"David Weber - Fifth Imperium 02 - The Armageddon Inheritance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

enhance one of our top people, we lose him for that long."

Tell me about it," Hatcher said sourly. "Do you realizeтАФwell, of course you do. But it's sort of
embarrassing for the brass to be such wimps compared to their personnel. Remember my aide, Allen
Germaine?" Horus nodded. "I dropped by the Walter Reed enhancement center to see him yesterday.
There he was, happily tying knots in quarter-inch steel rods for practice, and there I sat in my
middle-aged body, feeling incredibly flabby. I used to think I was pretty fit for my age, too, damn it! And
he'll be back in the office in another few weeks. ThatтАЩs going to be even more depressing."

"I know." Horus's eyes twinkled "But you're just going to have to put up with it I can't spare any of my
chiefs of staff for enhancement until you get this show firmly on the road."

"Now there's an efficiency motivator!"

"Isn't it just?" Horus murmured wickedly. "And speaking of getting things on the road how do you feel
about the defensive installations I've proposed?"

"From what I understand of the technology, it looks pretty good, but I'd feel better If we had more depth
to our orbital defenses. I've been reading over the operational data Dahak downloadedтАФand thatтАЩs
another thing. I want a neural link of my ownтАФand I'm not happy about how much the Achuultani seem
to like kinetic weapons. Can we really stop something the size of, say, Ceres, if they put shields on it
before they throw it at us?"

"Geb says so, but it could take a lot of warheads. ThatтАЩs why we need so many launchers."

"Fine, but if they settle in for a methodical attack, theyтАЩll start by picking off our peripheral weapons first.
ThatтАЩs classic siege strategy with any weaponry, and it's also why I want more depth, to allow for
attrition of the orbital forts."

"Agreed. But we have to put the inner defenses into position first, which is why I'm sweating the PDC
construction rates. They're whatтАЩs going to produce the planetary shield, and we need their missile
batteries just as badly. Not even Imperial energy weapons can punch through atmosphere very efficiently,
and when they do, they play merry hell with little things like jet streams and the ozone layer. ThatтАЩs one
reason itтАЩs easier to defend nice, airless moons and asteroids."

"Urn-hum." Hatcher plucked at his tip. I'm afraid I've been too buried in troop movements and command
structures to spend as much time as I'd like boning up on hardware. VassilyтАЩs our nuts-and-bolts man.
But am I correct in assuming your problems are in the hyper launchers?"

"Right the first time. Since we canтАЩt rely on beams, we need missiles, but missiles have problems of their
own. As Colin is overly fond of pointing out, there are always tradeoffs!.

"Sublight missiles can be fired from anywhere, but they're vulnerable to interception, especially over
interplanetary ranges. Hyper missiles can't be intercepted, but they can't be bunched from atmosphere,
either. Even air has mass, and the exact mass a hyper missile takes into hyper with it is critical to where it
reenters normal space.

That's why warships preposition their hyper missiles just inside their shields before they launch."

Hatcher leaned forward, listening carefully. Horus had been a missile specialist before the mutiny;