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

"But without the thermal protection of the comet nucleus it'll still be a lot worse than waving your hand
through a candle flame. I suppose I can set up a barbecue-mode rotation, run the cooling system at
maximum. Your box will help keep you safe, and I'll climb into one too, but if the temperature doesn't kill
us, the hard radiation flux probably will. You really think you can learn something useful?"

"This is a unique opportunity, sailor. It's usually very difficult to study Transcendent engineering because
they keep away from star systems that have been settled. Some of us think that the Hundred Minute War
was fought over the fate of the human race, that the Transcendents who won the war and quit the Solar
System believe that we should be left alone to get on with our lives."

"But this one didn't leave us alone."

"Strictly speaking, it did. Forty Eridani B and C, the white dwarf and the red dwarf, are a close-coupled
binary. Keid is only loosely associated with them. And they're a rare example of the kind of binary the
Transcendents are very interested in, one in which the masses of the two components are very different.
We have a unique opportunity to study stellar engineering up close. The Fanatics know this, which is why
they're so keen to destroy anything which comes too close."
"They want to keep the Transcendents' secrets secret."

"They're not interested in understanding the Transcendents, only in worshiping them. They are as fixed
and immutable as their belief system, but we're willing to learn, to take on new knowledge and change
and evolve. That's why we're going to win this war."

*****

Following the scientist's instructions, Carter dismantled three cameras and rejiggered their imaging circuits
into photon counters. While he worked, the scientist talked about her family home in Happy Valley on
Neuvo California. It had been badly damaged in one of the first Fanatic attacks, and her parents and her
three brothers had helped organize the evacuation. Her mother had been an ecosystem designer, and her
father had been in charge of the government's program of interstellar commerce; they were both in the
war cabinet now.

"And very proud and very unhappy that their only daughter volunteered for this mission."

Carter said that his family were just ordinary folks, part of a cooperative that ran a vacuum organism farm
on the water-and methane-ice plains of San Joaquin. He'd piloted one of the cooperative's tugs and had
volunteered for service in the Keidian defense force as soon as the war against the Fanatics began, but he
didn't want to talk about the two inconclusive skirmishes in which he'd been involved before being
assigned to the mission. Instead, he told the scientist about his childhood and the tented crevasse that was
his family home, and the herds of engineered rats he'd helped raise.

"I loved those rats. I should have been smart enough to stay home, raise rats and make babies, but
instead I thought that the bit of talent I have for math and spatial awareness was my big ticket out."

"Shit," the scientist said. "The singleship just passed through your debris field."

She opened a window and showed Carter the radar plot.

He felt a funny floating feeling that had nothing to do with free fall. He said, "Well, we tried."