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

crash comets into the atmosphere and raise the carbon dioxide partial pressure to stimulate greenhouse
warming had come to nothing.

In the end, only a few thousand people had escaped the great winter. Those in the Yankee Mars base
had died out within thirty years, and for two centuries the two dozen bases on the Moon had fought
savage wars over dwindling resources. Now, after the Copernicus Alliance had destroyed Little Tokyo,
the last humans alive were in two bitterly opposed bases, one at the South Pole, the other buried deep
below the surface of Mare Insularum. Enriched by the biomass looted from Little Tokyo, the Copernicus
Alliance would be urging its population to make babies, and would turn those babies into hardwired
warriors. In less than ten years they would be ready to begin a final war against South Pole -- so South
Pole would have to strike first. Of course, soldiers had never needed an excuse to go to war. It was what
they were programed to do.

Echo soon tired of staring at Earth, and withdrew into his own reveries. Despite the blast of meth, he
actually fell asleep, and woke only when the bus blew its retrojets and more or less crash-landed near the
wreckage of Little Tokyo. All flights were like this: fast and low to escape any autonomous missiles the
enemy might have scattered across the surface.

Captain Achilles kicked Echo to his feet, ordered him to pull on his gloves and fasten his helmet, kicked
him through the bus's airlock. Like all bases, Little Tokyo had buried itself deep underground, beneath
rubble berms and heavy slabs of concrete, but the Copernicus Alliance's burrowing warheads had blown
it open like so many hammers smashing into a clam shell. Bits of blackened concrete were strewn for
kilometres across the trampled and blasted moonscape. There were pits everywhere, brimful of inky
shadows, and the raw scars left by the strip-mining equipment that had pulled out every kilogram of steel
from the reinforced concrete and ripped up the solar farm and the greenhouses. The entire population
had been killed, either in the bombardment or in the desperate hand-to-hand fighting afterwards, and the
corpses had been rendered for their organics on the spot.

The Alliance had completely withdrawn from the wrecked and looted base sixty hours ago, leaving only
boobytraps for the scouting party from South Pole to deal with.

"We probably haven't found them all, so watch where you walk," Captain Achilles said as he manhandled
Echo towards a rover, where two soldiers were waiting for them. "I don't want to have to go back and
find another tech to take your place."

"I appreciate the sentiment. If the base has been stripped, why am I here?"

"Those sons-of-bitches didn't find everything. Get in."

As soon as Echo had clambered into the back of the rover, beside his brother, it accelerated down a
ramp of compacted soil into a wide cut-and-cover tunnel. They drove recklessly fast, in complete
darkness. From his p-suit's GPS, Echo estimated that they had gone twenty kilometres when the
headlights and brakes kicked on simultaneously and the rover slewed to a halt in front of a standard
airlock that protruded from a rubble wall.

Echo was shoved inside by the two soldiers and Captain Achilles, and they all cycled through into normal
pressure and a chilly but survivable temperature. Menaced by the soldiers' assault rifles, Echo was
ordered to strip off his p-suit. Shivering, his nose itching from the wet ash smell of moondust, Echo was
pinioned by a soldier while Captain Achilles used a pressure gun to blast a capsule under the skin of his
forearm.