"Kevin J. Anderson - Climbing Olympus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Kevin J)

She brought the rover to a halt and just sat there staring out the windowport for a few moments. "I have so much to ask you," she whispered.
_Percival_'s AI pilot asked if her query had been directed to the rover's systems; she left it wondering as she scrambled to put her environment suit on.
Rachel's heart thudded with amazement, anticipation, and more than a little fear. She wanted to leap out of the rover and embrace them, to show her joy at finding them alive. She wanted to know how the _adins_ had fared, what they had done in the intervening fifteen years, why they had broken off contact with Earth.
Her second impulse was to turn _Percival_ around and flee back downslope. What would the _adins_ do if they caught her? Murder her, as they had with the _dvas_ at the pumping station? She remembered watching videoclips of Boris Tiban's execution of Vice Commander Dozintsev on worldwide newsnets. The _adins_ were capable of savage acts, and she had no reason to believe they would spare her.
No matter.
Rachel parked the vehicle, and initiated the automatic shutdown procedure. The bulky rover settled to the ground, retracting its motile legs.
What might they do to her, indeed? Rachel had nothing to lose and, in an ironic way, this would bring closure to her work.
She sealed the protective plates over _Percival_'s windowports, then stood up. The recompressed air in her suit tasted cold and metallic, flattened by her own anxiety. She cycled through the sphincter airlock of the rover and turned back to key the locking combination.
Rachel had to find out for herself, even if no one else would know. She was probably the only one who cared about the _adins_ anyway, though it would leave Keefer with another mystery on his books. Something else to explain to UNSA.
_With a terrified sense of wonder she stepped forward to meet the _adins.__
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JESUS KEEFER
The mess room in the outer ring module was the only space large enough to hold all sixty-two Lowell Base inhabitants at the same time, and even so it was crowded. Keefer blinked his eyes and looked uncomfortably at all the faces. This was not how he had envisioned his first few days on Mars. What a way to welcome a new commissioner!
With the exception of Dr. Evrani, none of them knew what the emergency was. Bruce Vickery kept looking at Keefer with just a hint of frustration, probably upset because he hadn't been consulted before Keefer called the general assembly. Making a calming gesture with his hand, he hoped the operations manager would settle down once Keefer had a chance to speak.
Keefer stood at one end of the room and cracked his knuckles, looking toward the module entrance as he waited for the remaining two members of the off-shift to arrive. The last was Amelia Steinberg, a short, muscular structural engineer who made sure the inflatable modules maintained their integrity and all systems continued to function. She was always wrapped up in her own duties and didn't seem to care what was going on with the rest of the base.
Steinberg elbowed her way to the coffee dispenser and poured herself a cup with an unself-conscious arrogance that told Keefer she did not disrespect authority; she simply ignored it. She had wavy mouse-brown hair that might have made her look attractive had it not been for the angular features of her face -- square jaw, square nose, square cheeks, and square teeth. She took a sip of her coffee, set the cup on a bare spot on one of the tables, and plodded over to the food unit.
Before Keefer could speak, the other off-shift people stood up to serve themselves, following Steinberg's example. They looked groggy after being roused several hours early from their regular sleep period. Conversation began to rise, but Keefer remained silent and watched Steinberg, trying not to show too much annoyance. She shuffled four trays as she looked at labels describing their contents. Selecting one, she put the others back, leaned against the food unit door to close it, and popped her tray into the microwave.
"Should we keep waiting, Ms. Steinberg?" Keefer said. "All sixty of us are eager to assist you."
"I'm listening," Steinberg said without bothering to look at him. "You rang the dinner bell, so start talking."
Keefer frowned, then sighed. "All right," he said, placing his hands behind him on the curved fiber-composite structural wall, "we've got a problem. Commissioner Dycek is missing. She took one of the rovers and drove off without a recorded destination. She's been gone since early this morning, and she hasn't reported in. She intentionally switched off her locator beacon, so we are not able to locate _Percival_."
Vickery groaned.
"You got me out of bed for that?" Steinberg said, yanking her tray out of the microwave. She lifted the paper lid and frowned at the steaming breakfast she saw. "Maybe she'll drive off the edge of a cliff and do us all a favor."
"But she must not drive over a cliff!" Evrani stood up, flapping his hands. "We need the rover! Do you know how long it would take for us to get a replacement from UNSA?"
Keefer saw that the mood of the people in the room supported Steinberg's attitude. He expected some shock or concern, but only the new arrivals appeared worried. Dycek seemed to have alienated not just Keefer but everyone else on the base as well.
"She's probably out on a picnic with some of her _dvas_," Steinberg said. "Everybody knows she's helping them steal us blind."
"All right, enough!" Keefer shouted, genuinely angry now. "Every person is a valuable member of this base. Commissioner Dycek may be in danger. She has done something foolish, and I don't condone it for a minute -- but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be concerned."
The rest of the people fidgeted. After an uncomfortable moment, Vickery scowled. "The man's right. I don't particularly care for some of you clowns either, but I'd go out and rescue _you_ if you got into some sort of fix." A few people chuckled.
Keefer clapped his hands to get their attention again. "We don't know why Commissioner Dycek went. She could have a legitimate reason."
Steinberg laughed and started eating her breakfast.
"Okay, however unlikely that may be," Keefer amended. "But our first concern is to find her and bring her -- _and_ the rover -- back to base. Does anybody have an idea where she might have gone? Did anyone see her leave? That rover can take her a good distance, and she's already been gone for something like eighteen hours. She could have covered a hell of a lot of territory in that time, and we don't have the manpower to mount a search."
"Fucking right we don't!" Steinberg said, raising her plastic spork in the air. "Look, that storm is coming tomorrow. I've got my whole team scheduled to spend the day going over every module seal and all of the external equipment, slapping down some extra protection to make sure it can take the punishment. I don't have time to waste chasing Chicken Little because the sky is falling on her project."
"You know, Rachel signed the rover out day before yesterday, too, come to think of it," Vickery interrupted. "Took her bleeping sweet time with it. I have no idea where she went, though."
Evrani raised his hand, like a schoolchild. "I know! I checked the logs. She traveled to Noctis Labyrinthus, where the big avalanche occurred last year. She goes there quite often -- like someone visiting a cemetery. I have been keeping track of her movements. She was miserable about all those dead _dvas_."
"Another one of Dycek's 'angst appreciation' trips," Steinberg snorted. "Oh, boy, I hope she captured it all on videodisc."
Keefer frowned. He thought of the crumpled newspaper clipping on her bunk and the belongings scattered around her quarters. His gut feeling pointed to an unpleasant possibility. "We have ... reason to believe that Commissioner Dycek may not be in a completely stable state of mind."
"Bingo!" Steinberg said. A few of the others snickered.
"She will probably come back in the morning," Beludi al-Somak said. "You will see."
Keefer began to reply, but then an explosion of noise cut off his words. Alarms shrieked through the wall intercoms. Everyone scrambled at once. Keefer looked around in confusion.
"Oh, shit!" Steinberg and her two companions leaped to their feet with so much force in the low gravity that they nearly banged their heads on the ceiling. She flung her food tray in the air and swatted her full coffee cup aside as she shot toward the doorway.
Bruce Vickery reached the wall screen in a single leap, ramming his fingers down on the buttons. A schematic of Lowell Base blossomed on the screen with a flashing red light in one area. "Greenhouse dome!" he shouted over the racket. "Just a second, I'll tell you how bad it is."
"Fuck that!" said Steinberg as she vanished through the door, shouting over her shoulder, "We'll find out as soon as we get there."
As Vickery pushed his way out of the mess room, Keefer ran after him, trying to make his legs work in some approximation of a useful run. Some of the people panicked; others kept close to the wall to give the others free access. The babble of conversation, the shouted advice and warnings, the alarms, the smooth and too-identical corridors of the base, filled Keefer with confusion. "Hey, what's going on?" he called.
Vickery didn't even turn toward him as he did an awkward gallop down the corridor. "Puncture in the greenhouse dome. Massive pressure drop."
The alarms kept screaming, each sound worse than fingernails grating on a chalkboard. The base was deserted, since nearly everyone was still in the mess hall. Keefer seemed to be running through an eerie abandoned ship.
Vickery popped through several modules, taking unexpected shortcuts. Pressure doors had closed automatically, compartmentalizing the base, and Vickery was forced to punch in overrides, wasting precious time. Amelia Steinberg had vanished ahead of them, moving faster in an emergency than Keefer would have believed possible.
The pressure door to the greenhouse module had automatically sealed itself and the AI housekeepers refused to let anyone inside. Steinberg and her teammates were already there, pummeling the controls. "Brute force can defeat computer intelligence any day of the week," Steinberg said as she used a prybar to break the seal. "Open your mouths!" she called. "Pressure drop."
It took three of them to unseat the door and yank it open. Keefer's ears popped as air gushed through the module corridor into the greenhouse.
Inside, the flapping transparent dome sounded like a war zone. A small gash at the top and left of the dome was like a funnel through which air poured with the velocity of a gunshot, screaming and ripping the tear wider.
Crude resistance heaters glowed red, casting furnace heat into small areas in a vain attempt to stave off the deep freeze. Atmosphere pumps roared as they worked to compensate for the breach, dumping Martian air back into the inflatable dome, but the translucent walls had already begun to sag.
In the darkened interior Keefer saw rows of test plants whipping back and forth in the upward hurricane. A whirlwind of loose potting soil spattered into the domed space. Corn tassels, wheat stalks, pine seedlings, all seemed to cry out as their air bled away.