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

tions. Rumplestiltskin lay for 19,392 suns."
Arlene tapped at her watch calculator again. "This
planet rotates four hundred and twelve times per
orbit, so that's forty-seven Fredyears plus twenty-
eight Freddays."
"What's that in dog years?" I asked.
"For us, that's about forty years, six months."
"Jesus. Rumplestiltskin, were your people attacked
nineteen thousand suns ago?"
"Whack smack back crack whack smack back
crack "
"Who attacked you?"
"Newbies soobies."
"Was it a new species? Rumplestiltskin, how did
you meet your attackers?"
"Rumplestiltskin's people met the news on their
own world we expand our great empire we conquer all
we shall pound the Others into hotrock."
I closed my eyes, sorting through the Fred's tangled
speech. Arlene whispered into her throat mike, so I
alone heard her speculation: "Fly, think they found a
new species on its own planet, and somehow it ended
up attacking and destroying the Fred home planet?"
I grunted affirm; that was what I had figured from
the yammering. But there were some real problems
here; Sears and Roebuck had made it pretty clear that
most species took millions of years to get from
civilization to spaceflight—humans were such an
exception that we caught the Fred by surprise. They
first discovered us about four or five hundred years
ago, while Spain and Portugal were still sailing out in
wooden wind-driven ships to map the "New World."
The Fred confidently assumed we were tens of thou-
sands of years away from being able to offer any
effective resistance.
They didn't like us; they feared us because we, of all
the intelligent races known in the galaxy, could die.
They decided to exterminate us—another move in
the megenia-long chess match for control of the
galaxy. In the battle between the "Hyperrealists" and
the "Deconstructionists," we played the role of Kefiri-
stan, the poor unsophisticated farmer in whose back-
yard a minor skirmish is fought.
Hyperrealists, Deconstructionists—the terms were
courtesy Sears and Roebuck, who searched long and
hard through Earth philosophy and decided that
wacko, effeminate, limp-wristed literary critics in
New York were the finest, most refined philosophers
of the bunch. What a kick in the nuts: this great, grand
political war between two mighty empires turned on a