"Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space 04 - Absolution Gap" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

operation: two or three small chunks of former moon have already
splashed down, although nowhere near these islands. But how much does
it really know about what is going to happen? she wonders.
She issues a command to the butterflies. A regiment detaches from her
sleeve, assembling before her face. They interlace wings, forming a
ragged-edged screen the size of a handkerchief, with only the wings on the
edge continuing to flutter. Now the sheet changes colour, becoming
perfectly transparent save for a violet border. She cranes her head, looking
high into the evening sky, through the debris ring. With a trick of
computation the butterflies erase the ring and the moon. The sky darkens
by degrees, the blackness becoming blacker, the stars brighter. She directs
her attention to one particular star, picking it out after a momentтАЩs
concentration.
There is nothing remarkable about this star. It is simply the nearest one
to this binary system, a handful of light-years away. But this star has now
become a marker, the leading wave of something that cannot be stopped.
She was there when they evacuated that system, thirty years ago.
The butterflies perform another trick of computation. The view zooms
in, concentrating on that one star. The star becomes brighter, until it
begins to show colour. Not white now, not even blue-white, but the
unmistakable tint of green.
It isnтАЩt right.




ONE
Ararat, p Eridani A System, 2675




Scorpio kept an eye on Vasko as the young man swam to shore. All the way
in he had thought about drowning, what it would feel like to slide down
through unlit fathoms. They said that if you had to die, if you had no
choice in the matter, then drowning was not the worst way to go. He
wondered how anyone could be sure of this, and whether it applied to
pigs.
He was still thinking about it when the boat came to a sliding halt, the
electric outboard racing until he killed it.
Scorpio poked a stick overboard, judging the water to be no more than
half a metre deep. He had hoped to locate one of the channels that allowed
a closer approach to the island, but this would have to do. Even if he had
not agreed to a place of rendezvous with Vasko, there was no time to push
back out to sea and curl around hunting for something he had enough
trouble finding when the sea was clear and the sky completely empty of
clouds.
Scorpio moved to the bow and took hold of the plastic-sheathed rope
Vasko had been using as a pillow. He wrapped one end tightly around his
wrist and then vaulted over the side of the boat in a single fluid