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

tiny bit of LOX remaining. "How much we got left?"
Arlene asked.
"Approximately it is left 650 seconds is," they
answered, "but only at three gravities of Fredworld
for using the maneuvers rockets."
Arlene and I looked at each other; that was less than
eleven minutes of burn, and without even using the
huge main thrusters! Arlene tapped rapidly on her
wrist calculator, frowned, and tried the calculation
again. "S and R," she said, broadcasting through her
throat mike into the ship's radio communication
system. "I get a net drop of about mach fifty."
"That is correct in essential."
Arlene lowered her orange brows and spoke slowly,
like a child answering what she thinks might be a trick
classroom question. "Sears and Roebuck, if we're
doing mach seventy now, and we drop by mach fifty,
doesn't that mean we're still doing mach twenty?"
"Yes. The math are simplicity."
Now we both looked back and forth in confusion. I
took over the interrogation, now that I understood the
situation: "S and R, you braindead morons, we'll still
be splattered across the deck like a boxload of metal-
lic atoms!"
Long pause. Maybe they were manipulating each
other's head in that faintly obscene form of laughter
the Klave use. "No my childrens, but for we shall use
air-braking to reduceify the rest of the speed."
A terrible pit opened in my stomach. Even I knew
that the Fred ship was not, repeat not, designed to be
abused in such a fashion. It was designed to dock with
a pinwheel launcher and even to land gently using the
main thrusters to slow all the way to next to nothing
. . . not to belly-flop into the atmosphere like a disori-
ented diver, burning off excess speed by turning its
huge surface area directly into the onrushing air!
We would burn to a crisp. That is, if the ship didn't
tear itself into constituent parts first. "Hang on to
yourselves and things," suggested our mondo-weird,
binary pilots. "We're burning away the fuel starting
now."



7

The ship jerked, shimmied like a garden
hose, jerked again. "Where the hell's that crazy
mofo?" I demanded.
Arlene was knocked away from her perch by anoth-