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

She studied the area closely as the lander brought itself in but learned little more than she had seen at first glance. The desolation, the gloom, the symbiote-mold growing over everything; there was little she had not seen in the city. All of Mars was that way, in each place as in all places. The temple and the tunnel beneath it were the only novelties in the landscape—and it was her job to destroy them both.

The lander eased itself down onto the ground with one gentle bump as the craft set down. A perfect landing—but with a disconcerting sequel. The whole craft shuddered once, twice, then dropped another meter or so before coming to a final stop.

It took Kalani a moment to understand. The lander had set down on the “surface”—but the surface was merely the outer crust of the symbiote-mold. The weak and crumbly stuff was like crusted-over snow. Break through the outer layer, and the decayed mold underneath could provide no solid support. The ship only came to a complete rest when it reached the underlying solidity of rock and soil.

Kalani refused to indulge in the obvious by framing a metaphor for the Chronologic Patrol, or the state of things in general. She had work to do. She pulled the charges and detonators out of their locker, stuffed them into a pocket on her suit, and got moving.

She climbed out of the stubby little lander and stepped gingerly down onto the mold-crusted surface. The stuff looked even nastier from ground level, and, sure enough, it was even more unpleasant than in the city. The mold was a crumpled, wrinkled, dirty grey-green blanket that covered the world. Here and there the crust had broken open, and a cleansing wind had blown long enough to expose the actual surface of stone and soil. But it was plain to see such flaws soon healed themselves, the mold quickly swallowing up the land again wherever it showed itself

Strange things grew up out of the mold—great obscene brown mushrooms, reddish fanlike stalks, orange spikes, clusters of long knobbly fingerlike stalks, the hands of blue-grey corpses reaching up from under the mold to grab her and pull her down.

Kalani tried to get her imagination under control, even as she promised herself not to get too close to those finger-things. She started walking, moving carefully toward the temple. With every step, she could feel the mold crust giving under her feet just a little, creaking and groaning as she passed.

Almost against her will, she paused and looked around now and again as she made the short walk toward the temple. She dutifully recorded the views from each position, getting detailed shots of the wrecked landers and the temple from various angles, and of patches of surface that plainly had been torn up and had mold grow back over it.

They must have kept damned busy while they were down here,Kalani thought. It looked as if they had been dragging gear from the abandoned one-shot landers to their own ship. She could see bits of discarded equipment here and there, and a major collection of junk strewn right about where she figured their lander had set down. It looked very much as if they had been dumping hardware overboard in order to shed weight, and doing it in a hurry. There was obvious fire damage to the dumped equipment, and to the mold surface, and to the old one-shots. But there wasn’t enough oxygen in the current Martian atmosphere to support much in the way of combustion.You’d have to dump oxygen into the atmosphere in order for anything to burn. What the hell had gone on here? How had they even stayed alive on this planet long enough to do so much? From all the evidence, it seemed clear that they had been in burn-off suits like hers, albeit less sophisticated ones, with more limited duration.

Which reminded her to check her own suit’s status. She had to scrape a film of mold spores off the wrist display before she could read it clearly. She’d been in the suit for nearly three days, and slept in it twice. Even for a military-specification pressure suit, that was getting close to the duration limit. The displays said she had about eight hours left. She had no desire to spend anywhere near that much more time in such a hideous place.

She moved forward, hurrying a bit, toward the steps of the six-sided temple. She stepped on a thinner patch of mold crust, and her boot broke through. She fell, facefirst, into the miserable stuff. She pushed herself back up with both hands and came floundering out of the broken, crumbling, grey-green nightmare. She knelt there for a moment, calming herself, making sure that she wasn’t going to panic. The spores that were now all over her helmet and suit would kill her quickly, but most unpleasantly, if they reached her skin or lungs. They’d start digesting her before she was actually dead. But theyhadn’t reached her skin or her lungs. They were safely on the other side of her suit.A whole four or five centimeters away, she told herself.Isn’t that comforting?

She gave herself a few more seconds to settle down, then stood back up, brushed herself off as best she could, and moved on toward the temple. The best thing she could do for herself was get out of here as soon as possible—which meant getting the job done as soon as possible.

The steps leading up to the temple itself were all but completely buried in mold, to the point that it was difficult to see where they were. She moved carefully onto the upper platform on which the temple itself stood, and walked around it, searching for a way in. She spotted it on the western side of the structure. One wall panel had a handhold on one side and hinges on the other. She pulled hard on the handle and got exactly nowhere. She tried again, and started wondering what sort of tools she had on the lander. But on the third try the door finally shifted, grinding against the sand and the mold and opening about a quarter of the way before jamming up hard, completely immobile.

Never mind. It was open far enough for her to get in, even if she had to edge in sideways to manage it. She powered up her suit lights and went inside.

She stopped dead just inside the entrance, and started up full-image recording. They’d need to see this back at HQ, or else they’d figure she had imagined it. There had been faint marks on the floors down in the tunnel, but nothing this clear or distinct.

Footprints. Living footprints.Three sets of them, if she was reading it right, leading directly from where she stood straight to the solid wall on the far side of the room. Their boots must have picked up spores outside and planted them inside. The mold must have grown since where the boots had left the spores. She was undoubtedly about to plant her own set of spores with her own boots.

So, three of them got this far, at least,she thought.And then back out again. Now that she knew what to look for, she could just see fainter traces of three sets of prints pointed toward the exit.

If she had needed any evidence that there was something behind that wall, she had it now. One set of prints ended exactlyat the wall, with a bootmark that was cut off just ahead of the heel, and the front of the foot missing, as if the owner had simply walked straight on through.

She recorded it all, then walked to that wall, looking for the way in. She spotted it quickly enough—a handle set into the middle panel, the hinges set so it would swing to the left. She pulled it open and found a massive reinforced vault door behind it.

She checked the display on her inertial tracker and nodded. About eighteen hours before, she had stood on the far side of this door—about a meter east of her current location. It had required a hell of a backtrack to move that one meter, but she had done it. Now she had to make sure no one else ever did.

She examined the vault door. It had three sets of spin dials on it. The single word OR was stamped into the metal between the top and middle row of dials, and again, between the middle and bottom rows. Kalani nodded again. That was plain enough: The door had three possible combinations, any of which would open it.

Nor would she have to look far for clues to the combinations. They were right there, on the inside of the outer door. She carefully recorded images of the vault door, and of the inside of the outer door.

There were four thick pieces of transparent material sealed to the door panel. The top one held a sign reading THE RIGHT TIME AND PLACE. The second was an image of one side of a room more or less the size she was in, though of much finer material than the roughly hewn rock in this temple. There was some sort of inscription on one wall in the image, but that portion of the image had been deliberately blurred out. The third panel showed an image similar to the first, though apparently of the opposite side of the same room. Once again, the writing on the wall was deliberately blurred out and made illegible.

None of it made any sense to her. She could add it to the stack of puzzles she had found already. Let the big brains back at HQ take a crack at them.

The fourth panel was what she was interested in. It was another notice, printed in thick red block letters.