"Gardner Dozois - A Special Kind of Morning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

reported missing, the Combine would just cut the relay for that particular
code. We couldn't make them ourselves, because unless you used the
Combine's broadcast power you'd need a ton of generator equipment with
each weapon to provide enough energy to operate it, and we didn't have
the technology to miniaturize that much machinery. (Later some genius
figured out a way to make, say, a functioning biodeth with everything but
the energy source and then cut into and tap Combine broadcast power
without showing up on the coding board, but that was toward the end
anyway, and most of them were stockpiled for the shock troops at
D'kotta.) At least the "guns" worked. And there were even unexpected
advantages. We found that tanglefields, scattershields, phasewalls,
personal warders, all the usual defenses, were unable to stop the "bullets"
(the little missiles fired by the "guns")тАФthey were just too sophisticated to
stop anything as crude as a lump of metal moving at relatively sluggish
ballistic speeds. Same with "bombs" and "grenades"тАФ devices designed to
have a chemical reaction violent enough to kill in an enclosed place. And
the list went on and on. The Combine thought we couldn't move around,
because all vehicles were coded and worked on broadcast power. Did you
ever hear of "bicycles"? They're devices for translating mechanical energy
into motion, they ride on wheels that you actually make revolve with
physical labor. And the bicycles didn't have enough metal or mass to
trigger sentryfields or show up on sweep probes, so we could go
undetected to places they thought nobody could reach. Communicate? We
used mirrors to flash messages, used puffs of smoke as code, had people
actually carry messages from one place to another.

More important, we personalized war. That was the most radical thing,
that was the thing that turned us from kids running around and having
fun breaking things into men with bitter faces, that was the thing that
took the heart out of the Combine more than anything else. That's why
people still talk about the Realignment with horror today, even after all
these years, especially in the Commonwealth.

We killed people. We did it, ourselves. We walked up and stabbed them.
I mentioned a knife before, boy, and I knew you didn't know what it was;
you bluff well for a kidтАФthat's the way to a reputation for wisdom: look
sage and always keep your mouth shut about your ignorance. Well, a knife
is a tapering piece of metal with a handle, sharpened on the sides and very
sharp at the tapered end, sharp enough so that when you strike someone
with it the metal goes right into their flesh, cuts them, rips them open,
kills them, and there is blood on your hands which feels wet and sticky and
is hard to wash off because it dries and sticks to the little hairs on the
backs of your wrists. We learned how to hit people hard enough to kill
them, snap the bones inside the skin like dry sticks inside oiled cloth.

We did. We strangled them with lengths of wire. You're shocked. So
was the Combine. They had grown used to killing at a great distance, the
push of a button, the flick of a switch, using vast, clean, impersonal forces
to do their annihilation. We killed people. We killed peopleтАФnot statistics
and abstractions. We heard their screams, we saw their faces, we smelled