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

hundreds of thousands of kilometers beyond the star yet somehow coupled to its center of gravity.
Pinwheeling of the jet and light pressure on the vast sails tipped the star through ninety degrees, and then
the jet burned even brighter, and the star began to move out of its orbit.

A hundred days after that, the Fanatics arrived, and the war of the 40 Eridani system began.

*****

The scientist said, "The hunter-killers found us. We had to outrun them."

Carter said, "I was ready to make a stand." The scientist glared at him with her one good eye and said,
"I'm not prepared to sacrifice myself to take out a few drones, Mr. Cho. My work is too important."

She might be young and scared and badly injured, but Carter had to admit that she had stones. When the
singleship struck, Carter had been climbing into a p-suit, getting ready to set up a detector array on the
surface of the comet nucleus. She had been the first person he'd seen after he'd kicked out of the airlock.
He'd caught her and dragged her across twenty meters of raw vacuum to a lifepod that had spun loose
from the platform's broken spine, and installed her in one of the pod's hibernation coffins. She'd been
half-cooked by reflected energy of the X-ray laser beam that had bisected the main section of the science
platform; one side of her face was swollen red and black, the eye there a blind white stone, hair like
shriveled peppercorns. The coffin couldn't do much more than give her painblockers and drip
glucose-enriched plasma into her blood. She'd die unless she went into hibernation, but she wouldn't
allow that because, she said, she had work to do.

Her coffin was one of twenty stacked in a neat five by four array around the inner wall of the lifepod's
hull. Carter Cho hung in the space between her coffin and the shaft of the motor, a skinny man with
prematurely white hair in short dreads that stuck out in spikes around his thin, sharp face as if he'd just
been wired to some mains buss. He said, "This is my ship. I'm in charge here."

The scientist stared at him. Her good eye was red with an eightball hemorrhage, the pupil capped with a
black data lens. She said, "I'm a second lieutenant, sailor. I believe I outrank you."

"The commissions they handed out to volunteers like you don't mean anything."

"I volunteered for this mission, Mr. Cho, because I want to find out everything I can about the
Transcendent. Because I believe that what we can learn from it will help defeat the Fanatics. I still have
work to do, sailor, and that's why I must decide our strategy."

"Just give me back control of my ship, okay?" She stared through him. He said, "Just tell me what you
did. You might have damaged something."

"I wrote a patch that's sitting on top of the command stack; it won't cause any damage. Look, we tried
hiding from the hunter-killers, and when that didn't work, we had to outrun them. I can appreciate why
you wanted to make a stand. I can even admire it. But we were outnumbered, and we are more
important than a few drones. War isn't a matter of individual heroics; it's a collective effort. And as part
of a collective, every individual must subsume her finer instincts to the greater good. Do you understand?"

"With respect, ma'am, what I understand is that I'm a sailor with combat experience and you're a science
geek." She was looking through him again, or maybe focussing on stuff fed to her retina by the data lens.
He said, "What kind of science geek are you, anyway?"