"John Ringo - Council War 3 - Against the Tide" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ringo John)

control. And that had taken a long time to . . . improve.
Megan had not been a virgin when she was brought to Paul's harem but the subsequent rapes, and
there was no other term, were not pleasant. But, over time, she had grown not only to accept them
philosophically, but even to fall in love with her captor, horrible as that made her feel.
Paul could be a very charming man and he was the only source of news of the outside available to
them. Once Megan had, slowly, gotten over her initial revulsion she had grown, however much she hated
it, to first liking Paul and then, strangely, haltingly, loving him. She was a strong-willed young lady,
educated beyond ninety percent of her generation. She was the daughter of one of the few remaining
police in the pre-Fall period. Under her father's pressure, and later her own, she had used advanced
technology training methods to become more educated than most human beings in history. She was an
expert forensic chemist, was highly trained in self-defense, spoke three dead languages, could
cook-another almost lost art-and could do calculus in her head.
Being a harem girl had not been on her list of avocations. So it nearly drove her insane that she was
"falling" for her captor.
Eventually Paul, who had done research before setting up what he considered nothing more than a
"breeding pool," had explained that her reaction was anticipated. Captives who depended for their
survival purely on the will of captors, who kept close and intimate contact, tended to bond to them. Not
all; there was one girl, Amber, who had fought the captivity until she was eventually brain drained and
left as a willing semivegetable to Paul's desires. But Megan, like most of the rest of the "girls" had come
to know Paul, to bond to him and through that bonding to love him.
But that did not mean she wasn't going to kill him.
As soon as she figured out how to do it and survive.
What bothered her about the situation, other than being stuck in a harem, was that she now knew
more of the inner workings of the New Destiny faction than anyone outside of it. She knew their
weaknesses, knew their strengths, which were many. She longed, dreamed, of getting the information
out to the Freedom Coalition. But no matter how she pondered the problem, she couldn't figure out a
way to pass on the intelligence and survive. Among other things Paul had let slip in their many
conversations was that he had a source very close to the Freedom Council. And escaping with the
information would be difficult.
The girls were kept in close confinement, a large compartment in a castle that had been converted to
living quarters. There were only two entrances, both blocked by high-technology proscriptions. The
walls were stone, which she could deal with, the same way she intended to "deal" with Paul when the
time came. But even if the girls somehow made their way past those defenses they were surrounded by
the guards of New Destiny, both Paul's special guards, all of them highly trained fighters who were
bound to him by Net-imposed loyalty proscriptions, and the Changed legions that made up the bulk of
New Destiny's army.
She had only one idea and it was a long-shot. The council members were also called Key-holders
because the physical token of their position was a titanium strip. The protocols associated with transfer
of "ownership" of the keys were ancient and even baroque. A council member could not "lose" a key; if
they absentmindedly left it somewhere the AI that ran the Net, Mother, would simply port it to their
location. Paul had told her one time of his early days as a council member when Mother, apparently in
exasperation, had ported it One More Time and molecularly glued it to his forehead so he couldn't
remove it without a majority vote of the Council. It had taken him a week to build up the votes, over the
chuckles, and she sometimes wondered if the compromises over that had led, inexorably, to the present
war.
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But Keys could be transferred. They could be transferred voluntarily, say if a council member
wanted to retire. . . . But if a council member died it was "finders keepers." Minjie Jiaqi, who had been