"Severna Park - The Three Unknowns" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Severna)

Two: It was real. And no matter what her suspicious gut told her about Hoshi, only a complete idiot
would plant something fake and potentially compromise the most exciting archaeological find of the
millennium. Hoshi was many things, but she was no idiot.

Althea picked up the bone and rolled it between her fingertips. She took a deep breath and held it for a
long moment, to see how it felt to believe.




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Act V
 ·····


Hours later she looked up from Hoshi's notes to see the CNN crew mingling with the site crew. The
camera was gone and the CNN reporter—the only one in a full-facial-view helmet—stood in a
conversational pose with Hoshi, making casual gestures at the dig behind them. It looked like any official
interactions were over. Althea glanced over her shoulder at the lone pressure suit hanging by the door.
She knew how to put one on—she'd been drilled along with the rest of the passengers on the J.
Nessepah—and she wanted to see 34L before dark, reporters or not. She pulled the pressure suit over
her clothes, checked the air in the rebreather reservoir and her hair in the mirror. She put the helmet on,
checked the lugs twice, and shuffled out, down the cold corridors, through Hoshi's office, out the airlock,
and into the tractor shed.
The tractor was gone and the doors were wide open to the cutting wind. Even the suit couldn't keep it
out. The bright, distant disk of the sun glared down, giving the sand a dull, bloody look, but there was no
heat in it. Technically it was summer in this hemisphere, and Candor Chasma wasn't far from the equator,
but it was still in the minus 60's Fahrenheit. Althea stumbled through the sand, feeling cheated by the
gravity that was still heavy enough to rob her of any possible weightless grace. The cold made her fingers
numb and her joints ache. The rebreather felt like it was frozen to her face. It's air tasted of someone
else's mouth and smelled of their breath. Hoshi waved to her from across the road and Althea found
herself wishing for the azure sky on Neznaiyu. She fumbled with the suit's controls, and the heat came on
abruptly, a relief at first, then overwhelming. Hoshi's voice came through the speaker in her helmet.

"Roger, that's Professor Althea Mendez. I studied under her at Oxford."

"Althea Mendez?" Roger Dodd spun around as Althea blundered toward them, sweating now, up to her
ankles in ruddy dust. He trotted over, grabbed her hand, and shook it energetically—even so, it was a
thick, uncommunicative process in a pressure suit—and gave her a sly, full-facial-view grin brimming with
hidden knowledge.

Oh God, thought Althea. Hoshi told him about the bone.

But instead he said, "I'll bet you've seen the footage from Neznaiyu."

Althea braced herself to be evasive, but then, everyone on Mars seemed to know more about Neznaiyu
than she did. "What about it?"