"David Weber - Honor 07 - In Enemy Hands" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

IN ENEMY HANDS
David Weber
[24 oct 2001 тАУ scanned for #bookz]
[30 oct 2001 - proofed for #bookz тАУ by bookleech, v 1.0]
Prologue
"I think it's a mistake, a big one." Cordelia Ransom's blue eyes glittered,
but the passionate voice
which had raised and swayed so many chanting crowds was cold, almost flat.
Which, Rob Pierre
reflected, proved her emotions were truly engaged on this issue.
"I obviously don't, or I wouldn't have suggested it," he told her, meeting her
eyes levelly while he
sought to put enough iron into his deliberately calm reply to override her
chill intensity. He succeeded in
that, for the most part, but it wasn't as easy as it should have been, and he
knew it. He just hoped she
didn't.
Officially, Pierre was the most powerful man in the People's Republic of
Haven. As the creator and
head of the Committee of Public Safety, his word was law and his power over
the PRH's citizens absolute.
Yet even he faced limits, including the one which had finally decided him his
proposal was necessary, and
the fact that most of them were invisible to those beyond the ranks of the
Committee's membership made
them no less real.
His was a revolutionary government which had imposed itself upon the Republic
by force. Everyone
knew it had extended its grasp far beyond the caretaker role the PeopleтАЩs
Quorum had envisioned when it
voted to ratify his creation of the Committee and named him its chairman. The
Quorum had thought it
was setting up little more than a caretaker panel to restore domestic
stability as quickly as possible . . .
what it had gotten was a revolution run by a multiheaded dictatorship which
was quite prepared to use
coercion, suppression, and outright terror tactics to maintain its grasp and
promote its own agenda. That
was the heart of his problem. By using force and ruthlessness to reach so far
beyond what the Quorum
had expected and authorized, he'd made his power real and undeniable, but he'd
also deprived his
authority (which, he conceded, was not, quite the same thing) of that subtle
and elusive quality called
"legitimacy".
A rule imposed by violence or the threat of violence could be overturned the
same way, and as a
creature of force, his Committee had no recourse to the rule of law or custom
to support it. It was odd how
little thought people gave to governments which could claim those supports, he