"R. Garcia Y Robertson - Oxygen Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robertson R Garcia Y)

system near the leading Trojan point of the gas giant Cadmus, a spot intersected by the orbit of an
asteroid called Cassandra. Why Pender should be so concerned to pass on this data was a mystery to
DerekтАФbut the reasons were bound to be bad.

When he was done, Pender paused to survey the holoscape one last time, knowing that having delivered
his message, he really was dead, no longer able to affect the world of the living. In fact, each passing
second left him farther behind. Pender's smile widened, and he said to no one in particular, "Well, it was
worth it. Now give 'em one more good whack for me."

In a blink, Pender was gone, and they were all staring into the empty holoscape of Monument Valley.
Surveying the tall spires and painted desert, Derek wondered if this was someplace on Earth, but did not
dare ask. Everyone else seemed to understand immediately what Pender meant, and what was going to
happen. They asked him only one ominous question before returning him to the sealed cubicle. "How
long before all humans are totally off the planet?"

"Not long," Derek admitted. Human evacuation was his specialty, and there was small point in lying so
long as he was wearing a slave collar. "Ten days at most, more likely a week. But you can never be sure
you have gotten everyone."

Militiamen got a grim laugh out of that. Then Tammy took him back to his sealed cubicle, and he was
shut off from the cosmos. Time passed, precisely recorded by his nav-chip. Food arrived, and a personal
recycler in the corner shipped his wastes to hydroponics. Halfway to Cadmus' leading Trojan point, the
drive fields reversed and the Skylark started decelerating. Eclipse would have to decelerate as well, in
order to match orbits. Working out high-g trajectories in his head, Derek decided that Eclipse could cut
the distance considerably, but still would not catch up until they were long past the leading Trojan point.
Whatever was happening there, Eclipse could not stop it.

So much for the Navy. If anyone was going to stop the Humanists, it had to be him. Terrific. He had
finally found his own people, only to discover that they were homicidal lunatics. Mia thought that most of
human misery came from inventing weapons, and by now Derek was willing to agree. No sane Greenie
would carry out what looked like a suicidal mission of mass-destruction at the behest of some dead
murderer. Male or female, young or old, stupid or smart, the first thing a Greenie would ask was, "Why
in the world are we doing this?"

Yet no one on that mesa top questioned anything, except to pointedly ask when the "humans" would be
off the planet. Pender's people were probably already offplanet, leaving a sprinkling of peaceful
independent types like the Presleites, who had somehow managed to avoid the war and its
aftermathтАФso far. Mia was probably already down there too, taking samples from the hippos and
worrying about what had happened to him. While these maniacs plotted something fatal for her and every
Greenie on the planet. Not to mention all those hippos.

Acceleration fell almost to zero when they reached a spot corresponding to the current location of
Cassandra, a two-hundred-klick rock named for a Trojan princess. Cassandra meant "Entangler of
Men." Or so his nav-chip said. She had certainly entangled him.

Tammy came to get him, his remote in hand, the stinger in a hip holster, and a smirk on her face. He tried
to lodge a strenuous protest, but she pressed MUTE, saying, "We don't have time to argue. Right now
we are in a sealed room, and can't be overheard. Outside, we have to be ready to act together. Okay?"

Unable to speak, and not knowing exactly what Tammy meant, Derek nodded anyway. What choice did