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

er sudden "earthquake." I caught her by the arm, so
she didn't carom across the zero-g ship. "Christ! I
think he said he was headed toward Nav Room One,
right inside the engine compartment!" The ship
twirled like a chandelier, or so it felt; we dangled from
handholds, feeling sudden acceleration trying to yank
us free to fling us into God knows where. Nearly
eleven minutes later, the acceleration vanished as
abruptly as it began. Sears and Roebuck finished the
final burn. We were dead-sticking it the rest of the way
in, and that would be the end of the Fred shipЧand
possibly of us, too.
Then the atmosphere thickened enough that we
started feeling a real push; the bow of the ship became
"down," the stern "up." I drifted against the for'ard
bulkhead, now floor, with about 0.2 g, which quickly
escalated to full, then more than full gravity. Two,
three times our normal g! The inertial dampers were
offline, probably out of juice; we suffered through the
full deceleration phase. Four g's, four and a half.
The air-braking went on forever. I was crushed to
the deck by about eight hundred pounds of weight!
Then the gravity began to slide along the deck toward
the ventral bulkhead. Sears and Roebuck were pitch-
ing the nose upward to expose more of the hull to the
atmosphere.
We shed airspeed even as we gained more weight. I
heard a horrific explosion astern of usЧthe ship
swerved violently, hurling us across the new floor!
Arlene fell against me, but I was stunned. I shook my
head. "What the freaking hellЧ!"
She stared out a porthole, face ashen. "Jesus, Fly!
Freakin' ship splitting!" She slid her hand along the
deck and pointed. I just barely saw a huge piece of the
Fred ship below us, tumbling end over end, shattering
into "tiny" splinters scores of meters long.
It was getting hard to talk. We needed all our breath
to bear down, forcing blood back into our heads.
Thank God we were lying downЧat now six g's,
sitting up we might have passed out. I knew what was
happening: the Fred ship, strong as it was, was never
intended to burn through the atmosphere like this! It
was fracturing along heat seams, separating into the
components that had been attached by the Freds
when they assembled the vehicle, probably in orbit.
The damned thing was way too long for this sort of
monkey crap.
"Forward!" I shouted, nearly blacking out with the
effort. Arlene stared, confusedЧlack of oxygen-
bearing blood in her brain, maybeЧso I repeated,