"Kevin J. Anderson -1993- Assemblers of Infinity (v1.0) (txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Kevin J)

"That's why you're up here, Jase," Salito said. Jason hated to be called by the nickname, but he never bothered to correct people. She nudged him back to their rover. "Come on, demonstration's over. If I was ten years younger, I'd take you out to dinner."

"You're just trying to make points with the boss," he said.

Salito made a sound like static on the suit radio. "Won't need to after next month."

"Columbus won't be the same without you all," he said. "I'm going to miss the crew."

"You'll have sixty other people to keep you company."

Jason stepped over a rock as he climbed onto the rover's passenger seat, trying not to grip anything. Even at 4.5 psi suit pressure, the gloves still bit into his flesh. It was a common complaint. Fifty years of spaceflight and you'd think they could solve a simple problem of constant-volume suits, he thought. For months he'd put up with rubbing his hands raw each time he pulled off his gloves.

Salito started the rover and turned for Moonbase Columbus. "Aren't you looking forward to getting back to your wife? Seeing your twins?"

"Of course," he said. That's what Salito expected him to say. But Jason's wife Margaret had filed for separation a month ago, before he had even been gone a year. Some devotion! Talk about twisting in a knife 240,000 miles away. And his children Lacy and Lawrence hadn't seen him except on video transmissions since they were a year old. He was not looking forward to returning home. Being so far away put a little distance on the pain.

He tried to sound upbeat, for Salito's sake. "Hey, someone's got to put in that second level of habitation modules and make this base liveable, not a crummy boot camp. Can't trust a bunch of physicists and astronomers to get their hands dirty, digging tunnels and piling regolith. I watched how much trouble Bernard Chu had getting you all to put together the Sim-Mars base!"

Salito grunted over the radio; Jason had the frightening feeling that she saw right through his small talk.

Four groups made up the sixty person base, and everyone worked and socialized within their own group. Every six months a group rotated off the Moon, and a new one came on. After a six-month apprenticeship under Bernard Chu, who had transferred up to the Collins station at L-1, Jason had suddenly found himself the new commander of Moonbase Columbus. The change in assignment had surprised him as much as it had Chu....

As the rover continued, Mare Smythi unfolded to reveal Columbus Base. The Earth hung low over the crater wall, like a big blue drop teaming with life. The tip of the base's 16-meter telescope was barely visible behind the embankments of the buried living modules. From this vantage point, Jason couldn't see the optical interferometer, the gamma-ray telescope, and other astronomical equipment.

One of his first troubles as commander had been to placate the Earthbound astronomical community by assuring them that the seismic vibrations from the wandering He-3 processing plants would not disturb any of the sensitive astronomical devices. No one using a Disneyland telepresence link would be driving these monstrosities; the amusement parks used only little robotic rovers in a compound hundreds of kilometers away.

Jason had done that himself once, before he told anybody his dream to come up here. He remembered sitting behind the controls after waiting five hours in line at Disneyland, marveling at how he could be driving a real lunar rover almost a quarter million miles away, just for the fun of it. He smiled as Cyndi Salito continued to drive to the moonbase.

As if a switch had been thrown, radio chatter filled Jason's helmet as they came into line-of-sight. " -- not sure what happened. We lost contact with the hopper just before Waite's signal ended." "Get a hold of Dvorak yet?" "Still trying! L-1 can't raise him -- "

Salito turned toward him, but Jason was already using his chinmike to break into the discussions. "Columbus, this is Dvorak. Big Daddy, what's going on?"

"Jason, am I glad to hear you! We were just going to send someone out to find you -- "

Jason cut Lon Newellen off. "Okay, I'm back. What's going on?" He barely noticed Salito increasing the rover's speed.

"Trevor Waite's hopper -- we haven't been able to raise it."

"Did the communication link fail?"

"No, that's not it. They ... they were broadcasting from the VLF. Waite had gone with Becky Snow down into Daedalus crater and Lasserman was relaying the information from the hopper -- " Newellen fell into an uncomfortable silence. Jason was about to press him, when Newellen spoke again.

"There's something more. You'd better get in here and see the visuals yourself."

Jason stood just outside the holotank in the control center. Two meters in diameter, the transparent cylinder took up the center of the hemispherical room. He placed a hand on the shimmering image and let out his breath. "Whoa. What in the hell is that?"

Translucent spindly arms grew up from an impossibly deep hole next to the crater wall. A faint shimmer could be seen between the arms; two of them met in an arch half a kilometer up from the hole. The rest of the object seemed to be under construction.

The enormity of the scale made Jason take a step back when he caught a glimpse of the hopper landing zone, outside the crater. The hopper itself was destroyed. Trevor Waite, Becky Snow, and Siegfried Lasserman were dead. The first deaths on the Moon in years. And they were his responsibility.