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

ground to the stratosphere and back. At night it pulsed with molten scum,
ugly as a lanced blister, lighting up the cloud cover across the entire
horizon, visible for hundreds of miles. It was this ugly glow that finally
panicked even the zombies in the Environments, probably the first strong
emotion in their lives.

It'd been hard to sum up the effects of the battle. We thought that we
had the edge, that the Combine was close to breaking, but nobody knew
for sure. If they weren't as close to folding as we thought, then we were
probably finished. The Quaestors had exhausted most of their hoarded
resources at D'kotta, and we certainly couldn't hit the Combine any
harder. If they could shrug off the blow, then they could wear us down.

Personally, I didn't see how anything could shrug that off. I'd watched
it all and it'd shaken me considerably. There's an old-time expression, "put
the fear of God into him." That's what D'kotta had done for me. There
wasn't any God anymore, but I'd seen fire vomit from the heavens and the
earth ripped wide for rape, and it'd been an impressive enough surrogate.
Few people ever realized how close the Combine and the Quaestors had
come to destroying World between them, there at D'kotta.

We'd crouched that nightтАФthe team and IтАФon the high stone ramparts
of the tallest of the Blackfriars, hopefully far away from anything that
could fall on us. There were twenty miles of low, gnarly foothills between
us and the rolling savannahland where the city of D'kotta had been
minutes before, but the ground under our bellies heaved and quivered like
a sick animal, and the rock was hot to the touch: feverish.

We could've gotten farther,away, should have gotten farther away, but
we had to watch. That'd been decided without anyone saying a word,
without any question about it. It was impossible not to watch. It never
even occurred to any of us to take another safer course of action. When
reality is being turned inside out like a dirty sock, you watch, or you are
less than human. So we watched it all from beginning to end: two hours
that became a single second lasting for eons. Like a still photograph of
time twisted into a screamтАФthe scream reverberating on forever and yet
taking no duration at all to experience.

We didn't talk. We couldn't talkтАФthe molecules of the air itself shrieked
too loudly, and the deep roar of explosions was a continual drumrollтАФbut
we wouldn't have talked even if we'd been able. You don't speak in the
presence of an angry God. Sometimes we'd look briefly at each other. Our
faces were all nearly identical: ashen, waxy, eyes of glass, blank, and lost as
pale driftwood stranded on a beach by the tide. We'd been driven through
the gamut of expressions into extremisтАФ rictus: faces so contorted and
strained they achedтАФand beyond to the quietus of shock: muscles too
slack and flaccid to respond anymore. We'd only look at each other for a
second, hardly focusing, almost not aware of what we were seeing, and
then our eyes would be dragged back as if by magnetism to the Fire.