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

Stories from Asimov's have won 41 Hugos and 24
Nebula Awards, and our editors have received 18
Hugo Awards for Best Editor. Asimov's was also the
2001 recipient of the Locus Award for Best
Magazine.

Current issue also available in
various electronic formats at
Halo by Charles Stross Charles
Stross
The asteroid is running Barney: it sings of love on the high
lives in
frontier, of the passion of matter for replicators, and its friendship
Edinburg
for the needy billions of the Pacific Rim. "I love you," it croons in
Amber? s ears as she seeks a precise fix on it: "let me give you a h,
big hug. . . ." Scotland,
along
A fraction of a light-second away, Amber locks a cluster of
with a
cursors together on the signal, trains them to track its Doppler
couple of
shift, and reads off the orbital elements. "Locked and loaded,"
cats,
she mutters. The animated purple dinosaur pirouettes and
twenty or
prances in the middle of her viewport, throwing a
diamond-tipped swizzle-stick overhead. Sarcastically: "big hug so
time! I got asteroid!" Cold gas thrusters bang somewhere behind computers
her in the interstage docking ring, prodding the cumbersome farm , and a
ship round to orient on the Barney rock. She damps her
very
enthusiasm self-consciously, her implants hungrily sequestrating
patient
surplus neurotransmitter molecules floating around her synapses
partner.
before reuptake sets in: it doesn? t do to get too excited in free
His novel,
flight. But the impulse to spin handstands, jump and sing, is still
"The
there: it? s her rock, and it loves her, and she? s going to bring it
Atrocity
to life.
Archive,"
The workspace of Amber? s room is a mass of stuff that
is
probably doesn? t belong on a space ship. Posters of the latest
currently
Lebanese boy-band bump-and-grind through their glam routines;
being