"David Weber - Honor 01 - On Baslisk Station" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

"Maybe we have," Parnell said, "but there's an answer to that." Eyes turned to
him, and he shrugged. "Knock them off now. If we take out the remaining
military powers on our frontiers, we can probably cut back to something more
like a peace-keeping posture of our own."
"Jesus, Admiral!" Bergren snorted. "First you tell us we can't hold what we've
got without spending ourselves into exhaustion, and now you want to kick off a
whole new series of wars? Talk about the mysteries of the military mind-!"
"Hold on a minute, Ron," Harris murmured. He cocked his head at the admiral.
"Could you pull it off, Amos?"
"I believe so," Parnell replied more cautiously. "The problem would be
timing." He touched a button and a holo map glowed to life above the table.
The swollen sphere of the People's Republic crowded its northeastern quadrant,
and he gestured at a rash of amber and red star systems to the south and west.
"There are no multi-system powers closer than the Anderman Empire," he pointed
out. "Most of the single-system governments are strictly small change; we
could blow out any one of them with a single task force, despite their
armament programs. What makes them dangerous is the probability that they'll
get organized as a unit if we give them time."
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Harris nodded thoughtfully, but reached out and touched one of the beads of
light that glowed a dangerous blood-red. "And Manticore?" he asked.
"That's the joker in the deck," Parnell agreed. "They're big enough to give us
a fight, assuming they've got the guts for it."
"So why not avoid them, or at least leave them for last?" Bergren asked.
"Their domestic parties are badly divided over what to do about us-couldn't we
chop up the other small fry first?"
"We'd be in worse shape if we did," Frankel objected. He touched a button of
his own, and two-thirds of the amber lights on Parnell's map turned a sickly
gray-green. "Each of those systems is almost as far in the hole economically
as we are," he pointed out. "They'll actually cost us money to take over, and
the others are barely break-even propositions. The systems we really need are
further south, down towards the Erewhon Junction, or over in the Silesian
Confederacy to the west."
"Then why not grab them straight off?" Harris asked.
"Because Erewhon has League membership, Mr. President," Dumarest replied, "and
going south might convince the League we're threatening its territory. That
could be, ah, a bad idea." Heads nodded around the table. The Solarian League
had the wealthiest, most powerful economy in the known galaxy, but its foreign
and military policies were the product of so many compromises that they
virtually did not exist, and no one in this room wanted to irritate the
sleeping giant into evolving ones that did.
"So we can't go south," Dumarest went on, "but going west instead brings us
right back to Manticore."
"Why?" Frankel asked. "We could take Silesia without ever coming within a
hundred light-years of Manticore-just cut across above them and leave them
alone."
"Oh?" Parnell challenged. "And what about the Manticore Wormhole Junction? Its
Basilisk terminus would be right in our path. We'd almost have to take it just
to protect our flank, and even if we didn't, the Royal Manticoran Navy would