"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 2 - Blue Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Sheffield, which was already punctured. As the town had grown westward new
tents had attached to the previous ones like lobes of pillow lava; now the
construction moraines outside the latest tent were littered with bits of
framework, like shards of glass, and the tent fabric was missing in the
remaining soccer-ball shapes. Her rover bounced wildly over a mound of basalt
rubble; she braked, drove slowly up to the wall. The vehicle lock doors were
stuck shut. She put on her suit and helmet, ducked into the rover's own lock,
left the car. Heart pounding hard, she walked up to the city wall and climbed
over it into Sheffield.
The streets were deserted. Glass and bricks and bamboo shards and twisted
magnesium beams lay scattered on the streetgrass. At this elevation, tent
failure caused flawed buildings to pop like balloons; windows gaped empty and
dark, and here and there complete rectangles of unbroken windows lay
scattered, like great clear shields. And there was a body, face frosted or
dusted. There would be a lot of dead, people weren't used to thinking about
decompression anymore, it was an old settlers' worry. But not today.
Ann kept walking east. "Look for Kasei or Dao or Marion or Peter," she said to
her wrist again and again. But no one replied.
She followed a narrow street just inside the southern wall of the tent. Harsh
sunlight, sharp-edged black shadows. Some buildings had held, their windows in
place, their lights on inside. No one to be seen in them, of course. Ahead the
cable was just visible, a black vertical stroke rising into the sky out of
east Sheffield, like a geometric line become visible in their reality.
The Red emergency band was a signal transmitted in a rapidly varying
wavelength, synchronized for everyone who had the current encryption. This
system cut through some kinds of radio jamming very well; nevertheless Ann was
surprised when a crow voice cawed from her wrist, "Ann, it's Dao. Up here."
He was actually in sight, waving at her from a doorway into a building's
little emergency lock. He and a group of some twenty people were working with
a trio of mobile rocket launchers out in the street. Ann ran over to them,
ducked into the doorway beside Dao. "This has to stop!" she cried.
Dao looked surprised. "We've almost got the Socket."
"But what then?"
"Talk to Kasei about that. He's up ahead, going for Arsia-view."
One of their rockets whooshed away, its noise faint in the thin air. Dao was
back at it. Ann ran forward up the street, keeping as close as she could to
the buildings siding it. It was obviously dangerous, but at that moment she
didn't care if she was killed or not, so she had no fear. Peter was somewhere
in Sheffield, in command of the green revolutionaries who had been there from
the beginning. These people had been efficient enough to keep the UNTA
security forces trapped on the cable and up on Clarke, so they were by no
means the hapless pacifistic young native street demonstrators that Kasei and
Dao seemed to have assumed they were. Her spiritual children, mounting an
attack on her only actual child, in complete confidence that they had her
blessing. As once they had. But now-
She struggled to keep running, her breath hard and ragged, the sweat beginning
to flood through all over her skin. She hurried to the south tent wall, where
she came on a little fleet of Red boulder cars, Turtle Rocks from the Acheron
car manufactory. But no one inside them answered her calls, and when she
looked closer she saw that their rock roofs were punctured by holes at their