"Jason M. Hardy - BattleTech - MechWarrior - Dark Age 13 - The Scorpion Jar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hardin Clement)

The suite of rooms belonging to Paladin Victor Steiner-Davion appeared, from the outside, to be no
different from the rest. Only in the office was there lightтАФand that merely the glow from a single data
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screen. All the curtains were tightly drawn; no one outside would know that the Paladin was awake and
at his desk.

YouтАЩd think that at my age I wouldnтАЩt need to hide in the dark and work in secret, Victor thought to
himself. He gave a tired, quiet laugh. At my age, I shouldnтАЩt have to do this kind of work any longer,
period.

We believed weтАЩd taken care of all these problems, he thought. We told ourselves that weтАЩd left them
behind along with everything else from the bad old daysтАФthe family ties and alliances that we set aside,
the BattleMechs that we gave up and turned in for scrapтАФbecause Devlin StoneтАЩs vision of a new order
was going to make all of our fears and precautions obsolete. Maybe we should have known better. The
darker aspects of human nature do not simply disappear because some of the tools are taken away.
Power will always be contested. In so much you were wrong, Kattie, dear sister, but about this aspect of
human nature you may just have been right.

Yet the dream had become real; for a few brief decades it had worked. Until the day Devlin Stone made
the mistake of thinking that he could step away from his creation and let it run without him.

Was the dream flawed, then, from its very inception? Surely The Republic of the Sphere ought to be
able to continue without the charismatic presence of its founder. What did it sayтАФabout Devlin Stone,
about The Republic, and about those who had given their lives and their loyalty to bothтАФthat it might
not?

I have to believe, Victor thought, that we did not choose wrongly, and did not fight in vain.

His data screen pinged, distracting him from his reverie to announce a file arriving. He checked the
address from which the file had been sent, and smiled. The senderтАЩs true nameтАФwhich appeared
nowhere in the documentтАФwould have shocked respectable people and would have shocked The
RepublicтАЩs intelligence services even more had they known that Victor Steiner-Davion was in
correspondence with its owner.

But Victor had lived for a long time. He had been a MechWarrior during the turbulent, bloody years
before the founding of The Republic. In his youth, and even in his middle age, heтАЩd associated with any
number of people whose names and dossiers would have made law enforcement and intelligence services
distinctly nervous. And quite a few of those people still owed him favors.

The information contained in this particular file had been bought with the price of several of those favors.
But Victor considered the favors well spent. At his age, he wasnтАЩt likely to find another reason to need
them, and the information was good to have. The work he was doing now was like building a mosaic. He
had in his possession a great number of small pieces, each one individually nothingтАФbut when put
together in precisely the right fashion, they would make the picture plain.

Collecting all the tiles for the mosaic was the easy part, he reflected, at least if you happened to be him.