"William H. Keith Jr. - Warstrider 03 - Jackers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Keith jr William H)

calculated one, deliberately staged for his benefit;
Munimori was telling him in a manner much more direct
and meaningful than mere words, that he, Munimori, was
a man of singular power, one who could deliver honor and
great reward with one hand, pain and disgrace with the
other. The hostess knelt before him, beating his cha to
near-froth with a whisk before bowing and offering him the
porcelain cup. Bowing, he received it, but when he lifted
the bitter green liquid to his lips he could scarcely taste it.
As a good officer, Kawashima had been aware of the
talk spreading through the fleet, talk that had forecast the
first order he'd received, that soon only those native to Dai
Nihon could serve as fleet officers. There were rumors of
worse to come already circulating, rumors to the effect that
before long only native-born Nihonjin would be allowed to
serve in high military or government posts. Those rumors
had already caused minor riots and popular
demonstrations in Madras, Indonesia, and Anchorage.
After all, to be accorded the privilege of Imperial
citizenship without the attendant rights and status made
the whole concept of Japanese citizenship rather
pointless.
For centuries, Nihon had led softly, exercising her
control over Earth and her offworld colonies through the
instrumentality of the Hegemony, granting her subjects at
least the illusion of sovereignty. Now, it seemed, the cloak
was being thrown back, and naked force would be the
order of the day. Could Nihon rule all of the human
diaspora alone? And what of the nonhumans discovered
so far, the Xenophobes and DalRiss? If the ways and
thoughts of human gaijin were strange sometimes, what of
those beings, far stranger still?
Kawashima was not confident of the answers to those
questions and feared that Munimori and those in his clique
were moving too far, too fast, in purging the Empire of
gaijin influence.
He wondered about the civil war that seemed inevitable
now, as Empire and Hegemony squared off against
Confederation. The rebels had little in the way of naval
power, but they were men and women drawn from the
Frontier, the sixty-some worlds beyond the long-settled
Sekaino Shin, the Core Worlds that included Earth. That
meant that they were resourceful and that they were
united by a burning anger at the clumsy and wasteful
policies of a distant and unsympathetic government.
Hannichi, they were called, disparagingly, anti-Japanese,
as though the word were a synonym for "crazy." But
Kawashima had witnessed hannichi sentiments firsthand
only seven years earlier, during the Metrochicagan Riots. If
the Frontier worlds fought as fiercely for their