"Alastair Reynolds - Spirey And The Queen (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Alastair)

Mouser entered kill-range nineteen hours later, a wide pseudo-orbit three
thousand klicks out. The splinter - seventeen by twelve klicks across -
was far too small to be seen as anything other than a twinkling speck,
like a grain of sugar at arm's length. But everything we wanted to know
was clear: topology, gravimetrics, and the site of the downed ship. That
wasn't hard. Quite apart from the fact that it hadn't buried itself
completely, it was hot as hell.
"Doesn't look like the kind of touchdown you walk away from," Yarrow said.
"Think they ejected?"
"No way." Yarrow sketched a finger through a holographic enlargement of
the ship, roughly cone-shaped, vaguely streamlined just like our own
thickship, to punch through the Swirl's thickest gas belts. "Clock those
dorsal hatches. Evac pods still in place."
She was right. The pods could have flung them clear before the crash, but
evidently they hadn't had time to bail out. The ensuing impact - even
cushioned by the ship's manifold of thick - probably hadn't been
survivable.
But there was no point taking chances.
Quackheads would have finished the job, but we'd used up our stock. Mouser
carried a particle beam battery, but we'd have to move uncomfortably close
to the splinter before using it. What remained were the molemines, and
they should have been perfectly adequate. We dropped fifteen of them,
embedded in a cloud of two hundred identical decoys. Three of the fifteen
were designated to dust the wreck, while the remaining twelve would bury
deeper into the splinter and attempt to shatter it completely.
That at least was the idea.
It all happened very quickly, not in the dreamy slow-motion of a
neurodisney. One instant the molemines were descending toward the
splinter, and then the next instant they weren't there. Spacing the two
instants had been an almost subliminally brief flash.
"Starting to get sick of this," Yarrow said.
Mouser digested what had happened. Nothing had emanated from the wreck.
Instead, there'd been a single pulse of energy seemingly from the entire
volume of space around the splinter. Particle weapons, Mouser diagnosed.
Probably single-use drones, each tinier than a pebble but numbering
hundreds or even thousands. The defector must have sewn them on her
approach.
But she hadn't touched us.
"It was a warning," I said. "Telling us to back off."
"I don't think so."
"What?"
"I think the warning's on its way."
I stared at her blankly for a moment, before registering what she had
already seen.
That arcing from the splinter was something too fast to stop, something
against which our minimally-armoured thickship had no defense, not even
the option of flight.
Yarrow started to mouth some exotic profanity she'd reserved for precisely
this moment. There was an eardrum punishing bang and Mouser shuddered -