"David Drake - RCN Leary 1- With The Lightnings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

Adele concentrated on crawling, moving one limb at a time. The tiles were half-round sections of ceramic pipe laid each over the end of the next tile below. The ridged surface was hard on her knees but there was no way she'd have been able to walk down the way Daniel had, as calm as if he were at ground level.
All she'd have to do was roll forward dizzily and she would be at ground level, no question.
"The antenna controls are hydraulic," Daniel continued. "Mechanical on some ships, but that's rare. You can't use electrical power to shift the rig. Can't use radio when you're in the Matrix because even a tiny signal distorts the field and the ship goes God knows where. There's no more alone than that."
Adele's fingers touched the lip of the stone gutter. Verdigrised copper downspouts thrust out every twenty feet of its length. The only gargoyles on the Elector's Palace were those in its internal decoration.
Daniel put his hand beside hers on the gutter though his eyes remained fixed on the crowd. "Use my arm as a brace as you get yourself turned around," he said.
"Thank you," Adele said. She gripped his wrist with her left hand and rotated her legs under her. She didn't need the help, but it would have been impolite to refuse-and it was a help.
His arm felt as firm as a piece of structural tubing.
"They say 'One hand for the ship and the other for yourself,' " Daniel said, "but you can't always do that. If a joint's frozen or a valve is bleeding fluid, you need both hands for the job . . . and you use them, even though if you drift and the ship leaves you behind it'll be like you never existed."
Adele put her heels in the gutter but deliberately crossed her hands in her lap instead of bracing them behind her. She took deep breaths and forced herself to look down on Fountain Street. Crews were rolling a float up the palace's entrance drive to the waiting grandstands. It was supposed to be a spherical starship.
"I love standing at the top of an antenna, watching the universe throb," Daniel said softly. "It's like being a part of everything that ever was or ever will be.
"Here," he said. He seemed embarrassed to have been so talkative. He took off his goggles and offered them to Adele. "The sign says this was the first landing on Kostroma, by slowboat. I'd thought Kostroma dated from after sponge-space astrogation."
"Umm," Adele said. She held the goggles to her eyes instead of strapping them on. The image was bright and perfectly clear despite being magnified by something on the order of forty times. A pair of servants carried a banner between them on poles. When the angle was right she could read the legend: CAPTAIN WANG'S COLONY-2706 ANNO HEJIRA.
The servants' skin-tight suits looked like no garb Adele had ever seen before. She supposed it was somebody's idea of what people wore in the days mankind was limited to the Solar System.
Adele returned the goggles and slid her personal data unit from its pocket. She sniffed in amusement at the qualm she'd felt at bringing it out: she was even more afraid of dropping the computer than she was of falling.
Using the wands that she preferred to the virtual keyboard, she linked to the base unit in the library below and went searching. The bright sun made her think she should have worn a hat, but she wasn't sure she owned one that would have stayed on in the breeze here on the tiles.
Martial music began to play, its strains severely attenuated by the time they reached Adele's ears. "The float's in front of the grandstand now," Daniel explained with the goggles over his eyes again. He didn't ask what she was doing. "Eight people have gotten out-they can't have had much more room than they would've in a real starship. Especially a slowboat. One of them's claiming the planet, I gather."
"Just as I thought!" Adele said in triumph. All her fear had vanished since she got to work with the data unit. "The first reference to Captain Wang is in a post-Hiatus history of the Swartzenhild clan. That claims that Adria Swartzenhild was Wang's navigator and responsible for bringing the ship safely to Kostroma when the original calculations would have taken them past the system and into the eternal dark."
"Huh!" Daniel said, turning his head toward her. She supposed the goggles adjusted for nearby objects otherwise he was staring into one of her nasal pores-but it still made him look like a frog. "So that means there was an early colony after all."
"No, it means there wasn't," Adele said in satisfaction. "If the earliest reference is only three hundred years back and in a self-serving source, there's no evidence whatever. All the later references repeat the Swartzenhild account with embellishments and sometimes name changes."
She smiled. "Changes to the name of whoever's telling the story, that is."
A frown furrowed Daniel's forehead as he turned back to the tableau. "Simone Hajas is saving Captain Wang from a mutiny," he reported as figures shifted in front of the grandstand. "Look-"
He raised his goggles to meet Adele's eyes. "So you mean the story couldn't be true because it happened to the person telling it? Her family, I mean."
"No," Adele said. "I mean that if there's no record of the story for sixteen hundred years, and if the person who discovers the information is employed by the Swartzenhilds, who have risen from obscurity to trading wealth in less than a generation-both of which are the case-then the balance of the probabilities are that the story is an invention."
Her smile was cold. A finger-high plant grew from a joint in the roof tiles where windblown dirt had given it lodgment. Adele twisted off the dry head.
"The probability of it being false," she continued, "is about the same that this seed will fall if I throw it over the side."
She leaned over the gutter and dropped the bit of plant. It fluttered away toward the ground.
In sudden embarrassment she added, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't-"
Daniel broke into bellowing laughter. He slapped her on the back and cried, "Fair enough! You won't tell me how to rig a ship for the Matrix and I won't argue with you about history!"
"Well, it's not so much history as information," Adele muttered. "The first question is always whether the person who says something can know the truth. This time the answer was, 'Not really.' "
Daniel passed her the goggles again. Though the image through the electronic amplifier was sharp, Adele couldn't hold it steady enough to be of much use. For politeness's sake she watched the end of the skit before she handed them back.
The actors climbed back into the globular float. It rolled down Fountain Street in a haze of recorded music.
The next event was a group of people in checked robes, led by a lyre-shaped metal standard from which ribbons dangled. The legend stamped on the bars of the lyre couldn't be read from this angle, but they were obviously some guild or other.
"No Leary on record joined the RCN," Daniel said as he watched. "Till me. The Bergens, though, my mother's family-they were spacers as far back as the end of the Hiatus. And never a greater one than my Uncle Stacey, either."
Additional bodies of marchers followed the first. Some of them played musical instruments; all wore finery and carried banners or symbols of their craft. A cylindrical float, colored silver in contrast to the gold of the slowboat, was being wheeled toward the stands where it would be introduced into the line of march.
"My father made Uncle Stacey manager of the repair yards at Bantry when he retired," Daniel said. "Stacey brought some of his retired warrant officers to run the hands-on work and the business side, but he did the testing himself. Every spacer's heard of Commander Stacey Bergen, even the ones who never got out of the Cinnabar system. The yard does three times the business under Uncle Stacey than it had before him."
Adele wondered whether this personable young man had known anyone he could talk to since he joined the navy. There were more ways to lose your family than in the slaughter of a proscription.
The cylindrical "starship" was moving into place before the grandstand. "The Second Landing," Daniel read. "3381 Anno Hejira."
Then he added in the same tone of cool reportage, "Mind you, Father never ceases to say that only his charity saves his wife's brother from begging on the street. There could be some truth to that. Uncle Stacey isn't much of a businessman."
"This is quite real," Adele said, scrolling up her display. "A secondary colonization from Topaz, under the Princess Cecile Alpen-Morshach. And there was a Hajas . . ."
Daniel touched a control on the frame of his goggles. "Emilius Hajas, Commander of the Royal Bodyguard," he said. "Who it appears is personally laying out the site of Kostroma City. How did there chance to be a Hajas in both the first and second colonies, do you suppose?"
"According to the list of crew and colonists," Adele said dryly, "Emilius Hajas was a rigger with a series of disciplinary charges pending. He apparently deserted on Kostroma."
"To the great relief of his watch commander, I shouldn't wonder," Daniel said. "A colony ship must be hell on crew discipline. A training ship's bad enough, full of recruits who don't know one hand from the other."
He raised his goggles again to look at her. "That's all in your little handset?" he said, nodding to the data unit on Adele's lap.
"I'm linked to the library unit," she explained. "And through that to the whole net. There's a transmission lag since signals in both directions have to go through the satellite constellation, but I'm so used to this . . ."
She smiled at the little computer. She knew the expression was warmer than anything living had seen on her face for many years.
" . . . that I almost prefer it to using the big unit directly."
A band of children in Hajas silver-and-violet followed the second float. They were graduated by height. Adele wasn't sure she'd be able to judge how old they were even with the goggles' magnification, but those in the back looked extremely small.
Each child clung to a rope twined with flowers running from front to back of the file. The last few rows were tied to the rope, not just holding it. Stern-faced adult minders in livery marched at the corners of the group, carrying batons.
"You know," said Daniel in a tone of gentle musing, "it's as well that I'm up here and not down on the street. I guess they'll be using those sticks by the end of the procession when the little tykes are tired."
"It's a charity home for orphans," Adele said, reading off her display. They'd been scheduled for earlier in the line of march; she supposed there'd been difficulty getting such small children into position. "I think that's what they are, anyway."