![Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4] - Читать Любимую Русскую Полную Книгу 👉 Read-E-Book.com](/uploads/posts/books/1/9/3/5/termination-shock-calibre-4-99-4-download.jpg)
Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]
- Автор: Стивенсон Нил Таун
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: HarperCollinsPublishers
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]». Краткое содержание книги:
Amidst all that hugeness, he had to re-calibrate his eye just to see what he had come all this way to look at. In the desert of West Texas the Biggest Gun in the World had looked big just because it was the only sign of human activity, other than barbed-wire fences, for miles. Here, though, the head frame of the gun could have been overlooked as just another mysterious bit of mine infrastructure. Likewise, the sulfur heap was dwarfed by mountainous piles of mine spoil. It stood out only because it was yellow.
As advertised, little oxygen tanks on carts were lined up for the taking to one side of the helipad. There was also a rack with ski jackets, so that people who’d just flown up from the equatorial jungle didn’t have to bring warm clothes with them. But T.R. was standing right by the helipad next to a Tesla SUV (didn’t burn gasoline; didn’t need air) with its gull wing doors open. So Willem just quick-walked over and climbed into that, then leaned back and waited for his heart and lungs to scavenge enough oxygen to return his body to some kind of equilibrium. The seat was warm and so was the air once T.R. had got in and closed the doors. If there had been a chauffeur, Willem would have sat in the back with T.R. and Amelia would have rode shotgun. As it was she rode in the back so that T.R. and Willem could occupy the two front seats.
“You do have a taste for weird, difficult parts of the world,” Willem gasped, when the oxygen panic had subsided.
T.R. considered it carefully. “A thing you learn real fast, when you are in the oil business”—he pronounced it “ol bidness” and Willem honestly didn’t know if it was wry Texan self-parody, or actually how he talked—“or mining, is that almost every part of the world is weird and difficult. We don’t see those parts because we prefer to build our habitations in more hospitable areas. Which are rare. We come to think of Connecticut, Florida, France, and all that as how the world is. Places like this being aberrations. Thing is, geology don’t care about our convenience and so it puts the oil and the minerals in locations that are truly random. You put on a blindfold, Dr. Castelein—”
“Willem. Please.”
“You throw darts at random into a spinning globe, the odds of hitting Connecticut are small. The odds of hitting what you call a weird, difficult part of the world are high.”
“Fair enough.”
“But I’ll give you this much: this is the worst place of all, with the possible exception of Antarctica. The first map of New Guinea was drawn up just a little over a century ago. It killed seventy-nine out of eight hundred men who worked on it.”
“Drawing the map!?”
“Drawing the map. The first European expedition to these parts involved four hundred men and took over a year. Only fifteen of those four hundred stuck it out—and they didn’t even come close to reaching where we are now! When some crazy Dutch mountaineers finally made it up here in the 1930s they described it as a mountain of ore on the moon. This here”—T.R. made a “look about you” gesture—“was then the highest point on Earth between the Himalayas and the Andes. Because it was buried fifty meters deep under a glacier. Hence, the Dutch name of the place. Sneeuwberg. Snow Mountain. Since then the glacier has melted and the mountain has been leveled. No snow, no mountain. So now that”—he pointed to the brown rock crag that loomed over all this, so close they could, with oxygen tanks, simply hike over to it—“is the highest.”
“Five thousand meters, give or take,” Willem said.
“That is correct.”
T.R. during this had been piloting the car over a terrible road at little more than a walking pace. They had put the helipad behind them and passed through a security gate staffed by Caucasian men armed with submachine guns. There was a sort of buffer zone consisting of strewn cargo pallets and parked equipment. Here and there, Papuan men in hard hats and high-visibility vests were working on engines or driving forklifts. Then they passed through another belt of armed security and came alongside a row of office trailers. “Fiefdoms of different subs,” T.R. explained. “Brazos RoDuSh is a mining company. Period. Don’t wanna run medical clinics, commissaries, housing, anything that ain’t mining per se. So, subcontractors. You might remember this one.”
He had pulled up in front of a trailer that was unsigned and unmarked, other than a blank sheet of white printer paper taped to the door. “Welcome to the Papua offices of White Label Industries! Breathe deep and don’t go into oxygen debt as you ascend the four steps to the door!”
The interior was true to White Label form. The ends of the trailer featured a couple of smaller offices and a toilet, but most of it was a conference room. The walls were sheathed in cheap fake wood paneling with whiteboards drywall-screwed into place. A watercooler and a coffee maker sat in the corner on a makeshift table consisting of the cardboard boxes they had arrived in. The flimsiest, cheapest obtainable folding plastic chairs surrounded a couple of plastic folding tables jammed together. “Sometimes the glamour of it all is just a bit much,” T.R. gasped as he collapsed into one of those chairs and nearly buckled it. Next to it was an oxygen tank. He cranked its knob and took a few deep breaths as Willem tottered back to the toilet.
“Have you considered simply piping oxygen into rooms like this one?” Willem asked when he came back.
“First question I asked,” T.R. said. “Turns out it’s dangerous. You add too much oxygen, and stuff burns you didn’t know was capable of burning.”
Willem nodded and sat down. Amelia, who had better cardio, prowled up and down the length of the trailer looking out the windows. These had all been covered on the inside with steel mesh, affixed with drywall screws and washers. She gave one a rattle. “For grenades?” she asked.
“Correct. Wouldn’t stop a burglar. Protects upper management from casual fragging. Sandbags on the roof—before you ask.” T.R. turned his attention to Willem and winked at him to indicate that he approved of Amelia. “Welcome to the Southern Hemisphere branch!”
“Just barely.”
T.R. considered it. “You refer to the fact that we are only a couple hundred clicks south of the equator. It’s enough, though! The circulation patterns of north and south are surprisingly well separated. And the special circumstances here make it possible for us to reach farther south yet—we pulled off a few tricks that were not an option in our little old pilot project down Texas way.”
“Pilot project!” Willem said under his breath, shaking his head in disbelief.
T.R. had been fussing with the AV system while they chatted, and now pulled up an image on a 3D holographic projector that was mounted to the ceiling: the one concession in this place to fancy high-end office equipment. As if reading Willem’s mind, T.R. said, “Cost more than everything else combined. But we gotta put on some kind of show for folks like you who go to the trouble of coming all the way out to this godforsaken shithole!” Left unspoken was the question What the hell are you doing here? but Willem was pretty sure they’d get around to it after T.R. was finished putting on this big show of hospitality.
Hovering in the middle of the conference room was now a semi-transparent model of the entire mine complex. This slowly zoomed in on an area not far from the trailer where they were having this conversation. Hard as it was to make sense of the vast complex when viewed from a chopper, this rendering made it all even more confusing as it revealed all the underground works that had been cut into the mountain during the half century that Brazos RoDuSh had been working here. Not for the first time, Willem was awed, staggered, and even a little humiliated by the sheer scale at which the oil and mining industries operated—year in, year out, in a way that was basically invisible to the people on the other side of the world who benefited from what they were doing, and who funded these works, every time they checked their Twitter.