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

"Quantum vacuum theory." The scientist closed her eye and clenched her teeth and gasped, then said, her
voice smaller and tighter, "I was hoping to find out how the Transcendent manipulates the magnetic fields
that control the jet."

"Are you okay?"
"Just a little twinge."

Carter studied the diagnostic panel of the coffin, but he had no idea what it was trying to tell him. "You
should let this box put you to sleep. When you wake up, we'll be back at Pasadena, and they'll fix you
right up."

"I know how to run the lifepod, and as long as I have control of it, you can't put me to sleep. We're still
falling along the comet's trajectory. We're going to eyeball the Transcendent's engineering up close. If I
can't learn something from that, I'll give you permission to boot my ass into vacuum, turn around, and go
look for another scientist."

"Maybe you can steer this ship, ma'am, but you don't have combat training."

"There's nothing to fight. We outran the hunter-killers."

Carter said, "So we did. But maybe you should use the radar, check out the singleship. Just before you
staged your little mutiny, I saw that it was turning back. I think it's going to try to hunt us down."

*****

Carter stripped coffins and ripped out panels and padding from the walls. He disconnected canisters of
the accelerant foam that flooded coffins to cradle hibernating sleepers. He pulled a dozen spare p-suits
from their racks. He sealed the scientist's coffin and suited up and vented the lifepod and dumped
everything out of the lock.

The idea was that the pilot of the singleship would spot the debris, think that the pod had imploded, and
abandon the chase. Carter thought there was a fighting chance it would work, but when he had told her
what he was going to do, the scientist had said, "It won't fool him for a moment."

Carter said, "Also, when he chases after us, there's a chance he'll run into some of the debris. If the
relative velocity is high enough, even a grain of dust could do some serious damage."

"He can blow us out of the sky with his X-ray laser. So why would he want to chase us?"

"For the same reason the hunter-killer didn't explode when it found us. Think it through, ma'am. He wants
to take a prisoner. He wants to extract information from a live body."

He watched her think about that.

She said, "If he does catch up with us, you'll get your wish to become a martyr. There's enough
antiberyllium left in the motor to make an explosion that'll light up the whole system. But that's a last
resort. The singleship is still in turnaround, we have a good head start, and we're only twenty-eight million
kilometers from perihelion. If we get there first, we can whip around the red dwarf, change our course at
random. Unless the Fanatic guesses our exit trajectory, that'll buy us plenty of time."