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

their blood, and their vomit and shit and urine when their systems let go
after death. You have to be crazy to do things like that. We were crazy. We
were a good team.

There were twelve of us in the group, although we mostly worked in
sections of four, I was in the team leader's section, and it had been my
family for more than two years:

Heynith, stocky, balding, leather-faced; a hard, fair man; brilliant
organizer.

Ren, impassive, withdrawn, taciturn, frighteningly competent, of a
strange humor.

Goth, young, tireless, bullheaded, given to sudden enthusiasms and
depressions; he'd only been with us for about four months, a replacement
for Mason, who had been killed while trying to escape from a raid on Cape
Itica.

And me.

We were all warped men, emotional cripples one way or the other.

We were all crazy.

The Combine could never understand that kind of craziness, in spite of
the millions of people they'd killed or shriveled impersonally over the
years. They were afraid of that craziness, they were baffled by it, never
could plan to counter it or take it into account. They couldn't really believe
it.

That's how we'd taken the Blackfriars Transmitter, hours before
D'kotta. It had been impregnableтАФwrapped in layer after layer of defense
fields against missile attack, attack by chemical or biological agents,
transmitted energy, almost anything. We'd walked in. They'd never
imagined anyone would do that, that it was even possible to attack that
way, so there was no defense against it. The guardsystems were designed
to meet more esoteric threats. And even after ten years of slowly escalating
guerrilla action, they still didn't really believe anyone would use his body
to wage war. So we walked in. And killed everybody there. The staff was a
sentient techclone of ten and an executive foreman. No nulls or zombies.
The ten identical technicians milled in panic, the foreman stared at us in
disbelief, and what I think was distaste that we'd gone so far outside the
bounds of procedure. We killed them like you kill insects, not really
thinking about it much, except for that part of you that always thinks
about it, that records it and replays it while you sleep. Then we blew up
the transmitter with chemical explosives. Then, as the flames leaped up
and ate holes in the night, we'd gotten on our bicycles and rode like hell
toward the Blackfriars, the mountains hunching and looming ahead, as
jagged as black snaggleteeth against the industrial glare of the sky. A