"Rats Of The System" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

McAuley, Paul - Rats of the SystemRats of the System
PAUL McAUUEY
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)
Paul J. McAuley (www.omegacom.demon.co.uk,) lives in London, England. He often
writes hard SF, one of the group (along with Stephen Baxter, Peter Hamilton,
Iain M. Banks, and others) responsible for the hard SF/space opera renaissance
of the 1990s. He has three collections of short fictionЧThe King of the Hill and
Other Stories, The Invisible Country, and Little Machines. In 2001, he published
two new novelsЧThe Secret of Life, a hard SF near-future thriller, and Whole
Wide World, a novel of high-tech intrigue; in 2004, White Devils, and in 2005,
Mind's Eye, both SF thrillers. It is evident that in his novel writing he has
moved away from space opera, which characterized his early books.
"Rats of the System" was published in Constellations. It is classic McAuley,
good fun hard SF space opera: romance, and a battle with aliens.



Carter Cho was trying to camouflage the lifepod when the hunter-killer found
him.
Carter had matched spin with the fragment of shattered comet nucleus, excavated
a neat hole with a judicious burn of the lifepod's motor and eased the sturdy
little ship inside; then he had sealed up his p-suit and clambered out of the
airlock, intending to hide the pod's infrared and radar signatures by covering
the hole with fullerene superconducting cloth. He was trying to work
methodically, clamping clips to the edge of the cloth and spiking the clips deep
into the slumped rim of dirty water ice, but the cloth, forty meters square and
just sixty carbon atoms thick, massed a little less than a butterfly's wing, and
it fluttered and billowed like a live thing as gas and dust vented from
fractured ice. Carter had fastened down less than half of it when the scientist
shouted, "Heads up! Incoming!"
That's when Carter discovered she'd locked him out of the pod's control systems.
He said, "What have you done?"
"Heads up! It's coming right at us!"
The woman was hysterical.
Carter looked up.
The sky was apocalyptic. Pieces of comet nucleus were tumbling away in every
direction, casting long cones of shadow through veils and streamers of gas lit
by the red dwarf's half-eclipsed disc. The nucleus had been a single body ten
kilometers long before the Fanatic singleship had cut across its orbit and
carved it open and destroyed the science platform hidden inside it with X-ray
lasers and kinetic bomblets. The singleship had also deployed a pod of
hunter-killer drones, and after crash deceleration these were falling through
the remains of the comet, targeting the flotsam of pods and cans and general
wreckage that was all that remained of the platform. Carter saw a firefly flash
and gutter in the sullen wash of gases, and then another, almost ninety degrees
away. He had almost forgotten his fear while he'd been working, but now it
flowed through him again, electric and strong and urgent.
He said, "Give me back my ship."
The scientist said, "I'm tracking it on radar! I think it's about toЧ"
The huge slab of sooty ice shuddered. A jet of dust and gas boiled up beyond a