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

Daniel took off his goggles and put them in his lap. He rubbed his eyes. "Colder than space, charity can be," he said in the same soft voice.
He looked at Adele. "Well, I don't suppose it's the business of a naval officer to tell other people how to live their lives," he said.
"I don't suppose it is," Adele said mildly. She was searching files so that she had a reason to keep her eyes focused in front of her. Any data would do for the purpose.
Daniel sighed and relaxed. "Maybe Admiral Lasowski's right about my temper," he said apologetically. "Sorry."
Adele looked at the mortality statistics for inmates of the Electoral Home for Orphans and Foundlings. The information didn't surprise her-after all, why assume that aspect of Electoral whim would be better organized than the library was? It was amazing, though, that so many of the children were able to walk at all, given the rate at which inmates died after admission to the home.
"Look," Daniel said, smiling but quite clearly not looking at the procession while the orphans were still in sight. "There's parties all over the city tonight. I've made friends with a few of the Kostroman naval officers, a decent enough lot, and I've got an invitation to the Admiral's Ball."
The roof began to tremble at a very low frequency. Adele felt the vibration more as a queasiness than a sound, but the roof tiles clicked together at a gathering rate.
"Ah!" Daniel said. "That'll be the Princess Cecile lifting from the Navy Pool. Don't-"
He handed Adele his goggles again. "Here, it's best to use these if you're going to look straight at it, even this far away. They'll adjust for the glare."
He frowned and added, "I hope they're not going to overfly below three thousand meters."
Adele could hear the sound of a starship's motors through the air now. She held the goggles to her eyes, but it was gentle pressure of Daniel's hand that turned her to look south instead of west toward the Floating Harbor. A ship was rising on a plume of plasma.
"The navy uses a lagoon with a barrage across the mouth," he explained as she watched the vessel rise. It wasn't particularly large. "The navy warehouses are there too; that's where the ball tonight's going to be. Mostly the ships are in storage, but they activated the Princess Cecile for the celebration."
"I see," Adele said as she returned the goggles. The Princess Cecile had leveled out at what seemed to her a reasonable altitude and was cruising north toward the city.
"She's a corvette," Daniel said as he watched the ship. "Quite a nice little vessel, really. Kostroma built, but with most of her electronics bought from Cinnabar and her armament from Pleasaunce."
Plumes of colored smoke streamed from the corvette's outriggers, white on the right and purple from the other. The smoke mixed with the plasma exhaust into glittering, no-colored swirls like mica flakes strewn on mud.
"What I was going to say . . ." Daniel resumed. He offered the goggles; she refused them. "Is that I suppose you've got parties to go to yourself-"
Adele sniffed. He didn't suppose anything of the sort, and he was quite right.
The Princess Cecile began to launch fireworks to either side. Sparks of color purer than anything in nature rained from the airbursts. The boom of the charges was dull and arrived many seconds after the light of the display it ignited.
"Anyway," Daniel said, "if you'd like to see how the navy does it, I'm to bring a guest and-"
He paused in momentary horror. "That is," he resumed with formal caution, "if you'd care to attend the Admiral's Ball as a colleague of mine, Ms. Mundy, I would be very, ah . . ."
Adele chuckled. It wasn't a sound she often made. "I appreciate the offer, Daniel," she said. "But I think . . ."
She in turn paused. What did she think? That shutting herself in her shabby room was a better way to spend the evening?
And there was Markos, the man and his intentions . . . but she really didn't want to think about that.
"I think," she said, "that while I've never been interested in mating rituals in either the abstract or the particular, it might be interesting to attend the ball, yes. As I've found this event-"
She nodded toward the street.
"-interesting as a window on my new environment. Yes, I'll go with you if you'd care to have me."
Daniel grinned in what she judged was both pleasure and relief. "Good, good," he said, bobbing his head as he spoke. "Now, I've got a jitney and there's Hogg to drive. Shall I pick you up at your lodgings at, say, the ninth hour local time?"
His lips pursed in consideration before Adele could speak. "Hogg has the jitney, actually. But he'll drive us."
Adele thought about her apartment and the narrow, trash-strewn street the building stood on. Not that she needed to apologize for them to a lieutenant in debt to his servant, but . . . "No," she said aloud. "Why don't we meet at the back entrance to the palace gardens? At the guardpost."
"My hand on it!" said Daniel Leary.
As they shook, the Princess Cecile loosed another salvo of fireworks. The explosions sounded like a distant battle.

Adele Mundy sat at the library data console. The information she'd accessed shone in holographic letters in the air before her, all the brighter because the sky beyond the windows ranged from deep azure to deep magenta in the northwest. For the moment her eyes were closed.
A cleaning crew worked in the hallway, calling to one another in the high singsong dialect of one of the northern islands. Bottles clinked together under the thrust of brooms. The palace was the site of the Elector's Cotillion, the most prestigious of the scores of Founder's Day events. There was no holiday for the cleaners who had to sweep up the leavings of the crowds who'd been watching the parade from here.
Daniel had gone off to dress. Adele needed to do the same thing very shortly. As for the information on the air-formed display . . .
She'd told Daniel that she preferred her personal unit to the large console. That was true, but in this case she'd deliberately transferred data to the library computer to keep from subconsciously associating the words with her own equipment.
Adele opened her eyes and read the account for the first time in more than a decade. A Terran trade commissioner on Cinnabar at the time of the Three Circles Conspiracy had made a report on the events. The Academic Collections had received it in the normal course of accessions. Adele had stumbled across it by accident.

One of the most touching tragedies was that of a ten-year-old child, Agatha Mundy. She was at the home of a playfellow, a cousin on her mother's side, on the afternoon the proscriptions were announced. Her aunt, the younger sister of Agatha's mother, immediately rushed the child onto the street and told her to run away. The girl's attendant and guards abandoned her, to seek their own safety in flight.
The house from which Agatha was expelled was on the outskirts of Xenos but near a main road. The child appears to have wandered along the road for hours, perhaps as much as a day, before she was picked up by a trucker of bad reputation. This man sold the girl to a tavern and brothel near the main civil spaceport. There she remained for a week.
In misery and desperation the child finally accosted a pair of sergeants in the Land Forces of the Republic who frequented the tavern, explaining who she was. One of the soldiers throttled her and then cut the child's head off with a knife borrowed from the tavern's kitchen. The sergeants turned the head in to the Public Safety Office, claiming the bounty. The Office paid only half the usual amount because the child was well below the minimum age set in the Decree of Proscription.

Adele rubbed her temples, then deliberately overwrote the file so that no one on Kostroma would ever be able to read it again. Not that anyone would care. In all the human universe, Adele Mundy might be the only person to whom those were more than words.
She often told herself that she didn't care. Life would be so much easier if that were true. Caring didn't change the past, nor did it chart a course for the future. Only a fool could think that she understood all the side effects of her actions.
Adele stood and walked to the door. She would attend the Admiral's Ball tonight; and after that, who knew?

Warehouse 17 was one of nearly eighty in the fenced naval compound. The walls were brick with wooden trusses supporting a tile roof. The bunting and strings of colored glowlamps along the walls couldn't hide the big building's origins, but at any rate it was sufficiently large for the crowd of officers and their consorts.
Besides, the acoustics were good. The seven-piece string band playing from a dais opposite the buffet was pleasantly audible without amplifiers, despite conversations and the dancers' feet.
"I think I'll find a vantage point," Adele Mundy said. She bowed to Daniel and moved off toward a corner. He watched her leave with mixed emotions. Part of him felt that he needed to protect the librarian in what passed on Kostroma for a sophisticated social setting.
Another part of him was certain that unsophisticated or not, Adele could take care of herself. Daniel had no evidence to support his belief, but he'd have bet any amount of money that folk who touched her unasked would be lucky to get their hands back.