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

one. Sears and Roebuck must have thought we were
loons, since the Klave have nothing remotely like a
"sense of humor" defense mechanism; they just look
at each other.
The last part of the story I got was the creepiest:
Rumplestiltskin insisted, over and over, that those
damned nasty Newbies were still here. But where?
Sears and Roebuck began yanking their
heads back and forth again, expressing some sort of
emotion only a Klave could understand. "What are
you on about?" I demanded, still stewing about the
missing Newbies.
"We have faxed the injuns," declared our compatri-
ot. "To where would like you to go?"
Another hour had passed, and neither Arlene nor I
had gotten another intelligible word out of Rumple-
4
stiltskin. "What do you think?" I asked Arlene. "Has
he fulfilled his part of the bargain?"
She pursed her lips. "I can't think of anything else
to ask. We've hit a brick wall in every direction now."
Arlene inhaled deeply, then swallowed a nutrient pill.
"Yeah, Fly, I guess he's done what he agreed. You
going to burn him?"
I shrugged. "I promised—deal's a deal."
Gingerly, I reached across and pulled all the con-
nections from the torso of the Fred. I looked across at
Sears and Roebuck, but they had completely lost
interest, their long arms reaching all around the Fred
navigational unit, the one in this district of the ship,
and disconnecting and reconnecting fiber-optic ca-
bles. "You, ah, know where there's a Fred ray?"
The Fred ray was the last-ditch weapon that they
used against us when we rampaged through their base,
and later their ship; it was some sort of particle beam
weapon, much better than ours. Arlene had invento-
ried the weapons on the Fred ship, including seventy-
four Fred rays; she took me to the nearest one, leaving
me to drag the torso behind.
Turning my head away, praying to avoid vomiting
and completely humiliating myself in front of my
friend and subordinate, I balanced the torso on a
neutron-repellant backdrop, the only thing that would
stop the beam. The body fell over, and I set it up
again. Then I stepped back and cranked the weapon
around to point at the Fred's chest, where it stored its
brain.
"Man, I don't like doing this," I muttered.
"Fly, he's been trapped dead underneath that rub-
ble outside for forty years. One eye was open—