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

"A broadcast upload washed me up here, leading the pathfinder expedition. I told you that. But did I tell
you about the ... event ... which finally turned me?"

I try to swallow. "Not in detail. Except people like me were ..."

"Not your fault. I should have added: our home was Sirius Intersect, out on the edge of the Inner Centre,
the corespace dominated by the Ultrabrights. We had a terraformed world, ecology stabilised by massive
engineering input. Maintained by a high-tech, low-susperstition dirt-space mission, of course. Anyway, it
wasn't the assassintion squads that did it. That just alerted us, radicalized ... we began organizing as soon
as we realized what was going on."

"But that wasn't the main event. Even then, we thought there was scope for negotiation. A kind of
cold-war standoff, based on game theory and deterrence. But finally they went overt and just told us to
get out. I was on the committee when the Superbrights or Ultrabrights or whoever was running the show
announced that they were withdrawing life support -- just like that. If we wanted we could be beamed
out, signal-encoded, to a distant system ... but our whole system -- dirtworld or dreamtime afterlife or
uncolonised rock -- was being coopted. Everyone human who lived there was to shunt into deep stasis
..."

"They did that?" I say. "It shouldn't be possible!"

"Oh, but they did. Said they needed the timepower, the cycles, more than we did. Phased disintegration.
Everything within two parsecs of Sol was being rebuilt -- we had two years to evacuate an entire planet
before they restructured it. Then they would begin starlifting, dismantling Sirius-B, the dwarf star, for raw
material." He grins humourlessly. "You didn't know they could do that?"

"What did you do?"

"What could we do? We put together a pathfinder team then upload in good order. Then Anubis --

"We sat on our collective ass for fifteen years in a backwater hole with a suicide rate that tends towards a
hundred percent ... never saw that, did you? People just sort of ... bowed out. Couldn't take the
boredom or fear. Or the goon squad conscripted them. But now, who knows? If we can take the
Ultrabright ship and make use of its Dreamtime, well ... slower-than-light would be enough. The nearest
system is Newhaven, range five light years -- we could do it in under a century, given a real spaceship."

"Good luck to you. Boris, why did you shut the door before you told me ..?"

He looks over his shoulder. The door's still shut. He looks back at me. "I think there's a saboteur on
board."

"Say more."

"Pet theory of mine," he says. "Look at it this way. Your Boss, your Superbright owners, sent you. Do
you really think they don't believe in backup systems?"

Someone is sitting on my grave. I can feel it: a nasty sense of rightness. "If that's the case, we are all
losers. Including the saboteur. Maybe if we find them -- if they're there at all -- we can argue with them.
I'll keep my eyes open. But don't count on me succeeding."