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

Getting to his feet, Eli slapped the dirt from his uniform. "Where did you say the other hexadrons were
found?"

She shrugged. "They're everywhere. In the Sticks. The wadis. Buried in hillsides, embedded in the
dunes."

"And you never noticed anything like that mecha-nism?" He gestured to the jammed, half-open plate.

"No. The others were smooth-sided. Or we assumed they were." Defensively, she offered: "We've had
more pressing matters. Like surviving."

Marzano gestured Willem to take Sascha up the wadi, and the corporal left with the girl in tow. Sascha
looked back to where the action was, pleading with great blue eyes for the captain to countermand the
order, but he didn't.

Looking down at his feet, Eli sorted the possibilities. Two shadows, one faint, one dark, spread out from
the soles of his feet, as though there were two of him stand-ing there. He squinted up into the beady eye
of the dwarf sun.
"What is it, then, Captain?" Marzano asked.

"They're not landing craft." He looked at her straight on. "They're burrowing craft."

Luce Marzano pursed her lips and frowned, as though unable to reverse her opinions on the instant.
Then, with Eli, she looked down at the baked soil of the wadi with a long, appraising gaze.

2

Luce Marzano and Master Sergeant Ben Juric leaned over the screen. The soundings showed an
underground tun-nel with a side branch to the east. So far, readings were showing a uniformity in
dimensions, fueling speculations about mining shafts, a secret arms cache, and lava tubes.

In this case, one was half the size of the other.

"A natural system of tunnels isn't proportional," Eli said.

Ben Juric looked at him, gracing him with a crumpled lip. Juric didn't talk unless he had something to say,
so Eli had learned to read his face. Tell me something I don't know, the master sergeant managed to
convey.

From outside the tent, the noise of grinding gears erupted, as the techs put the craft through its paces,
dig-ging down a yard or two; digging back up. The engineers cracked the control system easily. The
controls were sim-ple; hardest were the calibrations for depth, and the techs were closing in on that.

Techs had been swarming over the craft since the gradiometer reading had revealed the tunnels earlier
that morning. The soundings crew were now some half mile up the wadi, still following the main tunnel,
measuring the gravity-gradient changes that implied subsurface struc-tures.

"Ahtran tunnels, I say," Marzano concluded. Maybe she hoped they were. He couldn't blame her if she
was ea-ger to fight the war she'd been denied, eager to forget the past year's truce with the enemy.