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

Freds created for us; they drew heavily from their own
world. They loved dark alcoves, doors that opened
suddenly with only a hiss for a warning; I couldn't
count how many times I whirled around, drawing
down on a frigging door!
Horrible bas-relief faces adorned every flat surface.
Then, right in the middle of a passageway on a space
ship, for Pete's sake, we'd run into a fountain of some
dark red fluid that sure as hell looked like blood.
The walls never seemed quite straight. Maybe
straight lines and right-angle turns bothered the Freds
as much as the crazy geometry set my neck hairs
upright. "Take a look," Arlene said, pointing at a door
through which we had to pass.
I sucked in a breath. "The mouth of Moloch? Jesus,
Albert should be here."
I looked sharply over at her, but she wasn't torqued
by the reference to her once and only. She nodded
slowly. "Albert would have loved this spread." That
was Arlene Sanders: her response to grief and fear was
literary irony. A perfect Marine.
Jesus, I felt homesick. Just a few months agoЧmy
timeЧI was wasting my life at Camp Pendleton,
loafing and pulling the occasional watch, thinking of
not reupping and dropping back into the world in-
stead. I had a fiancщe, now deceased; I had parents
and high-school friends; I had the expectation that the
world would look pretty much the same twenty years
later. Then we got sent to Kefiristan, but even that
was all right; it was crap, but it was the crap I'd always
known was possible in my chosen profession.
But when they yanked us out of the Pearl Triangle
and boosted Fox Company up to Phobos . . . well,
they yanked me out of my comfortable reality and
threw me into primordial chaos. So now I was jogging
the length and circumference of an alien spaceship,
hurling toward an unknown star at nearly lightspeed,
with a plural alien as ally and a mutable thing for a
guide; the only constancy was Arlene Sanders, now
my last and only friend.
It's not just a job, man, it's an adventure.
The weeks crawled past like worms on a wet side-
walk. Every few days, the Newbie mutated, evolved,
whatever you call it, slowly transforming from the
roughly humanoid shape we first found into a truly
alien form with a distended stomach, a pushed-in jaw,
and longer arms. I found the change fascinating and a
little scary; who was to say it wouldn't evolve into
something we couldn't handle?
But a queer thing happened: the closer we got to the