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

Arlene had a few good ideas for booby traps. If the
Fred had six days to prepare for our arrival, we had
eight weeks! We made good use of the time, practicing
a slow, steady retreat down the ship, sealing off
segments behind us and activating homemade bombs
to wreck the thing. We couldn't win, of course, not in
the long run, but then, as someone once said, the
trouble with the long run is that in the long run
everybody's dead!
Well, the bastards would pay for every meter. That
was my only goal, and at the staff meeting, Arlene and
even Sears and Roebuck regularly agreed with me. I
kept us hyped by unexpected alarm drills; Sears and
Roebuck figured out how to rig the ship's computer to
ring various emergency sirens and kill power in
different parts of the ship. I did the timing myself,
keeping the others on their toesies.
Then Arlene got tired of dancing like a puppet on a
chain, and she conspired with Sears and Roebuck to
simulate a General Catastrophe 101: all the power on
the ship dies except for faint warning horns all the
way for'ard in the engine room, the computer (on a
separate circuit) announces the self-destruct sequence
started with nineteen minutes until vaporization,
sound effects of a raging hurricane, and the enviros
blow enough air across me to simulate a massive hull
breech somewhere down south. Scared the bejesus out
of me! By the time the ship was down to thirty
seconds to detonation, and I still couldn't find the
blessed breech, I was reduced to running in circles like
a chicken with its head cut off, screaming and shout-
ing like a raging drunk!
When I recovered my normal heart rate and respi-
ration, I clapped Arlene in irons for the rest of the
trip. No, not really, but I threatened to do so, and had
she stopped laughing long enough to hear me, I think
she would have been terrified.
Sears and Roebuck had a weird sense of humor:
they went in for the bizarre practical joke, like some-
how attaching sound effects to our weapons. I visited
our makeshift "rifle range"—an unused manifest
hold with five hundred meters of jagged, saw-tooth
corridor and brightly colored markings at the far
end—but every damned round I fired went to its
doom with a long piercing scream of "heeee-
eeeeeeeee-eeelp!" God only knows where S and R
sampled the sound effect.
I was stunned when Sears and Roebuck told me and
Arlene that the practical joke was the only universal
form of humor throughout the galaxy. It was a sad day