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

"He'll have plenty of time to find us again. We're a long way from home, and there might be otherтАФ"

"All we have to do is live long enough to find out everything we can about the Transcendent's engineering
project and squirt it home on a tight beam." The scientist's smile was dreadful. Her teeth were filmed with
blood. "Quit arguing, sailor. Don't you have work to do?"

A trail of debris tumbled away behind the pod, slowly spreading out, bright edges flashing here and there
as they caught the light of the red dwarf. Carter pressurized p-suits and switched on their life-support
systems and transponders before he jettisoned them. Maybe the Fanatic would think that they contained
warm bodies. He sprayed great arcs of foam into the hard vacuum and kicked away the empty canisters.
The chance of any of the debris hitting the Fanatic's singleship was infinitesimally small, but a small chance
was better than none at all, and the work kept his mind from the awful prospect of being captured.

Sternward, the shattered comet nucleus was a fuzzy speck trailing foreshortened banners of light across
the star-spangled sky. The expedition had nudged it from its orbit and buried the science platform inside
its nucleus, sleeping for a whole year like an army in a fairytale as it fell toward the red dwarf. The
mission had been a last desperate attempt to try to learn something of the Transcendent's secrets, but as
the comet nucleus neared the red dwarf, and the expedition woke and the scientists started their work,
one of the Fanatic drones that policed the vicinity of the star somehow detected the science platform, and
the Fanatics sent a single-ship to deal with it. Like all their warships, it moved very fast, with brutal
acceleration that would have mashed ordinary humans to a thin jelly. It had arrived less than thirty
seconds behind a warning broadcast by a spotter observatory at the edge of Keid's heliopause; the crew
of the science platform hadn't stood a chance.

The singleship lay directly between the comet and the lifepod now. It had turned around and was
decelerating at eight gravities. At the maximum magnification his p-suit's visor could give him, Carter
could just make out the faint scratch of its exhaust, but he was unable to resolve the ship itself. In the
other direction, the red dwarf star simmered at the bottom of a kind of well of luminous dark. Its nuclear
fires were banked low, radiating mostly in infrared. Carter could stare steadily at it with only a minimum
of filtering. The sharp-edged shadows of the vast deployment of solar sails were sinking beyond one
edge as the jet dawned in the opposite direction, a brilliant white thread brighter than the fierce point of
the white dwarf star rising just beyond it. Before the Transcendent had begun its work, the red dwarf had
swung around the smaller but more massive white dwarf in a wide elliptical orbit, at its closest
approaching within twenty AU, the distance of Uranus from the Sun. Now it was much closer and still
falling inward. Scientists speculated that the Transcendent planned to use the tidal effects of a close transit
to tear apart the red dwarf, but they'd had less than forty hours to study the Transcendent's engineering
before the Fanatic's singleship struck.

Hung in his p-suit a little way from the lifepod, the huge target of the red dwarf in one direction, the vast
starscape in the other, Carter Cho resolved to make the best of his fate. The Universe was vast and
inhuman, and so was war. Out there, in battles around stars whose namesтАФAlpha Cen-tauri, Epsilon
Eridani, Tau Ceti, Lalande 21185, Lacaille 8760, 61 Cygni, Epsilon Indi, Groombridge 1618,
Groombridge 34, 82 Eridani, 70 Ophiuchi, Delta Pavonis, Eta CassiopeiaeтАФwere like a proud role call
of mythic heroes, the fate of the human race was being determined. While Carter and the rest of the
expedition had slept in their coffins deep in the heart of the comet, the Fanatics had invested and
destroyed a dozen settlements in Keid's asteroid belt, and the Keidians had fought back and destroyed
one of the Fanatics' huge starships. Compared to this great struggle, Carter's fate was less than that of a
drop of water in a stormy ocean, a thought both humbling and uplifting.