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

Spirey and the Queen
a novelette by Alastair Reynolds

Space war is godawful slow. Mouser's long-range sensors had sniffed the
bogey two days ago, but it had taken all that time just to creep within
kill-range. I figured it had to be another dud. With ordnance, fuel and
morale all low, we were ready to slink back to Tiger's Eye anyway; let one
of the other thickships pick up the sweep in this sector.
So - still groggy after frogsleep - I wasn't exactly wetting myself with
excitement; not even when Mouser started spiking the thick with
combat-readiness psychogens. Even when we went to Attack-Con-One, all I
did was pause the neurodisney I was tripping (Hellcats of Solar War Three,
since you asked), slough my hammock and swim languidly up to the bridge.
"Junk", I said, looking over Yarrow's shoulder at the readout. "War debris
or another of those piss-poor chondrites. Betcha."
"Sorry kid. Everything checks out."
"Hostiles?"
"Nope. Positive on the exhaust; dead ringer for the stolen ship." She
traced a webbed hand across the swathe of decorations which already curled
around her neck. "Want your stripes now or when we get back?"
"You actually think this'll net us a pair of tigers?"
"Damn right it will."
I nodded, and thought: she isn't necessarily wrong. No defector, no stolen
military secrets reaching the Royalists. Ought to be worth a medal, maybe
even a promotion.
So why did I feel something wasn't right?
"Alright," I said, hoping to drown qualms in routine. "How soon?"
"Missiles are already away, but she's five light-minutes from us, so the
quacks won't reach her for six hours. Longer if she makes a run for
cover."
"Run for cover? That's a joke."
"Yeah, hilarious." Yarrow swelled one of the holographic displays until it
hovered between us.
It was a map of the Swirl, tinted to show zones controlled by us or the
Royalists. An enormous slowly rotating disk of primordial material,
eight-hundred AU edge to edge; wide enough that light took more than four
days to traverse it.
Most of the action was near the middle, in the light-hour of space around
the central star Fomalhaut. Immediately around the sun was a material-free
void which we called the Inner Clearing Zone, but beyond that began the
Swirl proper; metal-rich lanes of dust condensing slowly into rocky
planets. Both sides wanted absolute control of those planet-forming
Feeding Zones - prime real estate for the day when one side beat the other
and could recommence mining operations - so that was where our vast armies
of wasps mainly slugged things out. We humans - Royalist and Standardist
both - kept much further out, where the Swirl thinned to metal-depleted
icy rubble. Even hunting the defector hadn't taken us within ten light
hours of the Feeding Zones, and we'd gotten used to having a lot of empty
space to ourselves. Apart from the defector, there shouldn't have been
anything else out here to offer cover.