"Baxter, Stephen - Manifold 03 - Origin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

For the first time since that dreadful moment of mid-air disintegration, she had
time to think.

It was all so fast, so blurred. She remembered Malenfant's final scream over the
intercom, her sudden ejection - without warning, she had been thrust into the
cold bright air, howling from the pain as the seat's rockets slammed into the
small of her back - and then, even as her 'chute had begun to open, she saw the
wheel opening like a mouth all around her - and she had realized that for better
or worse she was going to fall through it...

Blue light had bathed her face. There had been a single instant of pain,
unbearable, agonizing.

And then, this.

She had found herself lying on scrubby grass, in a cloud of red dust, all the
breath knocked out of her. Lying on the ground, an instant after being forty
thousand feet high. From the air to the ground: that was the first shock.

She was aware of the others, the strangers, the couple and the kid, who had
appeared beside her, out of nowhere. And she glimpsed that blue portal,
foreshortened, towering above her. But it had disappeared, just like that,
stranding her here.

Yes, but where was here?

She had cut the 'chute section free. She sat back on her haunches, flexing arms
that were not conditioned for manual work. She closed up the knife.

Then, on an impulse, she lifted up the knife and dropped it. It seemed to fall
with swimming slowness.

Low gravity. As if she was on the Moon.

That was ridiculous. But if not the Moon, where?

Get a grip, Emma. Where you are surely matters a lot less than what you are
going to do about it - specifically, how you plan to stay alive, long enough for
Malenfant to alert the authorities and come find you.

... Malenfant.

Had she been shying away from thinking about him? He certainly wasn't anywhere
near here; he would be making enough noise if he was. Where, then? On the other
side of the great blue portal?

But he'd been through the crash too. Was he alive at all?

She shut her eyes, and found herself rocking gently, back and forth, on her