"David Feintuch - Seafort 6 - Patriarch's Hope" - читать интересную книгу автора (Feintuch David)

first command, UNS Hibernia, not the vast and expensive behemoth
we'd constructed.

I grimaced past my wife, Arlene, to my old friend Admiral Jeff
Thorne, with whom I'd shared my misgivings.

Yes, Galactic, along with the nearly completed Olympiad and men1
two sister ships on the drawing boards, would help seed new
colonies, but home system had been establishing colonies for
nearly two centuries, and the existing colonies needed servicing
too. I doubted it would prove efficient to send a huge vessel such
as Galactic to supply Derek Carr's home colony of Hope Nation.

I glanced at the huge holoscreen, and the magnificent vessel that
dominated its view. Lights blazing, she floated high above the
planet, off Earthport Orbiting Station, at whose Naval wing she'd
been built.

I shook my head. After the fiasco with UNS Wellington many years
past, there was no thought of assembling a throng of dignitaries
on ship for her dedication. We'd been lucky to escape with our
lives that day, after the fish attacked. The aliens were gone now,
victims of the caterwaul stations I'd devised. From time to time,
in the dark nights when Lord God reproached me, I wondered whether
to add genocide to the roll of my sins.

"Could even SecGen Seafort have imagined just twelve years ago, as
he began his second administration, when the world was reeling
from the Transpop Rebellion and not yet recovered from the attacks
of the dread fish mat he did so much to abateтАФ"

My bream came in a hiss. Arlene's bony fingers squeezed my right
elbow in warning.



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PART I

I scowled at her. 'The damned sycophant! Did you hear whatтАФ"

My wife leaned close, the ghost of a smile smoothing the wrinkles
that caressed her still-bright blue eyes. "Cover your lips, Nick.
They'll read you."

"By Lord God, let them. IтАФ" Common sense finally intruded. I
subsided, seething.

To my left, a cough that might have been a chuckle. I shot Derek
Carr a steely gaze that would have withered him as a Naval