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

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 -
but we weren't suddenly chewing vacuum.
And that was very bad news indeed.
Antiship missiles come in two main flavours: quackheads and sporeheads.
You know which immediately after the weapon has hit. If you're still
thinking - if you still exist - chances are it's a sporehead. And at that
point your problems are just beginning.
Invasive demon attack, Mouser shrieked. Breather manifold compromised...
which meant something uninvited was in the thick. That was the point of a
sporehead: to deliver hostile demons into an enemy ship.
"Mm," Yarrow said. "I think it might be time to suit up."
Except our suits were a good minute's swim away back into the bowels of
Mouser, through twisty ducts which might skirt the infection site. Having
no choice, we swam anyway, Yarrow insisting I take the lead even though
she was a quicker swimmer. And somewhere - it's impossible to know exactly
where - demons reached us, seeping invisibly into our bodies via the
thick. I couldn't pinpoint the moment; it wasn't as if there was a jagged
transition between lucidity and demon-manipulated irrationality. Yarrow