The small sun, slightly more than half the size of the Earth's, was sinking toward the horizon. However, it still hung in that part of the sky that was blue-black even at midday. This was the so-called daytime circumzenith. Part of the glazing of the dome, which was not a dome at all, but a rectangular hangar in plan, faced the western part of the horizon, which was beginning to turn red. The reflections of this nascent sunset fell on faces, painting them copper-colored. On earth, such combinations of sky colors and sunlight were not to be found, except perhaps in the inaccessible mountains. Here, however, this was how the third quarter of each day looked.
The crowd roared approvingly once again - this was a practiced reaction to Doctor Heller expressing his next thought.
- What a herd! - Somerset thought angrily and casually glanced to the left, where this Radcliffe, the "leader", stood, in the previous life of the settlement an ordinary Senior Specialist, now turned into a rabid activist.
- We are not leaving after the meeting! - the "leader", who liked to make such unnecessary reminders of the vanity, shouted through the noise, noticing Somerset's glance.
- Yes, I remember, - Somerset responded, barely managing to fit into the pause in Doctor Heller's speech, once again telling about his circle of history, or rather, a turn of the spiral.
The nearest door, one of several leading from the dome to the perimeter gallery, was located a couple of dozen meters away. There was a screen hanging approximately there, in the corner of which there was a line with a digital clock. We should have waited another ten minutes and then...
- It's not the first time I've said that we are the ones who have found ourselves in the face of what illuminated humanity several thousand years ago, - Heller started up again, - The time has come for a new antiquity. We are the ones who have had the chance to build a true democracy. The history of humanity has described a circle of incredible proportions. Or rather, it has made a turn in the spiral of development. In ancient cities, which gave rise to the very concept of "democracy", the socio-political process was determined by a very small group of city citizens. They literally knew each other by sight. Well, or through one handshake. If there was inequality between them, it was dictated exclusively by merit. Any wicked person, be it a swindler or another criminal, was simply expelled. Yes, they did not exist on self-sufficiency - that society was slave-owning. But no matter how cynical it may sound now, slaves were not included in that picture - they were simply not considered people. Of course, it was terrible. But what remained in the memory of descendants was not that society as such, but an image. An image that they wanted to be equal to, but could not jump to that height. And so, humanity described a turn in its historical orbit and now we are here, armed with an unimaginable fleet of machinery. I am convinced that we can easily equal those titans of the ancient past. With an image. In the minds of generations of descendants, this was a society where an ordinary citizen was often able to immortalize his name for centuries. And in fact, this was true in reality.
everyone is excited about the idea of participating in these exploits of yours? - Somerset answered mentally.
- If some miracle had torn those ancient heroes from the shackles of their primitive existence and given them our machinery in exchange for slaves, then we would have emerged, - Heller continued.
- I need a miracle too. A miracle that will tear my ass out of the shackles of your fucking idea. Minutes on the screen replaced each other. The door located under the screen led to just such a miracle, to escape. To its, escape's, starting point.
- This Civil War would be better, but on Earth, with trees, earthly air and even dirt after the rain. And if you love your hardware so much, then love it without me. And each other in all sorts of combinations ... - Somerset continued the aimless mental discussion, - Be everything you want.
- Humanity, remaining on Earth, has long been mired in vices that were inevitable on the path to formation, - Doctor Heller continued, - With the course of development, it could get rid of them much more effectively, but we see a different result. Nevertheless, we should be grateful to him in a historical sense, and we do not intend to break with him under any circumstances. We will simply leave. We will not leave forever. Despite all this, we will ascend and have already ascended to a truly new level. We are forming our own habitat outside the Earth and are capable of providing for our own existence completely. Each of us is given such a fleet of machinery and such energy resources that are unthinkable for any inhabitant of the Earth, except perhaps for representatives of top business, but they also manage these capacities indirectly, through chains of countless intermediary managers. With us, every second, then third person is capable of designing and building a new production facility. We are a new stage of evolution. If not in the biological sense, then in the social and simply mental sense.
As for production, that was true. As a result, directives came from above, from the leaders of the rebellion, to set up production of their own military equipment. On Earth, the military-industrial complex has always been something elite, closed, but here the matter was entrusted to the first comers. Fortunately, everyone was a high-class engineer, with the exception of doctors - their task was to treat others, and not to build or extract. As for the rest, even for rations, for the most part, no cooks were responsible, but appointed duty officers.
As for the newly-minted weapons, the competence of those making decisions made mixed impressions. If anti-missiles, which had not yet been developed, were something rational, then wheeled armored vehicles seemed like a complete relic. Nevertheless, such a decision was made.
The unit of activist Radcliffe, which included Somerset, the same Senior Specialist as this newly-minted leader, was busy with armored vehicles. More precisely, it would have been the very beginning - the design and construction of production buildings. The very design of armored vehicles was a completely stupid copying of the templates of the Earth army, which had long ago turned into a global police force, capable only of suppressing an incomparably weak enemy. Suppressing an enemy like the dictatorships of the "yellow map" that had risen up for another rebellion or demarche, that is, that part of the planet's map that was populated by penniless people who had not emerged from the pre-industrial twentieth or twenty-first centuries. That was the life of Earth. The life of the settlement, which developed from the first landing site in 2275 and then for forty-five years, was, in general, something worthy. Everyone knew why they had flown here and upon returning, they received what they had earned. But that was before the rebellion. The new, rebellious organization of the labor resource, when people were recruited for various types of work in their free time, copied certain practices that had taken place in those unfavorable centuries. This is what the Bolsheviks did - a radical faction of communists who turned the entire history of the twentieth century upside down. This was told by, if not a friend, then a good buddy of Somerset, Dolbin, an Engineer-Lieutenant. He was a great connoisseur of such historical details, although at the same time he was also a fan of adding his own version. The latter did not cancel out the fact that he showed himself to be much more reasonable than most. Like Somerset, this reasonable man also had no desire to end his days here, in this world alien to human nature. Heller continued his chatter, which was occasionally joined by a barely audible buzzing - a pair of drones with large-format cameras were dangling under the glass dome. In general, the goal of this latest gathering was not only and not so much to process the brains of the two or three hundred people present, but to shoot another video version, which was to be distributed to all almost fifty thousand people. That was the population of the colony object, including about a thousand personnel who were in orbital space. There were some of those too - there was something to mine in orbit - Phobos was being gutted, taking out osmium, hafnium and ytterbium, which made up a significant portion of the meteorites that had once flown into it. Several hundred people were working on orbital construction - the smaller Deimos was now flying with a multi-kilometer openwork farm seemingly stuck into it - the celestial body was being used as a stabilizing load for the station under construction for growing large single crystals.
Finally, the time Somerset was aiming for had come. Slowly turning around, he moved to the right, towards the door. People began to slowly part one after another.
"Where are you going?" Jennifer's voice was heard behind her as she entered the unit. She was no less a fanatical activist than Radcliffe himself. - Toilet, - Somerset said quietly, turning around.
- Oh, okay, - she answered, seeming embarrassed, or rather feigning embarrassment.
- Thank you for allowing me, - Somerset thought angrily, continuing his movement toward the treasured door.
When a couple of doors of this standard airlock closed, Somerset finally breathed a sigh of relief. Now he was standing in the middle of a deserted corridor of the perimeter gallery. Along the way, Somerset had a rather extravagant thought that something like this had already happened in his life. Indeed, he had the same feeling, one must think, with adrenaline, in his distant childhood, when he had also made rather successful attempts to sneak out of classes. Or rather, from additional classes, and lessons too. Instead of Dr. Heller, there was a not quite normal teacher who intended, and most importantly, somehow received permission to conduct classes on all that Indian devilry. World ancient culture, damn it. The teacher, judging by the later, adult analysis of memories, was inclined to smoke, which she should not. It was noteworthy that there was also an analogue of these activists back then, in childhood. Moreover, those very same, as Dolbin, who had a virtuoso skill of expression, would have put it, "horned devils", just like young Somerset, did not show much desire to stay at school longer than required. And at the same time they prevented his escapes. Such was apparently human nature. On the other hand, who would have thought that this was a real training session, which very young Somerset had invented and arranged for himself. Now, much more was at stake than the prospect of choosing to leave or lose an extra hour and a half. Now, we were talking about long years of vegetating for no one knows what, if not about the whole life spent here. When Somerset signed the contract, he clearly understood why he needed it, and this ... A person can go to great lengths and endure a lot if he knows what it is all for. But if thoughtlessly, but in cahoots with the rest, if for the sake of some beautiful words - this is real madness. Less than a couple of minutes after the airlock doors closed behind him, Somerset was already walking along the gallery, with the plus fifty mark. Such construction markings were everywhere here. Now he needed to catch his breath - the caution that had become paranoid suggested that he should not rely on the elevator when he could get there on his own feet. The mark meant that the floor was at a height of fifty meters above the surface, and this was decent even in the conditions of reduced Martian gravity. The gallery had glazing and, if desired, if you pressed your face to the window, you could see a fragment of an abandoned dome, like all similar domes, which had the shape of a semi-cylinder, that is, as has already been said, a hangar. Somewhere to the side, about half a kilometer away, a train with ore was stretching. There was no such transport on earth - the track was five meters and each car was the size and load capacity of a small earth barge. Each sleeper of the track is a steel structure with its own device, with dampers and compensators of deformations. And this was the simplest and crudest.
When erecting building structures, it was common practice to use beams made of porous high-alloy steel, which were made not by casting, but by powder laser printing with the drawing of each half-open cavity. In the conditions of a lifeless planet, all that was needed for such delights was material and energy, and all this was there. On Earth, the transition to such an exorbitant quality in relation to the needs of the entire population would inevitably ruin the entire biosphere - one way or another, all production processes produced waste. Here, this did not change anything - in any case, these were all the same lifeless rocks and an atmosphere unsuitable for breathing with its dust.
It was not surprising that for people who were, in a good sense, fanatics of technology and space, Mars was a very tempting place. Somerset himself was like that. There was a second, no less, and in Somerset's case even more significant, component of motivation. A minimum contract of two Earth years allowed him to retire at thirty upon his return - this was the lower limit at which this entire contract cycle could end, consisting of the said two years and a year and a half of training on Earth, near-Earth orbit and the Moon. After two years, the contract could be extended for a year, and so on. But that was before. The zealous wave of early settlers, extending their contracts and stretching them out to ten years, had trodden an unfavorable path to the fact that the minimum contract became three and a half years - this was Somerset's. Two years would have been enough for him - the payment would have been enough to buy a decent mansion in the suburbs of any of the most prestigious cities of the "blue card" - numerous spots scattered across the "green card" and making up about twenty percent of it. The "green card" itself occupied approximately sixty percent of the entire land mass, but this area was gained, among other things, at the expense of sparsely populated Russia and Canada.
Somerset's native South American continent had yellow, green and blue areas. Brazil was on the "green map", while the superfederal district of "Sao Paulo Plus" was on the "blue map". Different taxes, different prices, different level. The inhabitants of Mars jokingly called their new territory differently: some called it the "red map", according to the traditional color of the planet, some called it the "white map", apparently implying it as a filmed, but still unknown "land". Once upon a time, there were white spots on the globe of the Earth.
As for the Earth itself, this whole system of different maps, of course, may have been far from any ideals of justice, especially from the point of view of the inhabitants of the "yellow map". And yet, how did they, that is, all the Earthlings, manage to stand before the abyss of civil war? Moreover, the actors were not the "yellow map" at all, but Old America and Russia on one side and Europe and Asia on the other. Somerset glanced toward the reddening west, on the horizon of which the iceberg of the enrichment plant loomed, black and lit. Even further, beyond the horizon, there was a rocket launch site with shuttles. That was where he needed to go. Somerset had switched off his phone back there, in the perimeter gallery. If anything happened, he could tell those blockheads who remained in the dome that he had dropped his phone in the toilet, or better yet, in the sink, and switched it off. He wanted to think that he wouldn't have to say that. Good people were waiting there, in the transport hub, a kind of train station. That was where Somerset was heading. The overpass gallery ended at an elevator and an exit to the landing. Ignoring the elevator, Somerset rushed to the stairs and further down. The descent led to the minus twenty mark, where there was a spacious main tunnel with a roadway and a pedestrian strip. There were people here. Somerset took out a portable radio with direct communication, which was not visible on the network. He turned it on, made sure that it was receiving the signal of another similar one, and put it away. That other one was with Dolbin.