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

reality. The unvoiced awareness that it was not given to human beings to touch
such moments, save fleetingly. The memory of who they'd been and what they'd
done would be with them always, yet it would be only memory, never again
reality. And as the heart-stopping fear and terror faded, the reality would
become even more precious and unattainable to them.

That was what truly gave the emotions whirling about her their strength . . .
and focused that strength upon her, for she was their leader, and that made
her the symbol of their joy and bittersweet regret alike.

It was also horribly embarrassing, and the fact that none of them knew she
could sense their emotions only made it worse. It was as if she stood outside
their windows, listening to whispered conversations they'd never meant to
share with her, and the fact that she had no choice -- that she could no
longer not sense the feelings of those about her -- only made her feel
perversely guilty when she did.

Yet what bothered her most was that she could never return what they had given
her. They thought she was the one who'd achieved so much, but they were wrong.
They were the ones who'd done it by doing all and more than all she'd asked of
them. They'd come from the military forces of dozens of star nations, emerging
from what the Peeps had contemptuously believed was the dustbin of history to
hand their tormentors what might well prove the worst defeat in the history of
the People's Republic. Not in tonnage destroyed, or star systems conquered,
but in something far more precious because it was intangible, for they had
delivered a potential deathblow to the terror of omnipotence which was so much
a part of State Security's repressive arsenal.

And they'd done it for her. She'd tried to express even a fraction of the
gratitude she felt, but she knew she'd failed. They lacked the sense she'd
developed, the ability to feel the reality behind the clumsy interface of
human language, and all her efforts had made not a dent in the storm of
devotion pouring back at her.

If only --

A clear, musical chime -- not loud, but penetrating -- broke into her thoughts
and she drew a deep breath as the first pinnace began its final approach.
There were other small craft behind it, including dozens of pinnaces from the
three squadrons of the wall which had come to meet Farnese and more than a
dozen heavy-lift personnel shuttles from the planet San Martin. They queued up
behind the lead pinnace, waiting their turns, and she tried not to let her
relief show as she thought about them. She and Warner Caslet, Farnese's exec,
had packed the battlecruiser, like all the other ships of the ESN, to the
deckheads to get all of the escapees aboard. The massive redundancy designed
into warship life-support systems had let them carry the overload (barely),
but it had done nothing about the physical crowding, and the systems
themselves were in serious need of maintenance after so long under such heavy
demand. The personnel shuttles outside the boat bay were but the first wave of
craft which would transport her people from the packed-sardine environment of