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

executive dancing bonelessly backwards on his heels, held up by the
stream of bullets. Heynith released the trigger. The executive collapsed: a
heap of arms and legs at impossible angles.

When we came up to the van, the young cadet was still dying. His body
shivered and arched, his heels drummed against the earth, his fingers
plucked at nothing, and then he was still. There was a lot of blood.

The others moved up from the valley mouth. Heynith sent them circling
around the rim, where the valley walls dipped down on three sides.

We dragged the bodies away and concealed them in some large rocks.

I was feeling numb again, like I had after D'kotta.

I continued to feel numb as we spent the rest of that morning in frantic
preparation. My mind was somehow detached as my body sweated and
dug and hauled. There was a lot for it to do. We had four heavy industrial
lasers, rock-cutters; they were clumsy, bulky, inefficient things to use as
weapons, but they'd have to do. This mission had not been planned so
much as thrown together, only two hours before the liaison man had
contacted us on the parapet. Anything that could possibly work at all
would have to be made to work somehow; no time to do it right, just do it.
We'd been the closest team in contact with the field HQ who'd received
the report, so we'd been snatched; the lasers were the only things on hand
that could even approach potential as a heavy weapon, so we'd use the
lasers.

Now that we'd taken the van without someone alerting the Combine by
radio from the cab, Heynith flashed a signal mirror back toward the
shoulder of the mountain we'd quitted a few hours before. The liaison man
swooped down ten minutes later, carrying one of the lasers strapped
awkwardly to his platvac. He made three more trips, depositing the
massive cylinders as carefully as eggs, then gunned his platvac and
screamed back toward the Blackfriars in a maniac arc just this side of
suicidal. His face was still gray, tight-pressed lips a bloodless white
against ash, and he hadn't said a word during the whole unloading
procedure. I think he was probably one of the Quaestors who followed the
Way of Atonement. I never saw him again. I've sometimes wished I'd had
the courage to follow his example, but I rationalize by telling myself that I
have atoned with my life rather than my death, and who knows, it might
even be somewhat true. It's nice to think so anyway.

It took us a couple of hours to get the lasers into position. We spotted
them in four places around the valley walls, dug slanting pits into the
slopes to conceal them and tilt the barrels up at the right angle. We finally
got them all zeroed on a spot about a hundred feet above the center of the
valley floor, the muzzle arrangement giving each a few degrees of leeway
on either side. That's where she'd have to come down anyway if she was a
standard orbot, the valley being just wide enough to contain the boat and