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

"Never said that." Tally shook her head. "No, I'm not about to be calling
all-clear, not quite yet. But I'm pretty sure that there's no danger right
exactly this instant. Not unless these killers are invisible and don't leave
footprints." She paused. "And, 'sides," she continued, "this is pretty much the
tallest ridge in the area. If they were coming for us, we'd see 'em miles away."

"But what if we did? What could we do? We'd be sitting ducks."
Tally grinned a broad grin. "Sitting ducks, you say? Take a peep that ridge over
there." She pointed.
I looked. Nothing special, no different than any other ridge. "So?"
I had glanced away for only an instant, but suddenly Tally had an omniblaster in
her right hand, a knife in her left, and a projectile rifle with an infrared
targeting scope resting at her feet. I had no idea how she could have concealed
such armament on her.
"How bout you?" she said. "Don't tell me you're naked?"
I was far from naked--the temperature couldn't have been more than a few degrees
above freezing-- but I wasn't carrying a weapon.
"Didn't I tell you to always wear a gun?" she said. "Dangerous out here. Who
knows who might want to shoot you?"
"Carry an omniblaster? No, I don't think you ever told us that."
"Yes I did. Told you both. Back in OLA." She paused for a second. "Shit. I bet
Leah's walking around naked, too." She shook her head. "You two just a bunch of
children. I'm surprised you've lived this long, I really am."
"Say, look," said Leah, coming up behind us. "The sun's out."
We both looked up. The sky had been steadily overcast ever since we had landed,
but the clouds were breaking up, and between them we had a glimpse of the sun.
"Take a look at that sky!" Tally said. "Isn't that gaudy!" Behind the clouds,
the Martian sky was a startling blue, a bright, nearly turquoise shade that I'd
never seen on Earth. I couldn't think of a reason offhand why the sky should be
a different color, but, naturally, Leah could.
"Methane," she said, after a second of thought. "After carbon dioxide, methane
is the main atmospheric component here. Strongly absorbs red light, so the sky
color is a deeper blue than just the Rayleigh scattering would predict."
"Oh," I said.
"Explains why the colors here are so muted," Leah said.
With the sunlight, the wind had picked up as well, a steadily rising wind out of
the north. Suddenly the coveralls we had on weren't enough to keep us warm. We
ran for the habitat.
#
The overcast had cleared completely the next day. The sky was preternaturally
blue, and the wind had become a steady near-gale from the north. Leah and I
worked inside. Tally still did her reconnaissance patrol outside, but I think
that even she must have spent much of her time huddled in the wind screen of one
or another of the boulders. Now we knew what had scattered the pieces of the
habitat.
The missing iron, as it turned out, wasn't a mystery at all. Once Leah realized
what to look for, she found it easily enough, in the form of grit scattered in
with the rest of the habitat pieces.
"It's a sulfur rich planet," she said. "I should have thought of it. In the year
and a half of exposure, everything iron or steel got converted to iron sulfide.