"Liz Martin - Bright Cloud of Music" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin Liz)

BRIGHT CLOUD OF MUSIC
by Liz Martin
┬й 2000 - All Rights Reserved



Zack heard the Central Command Core before he saw it. A klaxon shrieked atonally, setting his teeth on
edge. A pair of armed marines flanking the outer hatch saluted him, stirring tendrils of mist. Half-obscured
figures moved across the inner hatch, inside the Core. Zack stepped across a gangplank over a single
step of emptiness, a gimbaling buffer between inner Core and outer sphere. Kozinski waited for him
there, the astrophysicist's fleshy, salt and ginger-goateed face as lugubrious as Zack had ever seen.

"Governor." Kozinski gripped his arm. "I am sorry to...wake you." The pause seemed deliberate. He had
chimed through in the middle of Marjorie's shrill harangue, continued as weeping in the background for
the benefit of the open comm. "I thought it was that you should know." There were those who might think
otherwise.

Zack had to shout to be heard. "Can we shut that thing off?"

"We have tried. Itohaki doesn't know how. It's too old. He's working on it. Manually." Kozinski expelled
the last word with enough distaste to do for a draught of polluted Earth water. Unnecessarily, he guided
Zack into the Core. A haze hung in the cavernous chamber, softening blinking lights and blurring the walls
of giant holoscreens. Cold in there, it smelled of damp closets and old shoes. Zack lifted an eyebrow.
Kozinski shrugged. "Environmental. It is on the fritz again." Blue, slavic eyes showed more disgust at
yuan-pinching bureaucracy than they did resignation.

Between the fug and the siren, Zack's head began to ache.

An orb made of diamondoid materials inset with a floor of the same clear nano-engineering, the Core
glowed with a watery blue light cast from all sides. On the walls, H.I. systems projected a real time
wrap-around view of Europa's Vostok Ocean, as if the Core was in actuality the twenty kilometre
diameter hull of Europa Penal Institution. The air rippled queasily with the light.

Floodlit in a nemoesque panorama, the water shaded from clear aqua in the immediate surrounds to
glassy green and through every frequency of blue to indigo, and thence to blackness. Bubbles cupped the
chamber on all sides in curving streams, evidence that oxygen exchange systems manufactured every
breath that filled their lungs. Plankton swarmed in the floodlights. Seen from below or above but always
from the belly out, whiskered cleaner drones ate pathways around E.P.I., recycling algal build-up into
protein stores. An anchor of flexible fibres bundled into a hawser as thick around as a terran redwood
clamped the apex of the hull. The anchor line stretched up into the vanishing distance, towards the ice
cap.

Plankton, bubbles, algae; underneath a frozen sky, Europa lived. It was a suffocating, unsatisfactory,
unearthly existence, though, a diatomaceous soup engendered by the heat from undersea tectonic rifts
pulled this way and that by Jupiter's influence. It was an uncertain existence, on a moon where the
charted sea floor consisted of the calcified remains of mass extinctions, in places kilometres deep.

The siren cut off, leaving Zack's ears ringing, as after one of Marjorie's passions of homesickness.

"Jesu," Kozinski muttered thankfully, a little too loudly.