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

competed to see who could spin the most depressing
tale of woe, me or Arlene . . . listing in endlessly
expanding detail all the different reasons to just open
a hatch and be blown into the interstellar void.
I always wonЧnot that I had that many more
reasons to despair than Arlene, but because I had
more practice complaining about things.
"I left my true love behind," she would pine.
"At least you had one!" I retorted. "All I ever had
was a fiancщe, and I'm not sure I even knew her
middle name." Sears and Roebuck, our normally
jovial binary Klave pair, were no help; they locked
themselves in their cabin and wouldn't come out.
They couldn't even be coaxed out for a game of Woe Is
Me! But lately Arlene was winning by default: she was
too depressed to play. She just sat and stared out the
rear window.
The Fred ship was roughly cylindrical, spinning for
a kind of artificial gravity about 0.8 g at the outer
skin; in addition, during the first days, we had a heavy
acceleration pulling us backward as the ship got up to
speed. This was a Godsend; I always hated zero-g,
always. I always blew; I always got vertigo; I never
knew which way was up, because there was no up.
It was 3.7 kilometers long and about 0.375 kilome-
ters in diameter, I reckoned. I had some mild dizzi-
ness from the spinЧmy inner ear never really ad-
justed to that sort of crapЧbut it was a damned sight
better than the "float 'n' pukes" we rode from Earth
to Mars, or up to Phobos.
For the last twenty-four hours, I had followed
Arlene up and down the ship when she went wander-
ing, through blackness and flickering light. The whole
place tasted vile; most of taste is smell, and the stench
got on the back of my tongue and stayed there.
Arlene probably knew I was there, but she made no
attempt to talk to me. Occasionally, I heard weapons
fire; I thought she might be shooting up the "dead"
bodies of the Fred aliens. I couldn't believe it; she
knew they could still feel the pain of the bullets! Then
I caught her discharging her shotgun into a man-
shaped chalk outline she'd drawn on a bulkhead in a
stateroom that once belonged to the ship's engineer, a
Fred who was deactivated up on the bridge.
"What the hell are you doing, A.S.?" I demanded.
"Shooting," she said, staring dully at me. She slid
her hands up and down the barrel of her piece, getting
gun grease on her palms, but she didn't notice.
"You're shooting into a steel bulkhead, you brain-
dead dweeb! Where do you think the bullets are going