"Flint, Eric - Weber, David - Honorverse SS - From the Highlands" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flewelling Lynn)

From the Highlands
Eric Flint
THE FIRST DAY


Helen

Helen used the effort of digging at the wall to control her terror.
She thought of it as a variation of Master Tye's training: turn
weakness into strength. Fear drove her, but she shaped it to
steady her aching arms instead of letting it loosen her bowels.
Scrape, scrape. She didn't have the strength to make big gouges
in the wall with a pitiful shard of broken rubble. The wall was not
particularly hard, since it was not much more than rubble itself.
But her slender arms and little hands, for all their well-honed
training under Master Tye's regimen, were still those of a girl just
turned fourteen.
So what? She couldn't afford to make much noise, anyway. Now
and then, she could hear the low sound of her captors' voices,
just beyond the heavy door which they had placed across the
entrance to her "cell."
Scrape, scrape. Weakness into strength. The root breaks the
rock. Wind and water triumph over stone.
So she had been trained. By her father, as much as by Master
Tye. Decide what you want, and set to it like running water. Soft,
slight, steady. Unstoppable.
Scrape, scrape. She had no idea how thick the wall was, or even
whether it was a wall at all. For all she knew, Helen might simply
be digging an endless little tunnel through the soil of Terra.
Her abductors had removed the hood after they got her into this
strange and frightening place. She was still somewhere in the
Solarian League's capital city of Chicago, that much she knew.
But she had no idea where, except that she thought it was in the
Old Quarter. Chicago was a gigantic city, and the Old Quarter
was like an ancient Mesopotamian tel. Layer upon layer of half-
rubbled ruins. They had descended deep underground, using
twisted and convoluted passageways that she had not been able
to store in her memory.
Scrape, scrape. Just do it. Running water conquers all.
Eventually.
While she scraped, she thought sometimes of her father, and
sometimes of Master Tye. But, more often, she thought of her
mother. She could not really remember her mother's face, of
course, except from holocubes. Her mother had died when
Helen was only four years old. But she had the memoryЧstill as
vivid as everЧof the day her mother died. Helen had been sitting
on her father's lap, terrified, while her mother led a hopeless
defense of a convoy against an overwhelming force of Havenite
warships. But her mother had saved her, that day, along with her
father.