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

It didn't hurt, but there was nothing in the way of proprioceptive
feedback to indicate I'd actually managed to twitch any part of my body.
Quillin was moving too.
Wriggling, that is, since her suit's legs had been cleanly ripped away by
the wasps. Other than that she didn't look seriously injured. Ten or so
meters from me, she flopped around like a maggot and groped for her bow.
What remained of it anyway.
Chalk one to the good guys.
By which time I was moving, executing a marginally quicker version of
Quillin's slug crawl. I couldn't stand up - there are limits to what pilot
physiology can cope with - but my legs gave me leverage she lacked.
"Give up, Spirey. You have a head-start on me, and right now you're a
little faster - but that ship's still a long way off." Quillin took a
moment to catch her breath. "Think you can sustain that pace? Gonna need
to, you don't want me catching up."
"Plan on rolling over me until I suffocate?"
"That's an option. If this doesn't kill you first."
Enough of her remained in my field-of-view to see what she meant.
Something sharp and bladelike had sprung from her wrist, a bayonet
projecting half a meter ahead of her hand. It looked like a nasty little
toy - but I did my best to push it out of mind and get on with the job of
crawling toward the ship. It was no more than two hundred meters away now
- what little of it protruded above the ice. The external airlock was
already open, ready to clamp shut as soon as I wriggled inside -
"You never finished telling me, Spirey."
"Telling you what?"
"About this - what did you call it? The second imperative?"
"Oh, that." I halted and snatched breath. "Before I go on, I want you to
know I'm only telling you this to piss you off."
"Whatever bakes your cake."
"Alright," I said. "Then I'll begin by saying you were right. Greater
Earth's wasps should have made the jump to sentience long before those in
the Swirl, simply because they'd had longer to evolve. And that's what
happened."
Quillin coughed, like gravel in a bucket. "Pardon?"
"They beat us to it. About a century and a half ago. Across Sol system,
within just a few hours, every single wasp woke up and announced its
intelligence to the nearest human being it could find. Like babies
reaching for the first thing they see." I stopped, sucking in deep
lungfuls. The wreck had to be closer now - but it hardly looked it.
Quillin, by contrast, looked awfully close now - and that blade awfully
sharp.
"So the wasps woke," I said, damned if she wasn't going to hear the whole
story. "And that got some people scared . So much, some of them got to
attacking the wasps. Some of their shots went wide, because within a day
the whole system was one big shooting match. Not just humans against wasps
- but humans against humans." Less than fifty meters now, across much
smoother ground than we'd so far traversed. "Things just escalated. Ten
days after Solar War Three began, only a few ships and habitats were still
transmitting. They didn't last long."