"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Hell on Earth (english)" - читать интересную книгу автора

land it at Point Mugu. I guess you couldn't consider
Deimos strictly a moon anymore, since it appeared to
be mobile.
We were stuck a mere four hundred klicks from
where we wanted to be: but that was four hundred
kilometers straight up. What's more, we were flying
around the Earth at something better than ten kilom-
eters per second—not only would we have to jump
down, we'd better do one hell of a big foot-drag to kill
that orbital velocity.
And after that we'd solve Format's Last Theorem,
simplify the tax code, and cure world hunger.
That last one was easy enough to fix. The problem
wasn't that there wasn't enough food; it was just in
the wrong places and didn't last long enough. I once
heard an old duffer say all we really needed was food
irradiation, Seal-a-Meals, and a bunch of rocket mail
tubes to plant the food in the center of the famine du
jour.
Rocket mail tubes . . .
"Fly," I shrieked, jumping up and down. "I know
how to do it!"
"Do what, damn it?"
Could we do it? I did some fast, rule-of-thumb
calculations: our mass versus that of a typical "care
package" from Mars, the sort they sent up to the
grunts like me serving on Deimos; the Earth's gravita-
tional pull compared to that of Mars—it's harder to
fly up and down off the Earth's surface than the
Martian surface. Maybe ... no, it would work!
Well, maybe.
"I know how to get us across to Earth, Fly. Did you
know there's a maintenance shed for unmanned snip-
ping rockets on this dump of a moon?"
"No," he said suspiciously.
Of course he didn't. He was never stationed here,
like I'd been. It was a garage where the motor-pool
sergeant kept all the mail tubes, the shipping rockets. I
had no idea why they were called "mail tubes"; we
send our mail electronically, as the universe intended.
"A one-way ticket to Earth," I summed up, trying
to penetrate that thick skull of his. "If we can find any
kind of ship, we go home and kick some zombie ass.
Again."
"All over again," he breathed, catching my drift at
last. "Well, hell, we're professionals at this now!"
We continued looking at the familiar blue-green
sphere of Earth, as the unfamiliar white spots ap-
peared and disappeared all over the globe. An old
piece of advice floated up from deep in my memory: