"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Hell on Earth (english)" - читать интересную книгу автора

rine!"
"Yeah, just like you to have the woman do all the
hard work," she said.
"Just remind me to clean the carburetor before I
work on the piston valves."
"It's not a car, you moron!"
"Huh. I guess in space no one can hear you make
metaphors." Amazingly, she didn't shoot me.
Unfortunately, the rockets used by the Deimos
facilityЧhence all the spare partsЧwere short-hop,
lightweight supply rockets, never intended to carry a
single human being, let alone two of us ... and never
intended to fight a gravity well like Earth's.
There were a couple large-bore rocket casings left
over from God knows when, back before we had the
MDM-44 plasma motors developed by Union Aero-
space, and this was the key: I figured I could hot-rod a
44 into & bigger cousin, cram it inside one of the old
casings, and have enough juice to fling us off Deimos,
burn into the atmosphere, and brake to a (messy)
landing Somewhere on Earth.
My main goal was to keep from blowing us up.
After frying our spider baby in JP-9 jet fuel, I had a
new respect for the stuff. It beat the hell out of salad
oil.
Arlene squatted on an uncomfortable stool translat-
ing technical paragraphs into something I could un-
derstand. My optimist projection was to finish the
task in ten days!
Reality dragged ass.
Starting our third week, we ran into the first serious
problem. Trying to jerry-rig parts we couldn't find
into configurations we couldn't figure out was a bitch,
and I insisted we needed to test-fire the motor when I
finally got a working model. We didn't have much
time, but the motor was life and death, a must test.
We'd spent two days painfully assembling it, and I do
mean "we." Arlene enjoyed an excuse to get off her
stool; besides, it was a two-man job.
We finally ended up with a sleek beauty two meters
long and a meter in diameter, almost small enough to
fit inside the old-model rocket skin. Just a few odd
pieces here and there where I thought I could super-
charge the systemЧor where I couldn't find the
correct part and had to Substitute butter for eggs. A
pair of start cables snaked into the machine from ten
feet away, where a switch box was connected to
twenty-seven fifty-volt ni-cad batteries.
I'd spent half a day welding steel bars together into
a framework, sort of, kind of approximating the