"Richard Hatch - Battlestar Galactica 3 - Resurrection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hatch Richard)

The Chitain dreadnought, itself almost indestructible, is surrounded
by a nearly impenetrable forcefield. It is only by staying close to the
ship's underbelly and harrying away at it, like skreeters on the back of a
bova, that the Vipers have any hope at all, for the Chitain can't turn
their weapons after the Warriors without destroying their own ship.

It is all chaos and confusion; red beams sizzle from a hundred
different fighters, and the war-world's stinger tendrils answer with their
own deadly voice. But the concentrated assault is working; the Chitain
dreadnought is in trouble and the aliens know it. Like a
mortally-wounded animal, the great mechanical beast is going to take
down as many of its attackers as possible, and it looks like Apollo is
going to be first.

Frak, he thinks, and grits his teeth, waiting for the inevitable blast
from the onrushing Chitain fighter.

The blast comes not from the fighter, but is the fighter, vaporizing in
a spray of brightly-burning fuel, then winking out. It's Starbuck, of
course, there to save him as he's always been.

Apollo heaves a sigh of relief, more like a laugh, and he tells Starbuck
he's going to buy him a tankard of grog in the aft ODOC. But Starbuck
says, "Don't you remember? That's not the way it happened at all."

And he's right, it doesn't end like that, not even anything close to it;
this is nothing more than wishful thinking and rewriting the ending to
be more palatable than the truth was, because a moment later,
Starbuck's Viper is caught in the rippling fireball of the warship, the size
of a small planet, as it explodes. The shock waves spread out like circles
in a pond, shattering everything they touch. The Sky don't even try to
outrun the spreading death, but accept it as part of the endless cycle, the
way of the universe.

Everything happens fast after that, but the image of Starbuck,
slumped forward in his fire-blackened, shredded Viper, never seems to
leave Apollo's vision, neither waking nor dreaming.

The colonial fleet has suffered devastating losses, more than half their
force of Warriors and starfighters, and thirty-seven vessels, including
the Agro-2. DevastatingтАж but not nearly as devastating as seeing his
oldest friend, closer than any brother, closer than his own brother, lying
in his med-berth, kept alive only by machines. Starbuck's uniform is all
but melted to his body, and his flesh is blackened, cracked, with crazy
zigzags running off in every direction, as if his skin is a sun-blistered
mud-flat. There's been massive cranial trauma, and there's no way to
know if Starbuck will ever awaken again. If not for the slow and labored
rise and fall of his chest, anyone would think Starbuck a corpse.

Now Apollo is standing at another bedside, this time his father's, and