"Kay Kenyon - Maximum Ice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kenyon Kay)

Throwing off the covers, she called for lights and aban-doned her bunk. Sleep was hopeless, and a
sunrise beckoned. Now she would see all the sunrises, in sequence. The role of Ship Mother could fade,
since her people were finished with the long star road. Ship Mother had been the tether to home,
conceived as a tradition to preserve tradition.

But, truly, she was ready to stop parceling out her days.

In moments she had dressed and was heading down the corridor. Her impulse was to get moving, do
something, talk to peopleтАФgo outside. Only the science crew had been outside so far. You can go out in
the morning, Lieutenant Bertak had told her. Easy enough for him to put it off, he hadn't been waiting 250
years.

She almost collided with Fyodor Mirga, just emerging from the science station.

He was dressed for the cold.

"Going outside, then, Fyodor?" she asked, thinking she might slip out with him.

Fyodor looked eager. "I couldn't sleep. Might as well get an early start." He was supervising the boring in
the research tent outside, where a drill had been working through the night to provide a sample core.
"The drill is jammed," he added.

"Need some help?"
"Sorry, Ship Mother. Lieutenant Bertak saysтАж"

He didn't like to turn her down; only Lieutenant Bertak en-joyed that. They had not hit it off well, she
and the first mate.

Fumbling in his pocket, Fyodor brought out a translucent rock, a piece of crystal formed into a tiny,
perfect obelisk. He-pressed it into her hand. "A piece of the earth," he said.

She felt her throat swelling shut. Before she could embarrass herself with tears, Fyodor turned down the
corridor, waving good-bye, as two crewmen joined him. They were fully armed, and looked sour to be
awakened so early.

Zoya turned the crystal over in her hand. Fyodor didn't hes-itate to call it a piece of the earth. There
was something sweet and bold about the statement. Looked at strictly scientifically, the average atomic
composition of the substance was silicon, oxygen, aluminum, iron, calcium, and other elements, in the
precise ratio of the old earths crust. But the crystalline material was no known mineral. This notion
frightened most of the crew; but Fyodor had the look of a boy in a bicycle shop.

Once in the shuttle galley, she activated a cup of coffee and keyed up the view screen. The shuttle's
outside lights showed the near vicinity: the research tent, and surrounding it, a flat basin strewn with
erratic, faceted slabs, like jumbled ice flows. Wind blew eddies of clear sand, glittering in the floodlights.
It drifted into piles. However long earth had worn its coat, it had been long enough to erode slightly,
producing small grains of crystal.

The view didn't crush down on her as it did the crew. Never an ardent Catholic, Zoya still saw wisdom in
the injunction against despair. To her, this was a fresh start, a place swept clean of old dangers and
ancient sins.