"L. Neil Smith - Forge of the Elders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith L. Neil)

Vietnamese-American physician whose name she always had to struggle to remember—Rosalind
Nguyen—forty-two individuals, had been just as cramped, dirty and uncomfortable. This and the other
two eighty-year-old vessels, theHonorable John McCain and theHonorable Orrin Hatch , had never
been intended for flights of this duration, let alone interplanetary travel. They were fourteen souls per
shuttle, seven forward in crew quarters, seven aft in Hell for 349 days, 11 hours, 7 minutes. She was
grateful that consumables were stored in an emptied auxiliary fuel tank, fastened in Earth orbit under the
flattened belly of each ship.

Tucking an intransigent auburn strand into her cap, the major settled the phones over her ears, plugging
their leads into a receptacle just under the gasketed neck-rim of her suit. Peering over the rim, she
adjusted her oxygen flow and reached for her gloves, detaching them from the bulkhead with a ripping
noise. The nylon thumb loops fastened to her cooling undergarment had already begun irritating the soft
webbing of her thumb, but the gloves went on without a hitch. She snapped the lock-rings together and
turned them from the OPEN position to CLOSED without Pulaski's help, smoothing the cuffs back over
her wrists.

She reached for the bulky helmet which invariably reminded her of a gumball machine she'd been
fascinated with as a child. It still stood, she imagined, in a dusty corner of the grimy Trailways station in
the central Texas town where she'd been born. One of her earliest memories was of wondering what it
had looked like, full of the multicolored spheres it had been placed there to dispense by the McQueenie
Kiwanis or some other long-gone local pillar of a now-defunct establishment.

Reille y Sanchez had never seen a gumball, let alone tasted one. This had failed to strike her, even then,
as any great personal tragedy. In a global civilization reeling into the second quarter of an already ragged
twenty-first century, small children everywhere had at least been as equal as possible in their deprivation.
At that age (twenty years ago, she mused; she must have been all of eight or nine the last time she'd been
home) she couldn't appreciate the desperate situation in detail, but even then she'd understood, to some
small degree, how a nation locked into a collapsing international economy couldn't spare resources on
trivialities.

She wondered why she was thinking about it now. Perhaps it was something to do with that same
nation's eleventh-hour gamble (things hadn't improved since she'd grown up) employing obsolete
machinery, mothballed for decades, which had never been that good to begin with, to explore and exploit
the swirling belt of flying mountains circling between Jupiter and Mars. . . .
"Major?"

Before she was entirely aware of it, the air lock ready-light had turned green and the lid swung aside.
She squeezed into a compartment beyond the bulkhead, allowing herself to be sealed in. Across from the
hatch she'd come through, another led to the crew compartment mid-deck. Her helmet brushed a third
hatch, pierced with a tiny porthole like the others, leading outside.

She just had room to extract her EAA Witness, a high-capacity semiautomatic pistol of Czech design
and Italian manufacture chambered for 11.43x23mm Lenin (the original ".45 ACP" designation having
been dropped when all American gun companies were nationalized) from an insulated pocket on her right
thigh and give it a final check. It was an awkward task with the gloves, despite the special oversized
trigger guard, yet one she'd been reluctant to perform in front of the others. When she'd satisfied herself
that the chamber was loaded, the magazine full and locked in the grip, and three spares were in their
places in her left thigh pocket, she reholstered the weapon, smoothing the Velcroed flap. Clanking and
hissing noises faded as the machinery which made them reclaimed precious oxygen from the
compartment, replacing it with nothingness.