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

The crew which Daniel had brought from Kostroma was trained very well in that and every other aspect
of war.

As a boy, Daniel had listened to Uncle Stacey and the naval friends who came to chat with him in the
shipyard he ran after retirement. They'd talked of shifts in the Matrix, of sheared antennas, torqued hulls;
of days at a time spent in the glare of Casimir radiation, picking a course where none was known before.

It was those tales, told by master astrogators to other masters of the art, that had led Daniel to join the
RCN at age sixteen after the flaming row he'd had with his father, Corder. The Learys weren't a naval
family: they were politicians, movers and shakers of the Republic, and never a one of them had risen
higher than Corder Leary, Speaker Leary, himself.

Daniel laughed, surprising Adele and his uncle both. Grinning apologetically at their surprise he
explained, "I was just thinking that six years on, there's no decision I'm more glad of than that I joined the
RCN, but it could be that my reasons for making that decision had more to do with spiting my father than
they did with making a name for myself."

"I've never noticed that the reasons people do things have much connection with how well or badly
matters turn out," Adele said. "For example, I'm confident that my parents entered the Three Circles
Conspiracy with the full intention of saving the Republic from men who couldn't be trusted with power."
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She smiled. Adele gave the impression of being dispassionate about everything except knowledge, and
then only knowledge in the form of marks on paper or electronic potentials. That wasn't trueтАФthe
passion was there, Daniel knew, as surely as it was in his own explosive outburstsтАФbut Adele's analysis
would always be as cold and clean as the blade of a scalpel.

That was true even at times like this one, when Adele was analyzing the factors that led to the severed
heads of every member of her family, including her ten-year-old sister, being displayed from Speaker's
Rock.

"Your Lieutenant Mon's a good man," Stacey said. "Who did the yard assign for a supervisor? Archbolt,
I suppose? Or did they give you Berol?"

"Yes, Archbolt," said Daniel, watching members of thePrincess Cecile 's crewтАФthe
SissiesтАФclambering over the antennas with tool belts.

Harbor Three had a regular dockyard staff, but the strain of fitting out the fleet in anticipation of full-scale
war with the Alliance had overstrained their capacity. There would have been jobs for three times the
number of workmen, and there were no trained personnel to hire into the new slots.

One way around the problem was to use a vessel's own crewmen to perform all but the specialist yard
work. Normally crews were paid off when their ship docked in its home port; now, a third of the
Princess Cecile 's crew was at work refitting the vessel under the command of a ship's officer who also
was kept on full pay.

Daniel, as the corvette's captain, would normally have been that officer. He'd passed the posting down