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

officers, let alone dignitaries like Delos Vaughn's party, arrived and left the harbor in personally owned
monorail cars if they even used the system rather than aircars.

The wait wasn't a hardship. As soon as her companions had departed on the rising whine of an electric
motor, Adele drew out her personal data unit and started to learn what could be known about Delos
Vaughn.

Until very recently the only parts of Adele's life she would've called happy were those she'd spent finding
and organizing information . . . which to be sure was more time than she devoted to any other pursuit.
The place Adele's body slept had never been of much concern to her, and since the Proscriptions she
hadn't had a home outside her head.
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A heavy starship lifted from the pool in the center of the harbor, shaking everything for miles around as
its thousands of tons rose from a plume first of steam, then the flaring iridescence of hydrogen ions when
the plasma motors no longer licked the water's surface. Adele was barely conscious of the event,
adjusting her control wands in the precise patterns that guided her search.

The personal data unit was a featureless rectangle, four inches by ten inches, and half an inch thick. Its
display was holographic, cued to the focus of the user's eyes. Though the unit had a virtual keyboard or
could respond to voice commands, Adele preferred the speed and flexibility of the slim wands. She held
them at the balance between the thumb and first two fingers of either hand. An expert in their useтАФand
Adele was that if ever there was oneтАФcould access information almost as fast as her brain could frame
the questions.

Delos Vaughn of Strymon, age twenty-nine Earth years; sole offspring of Leland Vaughn, former
President of Strymon. Strymon presidency, a lifetime elective office with candidacy and franchise
limited to members of the Shipowning class. Shipowning class: a group of originally thirty-seven,
but now expanded to over a hundred, families; actually owning a starship is neither a necessary
nor a sufficient criterion for membership in the Shipowning class. . . .

Adele's little unit had a considerable storage capacity, but its real value on a developed world was to
give her access to other databases. Here on Cinnabar she was linkedтАФthrough the monorail control
circuitтАФto the central records computer in the Navy Office, which she used as her base unit.

It had occurred to Adele as she set up the connection on her first day back on Cinnabar that she
probably could've gotten authorization to use the system if she'd gone through some of the channels
available to her. She'd decided it was simpler to circumvent the electronic barriers to what she was doing
than it would've been to plow through bureaucratic inertia. Besides, it amused Adele to break rules when
she'd spent all her previous life obeying them.

In the past month Adele had gained Daniel Leary for a friend and the whole Republic of Cinnabar Navy
for home and family. Between them they gave her a remarkable feeling of security.

She grinned as she shifted back to another aspect of the problem she'd set herself.Delos Vaughn,
arrived on Cinnabar aboard the RCS Tashkentas a guest of the Republic. . . .