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

And with it, the drive worked its sorcery and created the perfectly opposed, converging gravity masses
which forced Dahak out of normal space in a series of instantaneous transpositions. It took a measurable
length of time to build those masses between transpositions, but that interval was perceptible only to one
such as Dahak. A tiny, imperfect flaw the time stream of the cosmos never noticed.

Which was as well. Should Dahak dwell in normal space any longer than that, catastrophe would be the
lot of any star system he crossed As those fields converged upon his hull, he became ever so briefly more
massive than the most massive star. Which was why ships of his ilk did not use supralight speed within a
system, for the initial activation and final deactivation of the Enchanach Drive took much longer, a time
measured in microseconds, not femtoseconds. Anu had induced a drive failure to divert the starship from
to original mission for "emergency repairs " anda tiny error in Dahak's crippled return to sublight speeds
explained the irregularity of Pluto's orbit which had puzzled astronomers for so long. Had it occurred
deep enough in Sols gravity well, the star might well have gone nova.

Chernikov plugged his neural feed back into the engineering subsection of Dahak's computer net, and the
computers answered him with a joyousness he was still getting used to. It was odd how alive, how
aware, those electronic brains seemed and Baltan, his ex-mutineer assistant, insisted they had been far
less so before the mutiny.

Chernikov believed him, and he believed he understood the happiness which suffused the computer net.
Dahak had a crew once moreтАФunderstrength, perhaps, by Imperial standards, but a crewтАФand that
was as it should be. Not just because he had been lonely, but because he needed them to provide that
critical element in any warship: redundancy. It was dangerous for so powerful a unit to be utterly
dependent upon its central computer, especially when battle damage might cut Comp Cent off from
essential components of its tremendous hull.

So it was good that men had returned to Dahak at last. Especially now, when the very survival of their
species depended upon him.

"Attention on deck," Dahak intoned as Colin entered the conference room, and he winced almost
imperceptibly as his command team rose with punctilious formality. He smoothed his expression and
crossed impassively to the head of the crystalline conference table, making yet another mental note to
have a heart-to-diode talk with the computer.

Dozens of faces looked back at him from around the table, but at least he'd gotten used to facing so
many eyes. Dahak was technically a single ship, but one with a full-strength crew a quarter-million
strong, a normal sublight parasite strength of two hundred warships, and the firepower to shatter planets.
His commander might be called a captain, yet for all intents and purposes he was an admiral, charged
with the direction of more destructiveness than Terra's humanity had ever dreamed was possible, and the
size of Coin's staff reflected that.

There were a lot of "Fleet Captains" on it, though DahakтАЩs new protocol demanded that they be
addressed in Colin's presence either as "Commander" or simply by the department they headed, since he
was the only "Senior Fleet Captain" and there could be but one captain aboard a warship. The Imperium
had used any officer's full rank and branch, which Colin and his Terra-born found too cumbersome, but
Dahak had obstinately resisted Colin's suggestion that he might be called "Commodore" to ease the
problem.

Colin let his eyes sweep over them as he sat and they followed suit Jiltanith was at his right, as befitted his
second-in-command and the officer charged with the organization and day-to-day management of