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

for the poor that the political members of her family had shown as a matter of policy had died with them
during the Proscriptions.

Electroluminescent strips along the axis of the tunnel's roof cast a cool glow over the interior. Mosaics
made from glass chips, sometimes with foil backing, lined the walls. The images portrayed the settlement
of Cinnabar in the third wave of human expansion.

The first colonists built with slabs of stabilized dirt extruded by vast machines carried in the bellies of four
starships. In the artist's rendering, bladed tractors crawled across a forested landscape, leaving behind
them fields green with human crops.

But the tractors and the furnaces forming construction material wore out. Later buildings were of wood,
stone, and concrete, because Cinnabar's industry was incapable of repairing the equipment which had
come from Earth. Cattle imported for meat and milk drew the plows.

Because the colony was less than a generation old when the Population Wars began, Cinnabar wasn't
dragged into the fighting as a participant. The complete collapse of interstellar transport threw the planet
onto her own weak resources, but she escaped the rain of redirected asteroids which wreaked
cataclysmic destruction on the more developed worldsтАФEarth herself foremost among the victims.

There were perhaps more humans alive in the universe today than there had been at the start of the
Population Wars, but the most populous single planet had only a fraction of the numbers which had
caused the Earth government to pursue a policy of forcing its excess on daughter worlds because sending
out further organized colonies would have been too expensive.

The population of the few remaining habitable portions of Earth was modest. In a manner of speaking,
Adele thought with a cold smile, Earth's policy had achieved its stated objective.

The final panels at the tunnel's upper end showed the rebirth of space travel on Cinnabar. To the left, a
multistage rocket rose on a plume of chemical flame; to the right, a starship using rediscovered principles
spread its sails, slipping from the sidereal universe in a haze of Casimir radiation.

Adele stepped into daylight again. The church rose before her in polished splendor; if she turned, she
would look out over the length of Pentacrest Vale to the notch between Dobbins Hill and the Castle, with
the western suburbs of Xenos visible as far as the eye could see.

A starship was rising from Harbor Three. It was huge, though despite wearing the uniform of the RCN
Adele didn't pretend to be able to identify vessels.

She sighed and walked across the marble pavers to the cantilevered gateway of the Library of Thomas
Celsus, which filled both levels of the church's west portico. On the pediment was a statue of the
founderтАФbusiness agent to Speaker Ramsey, the unchallenged ruler of the Republic two centuries in the
pastтАФoffering a scroll to the People, represented as a woman in flowing robes.

The Celsus served as the national collection and was the greatest library on Cinnabar. When Adele was
nine, her tutor had told her that the Celsus was the foremost repository of knowledge in the human
universe. Adele had immediately used the resources of the library to check his statementтАФand learned
there were several collections on the older worlds of the Alliance which could put the Celsus to shame.

Adele had immediately ordered the man out of her sight with a fury that shocked her parents and