"David Weber - Honor 09 - Ashes of Victory" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

CHAPTER ONE

Admiral Lady Dame Honor Harrington stood in the gallery of ENS Farnese's boat
bay and tried not to reel as the silent emotional hurricane thundered about
her.

She gazed through the armorplast of the gallery bulkhead into the brilliantly
lit, perfect clarity of the bay itself, and tried to use its sterile serenity
as a sort of mental shield against the tempest. It didn't help a great deal,
but at least she didn't have to face it alone, and she felt the living side of
her mouth quirk in a wry smile as the six-limbed treecat in the carrier on her
back shifted uneasily, ears half-flattened as the same vortex battered at him.
Like the rest of his empathic species, he remained far more sensitive to
others' emotions than she, and he seemed torn between a frantic need to escape
the sheer intensity of the moment and a sort of euphoric high driven by an
excess of everyone else's endorphins.

At least the two of them had had plenty of practice, she reminded herself. The
stunned moment when her people realized their scratch-built, jury-rigged,
half-derisively self proclaimed "Elysian Space Navy" had destroyed an entire
Peep task force and captured the shipping to take every prisoner who wanted to
leave the prison planet of Hades to safety lay over three standard weeks
behind them. She'd thought, then, that nothing could ever equal the explosion
of triumph which had swept her ex-Peep flagship at that instant, but in its
own way, the emotional storm seething about her now was even stronger. It had
had longer to build on the voyage from the prison the entire People's Republic
of Haven had regarded as the most escape-proof facility in human history to
freedom, and anticipation had fanned its strength. For some of the escapees,
like Captain Harriet Benson, the CO of ENS Kutuzov, over sixty T-years had
passed since they'd breathed the air of a free planet. Those people could
never return to the lives they'd left behind, but their need to begin building
new ones blazed within them. Nor were they alone in their impatience. Even
those who'd spent the least time in the custody of the Office of State
Security longed to see loved ones once more, and unlike the escapees who'd
spent decades on the planet inmates called "Hell," they could pick up the
threads of the lives they'd feared they would never see again.

Yet that hunger to begin anew was tempered by a matching emotion which might
almost have been called regret. An awareness that somehow they had become part
of a tale which would be told and retold, and, undoubtedly, grow still greater
in the tellings . . . and that all tales end.

They knew the impossible odds they had surmounted to reach this moment, in
this boat bay gallery, in this star system. And because they did, they also
knew that all the embellishments with which the tale would be improved upon
over the years -- by themselves, as likely as not -- would be unnecessary,
peripheral and unimportant to the reality.

And that was what they regretted: the fact that when they left Farnese, they
would also leave behind the companions with whom they had built that tale's