"Daniel Keys Moran - A Tale of the Continuing Time 04 - The AI War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

around and struck the cannon emplacement at over forty kilometers an hour. The shock slammed up
through the rigid suit, through Trent's knees and into his ribs --

His right knee popped so loudly Trent could hear it even through his suit's neck collar, his broken ribs
collapsed and Trent screamed at the top of his lungs as the PKF Elite who had been chasing him sailed
by, heading in the opposite direction.

Trent's first coherent observation after the shock wore off was that the laser cannon's focusing ring was
white hot. He stared at it from ten centimeters away, abruptly aware that the vacuum immediately in front
of his faceplate was filled with an invisible beam of coherent light that would vaporize him if he moved
wrong, if he moved out of the small space between the laser and the ship's hull.

He shot the cannon with both lasers.

The scalesuit's fingertip lasers were direct rip-offs of the lasers built into the fingers of modern model
PKF Elite, with modifications Trent had made himself. Trent had no degrees in anything; he had merely
been, while uploaded into the Black Beast, the finest nanotechnician, genegineer, engineer, physicist, and
so forth, off of Earth; he had certainly been the finest computerist, and the smartest AI, in history.

The results of the twin blasts were not impressive; the focusing ring flickered once and went black.

The corvette was designed by downsiders, and it showed: it had a top and a bottom. No SpaceFarer
would have made that mistake. The corvette had a pair of laser cannon mounted on the underside, but
only one on top, and Trent had taken care of it.

The corvette ceased acceleration.

Bad news. They probably knew he was on the hull; it was possible they had heard him hit and quite
certain that they knew their upper laser cannon had gone down and that Trent was responsible. PKF
inside the ship would be scrambling for the airlock, coming out to capture or kill Trent, and they would
find it easier to move in drop than under boost. A schematic of the corvette popped up in Trent's skull,
and he found himself moving forward over the hull before his forebrain had assimilated the information,
hands brought down into contact with the hull, the superconducting magnets coming alight. He headed
back down the hull to the airlock, gliding, the magnets keeping him in contact with the hull but not slowing
him at all, until he came to the spot, well forward on the hull, where the main airlock was embedded in
the hull. He cascaded his way down the decision tree, considering and rejecting options as he
approached the airlock. A corvette was not a troop carrier, was not designed to disgorge several
soldiers at once; one or two PKF at the most might cram their way into the lock to cycle through.

Trent glided to a slow stop immediately over the airlock --

The airlock was already cycling open, the outer door recessing, pulling back into the hull. A single
Peaceforcer inside, who knew Trent was waiting for him; he stood with a laser rifle, pointing it at the
edge of the airlock door as the door slid aside.

Good news, bad news. It wasn't an Elite; if it had been an Elite Trent would have shot him in the
faceplate. The laser blast would not kill an Elite, and the Elite would not suffocate in the time it would
take him to get back into pressure; an ordinary human might die of the blast, might die of the vacuum
shock.