"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Extremes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

The Earth glowed in front of him, green and blue and white: impossibly beautiful against the blackness of
space.
Coburn used the Earth as his marker, his goal, even though it wasn't. The horizon was so close, and the
Earth so large, that he almost felt like he could catch it, then hang it, like a souvenir, on the wall of his
apartment.
He followed the designated path on the Moon's surface, his feet landing in footprints left from previous
Moon Marathons. The regolith was packed solid here, the trail as old as time.
He had forgotten what it was like to be alone with himself in a familiar place, the sweat from his body
pooling at his feet before his suit recycled it. Earth marathons were not solitary events. Bodies bumped
each other, and the narrow quarters always made him claustrophobic.
Here he was on his own, with nothing to break the gray landscape except boulders, craters, and the
packed trail.
So he focused on the Earth, and tried not to listen to his own breathing. The sound screwed up the
rhythm of his legs. It had been ten years since he had run a marathon in anything less than 1G. He was
used to having the pounding of his feet match the force of his breath.
In.
Out.
In.
But here, on the flat, endless vista outside of Armstrong Dome, he ran with a different rhythm: step,
half step, push—or launch, as his coach used to say. Only when Coburn thought of launching off the
ground, he wasted energy going up, instead of moving forward.
He had to concentrate on distance and speed, not height. And while that sounded easy in gravity
one-sixth of Earth's, it was not. There were too many things that could literally trip a man up.
The monitor, built into the lower half of his helmet's tinted visor, told him he had run for six miles,
although it felt like much longer. The simulated programs he'd run hadn't been good enough, and the city of
Armstrong did not allow any training runs on the cross-country track.
In theory, no one was supposed to be able to train on the Moon's surface—suited, in the proper gravity.
In practice, a handful of extreme athletes and rebels managed it every year. If they got caught, they faced
jail time and disqualification from any off-Earth marathon for life.
Normally Coburn would have taken that risk, but he hadn't had time. He'd been planning an extreme
event on Freexen, and hadn't even planned to run in this thing until Jane called him back to Armstrong.
Their business, Extreme Enterprises, was running into some legal troubles, and she needed his cool head to
help her with the fine points.
He signed up for the Moon Marathon when he learned he'd be in Armstrong during the event. And this
marathon was turning out to be a lot harder than he had expected.
The first mile had been easy. The area outside Armstrong, like the areas outside any established dome,
was almost as tame as the interior of the dome itself. Several established vehicle tracks led to the dome's
exterior services, from the physical plant for each dome section to exterior maintenance and repair.
A lot of private industry also had buildings outside the dome. Some of those buildings housed exterior
equipment. Others had their own tiny environments for workers who had to stay outside for weeks at a
time.
These businesses and buildings were the real reason no one was allowed to train outside a dome. The
potential for sabotage was too great. The only way for a domed environment to survive was for the
residents to carefully monitor everyone who had access to the exterior.
Coburn had understood that intellectually. He'd modified his own VR program to compensate for the
changes in terrain, so he had trained in the proper conditions.
But he hadn't been prepared for the subtle things: the way the blackish-gray dirt moved beneath his
feet, forcing him to sink to the harder crust beneath; the impact craters too small to show up on any map—
some of them no wider than his fist, just wide enough to trip a runner and send him sprawling; the intensity
of the sunlight etching everything around him in clean, rigid lines.