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

Dahak's operation. Hector MacMahan sat at his left, as impeccable in the space-black of the Imperial
Marines as he had ever been in the uniform of the United States. Beyond them, rows of officers, each
department head flanked by his or her senior assistants, ran down the sides of the table to meet at its
foot, where he faced Vlad Chernikov, the man who had inherited the shipboard authority which had once
been Anu's.

Thank you all for coming," Colin said "As you know, we'll be leaving supralight to approach the Sheskar
System in approximately twenty-one hours. With luck, that means we'll soon reestablish contact with the
Imperium, but we can't count on that. We're going into a totally unknown situation, and I want final
readiness estimates from all of my senior department headsтАФand for all of you to hear themтАФbefore we
do."

Heads nodded, and he turned to Jiltanith.

"Would you care to begin with a general overview, XO?" he asked.

"Certes, Captain," Jiltanith said, and turned confident eyes to her fellows. "Our Dahak hath been a
teacher most astuteтАФaye, and a taskmaster of the sternest!" That won a mutter of laughter, for Dahak
had driven his new crew so hard ten percent of even his capacity had been committed full-time to their
training and neural-feed education. "While'tis true I would be better pleased with some small time more of
practice, yet have our folk learned their duties well, and I say with confidence our officers and crew will
do all mortal man may do if called."

Thank you," Colin said. It was scarcely a detailed report, but he hadn't asked for that, and he turned to
Hector MacMahan.

"Ground Forces?"

The ground forces are better organized than we could reasonably expect," the hawk-faced Marine
replied "if not yet quite as well as I'd like.

"We have four separate nationalities in our major formations, and we'll need a few more months to really
shake down property. For the moment, we've adopted Imperial organization and ranks but confined
them to our original unit structures. Our USFC and SAS people are our recon/special forces component;
the Second Marines have been designated as our assault component; the German First Armored will
operate our ground combat vehicles; and the Sendai Division and the Nineteenth Guards Parachute
Division are our main ground force.

There's been a bit of rivalry over who got the choicest assignment, but it hasn't gotten physicalтАжnot very
often, anyway." He shrugged. These are all elite formations, and until we can integrate them fully, a
continued sense of identity is inevitable, but they've settled in and mastered their new weapons quite well.
I'm confident we can handle anything we have to handle."

Thank you," Colin said again. He turned to General Georgi Treshnikov, late of the Russian Air Force and
now commander of the three hundred Imperial fighters Dahak had retained for self-defense. "Parasite
Command?"

"As Hector, we are ready," Treshnikov said. "We have even more nationalities, but less difficulty in
integration, for we did not embark complete national formations to crew our fighters."