"Judith Huey - Illustration" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huey Judith)

illustration by Judith Huey
© 1999 - All Rights Reserved




Mars was dead, impacted a thousand times along its equator by high-velocity bullets fired from the void.
They rent the crust, these missiles of ice and iron, awakening the god of war, awakening Olympus and
Arseus and Pavonis. Deimos was a satellite then, would surely have been visited by the stones itself, but
for Baxter and his team. They steered Deimos into an eccentric orbit opposite most everything else in the
system, running from death, running from the stones.

Now Deimos was an orphan. Lost, listless, she wandered a retrograde around Sol, cloaked in silence,
hypersensitive. Mars was dead, and Phobos as well, the former seething, molten, aflame; the latter simply
dust.

"Godot, this is Beowulf." Coded spurt. The microwaves spoke, spoke too loudly, ringing through miles of
rock, finding humanity in the depths of the onetime moon. "Return transmission relayed forty degrees
solar north, coordinates to follow."

Foster mother calling.

"Should I acknowledge?" Missy was young and beautiful and marred. Her right arm shuddered under
internal assault, and she fought back nausea and seizure as she spoke.

Baxter sneezed, focused, answered: "Affirm."

Her neural quivered as she subvocalized.

Baxter sat his vigil and fought against the memory of dead worlds. He studied his console, the flatscreen
surveillance outputs. They showed him the skin of his world: rock and black, doused in shadows thrown
from innumerable peaks and crater walls, edges made soft by regolith. Sol was near, her radiation fierce.
Solar radiation baked Deimos now, providing ironic safety, unlikely respite from a war humanity had
already lost.

As was the norm, Baxter withdrew. Thoughts assaulted him, vying with the machines in his blood for his
attention. He ignored the cytes and their own little insidious war, concentrating instead on the past, his
past, and how things had changed so drastically, so suddenly.

Earth followed Mars. There had been thousands of stones, cylindrical bullets of iron impacting, tracing
their annihilation in a straight line as the homeworld spun through the storm. At impossible velocities they
struck, most exploding in atmosphere, leaving a trail of titanic blasts as oxygen and nitrogen and argon
were suddenly compressed, forced aside, thrown back together in wakes of vacuum. The entire sky was
fire, a curtain of flame, and nobody heard the thunder in Warsaw, where the first chunks hit. Munich,
Lyon, Madrid, a hundred other cities burned from Poland to West Africa and beyond. For weeks the
Earth was scoured, plumes rising into atmosphere, poison floating from a ruptured, heaving crust. Man
was gone by then, victim of the plague or escaped into space or entombed beneath layers of ash.

"They're not coming, at least not in time." Missy spat the words as another seizure jostled her, fine blonde
hair flying in the null gravity. She bit down instinctively on her mouthplate, saving her tongue. Baxter