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

pretty 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
a pinch, we could survive a few minutes in hard
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