"Alexander Kazantsev. The Destruction of Faena (ГИБЕЛЬ ФАЭНЫ, англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

There was uproar on Space Station Deimo.
Station engineer Tycho Veg, handsome, prematurely grey-haired, slow and
pensive, was looking in disapproval at the bustle that had just begun. But
it was not in conformity with his mild nature to interfere in anything: he
gave way in all things to his wife, Ala Veg, and she was the one who had
thought of holding a banquet in honour of the arriving spaceship Quest.
The still unfaded beauty Ala Veg had become bored at home on Faena with
teaching astronomy to blockheaded Superiors. She insisted on leaving with
her husband for the space station, which only took married couples with the
required special qualifications. They would be able to return to their three
children left on Faena after earning enough to last them for the rest of
their lives, and Tycho Veg would finally become a workshop proprietor.
Ala Veg, with the pedigree face of a Superior, a fine, straight nose, a
short upper lip and a sensual mouth, went about with a permanently haughty
frown; she considered herself and her husband the two most important
Faetians on the base.
However, the wife of the station chief, Nega Luton, who had illegally
taken over the post of Sister of Health without being a qualified doctor,
was of a different opinion. Encouraged by her husband, Mrak Luton, a
corpulent donkey, she passed herself off as the first lady of space and
never missed an opportunity to sting Ala Veg with a reference to the
children she had abandoned. Ala would parry these blows, sparing neither
Nega's barrenness nor her unattractive appearance.
Lada, the young but well-upholstered cook and gardener, a good-natured
woman with an affectionate smile on her broad, snub-nosed face, did
everything quickly and efficiently, trying to please everybody. She adored
her husband, proud that he, Brat Lua, was the only one of the roundheads,
thanks to his mother's position in the Dictator's family, who had been able
to obtain an education on Danjab, the continent of the Culturals. He was
sent to Deimo both as jack-of-all-trades and as a representative of the
roundheads who were to move to the uncomfortable planet of Mar. Lada Lua
willingly followed him to serve all the inhabitants of Deimo.
A signal from her communications bracelet found Lada Lua in the
greenhouse, a transparent cylindrical corridor thousands of paces long.
Apart from Lada, no one used that corridor because it was on the axis of the
space station and there was no artificial gravity created by centrifugal
force as in the other quarters on the station. The nurserywoman did not feel
her weight as she floated in and out among the air-roots of the plants. The
function of soil was performed by a nutritive mist of the saps that the
roots needed. The harvest in space was much bigger than on Faena.
The signal found Lada Lua collecting sweet fruits for the forthcoming
banquet.
Holding on to the air-roots, Lada Lua hurried to answer Ala Veg's call.
She had to float quite a distance through the tangled air-roots and then go
down the shaft inside a spoke of the giant wheel, in whose rim all the
station's quarters were housed.
The cage in the shaft seemed to fall down into an abyss. The feeling of
weight began to appear only at the end of the ride, when the cage slowed