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

into the hunk of rock at a couple of hundred kilome-
ters per second, punching out a crater the size of the
Gulf of Mexico and, incidentally, atomizing us and
the ship.
It all depended on Sears and Roebuck. Arlene and I
offered to helpЧwe told them about our brilliant
piloting of the makeshift mail-rocket coming down
from the relocated Deimos moon to Earth's surfaceЧ
but the Klave just looked at each other, each putting
his gorilla-size hand on the other's head, and pumped
their crania up and down. We took it to be laughter
that timeЧderisive laughter.
I had no idea how good a pilot Sears and Roebuck
were, but I had a bad feeling it was like the President
taking the stick of Air Force One when the pilot has a
heart attack. Better than giving it to the presidential
janitor, though, which was basically where Arlene and
I stood in the pecking order. God, how I wished we
hadn't left Commander Taylor back at the Hyperreal-
ist military base! That babe could fly anything.
The other big problem was that unlike back at
Fredworld, we had no friendly pinwheel launcher to
catch us here and lower us more or less gently to the
surface. We were entirely on our own.
The rest of the journey was uneventful, including
the extra ten days of grace. We trained and practiced
various emergency drills, just for something to do:
one of the biggest problems with spaceflight is the
incredible, relentless boredom, but if there's one thing
the Marine Corps teaches you to handle, it's ennui.
We were always sitting on our hands, waiting for
somebody further up the food chain to finish a
mysterious errand, while the rest of us jarheads, men
with stripes on our sleeves, waited for The Word.
It wasn't like they let any grass grow under our feet.
There's always something to do around a military
base, even if it's just putting a nice polish on the brass
cannon on the stone steps at Pensacola (or scrubbing
the base CO's hardwood office floor with tooth-
brushes). If you manage to "miss" your gunny or your
top, you might find yourself with a whole afternoon
free, but there was always the NCO club to soak up
any extra dollars.
On the Fred ship, it was both more and less difficult
to find something to do for weeks and weeksЧharder
because there weren't any butterbars, silverbells, or
railroad tracks to tell us what to do, but easier because
we were on an alien space ship full of strange and
wonderful things to poke and monkey with, three
main corridors of 3.7 kilometers each at 0.8 g and one