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

doom.
But all good things must end. The time rolled by at
last, and Sears and Roebuck suddenly turned deadly
serious. We shut down the ramscoop, and I felt a
slight gravity push for'ard as we plowed into inter-
stellar hydrogen-dust and slowed. We did this for
about a week, then Sears and Roebuck started the
thrusters at a lower and more efficient level of acceler-
ation than what our ship originally had planned. It
made no difference to us; it was still far beyond the
fatal crushing level, so the inertial dampers kept it
down to the same level we had felt ramping up. Our
reindeer games stopped; we had no more zero-g shaft.
Suddenly heavy again after weeks of acceleration
ranging from 0.8 g down to zero, I dragged every
footstep, and my legs and back ached. Arlene didn't
have it so bad, since she didn't mass as much as I; she
still had a spring in her step and an increasingly grim
smile on her face. I knew the feeling; it had been
months since I killed anything. After what the Freds
had done to my life and my world, I developed the
taste for blood. Now that the Newbies had deprived
me of my rightful revenge, I was prepared to transfer
all that wrath to the new threat.
In short, I wanted to pump a few rounds into a nice,
smooth Newbie chest. But I was also starting to get
very, very nervous about what they had managed to
evolve into in the four decades they had been down
on the planet we approachedЧassuming they were
still there. I saw a number of possible outcomes, none
of them pleasant: the frustration of finding no one, the
humiliation of capture, the agony of us being annihi-
lated.
Then without warning one day, the reactor braking
suddenly stopped, sending Arlene and me flying (liter-
ally, the for'ard bulkhead that had been a deck
became a wall instantaneously, dropping us to the
outer bulkhead, which now was our only "floor"!).
"We're coming in down to landing," Sears and Roe-
buck soberly informed us, then used the last of the
hydrogen peroxide retros over the space of an hour to
cut the ship's rotation, leaving us in an orbit that
would take us directly into the planet's atmosphere
... at about mach seventy (that's Earth sea-level, dry-
air mach speed of seventy, about twenty-three kilome-
ters per second).
Trying to land at such a speed would kill us as
surely as blowing up the reactor pile. But we were
rapidly running out of options: when Sears and Roe-
buck killed the main thrusters, they did so with only a