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

through."
"What? What?" demanded Sears and Roebuck,
obviously hearing only my end of the conversation.
"Come on, boys," I said, setting off at a trot, "need
your magic over here."
I jogged across the compound, turning as necessary
to keep the beeps loud and fast. I found Arlene in two
minutes, just half a klick distant as the Fly flies. She
was crouching over a collapse of pumice stone, out of
which stuck one part of a Fred hand and foot.
Evidently, it had been unlucky enough to be caught in
a building when it fell, thus not getting out in time to
be disintegrated or kidnapped or whatever happened
to the rest.
Alas, the head was crushed to a pulp. "Damn," I
griped. "Even if we can somehow revive its body, it
can't tell us anything if its brain is destroyed."
Sears and Roebuck knelt to examine the body.
"The brain appears intact," they said, poking at the
chest. Duhh! I mentally kicked my butt; I knew they
didn't keep their brains in their heads, but it was hard
to remember. Klave didn't either, as I recalled.
"Can you fix it?" asked Arlene. "It'd be icy to know
what the hell happened."
Sears and Roebuck held the body down and drew a
cutting laser, casually slicing away the head, legs, and
arms. I nearly lost my lunch! The Klave were pretty
cold from our point of view; even so, carving up a
dead body just for laziness, to avoid hefting heavy
stones off the limbs, was a bit much!
They dragged the torso out of the rubble, knocking
over a few stray stones with it. I winced with
sympathy .. . even dead, I knew it could feel the pain
of every blow. With the body tucked underneath their
arms, Sears and Roebuck humped back toward the
Fred ship, Arlene and me forming a Goddamned
parade behind the macabre Klave pair.
The Freds didn't divide their ship into separate
departments, as humans do; they used something
more like an old "object-oriented" approach to space-
ship organization: different sections, like different
counties, each had their own essential services—
food, water, navigation, engines, and medical equip-
ment. God only knows how they divvied up the
workload; maybe they fought for it! But Sears and
Roebuck wandered around with the Fred body until
they found a batch of machines that they claimed
were "MedGrams," tossed the torso inside, and began
poking blue and red buttons on a control panel.
A couple of hours later—I watched, but Arlene