Элизабет Бир - Machine

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Элизабет Бир - Machine» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Город: New York, Год выпуска: 2020, ISBN: 2020, Издательство: Saga Press, Жанр: sf_space_opera, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Machine: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Machine»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

In this compelling and addictive novel set in the same universe as the critically acclaimed White Space series and perfect for fans of Karen Traviss and Ada Hoffman, a space station begins to unravel when a routine search and rescue mission returns after going dangerously awry.
Meet Doctor Jens.
She hasn’t had a decent cup of coffee in fifteen years. Her workday begins when she jumps out of perfectly good space ships and continues with developing treatments for sick alien species she’s never seen before. She loves her life. Even without the coffee.
But Dr. Jens is about to discover an astonishing mystery: two ships, one ancient and one new, locked in a deadly embrace. The crew is suffering from an unknown ailment and the shipmind is trapped in an inadequate body, much of her memory pared away.
Unfortunately, Dr. Jens can’t resist a mystery and she begins doing some digging. She has no idea that she’s about to discover horrifying and life-changing truths.
Written in Elizabeth Bear’s signature “rollicking, suspenseful, and sentimental” (Publishers Weekly) style, Machine is a fresh and electrifying space opera that you won’t be able to put down.

Machine — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Machine», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Elizabeth Bear

MACHINE

For Chelsea

The incredible thing was that the machine smiled, smiled perpetually.

—from The Trembling of the Veil , W. B. Yeats, 1922

Man, with his singular laughter, his droll tears,
His engines and his conscience and his art,
Made but a simple sound upon your ears:
The patient beating of the animal heart.

—from Sonnet IV, Wine from these Grapes: Epitaph for the Race of Man , Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1934
CHAPTER 1 ISTOOD IN THE DOOR AND looked down Down wasnt the right word - фото 1

CHAPTER 1

ISTOOD IN THE DOOR AND looked down.

Down wasn’t the right word, exactly. But it also wasn’t exactly the wrong word. All directions were down from the airlock where I stood, and almost all of them were an infinitely long fall.

I wasn’t only staring into bottomless space. I was aiming: aiming at a target that wheeled sickeningly less than a klick away. My own perch was also revolving around a central core, simulating a half a g or so, just to keep things interesting.

I was standing in the airlock door because I was going to jump.

Just as soon as I got my bearings and my timing.

I don’t get to be afraid now. I get to be afraid before and I get to be afraid after. But I don’t get to be afraid during.

There’s no room during for being afraid. So I have to fold the fear up. Tuck it out of sight and get on with all the important things I am doing.

In this case, saving lives and making history. In that order of priority and the reverse order of chronology.

I hoped to be saving lives, anyway, if I got lucky and there were still some lives on the other side of my jump to save.

Across that gulf of vacuum lay the ancient ship we pursued. It wasn’t far, by space travel standards. A few hundred meters, and it seemed like less, because Big Rock Candy Mountain was thousands of meters in diameter.

I say “ship.” But what I was looking at was an enormous wheel whipping around its hub as if rolling through space. It was a station orbiting no primary; an endless scroll of hull unreeling—subjectively speaking, because on my own ship I felt like I was standing still—in a spring-curl spiral twisting around us.

Not a smooth hull, but a rocky and pockmarked one. One punctured by micrometeors and crumpled by sheer stresses. With bits of structure projecting from the surface at varied angles and its cerulean and gold paint frayed by unfiltered ultraviolet and abraded by space dust.

Big Rock Candy Mountain was old.

About six hundred ans old, to be as precise as I could without running a lot of fussy conversions in my head. She’d come from Terra in the pre-white-drive era, and over the centians she had built up tremendous velocity.

She was zipping along at a solid fraction of the speed of light, out here in the dark places between the stars, much farther from home than she could have possibly been, her course no longer anything like the original plot retrieved by Core archinformists.

Maybe she’d gotten lost, or an impact that had caused some of the damage to her hull had knocked her off course. Or maybe the people who had outfitted her had lied about where they planned to go. The era of Terra’s history that had spawned sublight interstellar exploration and the generation ships had not been one of trust and peaceful cooperation between peoples. More one of desperate gambles and bloody-nailed survival.

Only one generation ship had ever reached a destination as far as history was aware, and that hadn’t ended well. We were here because this one had sent out a distress signal, and a Synarche ship, tracing it, had found her. And sent out a data packet requesting assistance on Big Rock Candy Mountain ’s behalf.

The Synarche ship had not been in contact since, which was disconcerting. And its locator beacon, and Big Rock Candy Mountain ’s distress signal, were still beeping away down there. And so we were here: to see if we could rescue anybody. If there was anybody left to rescue.

It didn’t look promising. The ship behind us was another ambulance, but the one after that contained a team of archaeologists and archinformists, and I had an unsettling premonition that there was going to be a lot more useful work for them to do than for us. I wasn’t sure exactly how far behind us they were, but I expected we were on our own for at least five to ten diar. The rescue could not afford to wait for backup.

There could be people alive in there. We had to proceed as if there were, until we had proven otherwise. But they’d done nothing to acknowledge our approach, and they had not responded to hails on the same frequencies as their distress beacon.

I couldn’t have preconceptions, because I couldn’t afford to miss anyone who might be alive. Nevertheless, contemplating the vast ruin before me made me feel sad. Worse, it was that creeping, satisfying sadness you get when you look on a ruin: at something long destroyed, something lost that isn’t your problem.

My own ship, Synarche Medical Vessel I Race To Seek the Living , was an ambulance associated with Core General. She had spent nearly a standard month with her modern engines burning fuel recklessly to match velocity with Big Rock Candy Mountain . Sally—as we called her—was fast, maneuverable, and had outsize sublight engines for her mass. She also had an Alcubierre-White drive for FTL travel, though since it didn’t impart any actual velocity to the ship, it couldn’t be used to chase down quarry in normal space. We’d had to slingshot the big gravity well at our origin point in the Core to accelerate, then conserve momentum through the transition in order to catch the speeding generation ship.

I say “slingshot” like it was a routine maneuver. In reality, there’s nothing quite like staring into the most enormous black hole in the galaxy, then flying right down its gullet like a gnat with attitude. (Inasmuch as anybody can stare into an actual black hole with their actual eyes unless they belong to one of the exotic species that can visualize X-rays or radio waves.)

So we’d already had one adventure leaving the Core, and now here we were. We weren’t docking with Big Rock Candy Mountain . We had no information about the structural integrity of this antique hulk, but common sense suggested it would be fragile. Unbalancing it, subjecting it to the stresses of docking—both were terrible ideas. We’d have to use one of our adaptable docking collars anyway, because the idea that our hardware and theirs would be compatible was laughable.

That’s why I was jumping.

It was not as dangerous as it probably seems. I’m Sally’s rescue specialist: getting people out of dangerous situations is my job, and I do this sort of thing frequently.

The insertion can be dicey, though.

My hardsuit had jets, so I had maneuverability. And everything in space is moving incredibly fast anyway, so what matters is the relative velocity. If you and I are moving at the same speed in the same direction and there’s nothing else around us, we’re functionally not moving.

Space has a whole lot of nothing. If I jumped at the right time, and corrected for Sally’s rotation, all I had to do was match velocity with the wheel and snug down onto it.

It was still breathtaking to stand inside that open airlock and look down . Sally had the processing power to hold a position over, or rather outside, Big Rock Candy Mountain basically forever. But Big Rock Candy Mountain was spinning, and one or two of her enormous central cables had snapped over the centians, so her spin had developed a wobble.

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Machine»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Machine» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Элизабет Бир - Собачий остров
Элизабет Бир
Элизабет Бир - Две мечты
Элизабет Бир
Элизабет Бир - The Best of Elizabeth Bear
Элизабет Бир
Элизабет Бир - Полоса выживания
Элизабет Бир
Элизабет Бир - Камуфляж
Элизабет Бир
Элизабет Бир - Не моих рук дело
Элизабет Бир
Элизабет Бир - Грязный урок сердца
Элизабет Бир
Элизабет Бир - В глубинах неба
Элизабет Бир
Элизабет Бир - Тяжелый урок
Элизабет Бир
Элизабет Бир - Орм Прекрасный
Элизабет Бир
Отзывы о книге «Machine»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Machine» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x