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

But there was. Big too, not much more than a half light-minute from the
rat.
"Practically pissing distance," Yarrow observed.
"Too close for coincidence. What is it?"
"Splinter. Icy planetesimal, you want to get technical."
"Not this early in the day."
But I remembered how one of our tutors back at the academy put it:
Splinters are icy slag, spat out of the Swirl. In a few hundred thousand
years there'll be a baby solar system around Fomalhaut, but there'll also
be shitloads of junk surrounding it, leftovers on million-year orbits.
"Worthless to us," Yarrow said, scratching at the ribbon of black hair
which ran all the way from her brow to fluke. "But evidently not to
ratty."
"What if the Royalists left supplies on the splinter? She could be aiming
to refuel before the final hop to their side of the Swirl." Yarrow gave me
her best withering look. "Yeah, okay," I said. "Not my smartest ever
suggestion." Yarrow nodded sagely. "Ours is not to question, Spirey. Ours
is to fire and forget."

Six hours after the quackheads had hared away from Mouser, Yarrow floated
in the bridge, fluked tail coiled beneath. She resembled an inverted
question mark, and if I'd been superstitious I'd have said that wasn't
necessarily the best of omens.
"You kill me," she said.
An older pilot called Quillin had been the first to go siren - first to
swap legs for tail. Yarrow followed a year later. Admittedly it made
sense, an adaptation to the fluid-filled environment of a high-gee
thickship. And I accepted the cardiovascular modifications that enabled us
to breathe thick, as well as the biomodified skin which let us tolerate
cold and vacuum far longer than any unmodified human. Not to mention the
billions of molecule-sized demons which coursed through our bodies, or the
combat-specific psychomodifications. But swapping your legs for a tail
touched off too many queazy resonances in me. Had to admire her nerve,
though.
"What?" I said.
"That neurodisney shit. Isn't a real space war good enough for you?"
"Yeah, except I don't think this is it. When was the last time one of us
actually looked a Royalist in the eye?"
She shrugged. "Something like four hundred years."
"Point made. At least in Solar War Three you get some blood. See, it's all
set on planetary surfaces - Titan; Europa; all those moons they've got
back in Sol system. Trench warfare; hand to hand stuff. You know what
adrenalin is, Yarrow?"
"Managed without it until now. And there's another thing: Don't know much
about Greater Earth history, but there was never a Solar War Three."
"It's conjectural," I said. "And in any case it almost happened; they
almost went to the brink."
"Almost?"
"It's set in a different timeline."
She grinned, shaking her head. "I'm telling you, you kill me."