"Terry Dowling - Flashmen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dowling Terry)

unnecessary from a crewтАЩs hands-on perspective. It was 1400 that
afternoon before the Trimmers rode their WHO-provided slow-mo ATV
through Checkpoint Sinbad and left civilization - human civilization - behind.

Then, yet again, they were a law unto themselves. Champions of the
hopes of the world. Officially indispensable. Unofficially expendable.

The first site reached from the southeast, soon after full radio
noise-out, was Winwa Landing, what had once been The Firewalker
because of its random plasma screens and dissociated spark-ups. Some
of the Landings failed, fell away, re-located in new forms elsewhere, who
could ever know? All that was left were the pylons, struts and gantries of the
old WHO/local natgov access piers. It was like that at Winwa.

Working with World Health, most national governments had set up
inspection piers early on wherever they could, long raised causeways with
observation towers and telemetry nodes. They looked like the promenade
piers of a previous age, and were as much to frame the phenomena as
anything, to provide frameworks, form and sense, things you could put on a
map and treat as quantifiable, borders around chaos. Sand drifts had
moved in, the wind and heat had stripped the paintwork. Winwa Landing
was a ghost town that had never lived.

They spent the night in the lee of the seventh pylon, listening to what
were left of the causeway struts ticking and cooling overhead and watching
the faintest play of bravura lights tricking around the inward flare-tail - all that
remained of what The Firewalker had once been.

They repacked their slow-mo before dawn and moved on, making
forty ks along the Delphin Track and passing The Arete before it became
fully active. Then it was The Pure off to their left, three ks distant but already
flexing and extending its clear-glass тАШsoul-findersтАЩ in the day.

They were passing The Lucky Boatmen when they saw their first
whirter assembling in the distance - three of its fourteen pieces spinning in
the warm air, orbiting each other as they sought lock-point for the rest. The
Trimmers would be well past before it posed a threat, but some other team
would have it to deal with. How it usually happened - one group triggering
sentinel responses that wasted another. Proof either that no other crew had
come in at Winwa yet or, far less likely but not impossible given how UN
agencies competed, that enough had done so to complete one
fourteen-stage whirter cycle and start another.

By mid-morning they were passing The Spanish Lantern on its
eastern side, keeping their focus on the trail ahead and only using
peripheral vision to note the flickering orange, blue and red
semaphore-at-noon running lights amid the balconies and bastions of the
fluted blast-furnace form. They wore their headsets to dampen the
teeth-chattering Castanet siren rhythms that gave it its name. So many
taggers and newbies would go closer, wanting to see the fiesta lights on