"C. Sanford Lowe & G. David Nordley - The Small Pond" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lowe C Sanford)

shares, and, well, the council and I think it’s time to share a little of your workload,
let some others get some more of the action.”
Liz couldn’t believe what she’d just heard. The warm fuzzy feeling evaporated
almost instantly, replaced with a cold knot in her stomach. She smiled weakly and
tried to hide her feelings. “I’m not exactly overworked.”
Gunheim shrugged. “Well, maybe it’s just that some other very capable
people have been under worked. At any rate, there’s been some friction, and
whenever anything like that happens, those of us who are in charge have to make
some response, tweak the organization, do something of that nature, just to let
people know we’re on the job.”
Liz suddenly felt naked and cold.
The table fell silent, everyone looking at Gunheim.
“Now don’t take this too personally. I don’t think anyone can really fault you
for doing something about Terry Peal and his bloody robot wars, but you’re pretty
young yet, and sometimes it takes a little more subtlety to keep everyone happy.”
“Chaos, how subtle did I have to be! I just let Ivan Marenkov take over the
stuff Peal wasn’t doing anyway.”
Gunheim shook his head. “And you left him off the production achievement
list.”
“But he wasn’t producing.”
“You could have lowered the threshold instead of bloody humiliating him.”
Gunheim’s last few words had a bit of snap in them. “But then,” he went back to his
avuncular style, “these are things some experience brings. You’re doing fair on the
impactor fabrication now so we thought we might let you concentrate on that and let
Mutori take over the people management chores.”
“You don’t understand, Mr. Gunheim,” Liz said, trying to keep a mixture of
anger and fear out of her voice. “My sister, Dr. Zhau Tse Wen, and the whole
project expect me to see that the efforts in this system are completed on schedule.
When you come down to it, the BHP is why this colony exists at all. I can’t just
walk away from that!”
“And you aren’t. The decision has been taken out of your hands, so you
aren’t breaking any promises. No worries.”
 Liz shot a look at Cyan Mutori, who smiled sympathetically, but said nothing.
Judi left the table with her son so quietly that Liz didn’t realize she was gone. David
sat openmouthed. He was running the biosurvey on the asteroid that would soon
impact Martin and was, she knew, very vulnerable to what had just occurred to her.
Payback time, Judi sent. He just needed an excuse.
****
A wave of rain clouds spiraling down from the south pole darkened the sky
over Liz’s dome, transparent when not in use as a display screen. Under it was her
one-room office, kitchen, bedroom, and entertainment center; a small, high-tech
outhouse hid behind some shrubbery. In actuality, the shrubbery formed the walls of
her abode; in the tropical climate of the low latitudes of Minot, an occasional splash
of warm rain was an easily acceptable trade for the feeling of openness and freedom
this style of living gave her.
But not today. Noon and still in bed, Liz lay under the sheets, head in the
pillow, reliving every moment of her life from when she decided to go down to that
rogue kuiperoid in the Solar System, to losing her office, to staring at DeRoot’s
ancient Greek computer while he used her body. At least that had been partly
voluntary; a choice, a trade. This time she had been truly raped without a stitch of