"Kevin J. Anderson - Climbing Olympus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Kevin J) Suited up, Rachel let herself out of the Lowell Base airlock into the hollow shelter that protected the three vehicles. One long-distance rover, _Percival_, sat unclaimed for the day.
With a self-protective dread, Rachel did not want to leave any hint of the _dva_ distress call until she had seen the situation for herself. Damage control. She debated going back inside to enter her destination and the purpose of her unscheduled excursion in the roster. If any of the other Lowell Base personnel had committed such a frivolous, unprofessional act, Rachel would have severely reprimanded them -- but what more could they do to her anyway? Rachel considered letting Keefer deal with the emergency situation. He was the new commissioner, wasn't he? But Rachel had to see what it was. They were her _dvas_. Seated behind the AI piloting panel, she argued with the automatic pilot to switch off _Percival'_s locating beacon. Operations Manager Vickery would probably overreact, and Keefer would feel duty-bound -- gung ho like a typical American -- and charge out to drag Rachel back home. No thanks. She wasn't supposed to go out by herself in the rover (as Evrani had told her in his last lecture), without filing a detailed description of her destination, how long she would be gone, and when rescue teams should be dispatched if she failed to return. "Fuck it," she said, in perfect colloquial English. Her stomach felt cold and tight, as if someone with a spiked glove kept squeezing her stomach. She eased _Percival_ out of the cave-like garage and picked up speed as she moved across the packed area of pinkish concrete around Lowell Base. Passage marks from hundreds of daily excursions crisscrossed the dusty plain from the base, around the jagged Spine, out to the landing pad. The all-terrain legs of the rover could scramble over most obstacles, and Rachel instructed the AI pilot to pick the fastest course. According to her coordinates, the _dva_ pumping station was about three hundred kilometers away, at the foot of Pavonis Mons -- a five-hour journey at the rover's top speed. Rachel circled the Spine, and when the sharp crags blocked her view of the inflatable modules, she headed out. With an odd, superstitious foreboding, she turned around to look out the side windows, and was disappointed to see that she could not take one last view of the base. -------- RACHEL DYCEK Ice, the color of spilled platinum on ochre dust, extended from the breached pipeline. Water jets had boiled into the thin atmosphere and frozen into steaming, lumpy stalactites and weird white pinnacles protruding from the pipe. Before long, the solid lake would erase itself again, frothing into the Martian sky. As she brought _Percival_ toward the pumping station, Rachel stared in horror and tried to assess the area of spilled ice. "Thousands of liters," she said to herself, "many thousands." She thought again with dismay of all the misplaced spare parts, the lost equipment, the annoying long-distance UN mutterings of her own mismanagement and "thieving _dvas_." Had they begun engaging in sabotage as well -- perhaps to protest her departure as commissioner? No, she decided. _Dva_ sabotage maybe, but not to protest her replacement. Rachel felt a dull sinking sensation inside as she stared at the roiling, steaming fog of precious water. A disaster as bad as she had feared. Because it had happened at a pumping station supervised by the _dvas_, her _dvas_, someone would no doubt find a way to trace it back to her. Yes, Rachel had been right to keep quiet about it for now, until she could think of some way to salvage the situation. Rachel turned a sharp eye from the clinging scabs of ice to the broken pipe itself. The thin-walled vessel was more than just breached -- someone had torn it apart with a crowbar. Sabotage indeed. Were the various _dva_ settlements feuding with each other? The _dvas_ were composed of different ethnic groups from the Sovereign Republics, and such struggles had been common throughout history -- but never here on Mars. The rover eased to a halt outside the pumping shack. With a sigh of small pressure pumps, it settled to the ground, kicking up a halo of fine dust. Rachel suited up as the AI went through its automatic shutdown and standby procedures. She checked her suit's oxygen-regenerator system, then cycled through the rover's sphincter airlock. Three _dvas_ emerged from the insulated Quonset hut, their meager shelter constructed of prefabricated components. Rachel watched the _dvas_ approach, recognizing none of them by name, though she placed the lead male and his ethnic group: Kazakh, from near the dried-up Aral Sea, which had been one of Earth's largest freshwater bodies until Joseph Stalin had obliterated it in the early twentieth century in his own disastrous attempts to rework the landscape to fit his whim. When the call went out for _dva_ volunteers, many families from the Aral region had leaped at the chance to come to Mars, to make a new start. But even here on a new planet they clung to their ethnic groupings. "Commissioner Dycek!" the leading _dva_ male greeted her. Though he bellowed with expanded lungs, his voice sounded watery in the thin air, muffled through her helmet sound pickups. He was a squat man with broad shoulders, wearing loose insulated overalls and padded gloves that made his fingers look like sausages. Steam swirled around his head as he breathed. The man's nose and ears were flattened to protect them from heat loss; the nostrils were wide sinks in the face to allow inhalation of greater volumes. Inside, the _dvas_ had a labyrinth of sinuses to warm the frigid air before it entered the lungs. The enlarged lungs bore attached efficiency modules, tightly packaged membranes to snatch more oxygen molecules from the air. The two _dva_ females also wore padded silvery overalls. They clung beside the man like superstitious children. All three looked battered, as if they had tumbled in a heavy brawl. The male and one of the females sported bloodstained bandages. Rachel suddenly remembered there were supposed to be five _dvas_ assigned to this station. Where were the other two? The burly male did the talking. "We did not expect someone of such importance to investigate our mishap," he said. His accent was thick and exotic. "But we are glad it is you, Commissioner Dycek. Only you can understand how bad it truly is. You will understand." Rachel turned her head inside the environment suit, trying to calculate the extent of the leakage. A heavy cost, naturally, but Lowell Base had plenty of surplus, as did the other bases. "What do you mean? How much water was lost?" The _dva_ man gestured to the metallic sheet of ice. "We managed to shut off the water up-line, and we will repair the damage here." With the flat of his hand he knocked away one of the hanging icicles. It shattered with a sound like breaking crystal as it struck the frozen ground. "Come with me, Commissioner. Let me show you what else." Rachel's environment suit crinkled as she followed the _dva_ man. She remained tight-lipped, afraid of what he might show her, of what last surprises Mars might spring on her. The air tasted sour and dusty from the chemical-regenerator pack. Near the door, under a coating of reddish dust and tendrils of frost, two iron-hard _dva_ corpses lay on the ground. Rachel bent down to look at the frozen crimson wounds, the splotched white skin. She had seen plenty of blood during her career as a surgeon, but the pure malice and violence here made the rancid taste of bile climb into her throat. The dead male's skull had been cleaved through to the brain, and the woman had been impaled through the chest. A stained scrap-metal sword lay next to the bodies. With an brief shudder, she thought of a roving gang of bandits, creating murder and mayhem among the _dva_ settlements. But that sounded ridiculous. What did the _dvas_ have that someone else might want? And who would want it? New ideas roared through her mind like the whirlwind of the approaching storm. A domestic squabble ... two _dvas_ killing each other over jealousy, or a card game, or one of the innumerable and stupid cabin-fever reasons she had seen so often in Neryungri? The Russian temper often led to drunken brawls that turned into manslaughter. But never before on Mars. Yes, indeed, this would look far worse in her dossier than an accidental avalanche. UNSA would have a field day with her, and she would have to give all the explanations. "Tell me what happened," she said in a weary voice. "Wait, that is not all. We left this other one by himself." The _dva_ man took her to the other side of the hut, while the women hovered over the bodies of their companions. "We did not want him tainting the soil beside our comrades." Rachel's mind was already spinning. Another one? But only five _dvas_ were stationed at this post. Who? An outside attacker? The third body lay sprawled, arms akimbo, head cocked against a shoulder as if the _dvas_ had hurled his body there in disgust, like so much garbage. Inside her helmet Rachel let out a gasp. "_Adin_," the _dva_ man said, stating the obvious. "I ... thought they were all dead...." Rachel said, aghast, unable to cope with the flood of sudden realization. It was as if her whole world had shifted on its axis. "Not all," the _dva_ man answered, gesturing with his stubby gloved hand at the exaggerated adaptations of the _adin_. The _adin'_s head was smashed, making him unrecognizable. The corpse wore a tattered, thin jumpsuit in the freezing air, with much of the skin exposed. The _adin_ must have lived like this in the wild environment, unprotected. "They came out of the darkness," the _dva_ man said. "They made noises outside to frighten us, and as you know we _dvas_ have no weapons. His comrade wrecked the pipeline. This _adin_ smashed through the doorway of our dwelling and attacked us. He killed two of us before I could club him to death." Rachel swallowed. "You said there was another one?" "He got away," the _dva_ man said. "The women injured him, but he escaped. We could not pursue him in the darkness. We had to hike up-line to shut off the water flow, otherwise it would have been worse." Looking down at the dead _adin_, Rachel felt dizziness like black raven's wings fluttering around her temples. "If he returns, though, we will be ready for him." The _dva_ man's face showed a grim stoicism. From beside the hut, he pulled out a long digging implement and jabbed it into the ground. The frozen mud rang with the force of the blow. Rachel turned back to the lake of ice and the broken pipeline that stretched from the water-rich volcanic rocks of the Tharsis highlands. The cone of Pavonis Mons rose high and symmetrical in the middle distance. "But you think you can repair this yourselves?" she asked. Perhaps she would not need to give all the details to Lowell Base. She could doctor the numbers, file a routine leakage report. The _dva_ man hung his head as if in shame, then nodded. "We are self-sufficient here, Commissioner, but we will need extra supplies and equipment. Much was damaged. And there will be no more _dvas_ to replace our fallen comrades. It will be difficult." "You will have to make do." Rachel frowned, preoccupied. "I thought you already had a complete set of spare parts." The _dva_ man shrugged and spread his hands helplessly. "Components do not last long in this environment, Commissioner. We have so many hardships." "I will see what I can do, but you need to make your repairs with haste," Rachel said. The skies to the north looked thicker than normal, clogged. "Our weathersat shows a class four dust storm on its way. It should arrive late tomorrow." The _dva_ women looked at her with sharp, deep-set eyes, but kept their silence, as if they held Rachel in awe. The _dva_ man shrugged and took a step backward. "We already know about the storm, Commissioner. We can smell it in the air." Rachel nodded behind her faceplate and hesitated. "One last question. This _adin_ who escaped -- where did he go? Do you have any idea where I might find him?" |
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