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

Warning. Locks and Security System Contain
Embedded Piezo-Thermal-Optical Detectors
Linked to Self-Destruct System. Any Attempt to
Break Through Locks will Initiate Self-Destruct.



She was not in the least surprised or alarmed—now. She had been, down in the tunnel, when she had finally recognized the white tubing in the vault of the tunnel as a rope charge. But no one set charges like that unless they had a way to detonate them, and booby-trapping the entrance was a fairly obvious guess as to how it might be done.

Should you locate an unauthorized entrance into the Technology Storage Facility, you are to destroy it.

So her orders read, and she was not going to argue with them. Not given what she had been through in order to get approval for a Mars visit in the first place—and not after what she had seen down there.

That was in fact the trouble: It was too obviously the next move. The tunnel’s builder had obviously known that the previous three visitors, or someone like them, would come here. Plainly, all had been prepared for them. She could not help but wonder if the tunnel’s builder had foreseenher visit as well. Had the builder anticipated that an officer of the Chronologic Patrol would, sooner or later, stand where she was standing, intent on destroying the place? Suppose hewished to have it wrecked, now that it had served its purpose? If so, was she then playing his game, doing his bidding?

But Kalani Temblar had already spent long enough in intelligence to shy away from such hall-of-mirrors worries. It was too easy to become immobilized, to start believing thateverything could be a trap, that any move you made could have been part of the Enemy’s master plan. She forced the worries from her mind. After all, her orders were explicit and provided no room for judgment on her part in this matter. She pulled out the charges and the detonators. She had brought four medium-sized bricks of flex-and-stick explosive with her. She peeled each one out of its container, then pressed one up against each set of spin dials. The fourth she set around the vault door handle. It was the work of a moment to set detonators into each charge, then string the detonators together to work off the same timer.

It was, however, with a vast reluctance that she reached for the timer itself. Long before she had headed to Mars, the Chronologic Patrol had known that someone might well have gotten into the Dark Museum. As the official entrance was well hidden, there were obviously good odds that someone had built his or herown entrance. The planning group for this job had given Kalani the explosives in order to wreck the entrance if she found it. No one had expected the illegal entrance to be anything more elaborate than a drilled vertical shaft like the Chrono Patrol’s own drop shaft, or perhaps some sort of chance pathway through the rubble left by the collapse of the upper levels.

No one had expected to find a massive, kilometers-long engineering project, let alone one with its own self-destruct mechanism. Now Kalani was planning to touch off that self-destruct system, destroying a fair-sized building and the tunnel under it. The folks back at HQ wanted a full visual record of her mission—and that would most certainly have to include images of the tunnel’s and temple’s destruction. That in turn meant she would have to stay close enough to record them.

A nice, simple, radio-controlled remote detonator would have suited the situation admirably. Head back to the lander, do a detailed preboost checkout, do a high-hover to, say, fifteen hundred meters, push the button, watch the bang, and boost for orbit. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a remote detonator.

A timer-controlled detonator made things far too exciting, forced her into too many guesses about how long it would take to get her ship to that high-hover, and too much faith that nothing would go wrong. Suppose she set the timer for too long and stood at high-hover for so much time she didn’t have enough propellant left to reach orbit? Suppose she set it short, and the whole damn place went up while her ship was still on the ground? Suppose she tripped and broke her wrist and couldn’t climb into the lander with just one hand before the damned thing went off? Or suppose it didn’t matter when she set the thing for, because the symbiote-mold had already eaten through the lander’s propellant plumbing? Or suppose she was so tired she’d just wired things up with a short across the leads, so the detonators would go off the moment she attached the timer? There was no way to be sure which, if any, answer would be right.

Just make the best guess you can,she told herself. Sensible advice, but what would the best guess be? She thought it through as carefully as she could, balancing the dangers of too fast against those of too slow.Call it twenty minutes, she told herself at last. She made the setting at once, before she was tempted to work it all through again, and then again, just to be sure. She could invent enough doubt to paralyze herself that way, too.

But she should at least check her wiring before she started the timer. She traced back her leads and confirmed they were all where they should be. Then she looked, not at the leads, but at the explosive charges. She couldsee the mold growing on it, a thin fuzz already coating the entire exposed surface of each charge, with thicker patches blooming here and there, growing moment by moment as she stood there and watched.Twenty minutes . Would there even be any explosive left to detonate by then? She looked to the timer again and thought hard. Suddenly, she was sweating again, sweating as if her suit cooling had cut out altogether.Heat. That mold was digesting the explosive fast enough that it had to be generating some significant heat and some extremely weird chemical by-products. And for all she knew, the mold had already infiltrated the detonators and was digesting the safeties on their mechanisms. The mold could set off all or part of the charges at any moment—or else keep them from going off at all.

The sooner, the better,she told herself. She was tempted to crank the timer down to ten minutes, but it would be all but impossible for her to take off that fast. She compromised on fifteen minutes, reset the timer, noted the exact time, started the countdown, and watched the numbers change from 15:00 to 14:59. She put the timer down carefully on the stone floor, making sure not to jostle any wires—then got the hell out of the temple as fast as she could go.

Not that she could go all that fast. Not in the big, clumsy burn-off suit. Not through the broken-up, dirty, treacherous surface crust that seemed to find new ways to kick up dust and spores with every step. Not with her eyes half-blinded by droplets of sweat, and more sweat spattering on the inside of her visor and drying there. Not moving as close as she was to the absolute ragged edge of exhaustion. And not stopping every five steps to see how much time she had left.

She forced herself to stop halfway, to kneel forward, hands on her knees, and catch her breath.Steady down, Lieutenant, she told herself.Panic is what will kill you fastest. Slow. Steady. Don’t wear yourself out floundering through the mold crust. It isn’t far to go.

Kalani soon discovered that last was a good thing, because she sure as hell wasn’t about to cover much distance. With the mold crust weakened and broken by her walking on it already, the going was at least twice as bad as it had been moving in the other direction. She fell twice, then gave up and deliberately walked ten meters south, ninety degrees away from where she was trying to go, in hopes of finding a steadier walking surface. Her boots still broke through with every step, but only by a couple of centimeters, rather than up to her ankles or knees. That helped, if only a little.

After what seemed a most unreasonably long time, she made it back to the base of the lander—and more hopelessly chewed-up surface. Whatever scraps of calm she had managed to gather to herself evaporated when she checked the countdown status again. Somehow, five minutes and thirty seconds had already gone poof.And you’ll go poof too, if you don’t start up that ladder fast, she warned herself.

She had another series of bad moments when she tried to reach up for the lowest rung of the ladder, which was set into the side of the lander, exactly between two of the lander legs. Just as she had her left arm fully extended to grab the rung, she broke completely through the mold crust and fell. The broken mold collapsed in around her, and she was buried nearly to her thighs. She looked up, and for one terrible moment thought the whole lander was toppling over on top of her. But no, it was just the weird low angle that made it look that way—plus her own agitated state of mind. Nor did it help that, with the surface fallen away, the lowest rung of the ladder was not only above her head, it was nearly out of sight, given the limited visibility her helmet’s visor permitted. She literally had to bend over backward even to see it.

Somehow, she dragged herself up and managed to find a solid enough bit of mold crust so that she could jump just high enough to grab that lowest rung. She pulled herself up, thankful for the low gravity, and grabbed the next rung, and the next, and the next. She opened the hatch, climbed in, and closed and sealed it behind her. She checked the countdown: seven minutes left.Not even exciting, she thought as she turned around.Plenty of time to do a quick prelaunch check and get out of here.

But just as she was about to indulge in a sigh of relief, she made the mistake of looking at the lander’s tiny control panel—and at the pilot chair. Vigorous new growths of mold spores had sprouted in both places. Kalani automatically reached out to brush the greyish fuzz off her seat—and realized there was twice as thick a growth on the arm of her suit. She looked down at herself, as best she could in the bulky suit, and discovered that virtually every part of her suit was covered in the stuff, as if her outer suit were growing a thin, patchy coat of grey-green fur. Something had stimulated the spores to very active growth. The idea of having the outer suit burned off was starting to seem downright appealing.

The suit and the chair didn’t matter so much. They’d still function if covered with grey fuzz.But if that crud is growing into the controls the way it’s growing into the explosive . . .

She sat down, strapped herself in, and, working carefully so as to not activate any of the controls by accident, brushed and peeled away as much of the stuff from the panel as she could. With all that crud hiding the display and gumming up the controls, she wasn’t going to be able to perform a preflight safety check—