The Second Angel

Начало книги

It was another bright, cold day on the Moon and the atomic clocks were flashing three hundred. Three hundred and twenty-four hours is the length of a lunar-equatorial day, which means that one day on the Moon is worth two full weeks on Earth. Few if any of the people working in Artemis Seven, a penal cave-mining colony, would have agreed with this value. For time passes slowly in a penal colony, especially a hard-labor facility operating in the constant, artificial light of an airtight underground lunar cavern at minus twenty degrees Celsius.

The penal colony was in a cavern under the overhanging lip of a large crater in the Moon’s Carpathian foothills. Ten miles long, two to three hundred yards wide, and almost as high, it held more than three thousand men and women, all of them convicted of a variety of felonies, from simple theft to premeditated murder. The shortest sentence was five years, and the longest, fifteen. There were no lifers in Artemis Seven. Hard time in a lunar colony is considered sufficient punishment for all but the most heinous crimes.

Читать дальше →