VoRoBei_Jack: переводы

→Moving together into an empty prefab dwelling at the edge of Free Haven, Octavia and Lars had rebuilt their lives. They made plans. They expanded. They tracked their automated mines and watched the seismic monitors for signs of tectonic disturbances that might affect their work or the town. The two drove out to the fields each day and labored side by side until well after dark. They worked harder, risked more... and survived.

→Though a terrible blow to the colony, the spore blight had drawn the survivors together even more tightly. The new mayor, Jacob “Nik” Nikolai, had delivered an impassioned eulogy for all the victims of the spore plague, somehow rekindling the fires of independence in the process and giving the settlers the drive to stay here. They had already lived through so much, survived so many hardships, that they could pull through this.

→Lars and Octavia had never returned to that house, burning it to the ground along with the tainted fields and the homes of seventeen other families that had been infected by the horrible, parasitic disease.

→The next morning she had awakened in a too-quiet house to find both of her parents dead in their bed. Beneath wet sheets twisted about by their final agony, the bodies of her mother and father were a quivering, oozing mass of erupted fungal bodies, rounded mushrooms of exploding spores that rapidly disintegrated all flesh....

→They passed outlying homes and fields, crossed over dry irrigation ditches, and reached the perimeter of the town, which was laid out in the shape of an octagon. A low perimeter fence encircled the settlement, but the gates for the main streets had never been closed.

→CHAPTER 7

→The lights of Free Haven glowed like a warm, welcoming paradise as the robo-harvester approached. In the distance Octavia could already hear the storm-warning siren next to the old Missile Turret in the town plaza, signaling colonists to find shelter. Everyone else—at least the colonists who had common sense—had already barricaded themselves inside their prefabricated homes to shelter from the storm.

→Nobody among the colonists ever suggested going back, though—especially not Octavia and Lars Bren.

→The original settlers had wanted nothing more than peace and freedom. They had begun idealistically, establishing a central town with resources for all the colonists to share, naming it Free Haven, and dividing farmland equally among the able-bodied workers. But in time the idealism faded as the colonists endured toil and new hardships on a planet that did not live up to their expectations.

→But the people here still followed their dreams. These exhausted colonists had left the tight governmental fences of the Confederacy for the promised land of Bhekar Ro some forty years before. They had sought independence and a new start, away from the turmoil and constant civil wars among the inner Confederacy worlds.

→Octavia shrugged. “I guess it was good enough for Mom and Dad.”Back when they were alive.

→“They're always bad ones. This is Bhekar Ro, after all—what do you expect?”

→Now she checked the weather scanner and atmospheric-pressure tracker in the robo-harvester's cabin, but the readings were all wild. “Looks like a bad one tonight.”

→The hull of the robo-harvester, once a gleaming cherry red, was now faded, scratched, and pitted. The engine ran as smoothly as a lullaby, though, and that was all Octavia cared about.

→She snorted indelicately. “But if you throw a plate or fry a hydraulic cam,I'mthe one who has to fix it.”

→Special thanks to Chris Metzen and Bill Roper at Blizzard for their valuable input; Rob Simpson and Marco Palmieri at Pocket Books for their support and for insisting on having us do the project; Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, without whom Gabriel Moesta wouldn't exist; Matt Bialer of the Trident Media Group for his encouragement on this project; Debra Ray at AnderZone for cheering us on; Catherine Sidor, Diane E. Jones, and Sarah L. Jones at WordFire, Inc., for keeping things running smoothly; and Jonathan Cowan, Kiernan Maletsky, Nick Jacobs, Gregor Myhren, and Wes Cronk for being ourStarCraft“tour guides” and for their unquenchable enthusiasm for the game.