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

I was a member of something so old that they even had to dig up the
name for it when they were rooting through the rubble of ancient history,
looking for concepts to use against the Combine: a "commando team."
Don't ask me what it means, but that's what it's called. Come to think, I
know what it means in terms of flesh: it means ugly. Long ugly days and
nights that come back in your sleep even uglier, so that you don't want to
think about it at all because it squeezes your eyeballs like a vise. Cold and
dark and wet, with sudden death looming up out of nothing at any time
and jarring you with mortality like a rubber glove full of ice water slapped
across your face. Living jittery high all the time, so that everything gets so
real that it looks fake. You live in an anticipation that's pain, like
straddling a fence with a knifeblade for a top rung, waiting for something
to come along in the dark and push you off. You get so you like it. The
pain's so consistent that you forget it's there, you forget there ever was a
time when you didn't have it, and you live on the adrenaline.

We liked it. We were dedicated. We hated. It gave us something to do
with our hate, something tangible we could see. And nobody'd done it but
us for hundreds of years; there was an exultation to that. The Scholars and
Antiquarians who'd started the Quaestor movementтАФleft fullsentient and
relatively unwatched so they could better piece together the muddle of
prehistory from generations of inherited archivesтАФthey'd been smart.
They knew their only hope of baffling the Combine was to hit them with
radical concepts and tactics, things they didn't have instructions for
handling, things out of the Combine's experience. So they scooped
concepts out of prehistory, as far back as the archives go, even finding
written records somewhere and having to figure out how to use them.

Out of one of these things, they got the idea of "guerrilla" war. No, I
don't know what that means either, but what it means is playing the game
by your own rules instead of the enemy's. Oh, you let the enemy keep
playing by his rules, see, but you play by your own. Gives you a wider
range of moves. You do things, I mean, ridiculous things, but so ancient
they don't have any defense against them because they never thought
they'd have to defend against that. Most of the time they never even knew
that existed.

Like, we used to run around with these projectile weapons the
Quaestors had copied from old plans and mass-produced in the autfacs on
the sly by stealing computer time. The things worked by a chemical
reaction inside the mechanism that would spit these tiny missiles out at a
high velocity. The missile would hit you so hard it would actually lodge
itself in your body, puncture internal organs, kill you. I know it sounds like
an absurd concept, but there were advantages.

Don't forget how tightly controlled a society the Combine's was; even
worse than the Commonwealth in its own way. We couldn't just steal
energy weapons or biodeths and use them, because all those things
operated on broadcast power from the Combine, and as soon as one was