pod shook free of its hiding place.

*****

Humans had settled the extensive asteroid belt around Keid, the cool Kl component of the triple star
system 40 Eridani, more than a century ago. The first generation, grown from templates stored in a
bus-sized seeder starship, had built a domed settlement on Neuvo California, an asteroid half the size of
Earth's Moon, and planted its cratered plains of water ice with vast fields of vacuum organisms.
Succeeding generations spread through Keid's asteroid belt, building domes and tenting crevasses and
ravines, raising families, becoming expert in balancing the ecologies of small, closed systems and creating
new varieties of vacuum organisms, writing and performing heroic operettas, trading information and
works of art on the interstellar net that linked Earth's far-flung colonies in the brief golden age before
Earth's AIs achieved transcendence.

The Keidians were a practical, obdurate people. As far as they were concerned, the Hundred Minute
War, which ended with the reduction of Earth and the flight of dozens of Transcendent AIs from the
Solar System, was a distant and incomprehensible matter that had nothing to do with the ordinary
business of their lives. Someone wrote an uninspired operetta about it; someone else revived the lost art
of the symphony, and for a few years her mournful eight-hour memoriam was considered by many in the
stellar colonies to be a new pinnacle of human art. Very few Keidians took much notice when a
Transcendent demolished Sirius B and used the trillions of tons of heavy elements it mined from the white
dwarf's core to build a vast ring in close orbit around Sirius A; no one worried overmuch when other
Transcendents began to strip-mine gas giants in other uninhabited systems. Everyone agreed that the
machine intelligences were pursuing some vast, obscure plan that might take millions of years to
complete, that they were as indifferent to the low comedy of human life as gardeners were to the politics
of ants.

But then self-styled transhuman Fanatics declared a jihad against anyone who refused to acknowledge
the Transcendents as gods. They dropped a planet-killer on half-terraformed Mars. They scorched
colonies on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and Neptune. They dispatched warships starward. The
fragile web of chatter and knowledge-based commerce that linked the stellar colonies began to unravel.

And just over six hundred days ago, a Transcendent barreled into the Keidian system, swinging past
Keid as it decelerated from close to light speed and arcing out toward the double system of white and
red dwarf stars just four hundred AU beyond. The red dwarf had always been prone to erratic flares, but
a few days after the Transcendent went into orbit around it, the dim little star began to flare brightly and
steadily from one of its poles. A narrowly focussed jet of matter and energy began to spew into space,
and some of the carbon-rich starstuff was spun into sails with the surface area of planets, hanging