"Alastair Reynolds - Galactic North" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

GALACTIC NORTH

Persistence can be a virtue, but perhaps -- as in the breakneck, relentlessly paced, gorgeously
coloured story that follows, which sweeps us along on a cosmic chase across thousands of light-
years of space and millions of years of time -- it can sometimes be taken a bit too far...
New writer Alastair Reynolds is a frequent contributor to Interzone, and has also sold to Asimov's
Science Fiction and elsewhere. A professional scientist with a Ph.D. in astronomy, he comes from
Wales, but lives in the Netherlands. His first novel, Revelation Space, already being hailed as one of
the major SF books of the year, has just appeared in Britain. His story "A Spy in Europa" appeared
in our Thirteenth Annual Collection.

LUYTEN 726-8 COMETARY HALO -- AD 2303

The two of them crouched in a tunnel of filthy ice, bulky in spacesuits. Fifty metres down the tunnel
the servitor straddled the bore on skeletal legs, transmitting a thermal image onto their visors.
Irravel jumped whenever the noise shifted into something human, cradling her gun nervously.
"Damn this thing," she said. "Hardly get my finger round the trigger."
"It can't read your blood, Captain." Markarian, next to her, managed not to sound as if he was
stating the obvious. "You have to set the override to female."
Of course. Belatedly, remembering the training session on Fand where they'd been shown how to
use the weapons -- months of subjective time ago; years of worldtime -- Irravel told the gun to
reshape itself. The memory-plastic casing squirmed in her gloves to something more manageable. It
still felt wrong.
"How are we doing?"
"Last teams in position. That's all the tunnels covered. They'll have to fight their way in."
"I think that might well be on the agenda."
"Maybe so." Markarian sighted along his weapon like a sniper. "But they'll get a surprise when
they reach the cargo."
True: the ship had sealed the sleeper chambers the instant the pirates had arrived near the comet.
Counter-intrusion weaponry would seriously inconvenience anyone trying to break in, unless they
had the right authorization. And there, Irravel knew, was the problem; the thing she would rather
not have had to deal with.
"Markarian," Irravel said. "If we're taken prisoner, there's a chance they'll try and make us give
up the codes."
"Don't think that hasn't crossed my mind already." Markarian rechecked some aspect of his gun.
"I won't let you down, Irravel."
"It's not a question of letting me down," she said, carefully.
"It's whether or not we betray the cargo."
"I know." For a moment they studied each other's faces through their visors, acknowledging what
had once been more than professional friendship; the shared knowledge that they would kill each
other rather than place the cargo in harm's way.
Their ship was the ramliner Hirondelle. She was damaged; lashed to the comet for repair.
Improbably sleek for a creature of vacuum, her four-kilometer-long conic hull tapered to a needle-
sharp prow and sprouted trumpet-shaped engines from two swept-back spars at the rear. It had been
Irravel's first captaincy: a routine 17-year hop from Fand, in the Lacaille 9352 system, to
Yellowstone, around Epsilon Eridani -- with 20,000 reefersleep colonists. What had gone wrong
should only have happened once in a thousand trips: a speck of interstellar dust had slipped through
the ship's screen of anti-collision lasers and punched a cavernous hole in the ablative ice-shield,
vaporizing a quarter of its mass. With a massively reduced likelihood of surviving another collision,
the ship had automatically steered toward the nearest system capable of supplying repair materials.