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

close and personal!
We had passed directly over the battery about fifty
klicks back; the journey would take us at least two
days and some . . . but after only ten kilometers, we
ran into a scouting party from the wogs driving some
kind of land cart. Not literally ran intoЧwe picked
them up when they were still five klicks range, track-
ing directly along our ship's wake.
Trusting to our electronic countermeasures, we
loped toward them until we were within half a klick;
at that point, we dropped to our bellies and crawled
the remaining distance, while the bad guys broke for
lunch. Arlene and I were both hungry, but we were
rationing our Fred food . . . and especially our Fred-
pills.
We got within a hundred meters, easily within
range of my M-14 BAR and the lever-action .45-
caliber rifle that Arlene toted for those occasions
where a shotgun just wouldn't do. We watched them
through our scopes, trying to figure out who they
were.
They looked oddly human, but their heads and
bodies were covered by thick pressure suits that might
have had battlefield capability. Their proportions
were humanoid. There were four scouts and one
supervisory type with a notepad built into his wrist
armor; I can smell an officious, jerky sergeant a klick
off.
"Sarge," Arlene said faintly over the radio, "there's
no cover, and we can pop most of them before they
burrow into the sand. We can take them before they
know what hit; they might not even get off a mes-
sage."
I hesitatedЧnot a good move for a battlefield non-
com, but sometimes you really don't have enough
intel. "Hold your fire, A.S. Let's see if we can hear
them first."
I programmed my electronic ears to scan sequen-
tially all sixty-four million channels, looking for any-
thing non-random; I caught a few tiny bursts of
information, but nothing that lasted longer than 0.02
seconds, according to the log. "You pick up any-
thing?" I asked.
"Fly, I'm getting bursts of pattern from channel 23-
118-190 that last about 0.02; they all last just that
long. You seeing that?"
"Now that you mention itЧ"
"I think whoever they are, they use much narrower
frequency channels than we use; we're kind of scan-
ning past them by scanning up and down within the