"SD Gottesman - Firepower" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gotlieb Phyllis)

his sardonic recital of rules. The wing commander detested the well-set-up
officers and gentlemen who would not and could not move until he had charted the
course. The wing commander had a healthy contempt for any and all formality and
routine, with which the naval service was weighed down as with tons of lead. But
the wing commander was, first, last and always, of that unalterable cast of mind
which makes the superb, chilled-steel military spy.
IN ALL THE RECORDS of the All Earth Union and Colonies navy, there had probably
been no such man as Bartok. Back to the days of the Herkimer scandal there had
been a succession of brilliantly proved men in his office, but for
resourcefulness and the spy's temperament he had had no equal.
He would have gone far in the old days; further than any intelligence man now
could. Many years ago, when Earth had only a few hundred colonial planets, the
news suddenly broke that there was a virtual' dictatorship over the navy by the
Intelligence Wing. Herkimer, since painted as a scoundrel of the deepest dye,
had been merely an exceptionally enthusiastic officer.
The course his enthusiasm ran included incidentally the elimination of much red
tape in the form of unfriendly fleet officers; that he regretted as unfortunate
and even tragic. But his mission of expanding Earth's culture and civilization
to the stars would not brook interference. Classic scholars could scarcely avoid
a comparison With the Roman emperor Trajan, who pushed the bounds of the Empire
to the absolute limits of the Western world, and created a situation which
hastened the fall of Rome by centuries.
Since the Herkimer affair they had been very careful with the Intelligence Wing.
Once it was almost abolished for good; a few years of operation of the fleet
practically blind, with no ground laid for them or information of enemy
movements proved that to be impractical. But they did what they could to keep
the spies within bounds. It was an actually heartbreaking situation to the
executives of the Wing. But you can't keep the voyeur instinct down; that was
what they were chosen for and that was how they operated.
Take this affair on Magdeburg's 83. It was an insignificant outer planet very
far away from New Metropole. Yet the filtering of rumors brought it into the
brilliant limelight of the Wing. The body of the fleet could not move less than
a mile-long battle-wagon at one time; the Wing--personified by Commander Bartok
-- dispatched tiny, trim Babe MacNeice. She returned with the information that a
hitherto trusted colonial officer had decided to play Napoleon and was secretly
fortifying the planet.
In the last analysis, lives were saved. The single cruiser could send a landing
party and take the trusted colonial officer back to Earth for trial; surely a
preferable alternative to a minor war with the propaganda inflamed ophidians
that were native to the planet.
Wing executives did not speak--In private--of their love for the body of the
fleet. They held to the stubborn conviction that there was nothing dumber than a
flag-ship commander, nothing less beautiful than a flag-ship.
CHAPTER II
AT ABOUT that time, things were popping on the Lineship Stupendous, two million
miles off the orbit of Venus. On it was jammed the entire Headquarters Wing of
the All Earth and Colonies navy. In the very heart of the ship, inside almost a
cubic mile of defensive and offensive power, was Wing Commander Fitzjarnes, by
virtue of his command Admiral of the Fleet.
"Not a murmur," he said to his confidential secretary, a man named Voss. "Not a