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

Sears and Roebuck had locked themselves in their
stateroom, the double-entities shouting that we were
all doomed, game over, pull the plug! God only knew
where they picked up the expressions, but the senti-
ment was pretty clear: when we got to Fredworld, the
most logical outcome was for us to be burned into a
nice warm plasma by the batteries of heavy-particle
weapons the Freds obviously had ringing their hellish
planet.
I'm not a big fan of logic. Logic predicted that
Arlene and I would be smoked during our last en-
counter with the Freds. They had everything except
the homecourt advantage, and even that was dicey,
the way they could change the architecture of Phobos
and Deimos at the drop of a flaming snotball.
When this donnybrook first started, Arlene and I
both thought we were dealing with actual honest-to-
Lucifer demons from hell! They sure looked like
demons; we battled the sons of bitches deep, deeper
into the Union Aerospace Corporation facilities on
Phobos and Deimos, the two moons of Mars. All the
rest of Fox Company, Light Drop Marine Corps
Infantry, were killed . . . and some were "reworked"
into undead zombies.
That was the worst, seeing my buddies coming at
me, brainless but still clutching their weaponry. I
mowed them down, feeling a little death every time I
killed a former friend.
But we faced far more dangerous foes: imps, or
spineys, as Arlene liked to call them, who hurled
flaming balls of mucus; pinkies ... two meters of
gigantic mouth with a little pair of legs attached; we
faced down ghosts we couldn't see, minotaurlike hell
princes with fireball shooters on their wrists ... even
gigantic one-eyed pumpkins that floated and spat
lightning balls at us! But the worst of all were the
steam demons: fifteen feet tall with rocket launchers,
it was virtually impossible to kill the SOBs.
On Earth, we discovered that the Freds were geneti-
cally engineering monsters to look and act like human
beings, until they suddenly opened up on you with
machine guns. They had a few failed attempts that
were horrific enough, one a walking skeleton!
But the whole mission turned on a fundamental
misunderstanding: when last the Freds contacted us,
we were at the dividing line between the Medieval and
Renaissance periods, like the late 1400s—and they
somehow got the idea we still were. They never
realized how fast we evolved socially and technologi-
cally; nobody else did it that fast! They came scream-