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

For years, the Quaestors had stung and run, always retreating when the
Combine advanced, never meeting them in conventional battle, never
hitting them with anything really heavy. Then, when the Combine had
risked practically all of its military resources on one gigantic effort
calculated to be effective against the usual Quaestor behavior, we had
suddenly switched tactics. The Quaestors had waited to meet the
Combine's advance and had hit the Combine forces with everything they'd
been able to save, steal, hoard, and buy clandestinely from sympathizers in
the Commonwealth in over fifteen years of conspiracy and campaign
aimed at this moment.

Within an hour of the first tacnuke exchange, the city had ceased to
exist, everything leveled except two of the Cerebrums and the Escridel
Creche. Then the Quaestors activated their terraforming devicesтАФwhich I
believe they bought from a firm here on Kos, as a matter of fact. This was
completely insaneтАФ terraforming systems used indiscriminately can
destroy entire planetsтАФbut it was the insanity of desperation, and they did
it anyway. Within a half hour, the remaining Combine heavy armaments
battalions and the two Cerebrums ceased to exist. A few minutes later, the
supposedly invulnerable Escridel Creche ceased to exist, the first time in
history a creche had ever been destroyed. Then, as the cycling energies got
out of hand and filterfeedback built to a climax, everything on the veldt
ceased to exist.

The carnage had been inconceivable.

Take the vast population of D'kotta as a base, the second largest city on
World, one of the biggest even in this sector of the Commonwealth. The
subfleets had been in, bringing the betja harvest and other goods up the
Delva; river traffic was always heaviest at that time of year. The mines and
factories had been in full swing, and the giant sprawl of the Westernese
Shipyards and Engine Works. Add the swarming inhabitants of the six
major Controlled Environments that circled the city. Add the
city-within-a-city of Admin South, in charge of that hemisphere. Add the
twenty generations of D'kotta Combine fullsentients whose discorporate
ego-patterns had been preserved in the mountain of "indestructible"
micromolecular circuitry called the Escridel Creche. (Those executives had
died the irreversible true death, without hope of resurrection this time,
even as disembodied intellects housed within artificial
mind-environments: the records of their brain's unique pattern of
electrical/chemical/psychocybernetic rhythms and balances had been
destroyed, and you can't rebuild consciousness from a fused puddle of
slag. This hit the Combine where they lived, literally, and had more impact
than anything else.) Add the entire strength of both opposing forces; all of
our menтАФwho suspected what would happenтАФhad been suicide
volunteers. Add all of the elements together.

The total goes up into the multiples of billions.