"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Endgame (english)" - читать интересную книгу автораpretty permanently over.
"Okay, kiddo," I said to A.S.; "let's go Newbie hunting." We suited up for combat, and for the first time in God knows how long, I found myself getting the shakes. Somehow, I'd thought the Freds would have burned all the fear out of me, leaving nothing but a cold husk of sociopathy. Not true. At the thought of going up against whatever it was that plowed the Freds into the dirt on their own home turf, my hands trembled so much I couldn't even StiKro my boots on tight. "Stay here and keep the engine running," I told Sears and Roebuck. "You want to start me the engines?" they asked, confused. "Just a figure of speech, you dufoids," Arlene explained. "But run through the launch sequence up to just before engine start .... We may have to book if we stumble onto a whole nest of them." Sears and Roebuck looked at each other, Alley Oop and his mirror image; they seemed perfectly content staying aboard the ship and letting the Marines do the dirty work. I sealed up the helmet and pressed the other armor seals tight; it wasn't a pressure suit, but in vacuum. I noticed Arlene's face was whiter than its usual English pale; she must have figured the odds the same as I. My breath sounded loud in my ears as we edged down the gangway onto the surface of Fredworld again. The landscape looked eerily alive through the night-vis flipdowns, tinted green but combining infra- red, radio emission, and visible light enhancement. I turned slowly with a microwave motion detector; nothing moved around us, unless it was over the jagged mountains on the horizon. "This isn't good," I said over a shielded, encrypted channel to Arlene. "Shouldn't there be some life, even if the Newbies killed all the Freds?" "Maybe they couldn't tell which were Freds and which were animals, so they fragged everything. May- be they used a nuclear bomb, or some kind of poison or a biovector." I grunted. "Doesn't seem likely that they'd manage to get absolutely every living thing, does it?" "There's another possibility, Fly: maybe there are living animals, but they're just not moving." "Animal means moving, Arlene, like animated." She didn't answer, so I started a spiral sweep, mainly |
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