La Difference

Начало книги

First, Jupiter. In Io’s black sky, nothing rivals it-certainly not the sun, whose distance-shrunken disk blazes brilliant but cold, cold. Jupiter’s great orb sprawls across almost twenty degrees of sky, forty times as wide as Luna from Terra and nearly four hundred times as bright.

And when you have seen Luna once through her phases, you have seen all she has to offer. Jupiter is an ever-changing spectacle, banded clouds always swirling into new shapes, white or orange spots-cyclones that could swallow continents-bubbling up from the interior only to fade away in hours, weeks, years (or, like the Great Red Spot, not at all).

Renée Messier never tired of the show. The crawler pilot resented the attention she had to give her vehicle as she zigzagged northwards through the lava-and-sulfur uplands south of Loki toward the United European seismic station beyond the volcano.

Even more, she resented the two Japanese crawlers on her trail. The men in them would kill her if they could.

Читать дальше →