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

velocity of just over twenty thousand kilometers per hour.

Dahak had stepped his transit shafts' speed down out of deference to his captain and Terra-born crew,
though Colin knew the computer truly didn't comprehend why they felt such terror. It was bad enough
aboard the star-ship's sublight parasites, yet the biggest of those warships massed scarcely eighty
thousand tons. In something that tiny, there was barely time to feel afraid before the journey was over,
but even at this speed it would take almost ten minutes to cross Dahak's titanic hull, and the lack of any
subjective sense of movement made it almost worse.

Yet the captain's quarters were scarcely a hundred kilometers from Command OneтАФa mere nothing
aboard DahakтАФand the entire journey took only eighteen seconds. Which was no more than seventeen
seconds too long, Colin reflected as he came to a sudden hah. He stepped shakily into a carpeted
corridor, glad none of his crew were present to note the slight give in his knees as he approached
Command One's massive hatch.

The three-headed dragon of Dahak's has relief crest looked back from it across the starburst cradled in
its raised forepaws. Its eyes transfixed him for a moment, fierce with the fidelity which had outlasted
millennia, and then the hatchтАФfifteen centimeters of Imperial battle steel duckтАФslid open, and another
dozen hatches opened and closed in succession as he passed through them to Command One's vast, dim
sphere.

The command consoles seemed to float in interstellar space, surrounded by the breathtaking perfection
of Dahak's holographic projections. The nearest stars moved visibly, but the artificiality of the projection
was all too apparent if one thought about it. Dahak was tearing through space under maximum
Enchanach Drive; at seven hundred and twenty times light-speed, direct observation of the cosmos
would have been distorted, to say the very least.

"The Captain is on the bridge," Dahak intoned, and Colin winced. He was going to have to do something
about this mania Dahak had developed for protecting his commander's precious dignity!

The half-dozen members of Colin's skeleton bridge watch, Imperials all, began to stand, but he waved
them back and crossed to the captain's console. Trackless stars drifted beneath his boots, and Fleet
Commander Tarn-man, his Tactical officer and third in command, rose from the couch before it

"Captain,'' he said as formally as Dahak, and Colin gave up for the moment.

I have the con, Commander." He slipped into the vacated couch, and it squirmed under him as it adjusted
to the contours of his body. There was no need for Tamman to give him a status report; his own neural
feed to the console was already doing that.

He watched the tactical officer retire to his own station with a small, fond smile. Tamman was Jiltanith's
contemporary, one of the fourteen Imperial "children" from Nergals crew to survive the desperate assault
on Anu's enclave. All of them had joined Colin in Dahak, and he was damned thankful they had. Unlike
his Terra-born, they could tie directly into their computers and run them the way the Imperium had
intended, providing a small, reliable core of enhanced officers to ride herd on the hundred pardoned
mutineers who formed the hub of his current crew. In time, Dahak would enhance and educate his
Terra-born to the same standard, but with a complement of over a hundred thousand, it was going to
take even his facilities a while to finish the task.

Colin MacIntyre reclined in his comfortable command couch, and his small smile faded as he watched the