"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Endgame (english)" - читать интересную книгу автораwith pain, horribly distended toward the deck. Color
had long since disappeared, and even the black and white images I could still see narrowed to a tunnel of light. Blurry outlines bent and twisted under the force. Again, the ship skewed, spun out of control until Sears and Roebuck regained control. How the hell were they flying the ship? Were there even any control surfaces left? We shoved through the last two rubber collars; I almost died in the second when my bulk stuck fast, and I couldn't breathe for the clingy seal across my mouth and nose. Arlene saved my life then, reaching back into the bottleneck, somehow mustering the strength to drag me forward by my hair a meter, clearing the rubber from my face. At last, we lay on the floor of Nav Room One, broken and bleeding from nose and ears, unable to see, hugging the deck like drunks at the end of a spree. I heard sounds above the shredding of the ship behind us, wordsЧSears and Roebuck saying some- thing. Desperately, I focused. "BeingЧshot." They gasped. "Shot at downЧdefenders shootingЧship breaking into partЧloosing controlling." Shot? Shot at? What the hell was this outrage? It was just too much, on top of the agony of reentry, to bastards," I wheezed. Ho, fat chance; more likely, we would all die before the ship even hit the groundЧ blown apart by relentless defenders with particle- beam cannons. I passed out, only for a moment; I woke to hear Sears and Roebuck repeating over and over, "Dirt alert! Dirt alert!" I opened my eyes, focused just long enough to see the ground rushing up like a freight train, then went limp and dark again. I composed my epitaph: Goodbye, cruel alien world. Sears and Roebuck must have flared out at the last moment, for I felt the nose rise majestically. Then the remaining tail section of the Fred ship, whatever was left, struck the ground with particular savagery, and the ship slammed belly-first into what turned out to be silica sand. A miracle that proved my faithЧhad it been granite or water, we would have been atomized. We were still traveling at least mach four when we painted the desert, and we plowed a twenty-seven- kilometer furrow across the surface of the planet, kicking up sandy rooster tails taller than the Buchan- an Building in the forty seconds it took us to slide to a stop. When the landing was over, we lay on the deck |
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