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