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

through the green sludge. You don't relieve a Marine
of his weapon, not ever. By doing so, I'd just effec-
tively demoted her to civilian. And the worst part
was, even she realized now that she'd been halluci-
nating.
She was crying when we walked slowly back to the
vehicle assembly room, a.k.a. the hangar. I'd never
seen Arlene cry beforeЧexcept when she had to kill
the reworked, reanimated body of her former lover,
Dodd.
"Hey," I said a few hours later, "can't we electro-
lyze water and get oxygen?"
Arlene was silent for a moment, her lips moving.
"Yes," she said, "but we'd only get a few breaths per
liter, and we need the water too, Fly."
"Oh." Not for the first time, I wished I knew more
engineering. I vowed to take classes when we made it
back home ... if there even was a "back home"
anymore.
I started having unpleasant dreams, so I didn't
mind giving up more of my sleep allotment. It was
always the same dream, actually. I loved roller coast-
ers as a kid. They were the closest I could get to flying
in those days. I lived only five miles away from a
freestanding wood-frame monster. I thought I would
love nothing better, until they built a tubular steel,
eight-loop supercoaster.
I'd never been afraid on the old roller coaster. With
all the courage of an experienced ten-year-old, I'd sit
in the car as it slowly reached the top, the horizon
slanting off to my left, and pretend it was the rim of a
planet and I was an astronaut. As it went over the top,
plunging down a cliff of wood and metal, I made it a
point of honor not to hold on to the crash bar. I was
too grown-up for that!
I was always interested in how things were put
together and how they worked. So I asked about the
new roller coaster. A man who worked at the amuse-
ment park told me stuff he wasn't supposed to say,
stuff he knew nothing aboutЧabout how the forces
generated could snap a human neck like rotten cord-
wood, how the auxiliary chain that gave the car
acceleration had a lot of extra strain on it for an eight-
loop ride.
As I started up the first hill of the new ride, I
thought about what I'd learned. I didn't know it was
all bogus crap made up to impress a ten-year-old.
The first loop, I worried about centrifugal force
snapping my neck; the second loop, I sweated over
velocity tearing me out of my seat; the third loop, I