"Robert Onopa - Area Seven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Onopa Robert)

Area Seven
Robert Onopa


Non era ancor di là Nesso arrivato,

quando noi ci mettemmo per un bosco

che da neun sentiero era segnato.




The data alarm squealed like a frightened small animal. The ship shuddered as we braked and the com
screen went blank for an instant, then kicked back up. Servos whirred in the nose below us.

We’d been slipping along at an altitude of a thousand meters in one of C Survey’s mapping skiffs. I’d
been asleep, off duty.

“Your turn,” Tessa said. The tired way she leaned over her console, her face pinched in the pale light,
seemed an image of the strain she’d been under.

“I went out yesterday,” I said. “Christ, don’t you remember?” Tessa and I had a history that went back
before we were posted to crew-on the way out, we’d even talked about something more permanent
between us-but it was affecting me too, a corrosive presence that had dogged the survey since we’d
entered the system. In the past few weeks I’d gotten so melancholy I’d taken to paging throughRational
Death and imagining cryogenic nights that never end.

You think I’m kidding. I wish.

“A motility sensor tripped the alarm,” she said evenly. “And you’re the exo, Serge.”

I scanned the data. “Movement’s in the box for atmosphere,” I said.

“Something replicates.”

“Crystals replicate,” I muttered. I studied an image from the planet on the belly camera, zoomed in.

On a gloomy, mottled surface, trunk-like forms rose in a vaguely regular way, like a surreal forest.
“Where are we?” I asked.

“Fair question. The com link cut out as I was running the program to clear waypoints. There’s a glitch-it’s
been happening all over the fleet. Now that we’re darkside, we won’t get another fix until the planet’s
rotated or we can do the astronomy. Area Seven, I could say that, we’re in Area Seven. But whereis
Area Seven? We can’t exactly say that.”

“Nice,” I sighed.

“Warm down there.”