"Justina Robson - Dreadnought" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robson Justina)

Dreadnought
JUSTINA ROBSON
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)

Justina Robson (www.justinarobson.co.uk) is "from Leeds, a city in Yorkshire in the north of
England. She always wanted to write and always did. Other things sometimes got in the way and
sometimes still doтАж but not too much." She went to Clarion West. She teaches yoga. She has a
child. She is the author of Silver Screen (1999), Mappa Mundi (2000), Natural History (2003), Living
Next DoorтАж (2005), and Quantum Gravity (2006). She said in a SF Site.com interview, "I am
science girl. Philosophy and linguistics are perceived as adjuncts or arts, compared with raw
sciences like physics, but I can't see the difference. They're all driven by the need to know, to
discover and to verify what's real. The drive to understand and explain is insatiable, the methodтАФ
whatever suits at the time." Her stories are dense, intense.

"Dreadnought" was published in Nature. It is typically intense and strange, a character vignette
that portrays a future in space that is dark, military, perhaps posthuman.

We sail upon a vast spaceship with open sides. She is only a skeleton of a vessel. A chassis of carbon
beams anchors her cargo to the engines. She carries hundreds of thousands of Armored soldiers. Some
work. Others sleep in ordered ranks, magnetically attached to clamps on the ship's ribs. There is no need
to move about. Where would we go? We talk a little, old friends, and in places lean on one another like
falling pillars. We turn our faces to the solar wind when we are awake. We like the light. It recharges our
electrical systems.

I unlock the lightweight frame of a Mess pod, prior to passing it on for jettison. My comrades are moving
a new one into position and are waiting to refuel. We will be first, because we have replaced the pod, but
the rest of this Mess is for the dead. As the new tank rolls in, I connect my hose and commence drinking.

At the front of the ship, instead of a nose cone, the dead are stacked in orderly catacomb files, upright,
packed in. They were placed there at the end of the last battle. As I watch the dead I see one decouple
itself from the aft side of the stack. It moves with cautious steps.

We are all connected but I cannot hear this one.

Through the shattered faceplate I see that the soldier's mouth is blocked by a piece of metal ingrowth.
When he was alive he was a Mute, one of my communication nodes, my flag-bearer. His forehead is the
flat ochre plain of dead human bone and his lidless ever-open eyes are the blue ofEarthly skies. Parts of
his Armor are badly damaged, but it ventilates and feeds his body.

I didn't know that I could function without my human host, until I saw him. I am glad. I need all my
troops. I am frightened. What will become of me?

He comes closer. Bones show through holes, fraying into space. Despite the fact that his neural
connections have been sufficiently regrown to permit communications and the effective functioning of his
remaining body and brain, he has not returned to his Unit. This is true of all the dead. I do not know why.

He drifts surreptitiously toward me, clamps to an open position at the pod, opposite mine. He moves
sluggishly, connects, and begins to fuel. He stares straight through me. His eyes do not reflect the Sun.
They have been rebuilt to withstand vacuum and they are not shiny.
I ping him for information. I want to catch his hand and ask him the question everyone asks of each other,