"Mary Ann Steele - Warrior Woman - The Forge of a Legend" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Mary Ann)

The selfless patriot reliving the past thrilled anew to the call to arms
issued by Sigurd's daughter. Pride surged as Theo recalled how swiftly Signe's
impassioned appeal rallied the nucleus of a force of fighters around a
charismatic athlete who even then possessed amazing skill with a sword:
proficiency rare among the Gaean rebels. Admiration rose uppermost as he
visualized the heroic struggle she mounted so as to overcome an all but
insuperable disadvantage: the lack of skill at swordsmanship almost
universally exhibited by a populace imbued with pacifistic ideals.

We faced enemies who grew up employing the one weapon that Columbian custom
traditionally allowed any citizen to wield for the purpose of settling
personal quarrels in legally sanctioned duels, the veteran recollected
somberly. That initial deficiency cost us heavily in lives.
His eyes remote, the former professor of history reviewed the factors
precipitating the violent conflict now entering a new phase. >From the moment
Johann made his landfall in this star-system one hundred fifty-one Earthyears
ago, the Columbian majority among his settlers proved themselves treacherous
allies to the Gaean contingent, Theo ruminated sadly. You'd think all factions
of the Triple Alliance would have learned something from the wars that
devastated Earth's colonies of spacefaring settlers, but no such enlightenment
occurred.

Johann--warrior, pirate, visionary, colony-founder--forged that agreement by
the sheer force of his personality. His mercenary spacer-fighters married the
sisters and daughters of a creative elite: colonial scientists and engineers
far too ruggedly individualistic to feel comfortable rejoining the packed
horde of easily led, mindlessly gregarious, bureaucratically controlled
humanity indigenous to Earth. Those two groups of hardy adventurers--ancestors
of the present-day Columbians--allied themselves with the first Gaeans:
clannish pacifists plentifully endowed with the courage required to join
Johann in a venture of incalculable risk.

Three great ships, tethered together, utilized some awesome, hitherto untested
power external to themselves, which flung them into a near-light-speed journey
that perhaps took them temporarily outside our universe. That time-dilated
Jump landed our forebears in the environs of a giant gaseous planet of a star
in the same spectral class as Sol--a star located an unimaginable distance
across the galaxy from the birthplace they knew they'd left forever.

You'd think in their sobering, irreversible isolation from the civilization
that spawned them, those refugees from a system devastated by two space wars
would have gotten along. But the Columbians never changed that mercenary
fighter's mentality, even if Johann rose above it, nor did the Gaeans ever
lose their stubborn belief that safety lay not in armament, but in insularity.
When the Columbians sought to appropriate Johann's Flagship, he vanished in
his fabulous warship. Our ancestors left shortly afterward: lifted the Gaea
one last time, and made the transit to an aggregation of dense metallic rocks
clustered about the second of two stable libration points in Dyson's orbit
around the gas giant.