"Linda Evans - Time Scout 2 - Wages of Sin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Evans Linda)

The corners of his lips twisted into a mirthless smile.
The thief would rue the hour he had cheated Lupus Mortiferus, the champion
Death Wolf of Rome. That decision holding hard-fought fear at bay, Lupus
clutched the pommel of his sword and set out on his hunt.
Wherever populations of illegal refugees spring up without legal status
inside an existing, "native" population, certain networks are formed almost as
automatically as baby whales swim straight for the surface to gulp that first,
essential breath of air. Almost by unconscious accord, mutual aid systems will
emerge to help illegal aliens survive, perhaps in time even thrive, in a world
they do not understand, much less control.
In the time terminals that had grown around those areas where gates formed
in close-enough profusion to warrant building a station, this unwritten rule
held as true as it did in the squalid streets of L.A. or New York, in the
streets of every major coastal city, in fact, where refugees of The Flood
which had followed The Accident, crowded together for safety, almost without
hope of finding any, each and every pitiful one of them without papers to
prove their identity or country of origin. Those uptime refugees struggled to
survive under even worse conditions, sometimes, than refugees trapped forever
on the time terminals. It didn't bear mentioning the living conditions of the
tidal waves of refugees fleeing endless, senseless wars raging throughout the
Middle East and the Balkans. Whole armies of them fled illegally across
national borders, fleeing genocide at the hands of enemies, many of them dying
in the attempt.
Men and women, children and strays, those who wandered into the terminals
through open gates and found themselves trapped without uptime legal rights,
without social standing, protected by the thinnest of "station policies"
because the uptime governments couldn't decide what to do about them-set up
social systems of their own in courageous attempts to cope. A few went
hopelessly mad and wandered back through open gates, usually unstable ones,
never to be seen again. But most, desperate to survive, banded together in
sometimes loosely, sometimes tightly knit confederations. Often speaking only
the common language of gestures, they share news and resources as best they
could, sometimes even going so far as to hide from official notice any
newcomers who might be exploited or injured by regulations and officialdom's
sometimes harsh notice.
On TT-86, management under Bull Morgan made such extreme efforts necessary
only rarely, but all downtimers shared a common bond few uptimers could really
understand. It was the experience of being lost together. Like the Christian
sects of Rome which had once met in the catacombs beneath the city or the
cells of Colonial American patriots hiding out from British armies and meeting
in any root cellar or thicket they could find, La-La Land's downtimer Council
met underground. Literally underground, beneath the station proper, in the
bowels of the terminal where machinery (which filled the air with chaos and
noise) kept the lights running, the sewage flowing, and the heated or chilled
air pumping; down where massive steel-and-concrete support beams plunged into
native, Himalayan rock, the refugees created their culture of survival.
Amidst the noise and whine of machines they barely understood, they met in
the cramped caverns of La-La Land's physical plant to bolster one another's
courage, pass along news of critical importance to their standing, and share
fear, grief, loss, and triumph with one another. A few had taken it upon