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

Roebuck, but don't ask me which is which." Or even
if that concept had meaning to the binary Klave.
"Josepaze Papoulhandes [new word] Fine [new
word]."
"Josepaze?" He looked down for a moment; it was
ritualized, and I figured it probably meant what
nodding your head meant in our time. "Josepaze,
what aliens did you chase here?"
He struggled, obviously trying to avoid any new
expressions that would confuse me. I was still suspi-
cious of his level of cooperation, but he seemed to
have given up any concern about his duty, his unit,
even his own life; it was like everything had lost all
meaning, now that I had a blade against his carotid
artery. I was used to people relaxing if they thought
they were about to die, but this was entirely too
apathetic.
"Aliens . . . evolve fast," he said at last. "Con-
quered EarthЧkilledЧleftЧfollowed here."
Arlene and I looked up at each other, and I swal-
lowed hard. Newbies? How the hell had they gotten
all the way to Earth and back? An evil chill settled
across my back and camped there for the night.



9

The evil ice that gripped me around my lower
back was a premonition of horrors to come. While I
straddled that doofus, holding my commando knife to
his throat and wondering why in hell he didn't make
even a pretense of resisting the interrogation, I sud-
denly noticed an unaccustomed quiet. I looked up.
"LanceЧwhat aren't I hearing?"
She stared around, puzzled. "Where the freak are
those freaks, Sears and Roebuck?"
The Klave, binary to the root, never managed to
keep perfectly silent; all the stray little thoughts that
run through a human's head run back and forth
between the two parts of a Klave pair, either spoken
directly out loud or at least subvocalized. They never
stopped! It got on my nerves for the first few weeks I
knew them, then I pretty much forgot all about it,
never even noticing when they muttered back and
forth to each other. Just as I couldn't tell Sears from
Roebuck, if that concept even made senseЧdid they
have separate names? I didn't think they did, Sears
and Roebuck being the single name of the single
pairЧI couldn't tell one voice from the other. Even-