"Alex Irvine - Elegy for a Greenwiper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Irvine Alexander C)

ELEGY FOR A GREENWIPER
Alex Irvine


ORBITAL SENSORS DETECTED the nanobloom just after sunrise. Within seconds, automated
plasma burns had cauterized the site, less than one hundred kilo meters from Hancock Dome. Overflying
puffballs poured forth a stream of scrubbers designed to lock in on hydrocarbons and free oxygen. Maps
of Kindred IV were redrawn to include the bloom as a warning to prospectors and surveyors.

Ten seconds later, greenwipers were called in.

The suborbital burn squeezed a headache from Krzysztof Nowak's sinuses. He closed his eyes, let his
suit's autodoc equalize pressure and goose the humidity up a few percent. By the time the transport had
crested its parabolic course and begun its accelerated fall back to the rocks of Kindred IV, the rebellion
in his sinuses had been successfully quelled.

A smooth pattern of retros guided the transport in a sharp curve through a sandstorm. Clear of the storm,
the pilot set out the circular quarantine course. Krz checked his filaments: clear to the left, clear to the
right, clear to the apex that would drop from the transport's belly once all of the greenwipers had made
their jumps.

His suit's subliminals, keyed to reinforce and focus, purred in his ear: Humanity has proved that it cannot
live in the green. Domes save both us and what we would destroy. A taste of green is the first taste of
mortality.

GO, flashed the light above his bay, and Krzysztof jumped.

Thirty seconds to ground. Krzysztof's heads-up displayed the unfolding filaments of the containment
hemi, anchored every hundred meters by a greenwiper in full dress. Bezel to his left, Morgan to his right,
and in front and below the seared rock and sand that marked the area of the bloom.

Nobody had told Krzysztof what to expect. Any one of a dozen organized groups could pull off a
terraforming bloom; the suit's processors had categorized more than a million separate nanos and
attributed them to different cells. He had time to wonder which signature would light up in the heads-up
retinal display, time to wonder why the greenies kept trying, time to think about the end of his shift, time
to savor the whiskey he would drink and visualize the face of the woman who would keep him company
that night.

His boots punched through Kindred's crust of frozen sand, settling shin-deep in the ashy lithosphere. The
filaments began to grow, thickening and twining into an invisible spiderweb designed to catch molecular
flies. Krzysztof released the flight locks and engaged his suit's joint servos. He deployed his plasma
nozzle. Samplers darted into the thin carbon-dioxide atmosphere and returned with captured nanos,
invisible enemy soldiers that under scanning would yield their secrets. Processors profiled the interlopers,
came back with the verdict:

Viriditas.

"Big leagues," Krzysztof breathed. Confirmation came from Bezel and Morgan even as puffballs settled
into the gaps between filaments, clouding the atmosphere with scrubbers known to be effective against
Viriditas nanos.