"Cory Doctorow - Liberation Spectrum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dodd Christina)

five or ten minutes to check her location against the map and to hammer down
an RF beacon that would serve to measure the drop-off over the terrain as they
hiked. She used binox with an integrated laserpointer to check the distance
and clarity to remote points, and a squealing handheld brick of oscilloscope
gear to measure the crossover of the other beacons on the hill. All the while,
she muttered down her cellphone's headpiece with the other crews, making sure
they weren't overlapping or diverging too widely, keeping everything squared
with the maps on her screens and in her head.

The woods had a high canopy, which was good news. When they started out,
they'd focused on getting above the leaf line, since leaves badly scattered RF
signals, but they'd ended up with networks that were only reachable by people
who were twenty feet off the ground. They'd blown a fortune downlinking the
relays to ground-level stations with omnidirectional antennae.

But then Lee-Daniel had had a brainstorm -- build the network below the leaf
line. Heavy canopy starved out any foliage that grew below the treetops,
leaving a clear line of sight (modulo the tree trunks, which were largely RF
transparent) on the forest floor. That pushed CogRad from a theoretical
project to a real success.

The frontmost Warrior, a girl of about 16, started off treating Elaine's halts
as a nuisance, but after the fifth one, when Elaine unshipped a
high-sensitivity digital altimeter, the girl's curiosity overcame her, and she
crowded in close to watch Elaine work. She didn't say anything, but thereafter
it was clear that she was fascinated by Elaine and her masterful use of all
her toys, bangles and bobs. As Elaine stalked through the brush with her face
stuck in the output from her various instruments as it scrolled along her
wireless clipboard, the girl kept reaching out to steer her clear of the
camouflaged tiger pits the Warriors defended their turf with.

Elaine was like a magnet for teenaged girls -- competent, beautiful, in
charge. At the next stop, she handed the girl a can of pink spraychalk and
directed her to mark the sightlines. The girl almost dropped the can, but then
recovered and puffed up a bit, marching off to lay down the hot pink lines.
The Warrior at the rear, a man of indeterminate age who wore a camou
balaclava, rolled his eyes, but that was OK; Lee-Daniel was figuring out a way
to get him engaged, too.

At the next stop, a bare ridge that overlooked the woods on one side and the
public highway on the other, Lee-Daniel tapped the other Warrior on his
shoulder, then gestured at travois on which Elaine's juniors had been hauling
their satellite tester. He cocked his head, then bent down to take one end,
and the other Warrior fell in at the other end. The two juniors looked
relieved and hitched up their packs, breaking out protein bars from their belt
pouches.

And so it went. By the time they reached the next ridge, the girl ("Mermaid")
had introduced herself, and the man ("Cobra") had done likewise, removing his
balaclava to reveal a middle-aged face handsome but for the deep acne scars.