"Charles Stross - Love me" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

4: Will you still love me ...




4: Will you still love me ...

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The radiation storm passes, watched only by impassive sensors mounted on the hub of the
colony cylinder.

The eye of the storm is a small black hole: a spark of evil light in the abyss. It burns with a
cold heat, blasting a sleet of hard gamma radiation out into the darkness of space. The
hole itself is smaller than a protein molecule, a tiny knot of tortured spacetime that weighs
as much as a mountain range. A halo of decaying matter swirls around it, dragged ever
inwards by a force of gravity turned in on itself. As it closes in on the sump at the bottom
of the gravity well the accretion disk heats up, until atoms split in the incandescent glare
of an on-going explosion. A hot spray of high-energy radiation floods off it, hosing across
the plane of the gas giant's system of moons. The hole is being used as a synchrotron
source, an energy weapon bright enough to shine across interplanetary distances. A dark
shape hides behind it, indistinct but almost as large as the colony: the physical body of the
Ultrabright attack drone. The drone is a dumb killing machine, unmotivated -- as yet -- by
the cool and unsympathetic mind of its maker. Given time, this will change ...

Its path takes it a long way from icy Turing or airless Pascal, but that makes no difference
to their fate. A steady stream of exotic particles sprays out, bracketing Pascal and the L5
colony quite neatly. It's hotter than a solar flare, hotter than a nova: the radiation
temperature is astronomical, hot enough to boil lead.

Closest approach is ten million kilometres. Drifting at under two percent of light-speed,
the hole falls onward through the stellar system. In sixteen hours time it will reach the
orbit of Wirth, the terraforming candidate that circles close in around Ridgegap-47.

The neutral particle beam that bathes the hole in exotic matter shuts off abruptly. Unseen
moderators clamp down, damping the postron/electron reactions in the accretion disk. The
hole continues to digest its halo of matter for a few scant minutes, but the dinner is over.
Now it will starve until it reaches Wirth and the terraforming station Anubis abandoned
years before. It is already a small hole, dangerously close to the lower bounds of stability.
Small holes are hot, decaying by emitting Hawking radiation; this one is already toasting
in the millions of degrees. When it explodes, the flash will be visible light years away.

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4: Will you still love me ...

That event is due in just over sixteen days time, some kilometres beneath the crust of the
doomed planet ...