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

doctrinal difference of aesthetics between two com-
peting schools of literary criticism. Billions of lives
hung in the balance between one dumbass way of
dissecting "eleven fragment stories" and another,
both of which missed the point entirely, of course.
That much, Sears and Roebuck told us, but no more. I
had no idea what the hell that meant; eleven story
fragments? But try telling S and R that.
His species, the Klave, were members of the Hyper-
realist tong; the evil Freds represented the slimy,
dishonorable Deconstructionist tong. Someday,
somehow, I was going to beat those sons of bitches,
Sears and Roebuck, into explaining the whole
damned thing to me. In the meanwhile, I just shrug
and thank God we soldiers don't have to understand
politics in order to follow orders.
Anyway, the Freds miscalculated . . . catastroph-
ically. When they returned to Fredworld, raised an
invasion force (taking about a century to do so), then
returned, a mere half a millennium had passed—but
to the Freds' shock, they found not a planetful of ig-
norant, superstitious farmers and sailors, but a tech-
nologically advanced, planet-wide culture with mis-
siles, nuclear weapons, particle beams, spaceflight,
and a brain trust unfrightened by horn and fang, scale
and claw.
Even after Arlene and I kicked their asses, when we
left Earth, humanity was on the ropes . . . just like the
old heavyweight Muhammad Ali. We played rope-a-
dope with the "demons," and if Salt Lake City and
Chicago were nuclear wastelands, so were the Fred
bases on Phobos and Deimos. Worse, the last rem-
nants of Fox Company—not only me and Arlene but
Albert and our teenage hacker Jill—had managed to
rescue the former human, now cyborg, Ken Estes,
which gave us the potential to tap into the Fred's
entire technology base. The Freds were genetically
engineering human infiltrators, but we were training
einsatzgruppen.
God only knew what was going to happen, since we
left Earth right at the exciting part. Or what had
happened already, actually. I had to bear in mind that
by the time we could return to the mother planet, four
hundred years would have passed!
The Freds made a critical miscalculation when they
assumed humans evolved at the same rate as every-
body else in the galaxy. Was it possible they made the
same mistake again, this time to far more disastrous
consequence?
Time to get a bit more specific with Rumplestilt-