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According to the video I had watched aboard the shuttle, Olympus Mons towers fifteen miles above the equivalent of sea level, making it a full-grown giant when compared to the relatively puny Mt. Everest, which stands little more than five miles high. Not to mention the fact that Olympus Mons boasts a caldera that is forty-five miles across and a base that would extend from the Montreal Urboplex all the way to what s left of the Big Apple. But no set of statistics could possibly do justice to the out-and-out magnificence of what I saw. Olympus Mons was nothing less than a brooding presence, squatting there like an ancient monument, measuring everything against its own enormous bulk. As for the land to the east, well, it wasn t any better, consisting as it did of a rock face fronted by a jumble of sharp-edged boulders. I noticed that while some of my companions were scoping things out, most were oblivious to their surroundings, as if they d seen it all before or just didn t care. They stood in clusters, their helmets pressed together for private conversations, or just staring at the ground. The lock opened and the last group shuffled out. An indicator light appeared inside my helmet, and the black man s voice filled my ears. He had a stylized X painted on the front of his otherwise unadorned suit. I tried to see through the polarized face plate but couldn t. Alright, boys and girls& listen up. For those of you who haven t already heard, my name is Dawkins, Larry Dawkins, Marscorp Field Supervisor extraordinaire, and one mean bastard. I ain t no lifer, and I ain t no ass-kisser, which means I got where I am by out-surviving a whole lot of dumb shits like you. So, if you work hard, and do exactly as I say, you might live long enough to get paid. Got any questions? Silence. Good& So here s the scoop. The company lost a shuttle about thirty miles north of here. The pilot and copilot bought the farm, but the ship s artificial intelligence thinks the cargo can be salvaged. And, since the cargo consists of ten Class IV Cargo Walkers, the first to make it dirtside, it s worth our while to go in after them. Questions? This time there was. The voice identified itself as Swango. and was clearly male, but I had no way of knowing which suit it belonged to. Yeah, I ve got a question. Why walk when we could ride? Well, gee, Dawkins said sarcastically, I wonder. You don t suppose it would have anything to do with those friggin boulders, do you? Or those god-damned rocks? You know, the ones in our way? Oh, Swango said self-consciously. Sorry. You certainly are, Dawkins agreed. Anyone else? I don t know what came over me, but the fog cleared off long enough for a thought to surface, and the words popped out of their own accord. What about oxygen, water, and food? Will we be resupplied? The Field Supervisor s reply was more accurate than he knew. Well, I ll be damned, a mule with half a brain. The answer is no, we won t. We have enough air, water, and food to reach the wreckage. Once there, we will take shelter in one of the remaining airtight compartments, resupply our suits, and recover the walkers. And here s the good news, folks: once the walkers are up and running, we ride out. The supposedly good news left everyone silent. It didn t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a whole lot of things could and probably would go wrong, that the company had left us with practically no safety margin, and that Dawkins was standing in the same pile of shit we were. I thought about what he d said earlier, about not kissing ass, and wondered if that explained why he had pulled such a rotten assignment. Alright, the man in question said, enough dorking around. Line up and draw your loads. The crawler remained where it was. Vapor outgassed into the thin atmosphere as a hatch slid open. The compartment was filled with a jumble of strange-looking equipment. Dawkins motioned us forward, grabbed what looked like a high-tech backpack from a row of similar packs, and handed it to the first person in line. I wondered why. If not supplies, what would we carry? The answer blew what was left of my mind. It quickly became apparent that our loads consisted of cyborgs! Walker Wonks, to be exact, specially engineered to pilot the huge machines, and more than a little weird. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |
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