"Allen Steele - Glorious Destiny" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

Enough. There's another reason he's ventured out into the cold Gabriel night.
Taking his coffee mug with him, he crosses the hall, briefly nodding or waving to
everyone whose eye he meets, until he reaches a door off to one side of the room.
A narrow corridor takes him past the council meeting room, the armory, and the
records room. His office door's shut, but there's light under the crack; he hears
Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" from within. He quietly opens the door, steps inside.
Dana Monroe is seated at his blackwood desk, studying the screen of his comp; she
doesn't look up as he comes up behind her, but smiles as he leans over to give her a
kiss on the cheek. "Wondering when you'd get here," she murmurs. "What took you
so long?"
"My turn to wash up after dinner, remember?" Lee finds the spare chair, pulls it
over next to the desk. "That stew you made was pretty good. What'd you put in it?"
"My secret ingredient." She notices the annoyed expression on his face. "Okay,
it's what I didn't put in. You told me you don't like garlic, so I left it out this time.
Better?"
"Much. Thank you." Dana had been a better Chief Engineer than she was a cook;
when she moved in with him last summer, one of the things she had to learn was that
her new mate was surprisingly temperamental about what he ate. Otherwise, they
have an easy relationship; although Lee has officiated at nearly a dozen civil
ceremonies and Dana's helped Dr. Okada deliver four babies, neither of them was in
any rush to get married and start a family. Let someone else be fruitful and multiply;
their job is managing the colony. "So what's the forecast?"
"Hmm...not good." There's a close-up image of the storm on the screen; the time-
stamp shows that it was captured by Alabama's cameras as it passed over Coyote's
eastern hemisphere an hour and a half ago. She taps the keypad, and now there's a
more distant view: a dense swirl of white clouds, shrouding the Equatorial River
about five hundred miles east of the Meridian Sea. "Looks like it's picking up
moisture off the river," she murmurs. "Still a long way off, but it's growing. Unless
something changes in the next day or two it's coming our way."
Lee nods. For the most part, the Alabama colonists made the right decision by
establishing a settlement close to the equator. Winter on New Florida isn't as brutal as
it is in the northern and southernmost latitudes, and they have the advantage of longer
growing seasons, from early spring through late autumn. Nonetheless, Coyote's global
climate is cooler than Earth's, and Bear's tidal pull frequently plays havoc with wind
patterns. Their first winter was relatively mild; it only figures that the colony would
eventually have to deal with a major snowstorm.
"There's still a couple of large mountains in the way," Dana says. She points to
the major range that straddles Great Dakota, the continent west of New Florida.
"Probably won't stop it, but they may blunt the worst of it."
"So we can hope," Lee says. "At least we've got some advance warning. If we
can..."
The comp chimes just then, as a small window opens in the center of the screen:

03.12.2304/1512 GMT
SAT TRANSMISSION / ALABAMA / PRIORITY 1A
CODE 1893: PROTOCOL ETW-1B
CLASSIFIED / COMMANDING OFFICER'S EYES ONLY
AUTHENTICATION: PASSWORD______

"What the...?" Dana's eyes narrow. "That's from the ship." She looks over her