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

tanglefield had snatched at us for a second, but then we were gone.

That's all that I personally had to do with the "historic" Battle of
D'kotta. It was enough. We'd paved the way for the whole encounter.
Without the transmitter's energy, the Combine's weapons and
transportation systemsтАФincluding liftshafts, slidewalks, irisdoors, and
windows, heating, lighting, waste disposalтАФwere inoperable; D'kotta was
immobilized. Without the station's broadcast matter, thousands of
buildings, industrial complexes, roadways, and homes had collapsed into
chaos, literally collapsed. More important, without broadcast
nourishment, D'kotta's four major CerebrumsтАФhandling an incredible
complexity of military/industrial/administrative tasksтАФwere knocked out
of operation, along with a number of smaller Cerebrums: the synapses
need constant nourishment to function, and so do the sophont ganglion
units, along with the constant flow of the psychocybernetic current to keep
them from going mad from sensory deprivation, and even the nulls would
soon grow intractable as hunger stung them almost to self-awareness,
finally to die after a few days. Any number of the lowest-ranking sentient
clonesтАФall those without stomachs or digestive systems, mostly in the
military and industrial castesтАФwould find themselves in the same position
as the nulls; without broadcast nourishment, they would die within days.
And without catarcs in operation to duplicate the function of atrophied
intestines, the buildup of body wastes would poison them anyway, even if
they could somehow get nourishment. The independent food dispensers
for the smaller percentage of fullsentients and higher clones simply could
not increase their output enough to feed that many people, even if
converted to intravenous systems. To say nothing of the zombies in the
Environments scattered throughout the city.

There were backup fail-safe systems, of course, but they hadn't been
used in centuries, the majority of them had fallen into disrepair and didn't
work, and other Quaestor teams made sure the rest of them wouldn't work
either.

Before a shot had been fired, D'kotta was already a major disaster.

The Combine had reacted as we'd hoped, as they'd been additionally
prompted to react by intelligence reports of Quaestor massings in strength
around D'kotta that it'd taken weeks to leak to the Combine from
unimpeachable sources. The Combine was pouring forces into D'kotta
within hours, nearly the full strength of the traditional military caste and
a large percentage of the militia they'd cobbled together out of industrial
clones when the Quaestors had begun to get seriously troublesome, plus a
major portion of their heavy armament. They had hoped to surprise the
Quaestors, catch them between the city and the inaccessible portion of the
Blackfriars, quarter the area with so much strength it'd be impossible to
dodge them, run the Quaestors down, annihilate them, break the back of
the movement.

It had worked the other way around.