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

knelt down to examine them and take samples: clothing, hair, skin, tissue. After
she examined the one in the habitat, she rose without speaking and went to the
one outside. Unlike the other one, the clothing on this one was partly eaten
away by bacteria.
Leah's long black hair blew around her face as she worked, but the
carbon-dioxide breeze wasn't strong enough to move the pieces of aluminum
framework. The wind must have been much stronger to have spread the wreckage so
far.
Tally stood, as always, a dozen paces away, eyes restlessly scanning the horizon
for enemies.
"We really should have had a doctor to do this analysis," Leah said, standing
up. "But a few things are obvious. For example, the man in the habitat had a
fractured skull."
"What?"
"But this one," she nodded down at the body she was standing over, "shows no
apparent sign of trauma. No rebreather, either, so I'll hazard a guess that
carbon dioxide poisoning was what did for him." Leah put the tissue samples into
her sample-pack and took a step toward the habitat. "I'll have to let the
computer analyze the samples to verify that, of course." She looked around. "Who
could have killed them? Why?" She looked up the plain, following the trail of
debris. "I think we've seen enough. Tinkerman, you have enough pictures? Does
your checklist have anything else?"
I looked down at the list. "No, as far as forensics is concerned, we're done."
"Then, unless you have any further suggestions, do you think maybe we could get
them decently buried?"
When there's a fatal incident in space, of whatever kind, there needs to be an
investigation. If it was an accident, the cause has to be found so that
Spacewatch Authority can take appropriate measures to prevent its recurrence,
and deliver warning to anybody else with similar equipment.
We were that incident investigation team, Leah and I. Tally, a freelance
survival specialist, was our protection. If somebody had killed the two
researchers, deliberately blown up their habitat for some as-yet undetermined
motive, whoever it was that had killed them might come back.
But nobody cared about Mars. The exciting horizons were light-years away, where
relativistic probes lasercast back terabits of images, giving the excitement of
vistas that anybody could access on optical disk without the danger and
discomfort of leaving Earth, and with far stranger life-forms than any mere
microbes. Mars was such an uninteresting location that it took over a year
before Spacewatch Authority noticed that a scientific team that had gone there
to study microbes hadn't returned. They were the first researchers to bother
with an on-site investigation of Mars in over a century.
"It doesn't make sense," I told Leah, back in the habitat. "Why would anybody
want to murder two researchers on a stinky planet too close to Earth to even be
interesting?"
She shrugged. "Kooks. Bacteria-worshipers. Or, maybe one of 'em had an angry
ex."
"It's not as if the planet were exciting," I said. "They tried to terraform it.
They failed. End of story, go home."
"Failed? Tinkerman, you have it all wrong. You should go learn a little history
before going on a trip." I could hear her switching into lecture mode. "They