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

of it, whoever's in charge. I just wonder; it's been
two hundred odd years back home; it'll have been
another two centuries before we can get back, maybe
longer, depending on where the Newbies lead us. I
just wonder whether there's still anything left worth
warning."
I didn't know how much of the conversation Sears
and Roebuck had heardЧlittle, I hoped. I stepped
forward and spoke aloud, rousing the Newbie. "New-
bies, attention please. Take us to yourЧto the rest of
you, please. Can you do that?"
It opened its eyes and spoke but did not otherwise
move. "We can take you to us if we have not changed
our plan for exploration. We are going to [unintelligi-
ble], but we do not know where we will go from
there."
"If we leave now," Arlene whispered in my ear,
"we'll still arrive about forty years after the Newbies
arrived, no matter where it is."
"Can you giveЧah, the Klave bearing and distance
to your location?"
The Newbie turned to Sears and Roebuck and
spoke in a different language. And the latter re-
sponded in the same tongue! Arlene and I stared at
each other; when had the Newbie learned to speak
Klavish? Then she rolled her eyes and solved the
mystery: "Learned it from the Freds, of course." It
probably wasn't Klavish, actually, just some common
language the two sides, the Hyperrealists and the
Deconstructionists, used for interparty negotiation.
Sears and Roebuck turned back to the local naviga-
tional system. Evidently, in the absence of conflicting
orders from any other section of the ship, any one
station was sufficient to pilot the entire vessel. "Voy-
age taking us another eight of weeks, it will," an-
nounced the pair of Klave. "External times in the
hundred and twenty of years."
Eight more long weeks . . . God, just what I
wanted. I took a deep breath. "Push the button,
Max," I said. Arlene gave me a swift kick in the ankle.
The lift sequence was bizarre. It took a full day,
much of which was a carefully calculated refueling
that the ship carried out automatically after Sears and
Roebuck programmed the course. Arlene interrogated
the Klave extensively on just how the launch itself
worked, then briefed me, like a good junior NCO.
On their homeworld, the Freds used something
Arlene called a "pinwheel launcher," which she de-
scribed as a huge asterisk in orbit around the planet.
Each limb of the asterisk was a boom with a hook