"Kay Kenyon - Tropic of Creation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kenyon Kay)

against the possibility of rain for the last five days. But each afternoon the sun struck the clouds back with
hammer strokes of 115 degree heat, and the basins lay hot and empty. The only water was beneath the
ground, sucked up by the nearby stand of desiccated pillars that passed for trees: the copse the enlisteds
called the Sticks. The trees hoarded the water inside, in cisterns. From these, the crew tapped and
rationed out water, pure as snowmelt, hot as geysers.

Sascha was prying on the hatch door of the hexa-dron.

"That will do, Sascha," Eli said.

She obeyed, stepping back from the alien craft. She bumped her hat off her head, letting it hang down on
her back by its straps, and allowed her black hair to escape its long braid in sweat-soaked strands. The
freckles her mother so hated were popping out by the minute. Pocks, Cristin Olander called them, the
same as the enlisteds called the ahtra.
Corporal Willem released the hatch covering. As Eli peered into the dusky interior, he thought he caught
a whiff of the ahtra smell: sweet and sour, fermented. A thread of memory released sounds, like birds
startled from a bushтАж deep, throaty shouts and distant screams. Even the ahtra could scream, though
they showed no fear, not even with a domino gun shoved into a pocked cheek.

But it was empty.

Eli hoisted himself into the craft, sitting on the edge of the curved seat to gain headroom. The interior had
a spare look, despite the characteristic ahtran patterns over every square inch of the bulkheads. A simple
control panel faced him on one wall, showing quirky instrumentation with depressions where switches
should be. Forty-five years of contact with the species, and Congress Worlds still had no clue why they
covered their ship walls with concen-tric squaresтАж where they came fromтАж why they lived in world
shipsтАж how they functioned with bicameral brainsтАж or how their star drive got an extra twenty per-cent
of speed out of pulse engines.

In the end it was that twenty-percent advantage that forced CW to bend kneeтАФin what was
euphemistically called an armisticeтАФso ahtra kept the riches of the Neymium Belt for themselves, ceding
a pauper's share to CW, and the warring parties backed off, licking their wounds.

Eli's grandfather could remember the days before the Great War when, for the first time, fast ahtran ships
made trade between the human worlds worthwhile, but the honeymoon was soon over.

"Captain Dammond," he heard from outside. Marzano was crouching and probing under the hexadron.
"This is curious."

He joined her to look under the craft. The underside contained a plate, stuck in a half-open position,
revealing a round mechanism within. Marzano reached up to pull the plate fully open, but it didn't budge.

Eli crawled under the craft, lying on his back in the dirt, staring up. Willem handed him a lamp from his
kit, and Eli aimed its beam into a circular maw of metal teeth. He lay there, absorbing this view. As he
reached up to touch the serrated edges, a whisper of soil tumbled into his face.

His brothers would know what this was. Hell, he knew what this was.

Marzano's face was in shadow as she crouched next to him. "What do you make of it?"