"Bova, Ben - Moonwar [v1, rtf]" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

All of the machinery was controlled by operators sitting safely inside their stations at the control center. Only a handful of construction workers were actually out on the floor of the crater Alphonsus.
I should be inside, too, Doug told himself. The deadline comes up right about now. I ought to be inside facing the music instead of out here, trying to avoid it all.
In the seven years of his exile on the Moon, Doug had always come out to the lunar surface when he had a problem that ached in him. The Moon's harsh, airless other-worldliness concentrated his mind on the essentials: life or death, survival or extinction. He never failed to be thrilled by the stark grandeur of the lunar landscape. But now he felt fear, instead. Fear that Moonbase would be closed, its potential for opening the space frontier forever lost. Fear that he would have to return to Earth, where fanatic assassins awaited him.
And anger, deep smoldering anger that men would threaten war and destruction in their ignorant, blind zeal to eradicate Moonbase.
Simmering inside, Doug turned back to the tractor and climbed up to its bare metal driver's seat. The ground here along the pass was rutted by years of tractors' cleats clawing through the dusty lunar regolith. He himself had driven all the way around these softly rounded mountains, circumnavigating the crater; not an easy trek, even in a tractor. Alphonsus was so big its ringwall mountains disappeared beyond the short lunar horizon. The jaunt had taken almost a week, all of it spent inside a spacesuit that smelled very ripe by the time he came home again. But Doug had found the peace and inner tranquility he had sought, all alone up on the mountaintops.
Not today. Even out here there was no peace or tranquility for him.
Once he reached the crater floor he looked beyond the uncompromising slash of the horizon and saw the Earth hanging in the dark sky, glowing blue and decked with streams of pure white clouds. He felt no yearning, no sense of loss, not even curiosity. Only deep resentment, anger. Burning rage. The Moon was his true home, not that distant deceitful world where violence and treachery lurked behind every smile.
And he realized that the anger was at himself, not the distant faceless people of Earth. I should have known it would come to this. For seven years they've been putting the pressure on us. I should have seen this coming. I should have figured out a way to avoid an outright conflict.
He parked the tractor and walked along the side of the construction pit, gliding in the dreamlike, floating strides of the Moon's low gravity. Turning his attention back to the work at hand, Doug saw that the digging was almost finished. They were nearly ready to start the next phase of the job. The tractors were best for the heavy work, moving large masses of dirt and rock. Now the finer tasks would begin, and for that the labs were producing specialized nanomachines.
He wondered if they would ever reach that stage. Or would the entire base be abandoned and left suspended in time, frozen in the airless emptiness of infinity? Worse yet, the base might be blasted, bombed into rubble, destroyed for all time.
It can't come to that! I won't let that happen. No matter what, I won't give them an excuse to use force against us.
'Greetings and felicitations!' Lev Brudnoy's voice boomed though Doug's helmet earphones.
Startled out of his thoughts, Doug looked up and saw Brudnoy's tall figure approaching, his spacesuit a brilliant cardinal red. The bulky suits smothered individual recognition, so long-time Lunatics tended to personalize their suits for easy identification. Even inside his suit, though, Brudnoy seemed to stride along in the same gangly, loose-jointed manner he did in shirtsleeves.
'Lev - what are you doing here?'
'A heart-warming greeting for your stepfather.'
'I mean ... oh, you know what I mean!'
'Your mother and I decided to come up now, in case there's trouble later on.'
Nodding inside his helmet, Doug agreed, 'Good thinking. They might shut down flights here for a while.'
'How is the suit?' Brudnoy asked.
Doug had forgotten that he was wearing the new design. 'Fine,' he said absently, his attention still on the digging.
'Do the gloves work as well as my engineers promised me they would?' Brudnoy asked, coming up beside Doug.
Holding out a hand for the Russian to see, Doug slowly closed his fingers. He could feel the vibration of the tiny servomotors as they moved the alloy 'bones' of the exoskeleton on the back of his hand.
'I haven't tried to crush any rocks with them,' Doug said, half in jest.
'But the pressure is not uncomfortable?' Brudnoy asked. 'You can flex your fingers easily?'
Nodding again, Doug replied, 'About as easily as you can in regular gloves.'
'Ahh,' Brudnoy sighed. 'I had hoped for much better.'
'This is just the first shot, Lev. You can improve it, I'm sure.'
'Yes, there is always room for improvement.'
The suit Doug wore was a cermet hard shell from boots to helmet; even the joints at the ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, elbows and wrists were overlapping circles of cermet. The ceramic-metal material was strong enough to hold normal shirtsleeve-pressure air inside the suit even though the pressure outside was nothing but hard vacuum. Thus the suit operated at normal air pressure, instead of the low-pressure mix of oxygen and nitrogen that the standard spacesuits required. No prebreathing was needed with the new design; you could climb into it and button up immediately.
The gloves were always a problem. They tended to balloon even in the low-pressure suits. Doug's gloves were fitted with spidery exoskeleton struts and tiny servomotors that amplified his natural strength, so he could grasp and work even though the gloves would have been too stiff for him use without their aid.
'Maybe we could lower the pressure in the gloves,' Doug suggested.
'We would have to put a cuff around your wrist to seal-'
'Priority message.' The words crackled in their earphones. 'Priority message for Douglas Stavenger.'
Tapping at the keypad built into the wrist of his spacesuit, Doug said, 'This is Stavenger.' He was surprised at how dry his throat suddenly felt. He knew what the message would be.
'All frequencies from the L-l commsat have been cut off,' said the chief communications technician. 'Communications directly from Earth have also been stopped.'
Doug's heart began hammering inside him. He looked at Brudnoy, but all he could see was the reflection of his own faceless helmet in the gold tint of the Russian's visor.
Swallowing hard, Doug said, 'Okay. Message received. Thank you.'
He waited a beat, then added, 'Please find Jinny Anson for me.'
'Will do.'
An instant later the former base director's voice chirped in his earphones, 'Anson here.'
'Jinny, it's Doug. I need to talk with you, right away.'
'I know,' she said, her voice sobering.
'Where are you?'
'In the university office.'
'Please meet me in my place in fifteen minutes.'
'Right.'
Doug turned and started along the edge of the construction pit, heading for the airlock in swift, gliding strides. Brudnoy kept pace beside him.
'It's started,' he said.
I'll inform your mother,' said the Russian.
With a bitter smile, Doug replied, 'She already knows, I'm sure. They couldn't declare war on us without her knowing about it.'