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

worlds of the Frontier had broken away, signing Travis
Sinclair's Declaration of Reason in conscious, symbolic
mimicry of the signing of a similar Declaration over seven
centuries before.
With worlds to draw on, there were plenty of recruits,
plenty of the raw materials, plenty of the
nanomanufactories needed to transform those raw
materials into warstriders and the other weapons of war.
What the Frontier Confederation needed more than
anything else in the unequal struggle for independence
was ships.
For centuries, Imperial Nihon had maintained the virtual
monopoly on space-based industrial facilities that it had
enjoyed since the early twenty-first century. Like most
high-tech artifacts, the individual pieces of ships -
especially of the starships that allowed travel from world to
world within the Shichiju in something less than centuries -
were grown in zero-G manufactories and assembled in
orbit. Most Confederation worlds maintained their own,
homegrown fleets of intrasystem ships and ascraft, and a
few like New America could even construct the power taps
and K-T drive units necessary for faster-than-light travel.
But Dai Nihon still dominated the godsea passages
between each of the gulf-isolated specks that was an
inhabited world. The Imperial Navy, and in particular the
nine Ryu-class dragonships and their battlefleets, were
simply unbeatable in any stand-up, one-to-one
confrontation. The Frontier Confederation needed more
and better starships. To get them, they needed to gamble
the handful of FTL-capable ships they already had.
Eagle was the Confederation flagship, formerly the
Imperial destroyer Tokitukaze, captured by Dev during the
Battle of Eridu and fresh now from repairs at New
America's orbital yards. Spread out behind her were three
converted commercial vessels, the hydrogen tanker
Tarazed and the Commerce-class freighters Mirach and
Vindemiatrix. They were fifth-generation K-T drive ships,
three of the very few such vessels in New America's
inventory, and all had been radically modified in the
Newamie yards during the past six busy months. The
freighters had been converted to lightly armed transports,
each massing just over 25,000 tons, each carrying four
air-space shuttles, five hundred armored troops, and a
company of warstriders.
Tarazed's conversion had been more radical. Originally
designed to transport cryo-H, the tanker was huge, five
enormous spheres strung like beads on a wire between a
tiny bridge-hab module and the boxlike bulk of her
mammoth drive and power section. Her lead containment
sphere had been gutted of cryogenic gear and field