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

lightning bolts of a signals officer, a senior warrant rank with pay and allowances equal to those of a
bosun.

Adele's handheld data unit slipped into a fitted pocket on her right thigh. That modification to her uniform
was absolutely nonstandard and the sort of thing that would send an inspecting officer ballistic if it were
noticed.

Daniel didn't even bother to wince any more. Adele without her data unit would be like Adele without
hands, personally miserable and of no value to the RCN. Whereas with the unitтАФand with the little pistol,
also nonstandard, nestled in a side pocketтАФneither Daniel nor Cinnabar ever had a better bulwark.

Adele Mundy was an RCN officer by grace of the Republic's warrant. By training and inclination she
was an archival librarian, a task she'd performed with skill amounting to genius before circumstances
required her to accept other duties. By birth, she was a Mundy of Chatsworth, one of the wealthiest and
most politically powerful houses in the Republic before the Three Circles Conspiracy had forfeited the
money and cost the head of every adult Mundy but one.
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Adele had been at school off Cinnabar when the cycle of treason and proscriptions played itself out in
blood. Distance had preserved her life; not her fortune, but she wasn't the sort to whom money meant
much one way or the other.

For that matter, Daniel sometimes suspected that life didn't mean much to Adele either; but duty did, and
craftsmanship. Daniel didn't try to remake his friends.

"She's a trim craft," Uncle Stacey said, assessing the corvette with a mind no less sharp for being
confined to a wheelchair-bound body. Commander Stacey Bergen, the finest astrogator of his day, had
opened or resurveyed half the routes in theSailing Directions for Ships of the Republic . "I've never
seen a Kostroman-built ship that wasn't as pretty as anything of her class, though some of them use
lighter scantlings than I'd have chosen for anything coming out of my yard."

The old man cocked his head over his shoulder to catch his nephew's eye with the implied question.

"The frames and hull plating are at RCN specifications, Uncle Stacey," Daniel said quickly. "The only
problem we've had in the conversion was that all the astrogational equipment is calibrated in Kostroman
AUs instead of Sol standard like us and the Alliance. Granted of course that theSissie 's a fighting
corvette, not a dedicated survey ship built to accept stresses that'd turn a battleship inside out."

ThePrincess Cecile 's hull was a rough cylinder two hundred and thirty feet long and fifty-five feet wide,
with bluntly rounded ends. Here in the graving dock she was clamped bow and stern by collars like the
chucks of a gigantic lathe. They could rotate her into any attitude, so that the antennas that lined her hull in
four rows of six each could be extended and canted throughout their range of motion.

Two twin four-inch plasma cannon provided the corvette's defensive armament in turrets offset toward
the starboard bow and sternwards to port. Their bolts of charged particles could deflect incoming
missiles by vaporizing portions of the projectile and converting that mass into slewing thrust. Offensively,
a practiced crew in thePrincess Cecile could launch her twenty missiles in pairs at one minute intervals.