"Charles Stross - Escape" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

5: Escape
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Days passed. The Bronstein dropped towards Turing on a long, slow orbit. Its reaction tanks were more
than half empty: this was a one-way trip. The cold-burn fusion reactor guttered on, boiling nitrogen into
mist; condensers liquefied it, driving heat pumps, driving generators that powered the meson source that
kept it all running. No rain of charged particles scattered the darkness behind the ship. Clamped to its
docking end, layer upon layer of radiation-absorbent material fanned out in a dark sheath, refrigerated
down to cosmic background temperature. Trotsky watched, waited, holding course with nerveless
patience as the ship crept slowly up on its prey. At anything less than a hundred kilometres the Bronstein
was as good as invisible -- and by the time it closed to that range the attack would already be underway.

Unseen in the darkness, seventy eight other ships matched course and locked their star sensors to the
same beacons. The fleet ran under tight emission controls, desperate to maintain radio silence. A single
uncontrolled pulse could give them away. And if the attack failed, eight hundred million lives were
doomed.

The prey was vast, the size of a small moon. It was pitted and scarred, an egg-shaped thing with dimples
at each end. An intricate array of tiled segments panelled it, winding from one pole to the other, visible at
long range. They looked organic and self-similar, like something that had grown rather than been built.
Trotsky kept an array of sensors locked on the distant speck, watching for signs of activity, but none
came. Nothing but a steady output of heat, a cloudy motion at the edges of perception. The intruder
starship was passive, drifting, waiting or dead.

The Bronstein, in contrast, was a hive of activity. Warm bodies -- thirty of them crowded in a life-system
built for twelve -- squirted from the guts of the 'coder, coughing and choking on acrid air in the cramped
red spaces of the ship. Desperation packed them four to a cabin, anchored at wrist and shoulder by
restrainer straps, claustrophobia and tension vying for domination as they practised, and argued, and
practised again ... while down in the payload bay, the drones ran through their choreographed self-test
sequences ... and the 'coder interface waited in its geodesic container, for the signal to begin.

I'm dozing in the close warm darkness of a cabin and when somebody kicks my hand it gives me the
shock of my life. I open my eyes and jacknife awake against the sleeping straps all at once, and yell: "
shit!" -- even though it was only a light kick. Then I see who it is. "Raisa --"

"Yes." It's confused, everything's tumbling, and there's clothing in the air that makes it hard to tell what's
what, and it's dark. She holds on to me then tries to squirm around until she's face to face: it's difficult
getting oriented in free fall. "Oshi. I want to talk --"

"-- was asleep," I groan. Suddenly hear what she said. "Want to talk? What about?"

"What do you think?" she asks. She's holding me tight, nothing very intimate about it except the fact of
the contact in itself. I shiver, look, see how she's changed. She's only been out of the tank a day, and I
haven't seen much of her. Her new body is much like the last. Hair a fine dark stubble, skin tight and pale
and new, barely dry. The smell of her is the odour of the tanks, acrid grainy waft of synthetic chorionic
fluid. "You just came in."

"Ack." She leans back to see more of me. She looks pleased to see me, which is a realization that shakes
me. I don't know whether to laugh or cry. It's as if she's forgotten whatever happened last time we met:
or maybe wasn't even there at all. "Been up to much?"