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

flash-boiled to steam; for a while we could see the gorge of its dry bed
stitching across the plain, but then the ground heaved up and obliterated
it.

It was unbelievable that anything could be left alive down there. Very
little was. Only the remainder of the heavy weapons sections on both sides
continued to survive, invisible to us in the confusion. Still protected by
powerful phasewalls and scattershields, they pounded blindly at each
otherтАФthe Combine somewhat ineffectively with biodeths and tacnukes,
the Quaestors responding by stepping up the discontinuity projector.
There was only one, in the command moduleтАФthe Quaestor technicians
were praying it wouldn't be wiped out by a random strikeтАФand it was a
terraforming device and not actually a "weapon" at all, but the Combine
had been completely unprepared for it, and were suffering horribly as a
result.

Everything began to flicker, random swatches of savannahland
shimmering and blurring, phasing in and out of focus in a jerky,
mismatched manner: that filmstrip run through a spastic projector. At
first we thought it must be heat eddies caused by the fires, but then the
flickering increased drastically in frequency and tempo, speeding up until
it was impossible to keep anything in focus even for a second, turning the
wide veldt into a mad kaleidoscope of writhing, interchanging shapes and
color-patterns from one horizon to the other. It was impossible to watch it
for long. It hurt the eyes and filled us with an oily, inexplicable panic that
we were never able to verbalize. We looked away, filled with the musty
surgings of vague fear.

We didn't know then that we were watching the first practical
application of a process that'd long been suppressed by both the Combine
and the Commonwealth, a process based on the starship dimensional
"drive" (which isn't a "drive" at all, but the word's passed into the
common press) that enabled a high-cycling discontinuity projector to
throw time out of phase within a limited area, so that a spot here would
be a couple of minutes ahead or behind a spot a few inches away, in
continuity sequence. That explanation would give a psychophysicist fits,
since "time" is really nothing at all like the way we "experience" it, so the
process "really" doesn't do what I've said it doesтАФdoing something really
abstruse insteadтАФbut that's close enough to what it does on a practical
level, 'cause even if the time distortion is an "illusionary effect"тАФlike the
sun seeming to rise and setтАФthey still used it to kill people. So it threw
time out of phase, and kept doing it, switching the dislocation at random:
so that in any given square foot of land there might be four or five
discrepancies in time sequence that kept interchanging. Like, here might
be one minute "ahead" of the base "now," and then a second later
(language breaks down hopelessly under this stuff; you need the math)
here would be two minutes behind the now, then five minutes behind,
then three ahead, and so on. And all the adjacent zones in that square foot
are going through the same switching process at the same time (goddamn
this language!). The Combine's machinery tore itself to pieces. So did the