"David Weber - Honor 03 - Short Victorious War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

golden-hearted uncle. Public Information was the official government
spokesman, its main propaganda
pipeline, but it had also wrested the Bureau of Mental Hygiene away from the
Ministry of Public Health
twenty years before. Jessup employed the Mental Hygiene Police with a cold and
ruthless dispatch which
sometimes frightened even Harris, and his personal control of the MHP made him
the most powerful
member of the cabinet, after the President himself.
"We weren't ready," Dumarest protested. "We were overextended digesting our
new acquisitions,
andтАФ"
"And you got too fucking fancy," Jessup interrupted with a rude snort. "First
that screw- up in Basilisk
and then the disaster in Yeltsin and Endicott. All we've done is let them
build their 'alliance' while our
military potential held steady. Are you seriously suggesting we're in a
stronger relative position now than
we were men?"
"That's enough, Duncan," Harris said quietly. Jessup glowered at him for a
moment, then lowered his
eyes, and the President went on more calmly than he felt, 'The entire cabinet
endorsed both operations,
and I'll remind all of you that however spectacular those failures were, most
of our other operations have
succeeded. We may not have prevented the Manticorans from building up their
alliance, but we have
secured countervailing positions. At the same time, I think we all know the
showdown with Manticore is
coming." Heads nodded unhappily, and Harris turned his eyes to Fleet Admiral
Amos Parnell, CNO of the
Peoples' Navy, who sat at Dumarest's elbow. "How do the odds really stack up,
Amos?"
"Not as well as I'd like, Sir," Parnell admitted. "The evidence suggests
Manticore has a considerably
greater technical advantage than anyone thought four years ago. I've
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personally debriefed the survivors
from the Endicott-Yeltsin operation. None of our people were involved in the
final action there, and we
don't have any hard data to support our analyses of what happened, but it's
pretty clear the Mantles took
out a Saladin-class battle-cruiser with only a heavy cruiser and a destroyer.
Of course, the Masadans
crewing Saladin were hardly up to our standards in terms of training and
experience, but that's still a
disturbing indication of our hardware's relative capabilities. On the basis of
what happened to Saladin and reports of survivors from the earlier actions,
we're estimating that, ton- for-ton, their technical superiority