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

"Oh, gawd!" Vickery said, craning his head toward the ceiling.
The other two techs grabbed self-sealing patches from stations by the wall. Loose scraps flew about in crazy circles, whipped by the breeze. Keefer stumbled into the center of the chaos, not sure what he could do to help.
The flexible walls of the modules were multiple-ply transparent polymer with radiation dampers, thick enough and tough enough to withstand most impacts. But not all. The puncture had occurred in the most inconvenient place for a major rip, nine feet off the ground. Steinberg wheezed, hauling in great breaths as her wavy hair flailed like seaweed tendrils about her head. "We'll need the scaffold! It's too high."
"Screw that!" Vickery said. "Hold your breath, Amelia. I'll lift you up there."
Steinberg snatched three of the wide mylar patches from one of the techs. Vickery stooped down, grabbed her by the calves of her legs. "Knees stiff! You can stand on my shoulders."
"Just do it, dammit!" Steinberg yelled.
In the one-third gravity, Vickery -- with his barrel chest and heavy arms -- had no trouble lifting the short, wiry woman straight up, placing her feet squarely on his shoulders like an acrobat.
Steinberg caught her balance and reached up with the opaque patches, but the airflow yanked at the self-sealing pieces in her hand. The first patch bent, stuck partly to the interior of the dome with the vicious adhesive, while the rest of the fabric was sucked through the rip, to flap in the icy breeze outside.
She took a second patch and slapped it up, covering most of the hole. A puckered indent showed where the low pressure on the outside still sucked at it. Wobbling, then regaining her balance on Vickery's shoulders, Steinberg took the third patch and covered the remainder of the hole.
Mercifully, the shrieking noise stopped, leaving only the rush of the emergency atmosphere pumps and the heater fans. Keefer shivered, looking for a thin film of frost on his own skin where the sweat had frozen. His ears ached.
With a grunt, Vickery wrestled Steinberg back down to the ground. "I'm awake now," she said, shaking her head. "No more coffee."
The emergency pumps continued roaring as they pulled in streams of cold air. "Shut those pumps off and use the subsidiary tanks!" Vickery shouted to one of the two techs inside the door. "That outside air's going to freeze the bleeping plants!"
While one of the techs turned on green emergency tanks to let warmed CO2 into the dome, Amelia Steinberg went to the wall controls and convinced the AI housekeeper to switch the emergency pumps to support-and-replenish mode, shunting the outside air through secondary steps in the chain so that it passed through heaters and filters before entering the dome. Keefer could smell the rusty richness of the outside atmosphere.
"That'll do it," she said. "Pressure should be back to normal in a few hours. Then they can come in and survey the damage. For now, let's go somewhere we can breathe! I'm getting dizzy from all this. The plants can have it!"
Steinberg pushed open the door and retreated back to the corridor. A handful of the other base inhabitants had gathered like spectators, including Tam Smith, who looked as worried about the plants as she was about Keefer. After Vickery followed the last man out, he sealed the door behind him and slumped to the floor.
Steinberg looked down at her stained coveralls. "Christ! I dumped hot coffee in my lap and I didn't even notice."
"Adrenaline's good stuff, ain't it?" Vickery said.
Keefer thought of the wreckage inside the greenhouse dome. Tam would have an interesting introduction to her first days of work as an agronomist on Mars. "Okay, so now can somebody tell me what the hell happened?" he said. "What caused that?"
Vickery shrugged. "Probably a meteorite. We've seen a lot of activity left over from the comet strikes. And the air's not thick enough to stop the medium-sized rocks yet. The little stones get through -- it probably vaporized on impact. We just happened to be in the middle of the targeting cross."
Keefer blinked his eyes. "The walls aren't thick enough? Shouldn't there be more protection?"
"Commissioner, this isn't a fortress here. The walls aren't much more than aluminum foil. You're living inside a balloon. It's a risk we all accepted before coming up here. You, too."
"Natural hazards," Steinberg said. "You just have to put up with them." She knitted her brows. "Now, some zoned-out doctor stealing a rover and taking off on a joyride is something else altogether. We shouldn't have to tolerate that kind of crap."
Vickery's face looked ruddy and more flushed now. He lifted his eyebrows. "I believe the alarms interrupted you from making an important commissioner-type announcement back in the mess hall? Something about Rachel?"
Keefer took a moment to recall his speech. "Yes. I was about to say that if Commissioner Dycek isn't back by morning, I want somebody -- " In his mind he saw Vickery working with the solar panels, Vickery lifting Steinberg so they could seal the puncture in the dome. " -- I want _you_, Bruce, to go out with me to look for her."
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BORIS TIBAN
When the UNSA rover ground to a halt and sat hissing exhaust from its methane engines, Boris expected a squad of armed security guards to emerge -- like the ones in the Siberian prison camp. The swarm of legs on the vehicle's underbelly made it look like some strange undersea creature, and its white metallic hull looked out of place among the rust reds, textured blacks and browns with highlights of encroaching green. The rover made too much noise, lumbering ahead as if it assumed everything else would get out of its way: unmistakably a human artifact.
Nothing happened for a long moment, second after slow-motion second ticking into the cold silence. Boris tensed, knotting his muscles, squeezing the titanium rod, knowing that if the humans did not emerge to confront them soon, he would lose his patience and rush howling at the rover, jabbing with the titanium staff like an aborigine with a stone-tipped spear.
"Are they taunting us?" he asked in a growling whisper.
When the outer airlock finally opened, Boris flinched backward, gesturing wildly for Cora to stay out of sight and out of danger. He hoped that Stroganov and Nastasia would dive for cover behind the stone faces if the humans started shooting. But Boris stepped forward proudly to meet them, his feet crunching on the broken soil.
To his surprise, only one person emerged from the sphincter airlock, backing out so that the oxygen regenerator pack sighed in the thin air first. The human stepped free and turned around to stare at Boris, moving slowly and with obvious hesitation. Behind the faceplate, he could see it was a woman, scrawny even in her environmental suit. Inside the suit she looked fragile and pathetic, like eggshells strung together with spiderwebs. Unarmed and alone.
A fool.
Boris felt the tension drain out of him, leaving him with a rejuvenated sense of bravado. He stifled a laugh and jammed his staff into the ground. "Stroganov! Help me," he bellowed, though the thin air snatched the fierceness from his words.
The two _adin_ men marched forward while the woman just stood unmoving and stared at them, as if in complete surrender. They grabbed her arms, lifting her off the ground in the low gravity. Her reflective suit felt slick and unnatural in Boris's numb grip. It was made of some kind of tough, metallized plastic that strained against the internal pressure she required to stay alive. The human woman said nothing, just gazed at them through the visor with an expression of wonder and awe on her narrow face. Her silence made Boris uneasy. Stroganov wore a perplexed expression.
The two _adin_ carried their prize easily. "You are our prisoner," Boris said, pushing his lips close to her curved faceplate to watch her cringe. "We will talk inside."
"I can walk by myself," she said. The voice from the speakerpatch was husky, but did not tremble with fright.
"Nevertheless, we will assist you. You are on our mountain, and we must be gracious hosts to the first visitor we've ever received on Mars."
Oddly, the woman let them manhandle her to the cave without a struggle. Seeing that he could easily take charge of the captive, Boris turned offhandedly to Stroganov. "Make sure Nastasia comes inside," he said.
Boris set the suited human down in the dimness of the lava tube and scrutinized her. Control lights inside her helmet illuminated her face. Boris saw granite-colored eyes and angular features, red-brown hair laced with iron-gray, wide mouth, generous nose. He discerned no expression of fear, though, which he found disconcerting. More unsettling was the fact that she looked hauntingly familiar to him. After all this time, how could he remember any humans at all?
He had spent the last sixteen years seeing nothing but scarred, monstrous _adin_ faces, and he had learned to read their new expressions in the harsh Martian environment, learned to decipher subtle emotions on visages that bore no customary noses or ears, with radically modified eyes, milky skin. He would not allow himself to think the stupidly narrow-minded remark that all humans looked alike -- but the woman was a shock to his senses, with her facial features and expressions so extreme that they seemed a caricature.
The woman straightened herself and looked around the grotto, ignoring him and studying how the _adins_ lived. Boris felt momentarily ashamed and embarrassed at their squalid, primitive living area. He could read her thoughts, as if they were words in Stroganov's wall-journal, characters etched in Cyrillic letters onto smooth black volcanic glass. _Is this all the_ adins _have done for themselves? Is this all they have made of the world on which they once were kings?_
Stroganov came back inside the cave, ducking his head and leading Nastasia, who ignored the suited human and went deeper into the cave. She mumbled something about looking for another fern flower, then toiled away into the dim passages.
Stroganov returned to Boris, eager to ask his questions of the human woman. "Why did you come here?" He looked from the helmet visor back to Boris. "Who is she?"
"I have not asked her yet," Boris snapped. The teacher should know his place by now. Boris drew a deep, deep breath, puffing out his chest and the auxiliary lungs on his back. He felt the icy air ache in the corners of his lungs.
"I recognize you," the woman said, turning to Boris and interrupting his posturing. Her words filtered out from the speakerpatch below the faceplate, in crisp textbook Russian straight from Moscow schooling, with no Siberian accent. "You are Boris Tiban. Boris ... Petrovich, isn't it?"
"I never knew my father, so don't call me Petrovich," he said, then bent closer. "How do you recognize me?" With strong _adin_ arms, Boris forced her to sit on one of the boulders inside the grotto, just to show he was in control. Cora often sat there, staring into the distance of her mind, thinking whatever inexpressible thoughts had haunted her since she had learned of the baby. Now, only a little light trickled inside from the dying day.
"Ah, you must have watched our transmissions to Earth. The cosmic adventure sponsored by Vice Commander Dozintsev and his masters at UNSA? Were you entertained by our struggle for survival on this world, while you and the rest of Earth sat warm and cozy on yours?"
Holding his rigid staff in front of him, he preened like a bird. He held his head high and spoke in a distant voice. "How often do they replay my last transmission to Earth, just before I executed Dozintsev? I wonder." He rang the metal rod on the lava floor for emphasis.
She did not respond at once. She was a quiet one, not easily intimidated. "No, Boris Tiban." Her wide lips smiled, a disturbing and superior smile that he wanted to tear from her face. He peered closer.
"I remember you from my selection procedures," she answered. "All the interviews, all the forms. Given time, I can probably recall details about every one of these _adins_ here."