"David Drake - RCN 02 - Lt. Leary Commanding" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

was cut formed a series of chevrons which changed from red to gold alternately depending on the angle
of the light. He was as hard to focus on as the flare of a plasma exhaust.

Apart from that he had a handsome, thirty-year-old face and an engaging smile. Three of the other
civilians wore clothes of similar style and flamboyant materials; the rest, like the naval officers, were
Cinnabar nationals.

"I'm honored to meet you, Commander," Vaughn said, speaking Universal with a better Xenos accent
than DanielтАФwho'd been raised on the Learys' country estate of BantryтАФcould've managed. "You must
have known my father. Your skilled explorations truly made the Sack a part of the greater universe for
the first time since the Hiatus."

"President Leland Vaughn," Uncle Stacey said. He was standing without support, now, gaining strength
from his memories; though Daniel and Adele kept close to either side in case of sudden weakness. "I sat
at his right hand at the banquet on our arrival. Quite clear on the value of exploration for the trade that
makes Strymon great. He's keeping well, I hope?"

"My late father, I'm afraid I should have said," Vaughn said with a deprecating rotation of his left hand.
"My uncle, Callert Vaughn, succeeded him within a year of my arrival on Xenos, and now that Callert too
has passed on, the presidency is in the hands of his daughter, Pleyna."

Momentarily Vaughn's tone became more sardonic than whimsical as he added, "Formally, that is. One
assumes that a twelve-year-old is largely guided by her tutor, Friderik Nunes. I recall Nunes from when I
last was on Strymon, fifteen years ago. He wasn't of much account . . . then, at any rate."

The hardness left Vaughn's expression, though now that Daniel had seen it once, he knew that it
remained a part of the man himself. Delos Vaughn was more than a young foreigner living high in the
fleshpots of CinnabarтАФthough he was probably that as well. Daniel would be the last man to suggest that
a taste for liquor and amiable women precluded a man from taking a serious attitude toward his
profession.

And whatwas the profession of Mr. Delos Vaughn?

Strymon had risen to prominence in the Sack, its region of space, following the thousand-year Hiatus
from interstellar travel at the end of mankind's first flush of colonization. Strymon had regained links with
Earth itself more quickly than most worlds; but, as the intricacies of sailing through the Matrix were
laboriously rediscovered, the Sack became a backwater.

Cinnabar expanded its sphere of influence and that influence hardened into something not so very
different from an empire; Strymon tried to compete. Twice the competition was military; the RCN had
crushed Strymon's forces both times.

Distance from CinnabarтАФtwo months of travel for a merchant ship and half that even for well-found
naval vesselsтАФpreserved a degree of independence for Strymon, but by treaty her navy was now limited
to light craft suitable for suppressing the endemic piracy of the three-star Selma Cluster nearby.

In halving the travel time between Strymon and Cinnabar, Uncle Stacey had done the Vaughns and their
subjects a doubtful favor. Still, by forcing Strymon to realize Cinnabar's hegemony, it no doubt prevented
the weaker power from wasting its substance in a third hopeless war. Certainly Delos Vaughn seemed