"Kristine Katheryn Rusch - Buried Deep" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

Thanks on this one go to my husband, Dean Wesley Smith, who kept me focused on the heart of this book,
and to Loren Coleman for one important late-night brainstorming session. Much appreciated, you two.




BURIED DEEP
 1
By the time Sharyn Scott-Olson had reached the crime scene, she already knew something was seriously
wrong. The three-block area surrounding the construction site was empty except for three police carts, five
officers, and Petros Batson. Petros stood at the edge of the site, staring down the street, obviously waiting
for her. His long coat brushed against the rust-colored Martian soil, and his boots were covered in dust,
making them look pale orange instead of black.
There were no Disty. Not on the streets, not leaning against the doorways in the nearby buildings, not
guarding the site, even though the excavation equipment was clearly Disty made.
The Disty had fled, and that made a shiver run through Scott-Olson. She knew that the Disty didn't like
death. One of the many reasons vengeance killings worked in Disty culture was because the Disty believed
that dead bodies contaminated the environmentтАФnot just for the moment those bodies touched the ground,
but for all time.
But the Disty also valued their homes, their businesses, and their possessions. Scott-Olson had entered
hundreds of locations in Sahara Dome, always to examine a dead body, and never before had she arrived at
a scene without at least one Disty there. Usually the Disty was a member of the Death Squad.
Scott-Olson had never been to a scene so unclean that not even the Death Squad would stand guard.
The surrounding neighborhood looked no different than it had ten years before. The buildings appeared
haphazardly built, although they weren't. Their doorways, tiny by human standards, were made for the adult
Disty. There were no windows. The buildings seemed to grow off each other.
Only one open street went from block to block, and that was a nod toward the initial human
requirements of Sahara Dome. Most of the streets, especially in this section, were little more than tunnels,
with buildings on top that stretched all the way to the dome roof.
The tunnels were so low that no adult human could walk through them without crouching. The walls
were narrow, as well. Humans who lived on Mars learned to stay thin if they wanted to travel inside the
domes. Heavyset humans sometimes couldn't fit inside the tunnels at all.
Scott-Olson was too thin, but sometimes even her arms brushed against the walls of Disty tunnels. She
was lucky she wasn't claustrophobic, since her job often took her into the Disty-only sections, where the
tunnels seemed even narrower.
Perhaps what surprised her most about the crime scene was that it wasn't narrow or covered with
buildings. It was the widest-open space she had ever seen in the Disty section. An entire human-sized city
blockтАФperfectly square, just like the blocks in the human section of the domeтАФhad been torn down.
Someone had removed the Disty brick and piled it against the back side of the square as if building a wall.
Scott-Olson looked up, saw the yellowish light on the underside of the dome, the shadow of the
inexorable dust on the top of the dome, and the darkness beyond.
Martian winter.
Even though she had been here for nearly twenty Earth years, she still couldn't get used to the
darkness. She used to imagine that she'd leave before the next winter set in.
She had no such illusions now.
"It's about time," Batson said as he walked toward her. He looked gigantic against the twisted Disty
buildings and the tiny carts. His long coat swayed behind him, creating eddies of reddish dust.
She had forgotten how ubiquitous the dust could be inside the Dome. The Disty had developed an
excellent filtration system to keep the dust outside, and almost all of the dome's interior was paved.
Except when buildings were torn down, and construction was underway.