Читать книгу Climbing Olympus - Kevin J. Anderson, Брайан Герберт - Страница 12

THE TITANIUM STAFF WAS sharp and strong. Unyielding and deadly—like Boris himself. The smooth metal was so cold it would have stripped the skin off a human hand, but the plastic adin skin kept him from feeling anything. Crouching, Boris ground its tip into the loose volcanic soil, as if stabbing Mars. He pried up a heavy rock and knocked it aside.

The powder of the fine rusty soil puffed like wind-scattered flour. The high-altitude breezes on the long, smooth slopes of Pavonis Mons picked up the red particles and whipped them around his feet. The storm season would soon be here.

Through with staring at the ground, Boris stood up, brushing off his ragged jumpsuit. “We must go,” he said to Nikolas.

Nikolas squatted near the rock. In his hand he held a scimitar that he had fashioned from a long strip of scrap metal taken from the original supply modules. He clanged its flat surface like a chime against the rough rock. Nikolas had honed and sharpened the edge repeatedly over the sixteen years of adin exile. For a moment it made Boris recall the anachronistic sickle and hammer of the old Soviet flag.

“Let us say goodbye to the women. Remember, we are doing this for Cora,” Boris said. “Stroganov is staying here in the caves. You and I will be the ones to strike.”

Nikolas nodded. “As it should be.”

Hooded eyebrows and the flattened noses and ears muted the expressions on scarred adin faces, but after so many years the adins had learned to read each other’s moods. When Nikolas grinned at Boris’s invitation, he looked cadaverous, like a laughing skull. In the low gravity he bounded past Stroganov’s frozen sculptures of Russian rebels to the mouth of the sheltering caverns. Boris followed him.

Inside the musty sheltered passages Nikolas lifted Nastasia from where she hunkered beside the volcanic steam vent. She dropped the wisps of wind-caught algae she had been boiling to remove the entrapped dust. “Let me kiss you, my passion!”

Nastasia shrieked in surprise, but then laughed as Nikolas wrapped his arms around her waist. “I shall return and make love to you all night long!” he said.

Boris turned his glance around in the dimness. Stroganov would be down by himself, deeper in the caves, exploring some of the labyrinthine lava tubes or polishing wall surfaces so that he could scratch his thoughts in stone. Stroganov was the only one who cared about making monuments and keeping a record of their toil. Boris intended to make his mark in a more immediate way.

Huddling away from the other adins, her only companions on an entire world, Cora Marisovna was by herself up at the caldera rim. Boris sighed and took long strides, squeezing his way through the winding upward passage until he saw Cora outside. He hesitated with a baffling rush of fear, just looking at her before she turned.

His woman, the adin he had claimed as his own. Boris had protected her during their first years on Mars; he had taken her away with him to a place where they could be comfortable and live out their remaining years as free people, not as serfs for the Earth governments. He did not know how to make her happy—and she did not know how to tell him, either.

Boris wanted to hold her tightly, crush her body against his, touching deadened skin to deadened skin. He needed to squeeze her so hard that it would hurt, inflicting his passion upon her in the only way their stolen nerves could feel. But the algae-tinted sky was like an open empty bowl above them, and the gentle winds around the caldera sighed with whispers of loneliness. He gathered his courage and shouted to her.

“Cora!” he called, trying to imagine the booming voice Pugachev might have used when rallying his rebels. “Wish me luck! Nikolas and I will take our revenge against the dvas for what has happened to you.”

But Cora shied away from him, as she had been doing for weeks. She mumbled to herself as she picked at the rocks strewn on the crumbly ground. “The dvas did nothing to me, Boris. Do not make another of your grand gestures in my name.”

He shrugged off her comment. Cora blamed him for her condition, but she refused to look at the entire picture. Everything on Mars was connected to everything else, and Boris Tiban and his surviving adins were at the bottom of the chain, as they always had been.

He tamped his staff down into the dirt impatiently. He breathed the air through his filtered nostrils, felt the bite of the cold on his sensitive inner mucous membranes. Cora was in one of those moods again, and Boris wondered how long it would last this time. He could not wait for her now; he had a mission to accomplish, a grand gesture to make.

“We shall return in a few days, Cora,” he said. The wind snatched his words away. “I shall think of you.”

He turned to leave her but, just as he ducked out of view in the downturning passage, he heard her say in a half whisper, “Be careful, Boris. Please.”

Boris and Nikolas set off down the slope of Pavonis Mons in the early morning, before the frost faded from the shadowed rocks. They ran down the long slope, at times laughing and enjoying themselves, but never forgetting their main mission. In the low gravity they could run all day long. They were adins.

Overhead, a few glimmering streaks marked the passage of meteorites through the atmosphere. Shooting stars had once been a rare sight in the skies on Earth, but the terraforming comet strikes had left a great deal of debris in nearby space for the battering ram of Mars to mop up on its journey around the sun.

Nikolas kept pace with Boris, breathing through his nose, working all four lungs to maintain the oxygen level in his blood. Boris put on an added burst of speed, and Nikolas ran right beside him like a loyal dog, flat-footed on the long and steady slope of Pavonis.

Back at the labor camp of Neryungri, Boris had been surprised when Nikolas turned out to be such a ready friend, eager and clinging, but much stronger than he had first appeared. Somehow, Nikolas had made it through the rigors of the adin selection process, just so he could remain with Boris.

Boris himself couldn’t give a damn about making the adin selection. Whether in a Siberian labor camp, or sweating in the Baku oil fields, or turned into an inhuman on the surface of Mars, his life was shit and it would stay that way until he could make it something else, until he could wrest his due from the oppressors. And there were always oppressors.

Boris Tiban was the illegitimate son of some Azerbaijani government official who had abandoned his mother; in turn, Boris’s mother promptly turned her young boy in for adoption when the money got too tight. By that time she had moved to the Armenian Republic, and the state placed him in a succession of orphanages, bouncing him like a soccer ball when he proved too intractable.

With the economy and social laws of the Sovereign Republics in constant flux, he went from reasonably comfortable conditions to austere barracks, from fresh meat to near starvation. He never felt happy, because he never knew how long anything would last.

At the age of fifteen he ran away from the foster home and wandered from Armenia, to Georgia, then back to Azerbaijan, finding work and trying to grab something worthwhile. Buffeted around so much in his life, Boris’s standard response was to lash out first, before anyone could strike against him.

During his exile in Neryungri, he had viewed the testing for the adin project and the subsequent surgeries as another way for the system to slap him down against his will, to force him into doing something that would cause him pain and lead to someone else’s benefit. He had volunteered, supposedly of his own free will, but what choice did he have?

The others treated Boris as a small man, an annoyance, an underling. But he had proved time and again that with unexpected brashness and no conscience he could make even powerful men quake in their boots, as he had done at the Baku oil fields and during the adin revolt when he had killed Vice Commander Dozintsev on worldwide Earth television. And now, after hiding for so many years, Boris Tiban would strike again. It would be his greatest act. …

Because of its smaller size, the horizon was foreshortened, and so sunset came rapidly. The sun set behind them, spilling the shadow of Pavonis Mons ahead of them. Darkness fell into a deep stained-glass violet with the air too thin to cloak the wealth of stars.

Breathing heavily through their noses, Boris and Nikolas stopped by a sheltered ledge of weathered rock, the collapsed walls of an ancient lava tube. “Down there,” Boris said, pointing toward the flat ochre plain with his long metal staff. “Look.”

Below, they could discern a metal pipeline leading away from the volcano, the small cluster of Quonset huts surrounded by cairns of rock. Distant substations run by dvas served as roasting plants for mineral samples to extract hydrated water molecules as well as freed oxygen and other volatiles. But this settlement was a pumping station at the intersection of two pipes. One line extended in the direction of the human base camp, while the other spread out to supply various dva mining clusters in the area. The water, kept liquid by volcanic heat in a reservoir deep under Pavonis Mons, could be carried all the way to Lowell Base in insulated pipes.

The work was done by dvas, the successors to the adins—but Boris looked on them as usurpers.

Through extreme measures, revolutionaries had succeeded in assassinating Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and the Bolsheviks had slaughtered Tsar Nicholas II and the entire Romanov family in 1918. He looked at the dva buildings and felt anger like an ulcer burning in him.

Boris Tiban held all the power in the world, because he had so little to lose.

“Let us rest here awhile, then keep moving,” Boris said, tossing a loose stone over the precipice. It dropped too slowly, tumbling end over end, then struck a boulder below with a high ping.

“We shall strike in the middle of the night.”