"Paul J. McAuley - Reef" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

floating in her vision and white noise in her ears while the transmitter searched for a
viable waveband, locked on andтАФpowтАФshe was back, falling past rippled pink
pavement.
The alarm went off, flashing an array of white stars over the panorama. Her
number two, Srin Kerenyi, said in her ear, тАЬYouтАЩre wanted, boss.тАЭ
Margaret killed the alarm and the audio feed. She was already a kilometre below
the previous bench mark and she wanted to get as deep as possible before she
implanted the telemetry relay. She swivelled the proxy on its long axis, increased the
amplitude of the microwave radar. Far below were intimations of swells and bumps
jutting from the plane of the cliff face, textured mounds like brain coral, randomly
orientated chimneys. And something else, clouds of organic matter perhaps.
The alarm again. Srin had overridden the cut-out.
Margaret swore and dove at the cliff, unfurling the proxyтАЩs tentacles and jamming
the piton into pinkness rough with black papillae, like a giantтАЩs tongue quick frozen
against the ice. The pitonтАЩs spikes fired automatically. Recoil sent the little proxy
tumbling over its long axis until it reflexively stabilized itself with judicious squirts of
gas. The link rastered, came back, cut out completely. Margaret hit the switch that
turned the tank into a chair; the mask lifted away from her face.
Srin Kerenyi was standing in front of her. тАЬDzu Sho wants to talk with you, boss.
Right now.тАЭ
The job had been offered as a sealed contract. Science crews had been informed of
the precise nature of their tasks only when the habitat was under way. But it was good
basic pay with the promise of fat bonuses on completion: when she had won the survey
contract Margaret Henderson Wu had brought with her most of the crew from her
previous job, and had nursed a small hope that this would be a change in her familyтАЩs
luck.
The Ganapati was a new habitat founded by an alliance of two of the
CommonwealthтАЩs oldest patrician families. It was of standard construction, a basaltic
asteroid cored by a gigawatt X-ray laser and spun up by vented rock vapour to give 0.2
gee on the inner surface of its hollowed interior, factories and big reaction motors dug
into the stern. With its AIs rented out for information crunching and its refineries
synthesizing exotic plastics from cane sugar biomass and gengeneered oilseed rape
precursors, the new habitat had enough income to maintain the interest on its
construction loan from the Commonwealth Bourse, but not enough to attract new
citizens and workers. It was still not completely fitted out, had less than a third of its
optimal population.
Its Star Chamber, young and cocky and eager to win independence from their
families, had taken a big gamble. They were chasing a legend.
Eighty years ago, an experiment in accelerated evolution of chemoautotrophic
vacuum organisms had been set up on a planetoid in the outer edge of the Kuiper
Belt. The experiment had been run by a shell company registered on Ganymede but
covertly owned by the Democratic Union of China. In those days, companies and
governments of Earth had not been allowed to operate in the Kuiper Belt, which had
been claimed and ferociously defended by outer system cartels. That hegemony had
ended in the Quiet War, but the Quiet War had also destroyed all records of the
experiment; even the Democratic Union of China had disappeared, absorbed into the
Pacific Community.
There were over fifty thousand objects with diameters greater than a hundred
kilometres in the Kuiper Belt, and a billion more much smaller, the plane of their
orbits stretching beyond those of Neptune and Pluto. The experimental planetoid,