"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Endgame (english)" - читать интересную книгу автораare going hunting." She licked her lips; sometimes
that girl is just a little too Marine. The gravity stopped, then reversed; we had out- voted the Newbie. But while we broke out into one of the outer corridors and ran the length of the ship, the situation reversed, and again we started slowing. The damned Newbie was doing the same thing we were! "ArleneЧhow many navigational centers?" "Um . . . forty-one that I counted." "Corporal, that thing has evolved intelligence be- yond ours. We can't outthink him, so there's only one thing to do: we have to drag him down to our level by attacking without thought or planning, purely chance encounters and brute force." We bolted through corridors lit only by our own flashes, dashing from nav to nav at randomЧrandom as a human brain can doЧdesperately hoping to catch the Newbie as he visited nav after nav. We ran into Sears and RoebuckЧtwice! But the Newbie remained as elusive as ever. The third time we bumped into the Klave and nearly blew them away, I had had enough. "Screw it, A.S.Чjust start pounding a shell into each nav center as we find it." It was time to reduce the choices. We went method- Arlene raised her semi-auto shotgun and pumped three or four shells into the delicate programming equipment. Everywhere we went, we tripped over dead Freds that we didn't even remember killing (and hadn't got around to dumping), so intense had been that firefight when we took over the ship. We had destroyed more than half the navs and had been hurled to the ground a dozen times by radical acceleration changes when we finally kicked a door and saw our enemy. The Newbie had his head buried in the guts of one of the destroyed navs, trying to repair it enough to cast another vote for slow-down. He jerked his new triple-heads up as we entered; his tentacle-arm snaked down the circuitry, bypassing the damage. "There is no need for violence," one of the heads said, speaking in calm, measured tones. "We must join forces against the Freds. The Newbies have decided they cannot coexist with the Deconstruction- ists. If you continue on the present course, we will be wiped out by the Newbies, who have their own agenda. Please, just listen to us!" He started to make a whole lot of sense. Arlene lowered her shotgun hesitantly, waiting to hear him |
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