"Alastair Reynolds - Beyond the Aquila Rift" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

I nodded. "That was the idea. So what's the prob?"

"The prob is a slot just opened up. Tower says we can lift in thirty minutes."

I shrugged. "Then we'll lift."

"I haven't finished the recal. As it is, things are worse than before I started. Lifting now would not be a
good idea."

"You know how the tower works," I said. "Miss two offered slots, you could be on the ground for days."

"No one wants to get back home sooner than I do," Ray said.

"So cheer up."

"She'll be rough in the tunnel. It won't be a smooth ride home."

I shrugged. "Do we care? We'll be asleep."

"Well, it's academic. We can't leave without Suzy."

I heard boot heels clicking toward us. Suzy came out of the fog, tugging her own mask aside.

"No joy with the rune monkeys," she said. "Nothing they were selling I hadn't seen a million times before.
Fucking cowboys."

"It doesn't matter," I said. "We're leaving anyway."

Ray swore. I pretended I hadn't heard him.

I was always the last one into a surge tank. I never went under until I was sure we were about to get the
green light. It gave me a chance to check things over. Things can always go wrong, no matter how good
the crew.

The Blue Goose had come to a stop near the AA beacon which marked the surge point. There were a
few other ships ahead of us in the queue, plus the usual swarm of AA service craft. Through an
observation blister I was able to watch the larger ships depart one by one. Accelerating at maximum
power, they seemed to streak toward a completely featureless part of the sky. Their jibs were spread
wide, and the smooth lines of their hulls were gnarled and disfigured with the cryptic alien runes of the
routing syntax. At twenty gees it was as if a huge invisible hand snatched them away into the distance.
Ninety seconds later, there'd be a pale green flash from a thousand kilometers away.

I twisted around in the blister. There were the foreshortened symbols of our routing syntax. Each rune of
the script was formed from a matrix of millions of hexagonal platelets. The platelets were on motors so
they could be pushed in or out from the hull.

Ask the Aperture Authority and they'll tell you that the syntax is now fully understood. This is true, but
only up to a point. After two centuries of study, human machines can now construct and interpret the
syntax with an acceptably low failure rate. Given a desired destination, they can assemble a string of