"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 2 - Blue Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

street corners into some safer place. People's faces, staring in concert; this
ran the world.

So Ann brooded over the next few days. And even more so after she took a rim
train in the direction opposite to Sheffield, counterclockwise to the north
arc of the rim. There Kasei and Dao and the Kakaze were occupying apartments
in the little tent at Lastflow. Apparently they had forcibly evicted some
noncombatant residents, who naturally had trained down to Sheffield in fury,
demanding to be reinstated in their homes, and reporting to Peter and the rest
of the green leaders that the Reds had set up truck-drawn rocket launchers on
the north rim, with the rockets aimed at the elevator and Sheffield more
generally.
So Ann walked out into Lastflow's little station in a bad mood, angry at the
Kakaze's arrogance, as stupid in its way as the greens'. They had done well in
the Burroughs campaign, seizing the dike very visibly to give everyone a
warning, then taking it on themselves to breach the dike after all the other
revolutionary factions had gathered on the heights to the south, ready to
rescue the city's civilian population while the metanat security were forced
to retreat. The Kakaze had seen what had been needed and they had done it,
without getting bogged down in debate. Without their decisiveness everyone
would still be gathered around Burroughs, and the metanats no doubt organizing
a Terran expeditionary force to relieve it. It had been a perfectly delivered
coup.
Now it seemed that success had gone to their head.
Lastflow had been named after the depression it occupied, a fan-shaped lava
flow extending more than a hundred kilometers down the northeast flank of the
mountain. It was the only blemish in what was otherwise a flawlessly circular
summit cone and caldera, and clearly it had come very late in the volcano's
history of eruptions. Standing down in the depression, one's view of the rest
of the summit was cut off-it was like being in a shallow hanging valley, with
little visible in any direction-until one walked out to the drop-off at rim's
edge, and saw the huge cylinder of the caldera coring the planet, and on the
far rim the skyline of Sheffield, looking like a tiny Manhattan over forty
kilometers away.
The curtailed view perhaps explained why the depression had been one of the
last parts of the rim to be developed. But now it was filled by a fair-sized
tent, six kilometers in diameter and a hundred meters high, heavily reinforced
as all tents up here had to be. The settlement had been home mostly to
commuter laborers in the rim's many industries. Now the rimfront district had
been taken over by the Kakaze, and just outside the tent stood a fleet of
large rovers, no doubt the ones that had caused the rumors about rocket
launchers.
As Ann was led to the restaurant that Kasei had made his headquarters, she was
assured by her guides that this was indeed the case; the rovers did haul
rocket launchers, which were ready to flatten UNTA's last refuge on Mars. Her
guides were obviously happy about this, and happy also to be able to tell her
about it, happy to meet her and guide her around. A varied bunch-mostly
natives, with some Terran newcomers and old-timers, of all ethnic backgrounds.
Among them were a few faces Ann recognized: Etsu Okakura, al-Khan, Yussuf. A
lot of young natives unknown to her stopped them at the restaurant door to