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

"I'll tell them that."
"The greens will be mad at you."
"Fuck the greens."

Some part of the Kakaze snuck into the west terminal of Sheffield, in the
light of a smoky dull sunset: small groups wearing blackened dirty walkers,
their faces white and frightened, angry, disoriented, in shock. Wasted.
Eventually there were three or four hundred of them, sharing the day's bad
news. When Coyote slipped in the back, Ann rose and spoke in a voice just loud
enough to carry to all of them, aware as she never had been in her life of her
position as the first Red; of what that meant, now. These people had taken her
seriously and here they were, beaten and lucky to be alive, with dead friends
everywhere in the town east of them.
"A direct assault was a bad idea," she said, unable to help herself. "It
worked in Burroughs, but that was a different kind of situation. Here it
failed. People who might have lived a thousand years are dead. The cable
wasn't worth that. We're going to go into hiding and wait for our next chance,
our next real chance."
There were hoarse objections to this, angry shouts: "No! No! Never! Bring down
the cable!"
Ann waited them out. Finally she raised a hand, and slowly they went silent
again.
"It could backfire all too easily if we fight the greens now. It could give
the metanats an excuse to come in again. That would be far worse than dealing
with a native government. With Martians we can at least talk. The
environmental part of the Dorsa Brevia agreement gives us some leverage. We'll
just have to keep working as best we can. Start somewhere else. Do you
understand?"
This morning they wouldn't have. Now they still didn't want to. She waited out
the protesting voices, stared them down. The intense, cross-eyed glare of Ann
Clayborne.... A lot of them had joined the fight because of her, back in the
days when the enemy was the enemy, and the underground an actual working
alliance, loose and fractured but with all its elements more or less on the
same side....
They bowed their heads, reluctantly accepting that if Clayborne was against
them, their moral leadership was gone. And without that-without Kasei, without
Dao- with the bulk of the natives green, and firmly behind the leadership of
Nirgal and Jackie, and Peter the traitor. . . .
"Coyote will get you off Tharsis," Ann said, feeling sick. She left the room,
walked through the terminal and out the lock, back into her rover. Kasei's
wristpad lay on the car's dashboard, and she threw it across the compartment,
sobbed. She sat in the driver's seat and composed herself, and then started
the car and went looking for Nadia and Sax and all the rest.

Eventually she found herself back in east Pavonis, and there they were, all
still in the warehouse complex; when she walked in the door they stared at her
as if the attack on the cable had been her idea, as if she was personally
responsible for everything bad that had happened, both on that day and
throughout the revolution-just as they had stared at her after Burroughs, in
fact. Peter was actually there, the traitor, and she veered away from him, and