"S. M. Stirling - Conquistador" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

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Conquistador by S. M.
Stirling
Acknowledgments
To Jerry Pournelle, for advice and assistance; Giovanni Spinella and
Mario Panzanelli, for help with Sicilian dialect; Steve Brady, for Afrikaans;
Greg Saunders, for local knowledge of LA; to the Critical Mass, for
continuing massively helpful criticism; and any others on the list.

All faults, errors, infelicities and lapses are my own.

And a special acknowledgment to the author of Niven's Law:

"There is a technical, literary term for those who mistake the opinions
and beliefs of characters in a novel for those of the author.

"The term is 'idiot.'"


PROLOGUE

Oakland, California
April 17, 1946
FirstSide/New Virginia

John Rolfe had rented the house for seventy-five a month, which
sounded extortionate but was something close to reasonable, given the
way costs had gone crazy in the Bay Area since Pearl Harbor. The landlord
was willing because Rolfe promised to do the badly needed repairs
himself, and because he had a soft spot for soldiersтАФhis son had died on
Okinawa, where Rolfe had taken three rounds from a Nambu machine gun
and gotten a Silver Star, a medical discharge and months on his back in a
military hospital. The house was a solid three-bedroom piece of
Victoriana, a little shabby and run-down like the area, shingle and
dormers; what they called Carpenter Gothic hereabouts, but at least it had
a basement. The previous owners had been Japanese-American, sent off to
the relocation camps in 1942; then it had been rented out to workers in
the shipyards to the north, part of the great wartime inrush, and they'd
made a mess of it.

A whole house to himself was an indulgence anyway, since he was
unmarried, but he'd spent too much of the last four years on troopships
and in crowded bases and bivouacs, plus painful months in the crowded