"ab Hugh, Dafydd & Linaweaver, Brad - Doom 04 - Endgame 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (ab Hugh Dafydd)

wall color—but still!
I looked around. "Do you, ah, you-all want to talk
about this?" I tried to sound casual.
"No," said Sears and Roebuck, without a trace of
emotion. And that was that. They never again re-
ferred to the wallpapering, they never explained it,
and we never found put what the hell they thought
they were doing. I think Arlene and I learned some-
thing very interesting about alien psychology on Day
Thirteen of our trip into Fredland; now if only we
knew what we found out!
Sears and Roebuck came out of their hole without
looking back, took a new stateroom, and made no
effort to cover the walls. We began rehearsing for our
last stand, when we would hit dirtside and the doors
would slide open.
We even knew what doors would open first. Sears
and Roebuck went to work on the Fred computer and
cracked it, or part of it, at least. The sequence display
of the mission was unclassified, and they displayed it
on the 3-D projector in the room we had decided to
call the bridge, where the captain's body still sat in the
co-pilot's chair without decomposing, although his
head-leaves had ceased to grow, leaving in place the
atrocious orange and black Halloween combination
that he wore when I killed him . . . probably a sign of
the emotion of desperate terror.
The timeline was precisely detailed: we knew the
very moment we would touch dirt—three days earlier
than I guessed—and which systems would operate at
what moment. The door-open sequence began about
seventy-five minutes after touchdown, and the first
door to open after safety checks and powerdown was
the aft, ventral cargo bay; it would take eleven min-
utes to grind backward out of the way. Over the next
fifty minutes or so, eleven other doors and access
portals would release, and all but two of them would
open automatically. We would be boarded by an
unholy army of monsters.
The only question was whether the Fred captain
had gotten a damned message off before we over-
whelmed his defenses. Probably. The final combat
took nearly an hour. Would it have done the Fred any
good?
At first, I thought that would give them two hun-
dred years' advance notice that we were coming, but
Arlene hooted with laughter when I mentioned it.
"What, you think their message travels at infinite
speed? What do you think this is, science fiction?"
I wracked my neurons for several minutes—physics