"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Endgame (english)" - читать интересную книгу автораshivered, as if feeling a chill wind or someone walking
across her grave. "Maybe we can pick up some trace from orbit." "After forty years?" "Maybe Sears and Roebuck has some idea." Yeah, right. Sears and Roebuck never even heard of the Newbies until just now, and if they had that hard a time understanding us and our evolutionary rateЧ Jeez, how could they even imagine the Newbies and what they might mutate into? "Let's head back," I decided. "We're not doing anything out here but scaring the pants off of each other." Arlene nodded gravely. "Kinky," she judged. I heard a strange, faint buzz in my earpiece as we headed back toward the ship . . . sounds, voices al- most. I could nearly believe they were whispers from the Fred ghosts, desperately trying to communicateЧ perhaps still fighting the final battle that had de- stroyed them. I was now convinced that there was not a single artichoke-headed Fred left intact on that planet, except for the corpses we brought with usЧ corpses we would never revive. In fact, I decided to leave them behind on Fredworld; the temptation to wake me dead, just tor someone to talk to, might be too great, overwhelming our common sense and self- But the notion of ghosts wasn't that far-fetched. Since their spirits never died, where did they go? I began to feel little stabs of cold on the back of my neck, icy fingers poking and prodding me. Jesus, shut off that imagination! I commanded myself. "Huh?" Arlene asked, jumping guiltily. "Criminey, Fly, are you a mind reader now?" I said nothing ... hadn't even been aware I spoke that last thought aloud; curious coincidence that it turned out to be perfectly appropriate. The ship was so huge that it was hard to recognize it as mobile; it looked like an artificial mountain, three- eighths of a kilometer high, over a hundred storiesЧ taller than the Hyundai Building in Nuevo AngelesЧ and stretching to the vanishing point in either direc- tion. The landing pad was barely larger than the footprint of the ship, clearly built to order. Weird markings surrounded the LZ, the landing zone, burned into the glass-hard surface by an etching laser, either landing instructions or ritual hieroglyphs. They looked like they once had been pictograms, now stylized beyond recognition. "You know, Fly, we've never actually walked all the way around this puppy." |
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