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

are 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-
ically from center to center, and in every room,
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