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

"Crap," Quillin said - but she sounded less cocksure than she had a few
moments before. "There was a war back then, but it never escalated into a
full-blown Solar War."
"No. It went the whole hog. From then on every signal we ever got from GE
was concocted by wasps. They daren't break the news to us - at least not
immediately. We've only been allowed to find out because we're never going
home. Guilt, Wendigo called it. They couldn't let it happen again."
"What about our wasps?"
"Isn't it obvious? A while later the wasps here made the same jump to
sentience - presumably because they'd been shown the right moves by the
others. Difference was, ours kept it quiet. Can't exactly blame them, can
you?"
There was nothing from Quillin for a while, both of us concentrating on
the last patch of ice before Wendigo's ship.
"I suppose you have an explanation for this too," she said eventually,
swiping her tail against the ground. "C'mon, blow my mind."
So I told her what I knew. "They're bringing life to the Swirl. Sooner
than you think, too. Once this charade of a war is done, the wasps breed
in earnest. Trillions out there now, but in a few decades it'll be
billions of trillions. They'll outweigh a good-sized planet. In a way the
Swirl will have become sentient. It'll be directing its own evolution."
I spared Quillin the details - how the wasps would arrest the existing
processes of planetary formation so that they could begin anew, only this
time according to a plan. Left to its own devices, the Swirl would
contract down to a solar system comprised solely of small, rocky planets -
but such a system could never support life over billions of years.
Instead, the wasps would exploit the system's innate chaos to tip it
toward a state where it would give rise to at least two much larger worlds
- planets as massive as Jupiter or Saturn, capable of shepherding
left-over rubble into tidy, world-avoiding orbits. Mass extinctions had no
place in the Splinterqueens' vision of future life.
But I guessed Quillin probably didn't care.
"Why are you hurrying, Spirey?" She asked, between harsh grunts as she
propelled herself forward. "The ship isn't going anywhere."
The edge of the open airlock was a meter above the ice. My fingers probed
over the rim, followed by the crest of my battered helmet. Just lifting
myself into the lock's lit interior seemed to require all the energy I'd
already expended in the crawl. Somehow I managed to get half my body
length into the lock.
Which is when Quillin reached me.
There wasn't much pain when she dug the bayonet into my ankle; just a form
of cold I hadn't imagined before, even lying on the ice. Quillin jerked
the embedded blade to and forth, and the knot of cold seemed to reach out
little feelers, into my foot and lower leg. I sensed she wanted to retract
the blade for another stab, but my suit armour was gripping it tight.
The bayonet taking her weight, Quillin lofted her bulk over the rim of the
lock. I tried kicking her away, but the skewered leg no longer felt a part
of me.
"You're dead," she whispered.
"News to me."