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

"I might as well face up to it with a pillow."

The scientist smiled her ghastly smile. She said, "We have to try. We have to try everything. Let me
explain what I plan to do at perihelion."

She told Carter that observations by drones and asteroid-based telescopes had shown that the
Transcendent had regularized the red dwarf's magnetic field, funneling plasma toward one point on
photosphere, where it erupted outward in a permanent flareтАФthe jet that was driving the star toward its
fatal rendezvous at the bottom of the white dwarf's steep gravity well. The scientist believed that the
Transcendent was manipulating the vast energies of the star's magnetic field by breaking the symmetry of
the seething sea of virtual particular pairs that defined quantum vacuum, generating charged particles ab
ovo, redirecting plasma currents and looped magnetic fields with strengths of thousands of gauss and
areas of thousands of kilometers as a child might play with a toy magnet and a few iron filings. The probe
she'd loaded with a dozen experiments had been lost with the science platform, but she thought that there
was a way of testing at least one prediction of her theoretical work on symmetry breaking.

She opened a window in Carter's helmet display, showed him a schematic plot of the slingshot maneuver
around the red dwarf.

Carter said, "You have to get that close?"

"The half-life of the strange photons will be very short, a little less than a millisecond."

"I get it. They won't travel much more than a few hundred kilometers before they decay." Carter grinned
when the scientist stared at him. He said, "Speed of light's one of those fundamental constants every
sailor has to deal with."

"It means that we have to get close to the source, but it also means that the photon flux will increase
anomalously just above the photosphere. There should be a sudden gradient, or a series of stepsтАж It
was one of the experiments my probe carried."

Carter said, "But it was destroyed, so we have to do the job instead. It's going to get pretty hot, that
close to the star. What kind of temperatures are we talking about?"

"I don't know. The average surface temperature of the red dwarf is relatively cool, a little over 3000
degrees Kelvin, but it's somewhat hotter near the base of the flare, where we have to make our pass."

"Why don't we just skim past the edge of the flare itself? The flare might be hotter than the surface, but
our transit time would be a whole lot less."

"The magnetic fields are very strong around the flare, and they spiral around it. They could fling us in any
direction. Outward if we're lucky, into the star if we're not. No, I'm going to aim for a spot where the
field lines all run in the same direction. But the fields can change direction suddenly, and there's the risk of
hitting a stray plume of plasma, so I can't fire up the motors until we're close."

Carter thought of his cutout. He said, "If you have to hit a narrow window, I'm your man. I can put this
ship through the eye of a needle."

The scientist said, "As soon as I see the chance, I'll fire full thrust to minimize transit time."