"Allen, Roger MacBride - Chronicles of Solace 3 - Shores of Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allen Roger Macbride)

Elber checked the time. УYouТre right,Ф he said. He kissed her good-bye, then knelt by his daughter and was rewarded with a porridge-coated embrace. He glanced up at the viewscreen again. He would have loved to stay home and pull up a more detailed report, but the job came first. Besides, they were merely getting ready. Nothing exciting to watch.

Elber stepped to the apartmentТs cramped bathroom and washed the porridge off his face. He looked in the mirror and laughed. What was the old saying?Life is what happens while youТre doing something else . They were preparing to remake a world out thereЧbut he had to get his daughterТs breakfast off his face and go to work.



Elber left their apartment and started his walk through the maze of corridors and elevators and stairways that made up the low-rent districts of SCO StationТs Aft End. Not so long ago he had dreaded stepping out of their door, for fear of getting hopelessly lostЧagain. Now he followed his usual route to work without a momentТs hesitation, finally getting clear of the Aft End econoflat complex and on to the larger corridors.

After a few more minutesТ walking, he stepped across the threshold into Ring Park. As always, his heart skipped a beat as he did so. Elber walked through the park every workday morning and evening back and forth between his familyТs small apartment on the Aft End and the cubicle he shared with three others in shipping operations on the Forward End. But no matter how many times he made the brief transit of the park, that sense of shock was always there.

Once, not so long ago, he had been a refugee in the big Collapse Panic,a squatter, a gluefoot, stuck on SCO with no place to go. And he had livedin Ring Park ,in the open air Чor as close as one got to open air on the station.

And now,he didnТt live there .He had a proper job, and his family had a proper place to live.

These days, long after the crisis was over, he could almost bring himself to believe that he had a right to be on Solace Central Orbital Station, that hebelonged there. But then he would cross into the Park, and walk past the very spotЧlong since relandscaped and all prettied up againЧwhere his group of refugees had set up camp and torn up the trees to burn campfires in a futile attempt to keep themselves warm. Even now, ElberТs cheeks burned with embarrassment when he thought of that, and of how pig-ignorant of stationside life they had been to try such a thing, how totally unaware of how the stationТs thermal control system worked. They might as well have drilled a hole through the outer hull to let in fresh air.

But now he knew better. He was nearly, if not quite, a station man. He had learned fast in his new job in the shipping office. But for all that he had learned his new job, and even if he wore a grey tunic and blue trousers and clean dress shoes and carried a datapad, there was much about him that still said Уfarmer.Ф

He was tall for his people, about 180 centimeters, with long gangly arms and legs, and a slim, wiry build that made him look taller. His hands were hard and callused still, though far less so than they had been on arrival at SCO Station. Shut away from the sunlight, here inside the station, his farmerТs tan had faded as well, and his blond hair had turned several shades darker. At times, his dark blue eyes, oval face, and habitual shy, slight smile made him seem almost childlike, though what he had been through should have hardened him long ago.

Elber walked past the smoothed-over lawn where the gluefeet had tried to bury their dead in the ten centimeters of topsoil and gravel that were all the living soil the Ring Park had, and remembered that, as well. When Station Security took away the dead for what they called Уproper disposal,Ф things had teetered on the knife edge of riot before calming back down.

And thenЧthen, after a half dozen provocations had failed to produce an explosionЧthen the explosion came, for no good reason. For no reason at all, bad or good, other than Zak Destan.

The gluefeet men were bored, they were restless, and they had been pushed around long enough. When Zak had led a bunch of the lads out to have a drink on the Long Boulevard, all it had taken was an argument with an aggressive bouncer to set them off. But it was Zak who had led them that night, and it was Zak who had gone looking for trouble.

Elber had been part of the group. He had run for the camp in the Park at the first sign of trouble, and had never quite decided, even deep in his own heart, why he had done it. Was it cowardice? Prudence? The instinct to be with his wife and child, to protect them when trouble was brewing? Had he done the right thing, or the wrong one? Either way, had he done it from good motives, or bad? Did it matter now, and had it ever?

He stepped through the Forward portal of the Ring Park, and onto the Long Boulevard. There, too, where the riot had started, and done its worst damage, all was clean and tidy again. The sidewalk cafe where Zak had picked a fight was still there, although under new management, and, of course, every stick of furniture, every glass and every bottle in the place had had to be replaced. Elber felt a completely irrational twinge of guilt over the damage every time he passed the place. He had, after all, been just about the only one there whohadnТt joined in the destruction.

But the riot didnТt matter anymore, either, and nor did who had done what. Not anymore. That was the clear message that came in from every corner. The claims had been paid. The investigations had all endedЧor, more accurately, had all unraveled after learning very little that everyone didnТt already know. The last of the gluefeet had been dealt withЧshipped back down to Solace, nearly all of them, with a small handful, like Elber, staying aboard SCO Station and finding work. Everything and everyone swept away or tidied up, the scars hidden discreetly under the new-planted trees and the fresh coats of paint.

Elber smiled to himself as he turned off the Long Boulevard and entered the elevator that would carry him to Station Level Six, where the shipping operations center was. Things changed so fast. Now, in his present job, one of his duties was checking the insurance status of every outbound cargo. Six months ago he hadnТt fully understood the concept of insurance, and now he was documenting premium payments, checking risk assessments, and comparing actuarial tables.

He arrived at the shipping office and made his way to the large, crowded, cramped back room that he shared with thirty other shipping clerks. He elbowed his way through to his cubicle, smiled a greeting at Fredor and SanЧJol, his fourth cubicle mate, had not yet arrivedЧsat down and set to work.

He looked to his datapad, brought up the first file in his docket, and frowned at the words that jumped out at him.Risk assessment revision . He had seen those words more and more often in the last few monthsЧand they never meant that the assessed risk was going down. And when the risks went up, the premiums went up.

But it wasnТt all the travel routes that were suffering risk spikes. The pattern was there, as clear as day, and this one fit in with the others. The cargoes outbound for Greenhouse and the orbital habs all arrived without unusual mishap. But the cargo going the other way, from Greenhouse and the habs through SCO to SolaceЧwell, cargo that landed on the planet had a nasty habit of not getting where it was going. It was getting chancier and chancier to ship anything on the surface, through the countryside. He scanned through a whole series of reports.Lost in transit, damaged in transit, incomplete inventory on arrival, pallet listed on invoice not delivered, shipment did not arrive.

There were a lot of names for it, but it was plain to Elber that a lot of cargo was vanishing. And yet, no one seemed willing to use the wordtheft. Which in turn suggested to Elber that people on the reporting end were afraid.

Elber glanced around the roomful of clerks, and, in his mindТs eye, at the huge spinning station full of people beyond. There were, he knew, merely a handful of people aboard who had any recent extended experience of life on Solace. Most of those aboard had lived in space for years, on SCO Station or elsewhere. A fair number had been born on the station, and had never once left it. And, as things on-planet got worse, there was less and less incentive for anyone to visit the surface. Of those whodid visit, few would stray outside the upper-class areas of Solace City.

In other words, it was unlikely that there was anyone else aboard SCO Station who knew the first thing about the countryside of Solace and also knew about the shipping business.

What the pattern of thefts told Elber was that the reivers were back. Or perhaps they had never been shut down in the first place, despite all the pronouncements from Solace City, years ago. Come to think of it, it did seem to him that the government had announced their eradication more than once. If theyТd been completely wiped out, why would anyone need to kill them again?

The reivers used techniques that stretched back at least to the near-ancients, based on the principle that it is easier to run a criminal gang in places far removed from the central governments, and in places where the locals are at least willing to tolerate you. And the best way to ensure that they did tolerate you was, of course, to buy them off, while being careful to do it in a way that let them at least pretend to keep their dignity.