"David Weber - Honor 05 - Flag in Exile" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

FLAG IN EXILE
David Weber

[23 oct 2001 - scanned for #bookz]
[27 oct 2001 - proofed for #bookz - by bookleech, v 1.0]

To Roger Zelazny - A gentleman, a scholar, a story-teller, and a friend I
didn't know long enough.

PROLOGUE
Admiral of the Green Hamish Alexander, Thirteenth Earl of White Haven, sat on
HMS Queen Caitrin's flag deck and gazed into his display. The Nightingale
System's G3 primary was a white specie of fire, and its single habitable
planet, too distant to be seen on visuals, showed as a tiny, blue-green light
deep in the plot.
So did the angry red rash of enemy warships between it and Queen Caitrin, and
White Haven studied that crimson wall of light with care. The People's Navy's
sensors had detected him hours ago, but the Peeps hadn't tried anything fancy;
they'd simply formed a wall between his task force and its objective and
steered to meet him well inside the systems hyper limit. That left him the
initiative, yet there was only so much he could do with it. They knew why he
was here, and they were inside him and able to stay there. Worse, they were
staying together, without the erratic maneuvering he'd seen so often. They
outnumbered him by four to three, and he'd abandoned any thought of tactical
sleight of hand in the face of their steadiness, but he was confident in his
ships' qualitative superiority. If he could neither split them up nor
outmaneuver them, he was willing enough to meet them head-on.
He checked the range once more, then looked into the com screen to Queen
Caitrin's command deck. "Very well, Captain Goldstein. You may open fire."
"Aye, aye, My Lord!" Captain Frederick Goldstein rapped, and the first,
massive salvo spat from Queen Caitrin's port broadside. The rest of Battle
Squadron Twenty-One fired with her, and all eight superdreadnoughts
simultaneously flushed the missile pods towing astern of them. BatRon Eight
and BatRon Seventeen's dreadnoughts followed suit, and thirty-two hundred
impeller drive missiles lanced out across five and a half million kilometers
of vacuum.
White Haven watched their outgoing tracks, and his frown deepened. The opening
phase was almost classic, straight out of the tac manuals, yet he felt a
nagging, unformed uneasiness. He had nothing overt to justify it, but there
were more targets over there than there should have been. Peep resistance had
been spotty for months, based on whatever frontier formations had held
together long enough to be redeployed against Manticore's drive on Trevor's
Star. But this formation's unit strength looked far more like a proper task
force, and the difference between its steady, unswerving course and the
confusion which had plagued Peep fleet commanders since the war's start was
too marked. It roused an instinctive wariness, and that instinct jabbed at him
like a sharp stick. It was why he'd fired at such long range rather than
closing before he unleashed his first and heaviest salvo, and he made himself
sit motionless, fighting an urge to fidget, as return fire stippled his plot.
That fire was lighter than the deluge his own ships had spawned, for the Peeps