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

The anger in Tsien's hooded gaze faded, and he nodded slowly.

"Very well, General Hatcher, I am empowered to accept your offer, and I will do so. I caution you that I
do not agree without reservations, and that it will be difficult to convince many of my own officers to
accept my decision. It goes against the grain to surrender all we have fought for, whether it is to Western
powers or to powers from beyond the stars, yet you are at least partly correct The world we have
known has ended. We will join your efforts to save this planet and build anew. Not without doubts and
not without suspicionтАФyou would not believe otherwise, unless you were foolsтАФbut because we must
.Yet remember this: more than half this world's population is Asian, gentlemen."

"We understand, Marshal," Hatcher said softly.

"I believe you do, Comrade General," Tsien said with the first, faint ghost of a smile. "I believe you do."

Life Councilor Geb brushed stone dust from his thick, white hair as yet another explosive charge
bellowed behind him. It was a futile gesture. The air was thin, but the damnable dust made it seem a lot
thicker, and his scalp was coated in fresh grit almost before he lowered his hand

He watched another of the sublight parasites Dahak had left for Earth's defenseтАФthe destroyer Ardat,
he thoughtтАФhover above the seething dust, her eight-thousand-ton hull dwarfed by the gaping hole which
would, when finished, contain control systems, magazines, shield generators, and all the other complex
support systems. Her tractors plucked up multi-ton slabs of a mountain's bones, and then the ship lifted
away into the west, bearing yet another load of refuse to a watery grave in the Pacific. Even before
Ardat was out of sight, the Terra-born work crews swarmed over the newly-exposed surface of the
excavation in their breath masks, drills screaming as they prepared the next series of charges.

Geb viewed the activity with mixed pride and distaste. This absolutely flat surface of raw stone had once
been the top of Ecuador's Mount Chimborazo, but that was before its selection to house Planetary
Defense Center Escorpion had sealed the mountain's fate. The sublight battleships Shirhan and Escal
arrived two days later, and while Escal hovered over the towering peak, Shirhan activated her main
energy batteries and slabbed off the top three hundred meters of earth and stone. Escal caught the
megaton chunks of wreckage in her tractors while Shirhan worked, Ming them for her pressers to toss
out of the way into the ocean. It had taken the two battleships a total of twenty-three minutes to produce
a level stone mesa just under six thousand meters high, and then they'd departed to mutilate the next
mountain on their list.

The construction crews had moved in in their wake, and they had labored mightily ever since. Imperial
technology had held the ecological effects of their labors to a minimum impossible for purely Terran
resources, but Geb had seen Chimborazo before his henchmen arrived. The esthetic desecration of their
labors revolted him; what they had accomplished produced his pride.

PDC Escorpion, one of forty-six such bases going up across the surface of the planet, each a project
gargantuan enough to daunt the Pharaohs, and each with a completion deadline of exactly eighteen
months. It was an impossible taskтАж and they were doing it anyway.
He stepped aside as the whine of a gravitonic drive approached from one side. The stocky, olive-brown
Imperial at the power bore's controls nodded to him, but despite his rank, he was only one more
rubber-necker in her way, and he backed further as she positioned her tremendous machine. She
checked the coordinates in her inertial guidance systems against the engineers' plat of the base to be with
care, and an eye-searing dazzle flickered as she powered up the cutting head and brought it to bear.