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

Hoshi checked something on the side of her helmet. "No."

"Then tell me what you think this was."

Hoshi let her breath out through her teeth. "An outpost? A place where they sent exiles? A prison?
Maybe the people who built this weren't even native. They certainly weren't expert masons. Maybe they
were sent here, or trapped here, or just dropped off as punishment, and this was the best they could do
to survive. Like Robinson Crusoe on Mars."

She smiled, or at least her eyes smiled over the apparatus of the rebreather.

"And what about the bone?"

"It was in the corner like a piece of trash."

Althea huddled on the edge of the catwalk. "It's definitely human."

"Definitely."
There was simply nothing in the lab reports that could be faked about the bone's age or composition or
DNA. Four different labs agreed. Althea shaded her eyes at the pinkish horizon. Hoshi was nothing if not
thorough. "Why isn't there a midden? Didn't these people have trash? And what about the rest of the
body? It's not like there're scavengers to drag off the remains." Wind rushed past them, scattering sand.
"Have you found anything else?"

"Nothing. We've done subsurface scans in a three-hundred-kilometer radius. It's like all this just dropped
out of the sky."

Althea straightened up carefully. "How long are the reporters staying?"

"They leave tonight."

"I'll need a place I can have to myself for the next few weeks. Maybe longer."

Inside the helmet, Hoshi's expression was hard to read. To Althea, she seemed relieved.




·····


That evening, Althea sent a message back to her assistant at Oxford, Murphy Noyes, locked tight with
passwords that only she and Murphy knew. She included the DNA information supplied by the Martian
labs and instructed him to track the regional origins of the code. She suggested that he look into any
robberies from museums in the areas where the DNA might prove to be from. She emphasized that he
include small, unguarded collections.
Althea leaned back in her chair, alone in the chilly boxcar. She blew on her hands and watched the
screen as her instructions shot homeward. There was no shortage of work while she was waiting for
Murphy. She toggled to her to-do list, titled in Latin—facere—a habit left over from her undergrad days.
She already had a dozen jobs for Hoshi; widen the survey, broaden the parameters for finding a midden.