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

retired to live on the credit subsidy he had earned with forty years of
service. The next morning, precisely at the start of his accustomed work
period, he stole a biodeth from a security guard in the Admin Complex,
walked into his flowsector, killed everyone there, and disappeared from
Urheim. After a year on the run, he had managed to contact the
Quaestors. After another year of training, he was serving with a
commando team in spite of his age. That had been five years ago; I had
known him for two. During all that time, he had said little. He did his job
very well with a minimum of waste motion, never made mistakes, never
complained, never showed emotion. But occasionally he would smile and
burn a hole in something. Or someone.

The sun dived at the horizon, seeming to crash into the plain in an
explosion of flame. Night swallowed us in one gulp. Black as a beast's belly.

It jerked me momentarily back into reality. I had a bad moment when I
thought I'd gone blind, but then reason returned and I slipped the infrared
lenses down over my eyes, activated them. The world came back in shades
of red. Heynith was working cramped legs against the body of the laser.
He spoke briefly, and we gulped some stimulus pills to keep us awake; they
were bitter, and hard to swallow dry as usual, but they kicked up a
familiar acid churning in my stomach, and my blood began to flow faster.
I glanced at Heynith. He'd been quiet, even for Heynith. I wondered what
he was thinking. He looked at me, perhaps reading the thought, and
ordered us out of the trench.

Goth and I crawled slowly out, feeling stiff and brittle, slapped our
thighs and arms, stamped to restore circulation. Stars were sprinkling
across the sky, salt spilled on black porcelain. I still couldn't read them, I
found. The day plants had vanished, the day animals had retreated into
catalepsy. The night plants were erupting from the ground, fed by the
debris of the day plants. They grew rapidly, doubling, then tripling in
height as we watched. They were predominantly thick, ropy shrubs with
wide, spearhead leaves of dull purple and black, about four feet high. Goth
and I dug a number of them up, root systems intact, and placed them on
top of the tarpaulin to replace the day plants that had shriveled with the
first touch of bitter evening frost. We had to handle them with padded
gloves; the leaf surfaces greedily absorbed the slightest amount of heat
and burned like dry ice.

Then we were back in the trench, and it was worse than ever. Motion
had helped for a while, but I could feel the numbing panic creeping back,
and the momentary relief made it even harder to bear. I tried to start a
conversation, but it died in monosyllabic grunts, and silence sopped up
the echoes. Heynith was methodically checking the laser controls for the
nth time. He was tense; I could see it bunch his shoulder muscles, bulge
his calves into rock as they pushed against the footplates of the saddle.
Goth looked worse than I did; he was somewhat younger, and usually
energetic and cheerful. Not tonight.