"Severna Park - The Three Unknowns" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Severna)

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Act IV
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When she woke up, it was Martian noon. The snoring had stopped. Someone had turned on the coffee,
and now there was a red plastic file case lying on the desk. She pushed off the covers and a motion
sensor in the ceiling flashed. Warm air began to blow in from the corners of the room, rustling the
separating curtain.
Althea listened. No snoring. "Anybody over there?"

No answer. She peeked around one end of the dense fabric. The cots were made and vacant. She went
to the window. Outside, across the road that cut between the boxcars and the dig site, the site crew was
hard at work for the CNN cameras and probably had been for hours. Althea looked for Hoshi among
the dusty white pressure suits and helmets. The shortest one. That had to be her.

Althea eyed the last of the pressure suits and its helmet, hanging alone on the rack by the door. Let Hoshi
have her moment with the cameras. All that would be over soon enough. Althea poured herself a cup of
coffee instead and sat down at the desk.

Inside the red plastic file case was a neatly bound book of field notes and a DVD. The little knot of tissue
paper with the finger bone was there, too, ivory-colored and audacious. Althea nudged it onto the desk.
Hoshi's nerve was simply amazing. She pulled her laptop out of her bag, slid the DVD into it, and blew
on her coffee as the site catalogue menu came up on the screen. One of the video entries was marked
with an asterisk. Althea picked that one and opened the book of field notes while it loaded.

In the book, the site's overall layout was marked with a plastic tab, and she turned to that first. The ruins
consisted of a large rectangular foundation surrounded on three sides by a total of nine smaller square
units, each connected by openings in the wall to the larger space. If the openings were doorways, none of
them were intact enough to guess how tall the occupants had been. On Earth, this would probably have
been living quarters with storage areas. On Earth, the first things Althea would have looked for were the
town dump and the cemetery. The wealth of civilizations eventually ended up in one place or the other.
But what about the wealth of Mars?

She glanced at the laptop and tapped the icon to start the video. It started silently with an overhead view
of the site, overlaid digitally with a grid. The grid corresponded to the real grid outside, meticulously laid
out with nylon string, dividing the site into square meter segments. The graphic on her laptop zoomed in
onto grid 34L, which was a corner of the largest structure. The image froze, then cut to the jiggling view
from a camera on someone's helmet. Whoever they were, they were down on their knees in the floury
red dirt, breathing noisily as they dug into 34L with a toothbrush and a dental pick.

Hoshi's voice came from somewhere to the digger's left. Althea turned up the sound.