"David Weber - Empire of Man 04 - We Few" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

city, or, if they liked nature so much, they could feel free to escape into the jungles of Marduk, teeming
with carnivores who would be more than happy to ingest them.
Prince Roger Ramius Sergei Alexander Chiang MacClintock watched the explosion with a stony
face, then turned to the small group gathered in the ship's control room, and nodded.
"Okay, let's go."
The prince was a shade under two meters tall, slim but muscular, with some of the compact strength
usually associated with professional zero-G ball players. His long blond hair, pulled back in a ponytail,
was almost white from sun bleaching, and his handsome, almost beautiful, classic European face was
heavily tanned. It was also lined and hard, seeming far older than his twenty-two standard years. He had
neither laughed nor smiled in two weeks, and as his long, mobile hand scratched at the neck of the
two-meter black and red lizard standing pony-high by his side, Prince Roger's jade-green eyes were
harder than his face.
There were many reasons for the lines, for the early aging, for the hardness about his eyes and
shoulders. Roger MacClintockтАФMaster Roger, behind his back, or simply The PrinceтАФhad not been so
lined and hard nine months before. When he, his chief of staff and valet, and a company of Marine
bodyguards had been hustled out of Imperial City, thrust into a battered old assault ship, and sent
packing on a totally nonessential political mission, he had taken its as just another sign of his mother's
disapproval of her youngest son. He'd shown none of the diplomatic and bureaucratic expertise of his
older brother, Prince John, the Heir Primus, nor of the military ability of his older sister the admiral,
Princess Alexandra, Heir Secondary. Unlike them, Roger spent his time playing zero-G ball, hunting big
game, and generally being the playboy, and he'd assumed that Mother had simply decided it was time for
him to steady down and begin doing the Heir Tertiary's job.
What he hadn't known at the time, hadn't known until months later, was that he was being hustled out
of town in advance of a firestorm. The Empress had gotten wind, somehow, that the internal enemies of
House MacClintock were preparing to move. He knew that now. What he still didn't know was whether
she'd wanted him out of the way to protect him . . . or to keep the child whose loyalty she distrusted out
of both the battle and temptation's way.
What he did know was that the cabal behind the crisis his mother had foreseen had planned long and
carefully for it. The sabotage of Charles DeGlopper, his transport, had been but the first step, although
neither he nor any of the people responsible for keeping him alive had realized it at the time.
What Roger had realized was that the entire crew of the DeGlopper had sacrificed their lives in
hopeless battle against the Saint sublight cruisers they had discovered in the Marduk System when the
crippled ship finally managed to limp into it. They'd taken those ships on, rather than even considering
surrender, solely to cover Roger's own escape in DeGlopper's assault shuttles, and they'd succeeded.
Roger had always known the Marines assigned to protect him regarded him with the same contempt
as everyone else at Court, nor had DeGlopper's crew had any reason to regard him differently. Yet
they'd died to protect him. They'd given up their lives in exchange for his, and they would not be the last
to do it. As the men and women of Bravo Company, Bronze Battalion, The Empress' Own, had marched
and fought their way across the planet they'd reached against such overwhelming odds, the young prince
had seen far too many of them die. And as they died, the young fop learned, in the hardest possible
school, to defend not simply himself, but the soldiers around him. Soldiers who had become more than
guards, more than family, more than brothers and sisters.
In the eight brutal months it had taken to cross the planet, making alliances, fighting battles, and at
last, capturing the spaceport and the ship aboard which he stood at this very moment, that young fop had
become a man. More than a manтАФa hardened killer. A diplomat trained in a school where diplomacy
and a bead pistol worked hand-in-hand. A leader who could command from the rear, or fight in the line,
and keep his head when all about him was chaos.
But that transformation had not come cheaply. It had cost the lives of over ninety percent of Bravo
Company. It had cost the life of Kostas Matsugae, his valet and the only person who had ever seemed to
give a single good goddamn for Roger MacClintock. Not Prince Roger. Not the Heir Tertiary to the