"Allen, Roger MacBride - Chronicles of Solace 3 - Shores of Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allen Roger Macbride)

Clemsen Wahl:Starship crew member stranded on Asgard Five by equipment malfunctions aboard his ship. Later, recruited to serve aboard theDom Pedro IV . He ran off from a landing party during a visit to Rio de Janeiro.

Part One

THE PRESENT PAST

Chapter One

THE RUINED WORLD

MARINERCITY
MARS

June 15, 5343 (Earth Reckoning, Common Era)

The lift door opened, and Kalani Temblar stepped out into the wreckage of the ruined city. She had been working hard, but that wasn’t what had her perspiring. It was fear of what came next, not the effort of what she had just done, that had drenched her brow and neck with sweat.

She did not attempt to wipe the sweat away. That would have been impossible, even had she been wearing an ordinary pressure suit, and the suit she wore was far from ordinary.

She stepped away from what was officially called the Emergency Evaluation Vertical Covert Entrance, Technology Storage Facility. According to the files, the last Chrono Patrol agents to use it, hundreds of years before, had simply called it the Dark Museum Drop Shaft. Whatever it was called, Kalani sincerely hoped she never had to go down it again. There was too much down there in the underground museum, too much in too many ways.

Still beats being out on the surface,she told herself.Best to be off-planet as soon as possible. She patted the bulge of the data recorder in her suit pocket. What she had recorded already in there would turn everything—everything—upside down. The evidence she had uncovered in the Dark Museum was going to give the Chronologic Patrol’s Central Command fits. If she stayed alive long enough to get it to them.

She stumbled through the thrice-cursed cityscape. Mariner City had been abandoned to plague a thousand years before, then entombed by the murderous symbiote-mold—then wrecked by an explosion in the Dark Museum hidden underneath it. She made her way around the smashed buildings, giving as wide a berth as possible to the thicker clumps of symbiote-mold that covered everything. The old files said that, way back when, the stuff had been even thicker and more virulent outside the city. Unfortunately, she was about to have the chance to find out if that was still true.

Lurching and stumbling through the crumbling, mold-covered wreckage, she arrived back at her lander—and was disheartened to see that it had already acquired a thin dusting of mold. She could almost imagine that she could see it growing. She glanced at the arm of her suit and didn’t need to imagine anything. The thin tufts she had first noticed a few hours ago were now plainly visible.

The lander was purpose-built for landing on, and traveling across, Mars: a short fat cone with three legs and thrusters in the base. Nothing fancy. The cabin wasn’t even pressurized. No sense sending something sophisticated down to this place. The Interdict Law made it clear that any ship that landed on Mars had to be incinerated, for fear of contaminating whatever else it might touch.

Her pressure suit was actually two suits, one inside the other. Once she was off-planet and safely back in space, alongside the one-person Chrono Patrol transport that had gotten her to Mars orbit, the first thing she would do would be to beam all the data she had captured over to a datastore that wasn’t hopelessly saturated with Martian contaminates. Then she would abandon the lander, sending it into a burn-up trajectory with the Martian atmosphere. Then she’d seal herself in a fabric bubble, pump in a pure oxygen environment, and ignite the outer suit. It would disintegrate completely, leaving her in the supposedly fireproof inner suit. She sure as hell hoped it was fireproof.

Watching from the inside as her pressure suit burned was going to be a new experience for Kalani, but the people she was tracking had done it, or something very like it. She was going to have to do a lot of the things they had done. She could see that now.

She climbed up into the lander and sealed the hatch. The hatch, and the hull itself, for that matter, weren’t designed to hold pressure in but merely to provide a reasonably smooth aerodynamic surface during transit through the atmosphere. Even so, it felt good to havesomething between herself and that horrific landscape.

But she wouldn’t just get to lift off and leave the damned planet. Oh, no. She would have to land one more time, in order to finish her investigations here and seal off a massive breach in security that had been there for at least a century before she was born. What was the near-ancient phrase—“closing the barn doors after the horses have already gone”—something like that. Still, orders were orders. The tunnel would have to be shut.

She strapped herself in and fired the lander’s main thruster, not even bothering to calculate a flight plan. Her destination was so close that it wasn’t worth the effort. She had the coordinates she needed from her suit’s inertial-tracking system. All she had to do was fly up, fly due east five kilometers, and land again.

The lander jumped into the sullen sky and nosed over as it reached the apex of its flight. Kalani squirted the coordinates from her suit’s tracker into the lander’s flight systems, and told the lander to paint a bright red x on her heads-up display.

There,that six-sided building out in the middle of the mold fields. That must be it. She did a lock-in on the lander’s flight systems, and told it to do a slow-speed approach and autoland fifty meters shy of the structure.

The lander took over the flying, and Kalani was able to concentrate on the landscape below. Time had passed, and the symbiote-mold grew quickly. Still, she could read traces of her quarry’s visit. At a guess, she was about to land almost precisely where they had. It was also quite clear they had run into trouble. The surface was still broken and disturbed, and showed some signs of fire. The wreckage of several one-shot cargo landers, and the remains of the burned-off camouflage covers that had hidden them, were nearby. She made sure her recorders were running, getting a visual record of it all, just in case there was ever an occasion that the evidence might prove useful.

But it was the rough-hewn six-sided structure that drew her attention. It looked for all the world like a long-abandoned temple to some long-forgotten god.

Never mind the poetic imagery,she told herself severely.What matters is that it has to be the place I’m looking for. Just a few hours before, she had been in the tunnel that ran under that structure, and even walked up a flight of stone stairs that led to what had to be the inner chamber of that building, but the steel door between the inner and outer chamber had been locked against her. She had been forced to backtrack all the way through the tunnel, back through the wreckage of the Dark Museum, back out onto the surface, then fly her lander here, in order to get to the other side of that door.