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

Sears and Roebuck.
"You want to start me the engines?" they asked,
confused.
"Just a figure of speech, you dufoids," Arlene
explained. "But run through the launch sequence up
to just before engine start.... We may have to book
if we stumble onto a whole nest of them."
Sears and Roebuck looked at each other, Alley Oop
and his mirror image; they seemed perfectly content
staying aboard the ship and letting the Marines do the
dirty work. I sealed up the helmet and pressed the
other armor seals tight; it wasn't a pressure suit, but in
a pinch, we could survive a few minutes in hard
vacuum. I noticed Arlene's face was whiter than its
usual English pale; she must have figured the odds the
same as I.
My breath sounded loud in my ears as we edged
down the gangway onto the surface of Fredworld
again. The landscape looked eerily alive through the
night-vis flipdowns, tinted green but combining infra-
red, radio emission, and visible light enhancement. I
turned slowly with a microwave motion detector;
nothing moved around us, unless it was over the
jagged mountains on the horizon.
"This isn't good," I said over a shielded, encrypted
channel to Arlene. "Shouldn't there be some life, even
if the Newbies killed all the Freds?"
"Maybe they couldn't tell which were Freds and
which were animals, so they fragged everything. May-
be they used a nuclear bomb, or some kind of poison
or a biovector."
I grunted. "Doesn't seem likely that they'd manage
to get absolutely every living thing, does it?"
"There's another possibility, Fly: maybe there are
living animals, but they're just not moving."
"Animal means moving, Arlene, like animated."
She didn't answer, so I started a spiral sweep, mainly
watching the outer perimeter. After three hours of
recon, I was starting to regret being so nice and
burning Rumplestiltskin's mortal coil, setting free his
soul. "If that bastard lied to me—"
"You'll what?" came Arlene's radio voice in my ear.
"Resurrect him and kill him again?"
"Maybe we should resurrect the Freds on the ship.
Whoops, don't correct me; I just figured out how
stupid that suggestion was." I managed to catch her
while she was inhaling, or else she would have quickly
snorted that the Freds on the ship knew even less
about the Newbies than we—we had already killed
them before we left for Fredworld, a hundred and