"Dan Simmons - Orphans of the Helix" - читать интересную книгу автора (Simmons Dan)

"What are Patek's recommendations going to be when we humans meet in a few minutes?" Dem Lia
bluntly demanded from Ry├┤kan.
The AI hesitated only the slightest of perceptible instants. AI's understood both discretion
and loyalty to the human working with them in their specialty, but they also understood the
imperatives of the elected commander's role on the ship.
"Patek Georg is going to recommend a hundred-kilometer extension of the class-twenty external
containment field," said Ry├┤kan softly. "With all energy weapons on standby and pre-targeted on
the three hundred nine thousand, two hundred and five approaching Ousters."
Dem Lia's eyebrows rose a trifle. "And how long would it take our systems to lance more than
three hundred thousand such targets?" she asked softly.
"Two-point-six seconds," said Ry├┤kan.
Dem Lia shook her head. "Ry├┤kan, please tell Patek Georg that you and I have spoken and that I
want the containment field not at a hundred-klick distance, but maintained at a steady one
kilometer from the ship. It may remain a class-twenty field -- the Ousters can actually see the
strength of it, and that's good. But the ship's weapons systems will not target the Ousters at
this time. Presumably, they can see our targeting scans as well. Ry├┤kan, you and Patek Georg can
run as many simulations of the combat encounter as you need to feel secure, but divert no power to
the energy weapons and allow no targeting until I give the command."
Ry├┤kan bowed. Basho shuffled his virtual clogs but said nothing.
Lady Murasaki fluttered a fan half in front of her face. "You trust," she said softly.
Dem Lia did not smile. "Not totally. Never totally. Ry├┤kan, I want you and Patek Georg to work
out the containment-field system so that if even one Ouster attempts to breach the containment
field with focused plasma from his or her solar wings, the containment field should go to
emergency class thirty-five and instantly expand to five hundred klicks."
Ry├┤kan nodded. Ikky├╗ smiled slightly and said, "That will be one very quick ride for a great


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mass of Ousters, Ma'am. Their personal energy systems might not be up to containing their own life
support under that much of a shock, and it's certain that they wouldn't decelerate for half an AU
or more."
Dem Lia nodded. "That's their problem. I don't think it will come to that. Thank you all for
talking to me."
All six human figures winked out of existence.

Rendezvous was peaceful and efficient.
The first question the Ousters had radioed the Helix twenty hours earlier was, "Are you Pax?"
This had startled Dem Lia and the others at first. Their assumption was that these people had
been out of touch with human space since long before the rise of the Pax. Then the ebony, Jon
Mikail Dem Alem, said, "The Shared Moment. It has to have been the Shared Moment."
The nine looked at each other in silence at this. Everyone understood that Aenea's "Shared
Moment" during her torture and murder by the Pax and TechnoCore had been shared by every human
being in human space -- a gestalt resonance along the Void Which Binds that had transmitted the
dying young woman's thoughts and memories and knowledge along those threads in the quantum fabric
of the universe which existed to resonate empathy, briefly uniting everyone originating from Old
Earth human stock. But out here? So many thousands of light-years away?
Dem Lia suddenly realized how silly that thought was. Aenea's Shared Moment of almost five
centuries ago must have propagated everywhere in the universe along the quantum fabric of the Void