"John E. Stith - Manhattan Transfer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stith John E)

MANHATTAN TRANSFER by John E. Stith
Copyright 1993

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MANHATTAN TRANSFER
(Copyright 1993)
by John E. Stith

Chapter 1
Going Up

Manhattan never sleeps. It doesn't even blink. By three in
the morning, it was as close to lethargy as it ever gets, but
that was still busier than a nursery full of hyperactive kids
with megadoses of sugar and caffeine.
As something quite out of the ordinary began, Manhattan lay
awake in the dark.
#
Slightly past the orbit of Saturn, over forty degrees above
the plane of the ecliptic, ionized particles of the solar wind
encountered a disruption where none had existed before.
Space twisted. An artificial rotating singularity deformed
the fabric of space, bending it in on itself until a black hole
formed. Charged particles that would normally have sped directly
through the region, instead began to move in arcs, most of which
ended at the singularity. They accelerated as their paths curved
tighter toward the gravitational lens, speeding faster and faster
as they approached, and, during their final nanoseconds of
existence outside the event horizon, spewing X-rays like tiny
distress calls.
The event horizon bloomed to a diameter of several hundred
kilometers before it stabilized. While the solar wind funneled
into the region, an enormous black starship emerged from inside
the event horizon. The starship, almost as black as the region
of space it slid out of, absorbed radiation across the entire
spectrum as it spun sedately. As the nearby singularity was
switched off, the event horizon shrank until it vanished, and the
only obstruction to the solar wind was the ship itself.
The huge squat disk-shaped ship sported octagonal rather
than circular endplates. The disk was about ten kilometers tall,
as thick as a small moon, and the octagonal endplates spanned
over ten times that distance. The ship's spin slowed until it
hung motionless in the dim starlight. The ship then began to