"Geoffrey Landis - Ecopoiesis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

puzzle.
"There are some minor pieces missing, but I think we've pretty much got
everything important," she said at last.
I walked up behind her and looked at the neatly-indexed array of scrap. "What
have you learned?"
She shook her head. "It doesn't tell me a story, yet." She picked up a piece and
handed it to me. "Tell me what you think about this one."
It was a curved piece of aluminum, forty-centimeters long, somewhat bent.
"Exterior habitat pressure-vessel wall," I said.
"Right so far. What else?"
The piece had broken at a seam at one edge. Shoddy workmanship? Probably not;
the other end had ripped jagged right across; the weld had probably never been
designed for the stress it must have taken. It was bent in the middle. The
jagged end had a scrape of paint on the raw metal. "Blue paint chips on the end
here," I said.
"Right," she said. "And the bend?"
It took me a moment, but suddenly I saw it. "Bent the wrong way," I said. "It
bowed in. The explosion should have blown it out." I thought for a moment.
"Could have been bent by the wind, later."
She nodded, thoughtful. "Possibility. There are other pieces bent the same way,
though."
"How much overpressure would it take to bend it that way?"
"Good question," she said. "If we could figure the overpressure as a function of
position, we can guess the locus of the blast. Turns out, though, that it
doesn't take much blast pressure to make the habitat structure fail this way.
The pressure vessel was designed to hold an interior pressure; it's not well
designed against an external overpressure."
"So, what do you think?"
"It might have failed in the rarefaction rebound following the overpressure of
an explosion," she said. "Microstructural examination might tell. Might not."
"Or the explosion was outside the habitat." That would make sense. If somebody
had wanted to kill the team, the easiest way to do it would have been to put a
bomb next to the shelter.
Leah shook her head and chose another piece to hand to me another. "Carbon
deposits," she said.
I looked at it and nodded. The burn marks were on the concave side, the
interior. "Fire after the blast?" I suggested.
She nodded, but slowly. "Could be, I suppose. But after the habitat breach,
everything vents to the reducing atmosphere. Fire goes out pretty quick."
#
"If it was murder," Leah said, "Who might have done it?"
We were sitting back in the little conference room. My whole face itched now,
despite the ointments that Tally had devised for sunburn. My face felt like I
was still wearing the rebreather.
"Hard to say," Tally said. "I suppose either one of 'em might have had enemies.
If it wasn't personal, I've got a few possibilities. First, before they went,
turns out they got a couple of anonymous messages saying not to go. The point
was, Mars was property of Freehold Toynbee, and it was reserved for the
Martians, however long it took them to appear. Humans were expressly forbidden
to land."