The Merchant’s War полностью

Huw looked up at the underside of the dome. A gust of wind set up a sonorous droning whistle, ululating like the ghost of a dead whale. The dome was thick. He froze for a moment, staring, then raised his binoculars again. He raised his dictaphone, and began speaking. "The installation is covered by a dome, and back in fhe day it was prob-ably guarded by active defenses. You'd need a nuke to crack it open because the stuff it's made of is harder and more resilient than reinforced concrete, and it's at least three, maybe four meters thick. Coming down from the zenith, perhaps eighty meters off-center, the shotgun-blast of lightning-hot plasma has sheared through almost fifteen meters of this-call it supercrete? Carbon-fiber reinforced concrete?-and dug an elliptical trench in the shallow hillside. It must have vaporized the segment of the dome it struck. How in Hell the rest of the dome held-must have a tensile strength like buckminsterfullerene nanotubes. That's probably what killed the occupants, the shockwavc would rattle around inside the dome..."

The tree branches rustled overhead as the drone of the dead whale rose. Huw glanced up at the clouds, scudding past fast in the gray light. He sniffed. Smells like snow. Then he glanced over his shoulder, and turned, very deliberately, to raise a hand and wave.

Elena was the first to catch up with him. "Crone's teeth, Huw, what have you found?"

"Stand away from there!" He snapped as she glanced curiously at the edge of the gaping hole in the dome. "It's radioactive," he added, as she looked round and frowned at him. "I think whatever happened a long time ago was... well, I don't think the owners are home."

"Right." She shook her head, looking up at the huge arch that opened the dome above them. "Wow. What are we going to do?"

"Yo." Yul trotted up, rifle cradled carefully in his arms. "What now-"

Huw checked his watch. "We've got half an hour left until it's time to head back to base camp. I don't know about you guys, but I want to do some sightseeing before I go home. But first, I think we'd better make sure it doesn't kill us in the process." He held up his Geiger counter: "Get your tubes out." A minute later he'd reset both their counters to click, rather than silently logging the radiation flux. "If this begins to crackle, stop moving. If it buzzes, back away from wherever the buzzing is highest-pitched. If it howls at you, run for your life. The higher the pitch, the more dangerous it is. And don't touch anything without checking it out first. Never touch your counter to a surface, but hold it as close as you can-some types of radiation are stopped by an inch of air, but can kill you if you get close enough to actually touch the source. Got that? If in doubt, don't touch."

"What are we looking for again, exactly?" Yul raised an eyebrow.

"Magic wands. C'mon, let's see what we've got."

The trouble with trains, in Miriam's opinion, was that they weren't airliners: you actually went through the landscape, instead of soaring over it, and you tended to get bogged down in those vast spaces. About the best thing that could be said about it was that in first class you could get a decent cooked meal in the dining ear then retire to your bedroom for a night's sleep, and wake up seven or eight hundred miles from where you went to bed. On the other hand, the gentle swaying, occasional front-to-back lurching of the coaches, and the perpetual clatter of wheels across track welds combined to give her a queasy feeling the like of which she hadn't fell since many years ago she'd let her then-husband argue her into a boating holiday.

I seem to be spending all my time throwing up these days. Miriam sat on the edge of her bed, the chamber pot clutched between her hands and knees in the pre-dawn light. What's wrong with me? A sense of despondency Washed over her. All I need right now is a stomach bug,.. she yawned experimentally, held her breath, and let her back relax infinitesimally as she realized that her stomach was played out. Damn. She put the pot back in its under-bunk drawer and swung her legs back under the sheets. She yawned again, exhausted, then glanced at the window in mild disgust. Might as well get started now, she told herself. There was no way she'd manage another hours sleep before it was time to get up anyway: the train was due to pause in Dunedin around ten o'clock, and she needed to get her letter written first. The only question Was what to put in it...