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

when they bounce off it?"
Arlene said nothing. She hadn't been hit by a
ricochet yet, but if she kept shooting at steel bulk-
heads, it was only a matter of moments.
Two minutes after I left, I heard the shooting start
up again, but she denied later that she had fired her
rifle again.
I returned to the bridge for a long face-to-face with
the "dead" Fred captain. They're not like us ...
rather, we're not like them or the rest of the intelligent
races of the galaxy.
A Fred alien, and everybody else except a human,
can never die. Even when you shoot his body to Swiss
cheese, so his blue guts and red blood dribble out the
holes onto the deck, his consciousness remains intact.
Blow his head apart, and it floats as a ghost, drifting
like invisible smokeЧstill thinking, hearing and see-
ing, feeling and desperately dreaming. You can talk to
them; they actually hear you.
The Freds and other races pile their dead in fantas-
tic cenotaph theaters where they are entertained day
and night by elaborate operas and dances of great
beauty, all to keep the "dead" vibrant and interested
until such time as they're needed for revivificationЧ
assuming there's enough left of the body and enough
interest on the part of an animate Fred to pay for it.
I'd shot the captain nine days ago as he lay on the
floor, reaching up to implement and lock in the
preprogrammed course for Fredworld. Despite the
best efforts of me and Arlene and our contractor-
advisors Sears and RoebuckЧa Klave binary pair
who each looked like a cross between Magilla Gorilla
and Alley OopЧwe couldn't figure out how to change
course or even shut off the engines.
I picked the captain up and sat him in the co-pilot's
chair. Poetic justice; he had died bravely ... let him
see where he was going. Now I stood directly in front
of the bastard so his dead eyes could drink me in.
"God, I wish I could repair your wounds and bring
you back to life," I said, "so I could kill you all over
again and again and again, and repeat the process
until you told me how to turn this piece-of-crap ship
around. But I promise you I'll obliterate your brain
before I'll let you be recaptured and revived by your
Fred buddies."
I blamed the captain for Arlene's psychosis; I would
never forgive him for it and would kill him again if I
ever got the chance.
Christ, where to jump in on this thing? I never
know where to start to bring everyone up to date.