Climbing Olympus. Kevin J. Anderson

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      Cora backed out of his way. She did not say a word to him. He glared at her, at how her body had betrayed both of them, and felt the long, dull rage eating at his stomach. Without the furnace of anger he kept stoked within him, Boris felt nothing at all.

      I am obsolete, but I am not a museum piece! he thought. Statues and trophies gathered dust. But Boris Tiban could still act against his oppressors.

RACHEL DYCEK

      BY THE TIME RACHEL BROUGHT the long-distance rover back to Lowell Base, meandering aimlessly across the Martian landscape as she gathered her thoughts, the distant sun had already fallen behind the line of crags called the Spine.

      Operations manager Bruce Vickery was there to meet her at the parking shelter, hands on stocky hips, suited up and ready to clamber into Percival as soon as Rachel opened the airlock. The speakerpatch in Vickery’s helmet flattened his annoyance.

      “Hey, Rachel, I needed to go out a lot earlier than this. You were scheduled to be back hours ago.” Vickery turned his back on her and popped open the rover’s storage compartment, slinging in a backpack of tools he had with him. It landed inside the bin with a hollow thunk. “It’s going to be damn tough to calibrate those meteorology stations without the sun.”

      The strong tone in his usually even voice triggered her defensiveness, and she turned to him. The base had two long-distance rovers, after all. “Why couldn’t you take Schiaparelli?”

      “It’s being serviced. Al-Somak is using it to meet the lander tomorrow, and he wants it bright and clean. I’ve been waiting here for you for hours. I wish you wouldn’t do this to me, Rachel.” Vickery sounded like an exasperated father trying to talk sense into his teenaged daughter. Rachel felt small, and hated herself for feeling that way.

      “Take it then. It is all yours.” Behind her, she heard Vickery climb through the sphincter airlock. The thousands of small telescoping legs reset themselves with a whisking noise, levering the body of the rover high enough off the ground to clear any obstacles on the terrain. Like an impatient bull, Percival snorted a thin whistle of cold steam as it cleared its exhausts.

      Still sluggish from her self-indulgent afternoon, Rachel walked along the packed-dirt path to the outer module’s entrance, then let herself through the main airlock into the changing area. She used one of the wall-mounted vacuum hoses to remove as much of the red dust as she could from her suit, then disconnected her helmet. The air smelled sour and metallic, with a musty, carbolic smell from the air-regenerating unit. She switched off the backpack and slipped it from her shoulders, then shucked her suit. Glowing resistance heaters shed small pools of warmth in the changing area, but they could not beat back the ever-present cold of Mars. The changing stool felt like ice against her bare legs as she tucked the suit components in the designated storage cubicle.

      With a damp poly-sponge, Rachel rubbed down her body to remove the sweat and grit. The cold dampness made her skin tingle, like sitting in a sauna and then running across the snow in the camp in Siberia where she had secretly performed the adin surgeries.

      As she dressed in a clean jumpsuit, Rachel checked her trim and compact body. Even under the one-third gravity, she had not degenerated to flab over ten years. At fifty she looked hard, annealed by the fire of human scorn and the cold of Mars.

      Back on Earth, though, in the oppressive gravity of forced retirement, she would become a fossil soon enough.

      Rachel made her way through the bulkhead door into the narrow corridor connecting the inflatable modules. As she passed into the central module that housed the main computers and communications facilities, Dr. Evrani, the meteorologist, burst in on her, waving his hands and simmering in anger. He was a little man, scrawny and hyperactive, as if his body were too small to contain the energy he generated. Even after five years of listening to his loopy Pakistani accent, Rachel still found him hard to follow. He reminded her of the Indian inquisitor that had dissected her on the world newsnets during the UN adin hearings, which might partially account for her dislike of Evrani.

      “You were not here, Commissioner!” Evrani said, his pecan-brown eyes wide, as if Rachel had somehow forgotten about being gone all day. “I had to accept the transmission myself from Commissioner Keefer in the orbiter. How could you forget? Why were you gone at a time like this?”

      “So what did he want?” She walked to her desk screen and activated it. Leaning over the clutter in her personal area, Rachel read the message herself even as Evrani summarized it.

      “They have reached orbital insertion on schedule and all systems have checked out. They will deploy the lander at our local sunup—”

      “—tomorrow morning,” Rachel said, on top of his words. “Then everything is on schedule and routine? No problems?” She glared at him with cold gray eyes. “So what are you so upset about?”

      Evrani shook his narrow, big-knuckled finger at her. “You should not go out of sight alone in a rover. We are on the buddy system. Those are the regulations.”

      Rachel scowled at him. “I will take your words under advisement, Dr. Evrani.” In the back of her mind, she wondered how Evrani had ever passed all the human factors tests. Cooped up together under pressure on Lowell Base, the fifty people had broken into a bunch of insulated cliques, and Evrani had become the tattletale.

      Tomorrow morning, Commissioner Jesús Keefer would land, and she had to prepare to be rotated home. After two weeks Captain Rubens would have refueled his interplanetary shuttle from the oxygen mining station on Phobos and prepared for the launch window to return to Earth. Rachel Dycek and five others would be rotated back home. Settling into her retirement, she would sit back in a comfortable dacha on Earth, maybe go on a speaking tour, maybe write her memoirs of the days of the adin project, or publish a final report on the success of the dva phase of human augmentation.

      Though her work on Mars had been superseded by other terraforming concerns, Rachel did not want to go back home. Adapted humans had always been intended as a short-term phase in the overall scheme. But she was having trouble adjusting to that reality.

      Erasing her screen, Rachel shut down the terminal. Feeling claustrophobic in the confined module, she envied the dvas out there in the open, breathing the air, feeling Martian breezes against polymer-insulated skin. “Excuse me, Dr. Evrani. I have a lot of preparations to make before tomorrow.”

      Rachel made her way to the tiny cramped cabin that had been her private quarters for a decade—“cozy,” the habitation engineers had called it. No doubt they would have said the same thing about a coffin.

      Rachel folded down her bunk and snapped it out from the wall with a tight clack to lock it into place, then adjusted the controls to soften the mattress. She lounged back on the thin, spongy layer and pulled a thermal blanket over herself to keep warm. As she closed her eyes, Rachel thought back, trying to count how much of her life she had wasted on augmentation projects.

      For twenty-one years of her career she had been involved with the concept, initially as an assistant, then section leader, then overall head of the adin project while hiding in a secret installation built within the Neryungri labor camp. She had started the job when she was twenty-nine, rosy-cheeked and idealistic, with enough stamina to surpass her competitors and no politics to speak of—nothing to offend the changing groups in control of the Sovereign Republics. She had excelled in medical school, practiced surgery for two years, before her real work had begun. Separating from her husband СКАЧАТЬ