"Paul J. McAuley - Winning Peace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

around Carver as he fixed a line between the dead womanтАЩs utility belt and his
broomstick.

After heтАЩd towed the body back to the tug and stowed it in the cargo hold,
Carver discovered a long tangle of transparent thread thinner than a human hair
wrapped around Dr. SmithтАЩs right arm. He couldnтАЩt cut off a sample with any of his
suitтАЩs tools; he had to unwind the entire tangle before he could bring it inside the tug
and feed one end of it into the compact automated laboratory. HeтАЩd brought the
computer from Dr. SmithтАЩs suit inside too, but its little mind was dead and its
memory had been irretriev-ably damaged by years of exposure to the brown dwarfтАЩs
magnetic and radiation fields.

The lab determined that the thread was woven from fullerene nanotubes doped
with atoms of beryllium, magnesium, and iron, and spun into long helical domains,
was a room-temperature superconductor with the tensile properties of construction
diamond: useful properties, but hardly unique. Even so, the fact that its composition
didnтАЩt match any known fullerene superconductors was tantalizing, and although he
told himself that it was most likely junk, debris in which Dr. SmithтАЩs body had
become entangled after the destruction of her ship, Carver carefully wound the
thread around a screwdriver, and shoved the screwdriver into one of the pouches of
his p-suitтАЩs utility belt.

He had been hoping that the astrophysicist had survived; that she had been
sleeping inside the escape pod; that after heтАЩd woken her, she would have agreed to
help him. He knew now that everything depended on whether or not the !Cha was
alive or dead, and reckoned things would go easier if it was dead. Because if it was
still alive, he would have to try to make a deal with it, and that was a lot riskier than
trying to make a go of it on his own. For one thing, it was possible that the !Cha had
murdered Dr. Smith because it wanted to keep whatever it was theyтАЩd found to itself.
For another, like every other alien species, the !Cha made it clear that human beings
didnтАЩt count for much. Ever since first contact, when the Jackaroo kicked off a
global war on Earth and swindled the survivors out of rights to most of the solar
system in exchange for a basic fusion drive and access to a wormhole network
linking a couple of dozen lousy M-class red dwarf stars, aliens had been tricking,
bamboozling, and manipulating the human race. In the long run, like other species
before them, humans would either kill themselves off or stumble onto the trick of
ascendency and go on to wherever it is the Elder Cultures have gone, but meanwhile
they were at the mercy of species more powerful than them, pawns in games whose
rules they didnтАЩt know, and aims they didnтАЩt understand.

Carver had a little time to work out how to deal with the !Cha; before it
retrieved the escape pod, the tug spawned dozens of probes and mapped the brown
dwarf with everything from optical and microwave radar surveys to a quantum
gravity scan. Ganesh Five B was a cool, small T-type, formed like any ordinary star
by condensation within an interstellar gas cloud, but at just eight times the mass of
Jupiter, too small to support ordinary hydrogen fusion. Gravitational contraction and
a small amount of sluggish deuterium fusion in its core warmed its dusty atmosphere
to a little under 1500 de-grees centigrade. There were metal hydrides and methane
down there, even traces of water. Sometimes, its bands of sooty clouds were lit by
obscure chains of lightning thousands of kilometers long. Sometimes, when the tug