"Stars - 01 - Four Hundred Billion Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

McAuley, Paul J - Stars 01 - Four Hundred Billion StarsFour Hundred Billion
Stars
Paul J. McAuley


CONTENTS
Part 1 - Camp Zero
Part 2 - The Hold
Part 3 - The Keep
Part 4 - At The Core
Part 5 - Four Hundred Billion Suns



1. CAMP ZERO
They took away Dorthy Yoshida's clothes and gave her a cut-down gee-suit, doped
her and fitted her into a dropcapsule, flooded it with impact gel and sealed the
hatch. And then they shot her ass-backward out of orbit.
For a long minute she was falling free. Oxygen hissed in her facemask and
meaningless indicator lights blinked centimetres from her face through the
distorting gel, but it all seemed like something she was watching on a trivia
show. She knew that her detachment came from the tranquillizer, but that didn't
matter either. She was floating beyond it all.
And it was good to be alone at last. Despite her implant, she had never been
entirely free of the emotions of the crew and other passengers in the ship's
cramped quarters, forever colouring her thoughts and seeping into her dreams
like bad gas. A not-inconsiderable reason why she had wanted to become an
astronomer at the end of her contract with the Kamali-Silver Institute had been
the opportunity it afforded for escape from the seething energies of
civilization, the storms of emotion that broke upon her day after day, eroding
her resources as steadily as the sea erodes the land. The weeks in transit had
been as exhausting as a year in any city. So the minute of freefall was a drop
of nirvana: salt crystal or snowflake, she dissolved in it.
Then the retrojets cut in. The impact gel gloved the length of her bodyЕ and
relaxed. For a moment she was weightless again.
A jerk!
And another!
The dropcapsule groaned. Something working behind Dorthy's cloudy detachment
told her that it must be entering the atmosphere. They'd explained the sequence
of events while she was being prepared for the descent, and she tried and failed
to remember what came next as her weight began to build again, counter-balanced
by the resistance of the gel. The dropcapsule vibrated, its thin skin plucked as
it ploughed the upper air. Interference patterns raced through the gel, rocking
Dorthy's body, shattering the constellations of indicator lights. Below her,
below the ribbed floor, the capsule's ablation shield was growing hotter,
burning red, burning gold, burning white, flowing backward and flaking away. All
Dorthy felt was her increasing weight, seemingly centred between her breasts,
pushing down on her heart, pressing her against the rigid cushion of gel. She
couldn't breathe: her cheeks were drawn back in a ghastly rictus: her eyeballs
were flattening in their sockets.