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