"Geoffrey H. Landis - Falling onto Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

desperation, the mob that had been the sixth wave ripped apart the base, the visible symbol of the
civilization that had sent them a hundred million miles to die. The women who remained on the base were
raped, and then the destroyers gave them the chance to plead for their lives.

The men of the fourth and fifth waves had joined together. For the most part they were strangers to each
otherтАФmany of them had never seen each othersтАЩ faces except through the reflective visor of a suit. But
they had slowly learned that the only way to survive was to cooperate. They learned to burrow under the
sand, and when their home-made radios told them that the base was being sacked, they crept across the
desert, and silently watched, and waited. When the destroyers abandoned the base, after looting it of
everything that they thought was valuable, the fifth wave, hiding under the sands, burst out and caught
them unprepared. Of the destroyers who had attacked Shalbatana base, not a single one survived. The
leader Dingo fled into the desert, and it was Jared Vargas, my great-great grandfather, who saw him,
followed him, tracked him down, and killed him.

And then they went to Shalbatana base, to see whether anything left could be salvaged.

G-g-grandpa found her in the wreckage and ripped the tape off her eyes. She looked at him, her eyes
unable to focus in the sudden light, and thought him one of the same group that had raped her and
sabotaged the habitat. She had no way of knowing that others from his group were frantically working to
patch up one of the modules to hold air, while G-g-grandpa and others searched for survivors. As the
leaking air shrieked in her ears, she looked up at him, blinking, blood running from her nose and ears and
anus, and said, тАЬYou have to know before I die. Oxygen in the soil. Release it by baking.тАЭ

тАЬWhat?тАЭ G-g-grandpa said. It was not what he had expected to hear from a naked, bleeding woman
who was about to pass out from anoxia.

тАЬOxygen!тАЭ she said, gasping for breath. тАЬOxygen! The greenhouses are dead. Some of the seedlings may
have survived, but you don't have time. You need oxygen now. You'll have to find some way to heat the
regolith. Make a solar furnace. You can get oxygen by heating the soil.тАЭ

And then she passed out. G-g-grandpa dragged her like a sack of stones to the one patched habitat
module, and shouted, тАЬI found one! Est├б viva! I found one still alive!тАЭ

Over the following months Jared held her when she cried and cursed, nursed her back to health, and
stayed with her through her pregnancy. Theirs was one of the first marriages on Mars, for although some
women had been criminals infamous enough to be sentenced to Mars, still the male prisoners
outnumbered the females by ten to one.

Between them, the murderer and the scientist, they built a civilization.

And still the ships came from Earth, each one more poorly built and delivering more corpses than living
men. But that was in its way a blessing, for the men would mostly die, while the corpses, no matter how
emaciated, had valuable organic content that could turn another square meter of dead Martian sand into
greenhouse soil. Each corpse kept one survivor alive.

Thousands died of starvation and asphyxiation. Thousands more were murdered so that the air that they
breathed could be used by another. The refugees learned. Led by my great-great-grandfather and
grandmother, when a ship fell to Mars, they learned to rip it apart to its components before its parachutes
had even settled. Of its transporteesтАФwell, if they couldn't breath vacuum (and the thin Mars air was
never more than dust-laden vacuum), they had better scramble.