"Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - Reflex" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

REFLEX by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle


Any damn fool can die for his country. General George S. Patton.

3017 AD
The Union Republic War Cruiser Defiant lay nearly motionless in space a half
billion kilometers from Beta Hortensi. She turned slowly about her long axis.
Stars flowed endlessly upward with the spin of the ship, as if Defiant were falling
through the universe. Captain Herb Colvin saw them as a battle map, infinitely
dangerous. Defiant hung above him in the viewport, its enormous mass ready to fall
on him and crush him, but after years in space he hardly noticed.
Hastily constructed and thrown into space, armed as an interstellar cruiser but
without the bulky Alderson Effect engines which could send her between the stars,
Defiant had been assigned to guard the approaches to New Chicago from raids by the
Empire. The RepublicтАЩs main fleet was on the other side of Beta Hortensi, awaiting an
attack they were sure would come from that quarter. The path Defiant guarded sprang
from a red dwarf star four-tenths of a light year distant. The tramline had never been
plotted. Few within New ChicagoтАЩs government believed the Empire had the
capability to find it, and fewer thought they would try.
Colvin strode across his cabin to the polished steel cupboard. A tall man, nearly
two meters in height, he was thin and wiry, with an aristocratic nose that many
Imperial lords would have envied. A shock of sandy hair never stayed combed, but he
refused to cover it with a uniform cap unless he had to. A fringe of beard was
beginning to take shape on his chin. Colvin had been clean-shaven when Defiant
began its patrol twenty-four weeks ago. He had grown a beard, decided he didnтАЩt like
it and shaved it off, then started another. Now he was glad he hadnтАЩt taken the annual
depilation treatments. Growing a beard was one of the few amusements available to
men on a long and dreary blockade.
He opened the cupboard, detached a glass and bottle from their clamps, and took
them back to his desk. Colvin poured expertly despite the Coriolis effect that could
send carelessly poured liquids sloshing to the carpets. He set the glass down and
turned toward the viewport.
There was nothing to see out there, of course. Even the heart of it all, New
ChicagoтАФUnion! In keeping with the patriotic spirit of the Committee of Public
Safety, New Chicago was now called Union. Captain Herb Colvin had trouble
remembering that, and Political Officer Gerry took enormous pleasure in correcting
him every damned time. тАФUnion was the point of it all, the boredom and the endless
low-level fear; but Union was invisible from here. The sun blocked it even from
telescopes. Even the red dwarf, so close that it had robbed Beta Hortensi of its
cometary halo, showed only as a dim red spark. The first sign of attack would be on
the bridge screens long before his eyes could find the black-on-black point that might
be an Imperial warship.
For six months Defiant had waited, and the question had likewise sat waiting in
the back of ColvinтАЩs head.
Was the Empire coming?

***

The Secession War that ended the first Empire of Man had split into a thousand