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

attached; the diameter of the asterisk, counting the
booms, was something on the order of seven thousand
kilometers!
The whole pinwheel affair rotated directly opposite
the day-night rotation of the planet. The spokes of the
pinwheel descended from the sky and just kissed the
ground; at that precise point, ground and boom were
moving exactly the same speed and direction ... so
from the viewpoint of a ship on the runwayЧour
shipЧthe boom appeared to hesitate motionless for a
moment.
That was the moment that our ship attached itself
to the boom; in that fraction of a second, the Fred
ship transformed itself from being a member of the
Fredworld system to a member of the pinwheel sys-
tem. Then, as the pinwheel continued to rotate, it
pulled our ship up with it ... gently at first; it felt like
zero-g for a few minutes. Then we felt the centrifugal
tug as we were yanked in a different direction than the
planetary rotation.
The g force increased rapidly, then just as suddenly,
it decreased as the inertial dampers kicked online.
Still, my stomach flew south while the rest of me went
north, and I longed for the comfortable, familiar
disorientation of mere zero-g! That was a first, I was
absolutely convincedЧFly Taggart longing for free-
fall!
The pinwheel carried us up and around, then at
perigee, the highest point of our little mini-orbit
around the center of mass of the rotating asterisk, the
ship decoupled, launching us into space. We were
once again at freefall, and I regretted my earlier wish
for it. But the ship immediately started spinning up,
eventually hitting 0.8 g again. Meanwhile, the engines
began to whine and moan and loudly groan, and we
felt the hard backward push that indicated we had
started our long acceleration, prior to the seven-week
drift, culminating with the hard deceleration at the
other end, dropping us into . .. into what?
It was a frightening thought. And we would have
fifty-eight creeping days to think about it.
We fell into a standardized shipboard routine:
training, mess, watchstanding, strategic mental im-
provement (we played chess and Go), and endless
worrying, discussing, theorizing, emotional reminis-
cence of all that was best on Earth before this whole,
horrible nightmare started. Once again, I took to
walking the long, wet, slimy, hot corridors ... but
this time with Arlene at my side.
Everything we saw reminded us of the monsters the