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

Just like her, he thought moodily, almost angrily. Why in Christ's name can
the woman never bring a ship back intact? What the hell is it that makes her -
-

He chopped the thought off again, and this time he felt his mouth twist in
sardonic amusement. His was not, he reflected, the proper mood for an officer
of his seniority at a moment like this. Up until -- he glanced at his chrono -
- seven hours and twenty-three minutes earlier, he, like all the rest of the
Manticoran Alliance, had known Honor Harrington was dead. Like everyone else,
he'd seen the grisly HD of her execution, and even now he shuddered as he
recalled the ghastly moment when the gallows trapdoor sprang and her body --

He shied away from that image and closed his eyes, nostrils flaring while he
concentrated on another image, this one on his own com less than eight hours
earlier. A strong, gracefully carved, half-paralyzed face, framed in a short
mop of half-tamed curls. A face he had never imagined he would see again.

He blinked and inhaled deeply once again. A billion questions teemed in his
brain, put there by the raw impossibility of Honor Harrington's survival, and
he knew he was not alone in that. When word of this broke, every newsie in
Alliance space -- and half of those in Solly space, no doubt, he thought --
would descend upon whatever hiding places Honor or any of the people with her
might have found. They would ask, plead, bully, bribe, probably even threaten
in their efforts to winnow out every detail of their quarry's incredible
story. But even though those same questions burned in his own mind, they were
secondary, almost immaterial, compared to the simple fact of her survival.

And not, he admitted, simply because she was one of the most outstanding naval
officers of her generation and a priceless military asset which had been
returned to the Alliance literally from beyond the grave.

His pinnace arced down under the turn of Farnese's flank to approach the boat
bay, and as he felt the gentle shudder when the tractors captured the tiny
craft, Hamish Alexander took himself firmly in hand. He'd screwed up somehow
once before, let slip some hint of his sudden awareness that the woman who'd
been his prot├йg├йe for over a decade had become something far more to him than
a brilliant junior officer and an asset of the Royal Manticoran Navy. He still
had no idea how he'd given himself away, but he knew he had. He'd felt the
awkwardness between them and known she'd returned to active duty early in an
effort to escape that awkwardness. And for two years, he'd lived with the
knowledge that her early return to duty was what had sent her into the Peep
ambush in which she had been captured . . . and sentenced to death.

It had burned like acid, that knowledge, and he'd watched the Peep broadcast
of her execution as an act of self-punishing penance. In an odd way, her death
had freed him to face his feelings for her . . . which only made things
immeasurably worse now that he knew she wasn't dead, of course. He had no
business loving someone little more than half his age, who'd never shown the
least romantic interest in him. Especially not while he was married to another
woman whom he still loved deeply and passionately, despite the injuries which