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

with me; when I entered, she left by another portal, so
I ate alone. Then when I left to return to duty (staring
out the forward video screen, wondering when some-
thing would happen), Arlene snuck in and hid away
from me.
I barely saw her any more often than I had before
. . . but I felt a thousand percent relieved, because
now she was angry rather than desolate and apathetic.
Anger. Now that I have a good handle on. I'm a
Marine, for Christ's sake! What I couldn't understand
was despair.
Angry Marines don't stay angry for long, especially
not at their NCOs. Sergeants are buttheads; we'd both
known that since Parris Island! After a while, Arlene
took to haunting the mess hall when I was there,
sitting far away; then she sat at my too-tall table, but
at the other end; then she got around to eating across
from me ... but she glared a hell of a lot.
I waited, patiently and quietly. Eventually, her
need for human company battered down her fury at
me for risking my life like I did, and she started
making snippy comments.
I knew I'd won when she sat down four days after
the shooting incident and demanded, "All right, Ser-
geant, now tell me again why you had to do something
so bone-sick stupid as to step in front of a live rifle."
"To piss you off," I answered, truthfully.
Arlene stared, her mouth hanging open. She had
shaved her hair into a high-and-tight again, and it was
so short on top, it was almost iridescent orange. Her
uniform was freshly laundered—Sears and Roebuck
had showed us how to use the Fred washing machines
when we first took over the ship, two weeks earlier—
and I swear to God she had ironed everything. She
had been working out, too; she looked harder, tighter
than she had just a few days earlier, and it wasn't just
her haircut. Now I was the only one getting soft and
flabby.
"To piss me off? For God's sake, why?"
"A.S.," I said, leaning so close we were breathing
each other's O2, "I don't think you realize how close I
came to losing you. Despair is a terrible, terrible
mental illness; apathy is a freaking disease. I had to do
something so shocking, something to give you such a
burst of adrenaline, that it would jerk you out of your
feedback loop and drag you, kicking and screaming,
back to the here and now."
I scratched my stubbly chin, feeling myself flush.
"All right, maybe it was pretty bone-sick stupid. But I
was desperate! What should I have done? I don't think