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

sniffing the winds to figure out why they were still
alive. I was so beat, I didn't even go over and tell
them. Let 'em figure it out on their own, I angrily
decided! I'd been on my feet forever, and I wasn't in
the mood to deal with them. Arlene was bad enough.
As soon as it became obvious there were no Freds
anywhere around—hence, probably very few Freds, if
any, on the whole planet, else they would have
stormed our ship, even if they had to send for
troops—Arlene reslung her weapon-of-choice, a
twelve-gauge, semi-auto riot gun made by Krupp-
Remington, the RK-150, with 150-round drum maga-
zine. She set off in a spiral search pattern to see if she
could figure out what the hell happened.
I stood in the shade, panting in the burning heat.
Fredworld, at least this part of it, was hot as Hell, 54.5
degrees centigrade according to my wrist-therm.
Sweat poured down my face; the perspiration didn't
evaporate in that humidity, especially not under a
helmet. I wished I had a standard-issue pressure suit
with air conditioning; but we hadn't made any plans
to stowaway aboard a Fred ship, so we didn't think to
bring them along. Space suits we had, courtesy of
Sears and Roebuck, but they didn't help with plane-
tary temperature (I asked).
Sears and Roebuck cautiously approached. As usu-
al, they didn't seem the least affected by the heat or
anything else. They peered around anxiously. "Are
they all dead?" they asked.
I shrugged. "Dead or gone. I don't see any bodies.
Sanders is doing a sweep. We'll see what she says."
I poked around a little. What I thought was a condo
complex turned out to be a series of interconnected
buildings, like the Pueblo Indians used to build in
caves up a cliff, but these were built into the natural
hollows formed by cracks in the ground. I saw what
might have been molded furniture, but nothing of a
personal nature. Of course, we didn't have a freaking
clue what, if anything, a Fred would consider person-
al. The buildings were bleached white, like all the
color was burned out of them, leaving a pockmarked
surface like pumice.
Arlene's voice jumped at me through my ear receiv-
er. "Fly, I think you'd better come over here. I've got
a live one."
"Live?" I asked, flipping up my dish antenna and
homing in on her signal—standard armor-issue, very
useful.
"Oops, I mean a fresh dead body—maybe we can
fix it and revive the bastard, figure out what blew