"David Weber - Worlds of Honor 4 - Service of the Sword" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

Navy proper rather than some corrupt individual over in BuPersonnel had benefitted.
Not surprisingly, given his family interests, Ozzie was specializing in Supply. Logistically, he
was brilliant, able to glance at a complicated schematic and reduce it to its component parts
before Michael had finished reading the headers. Although Supply was outside the line of
command, and thus often discounted by ambitious sorts, Michael was enough of a history buff to
realize that many battles had been won or lost even before they were joined due to logistical
considerations.
The problem with Ozzie was that he apparently saw Michael as another resource to be
cultivated for the future benefit of himself and his familyтАФand he figured Michael should see
him in the same light. Michael didn't like this one bit, but although Ozzie was not ostensibly
connected to anyone in politics, money could be used as easily as aristocratic connections to
obstruct the Queen and her policies, so Michael made certain not to alienate Ozzie, while quietly
fuming beneath the other's fawning attention.
What united Astrid and Ozzie was a sense of superiority over their fellows, though ironically
Michael was fairly certain that each privately thought little of the other. Like a lodestone
attracting iron filings, these two had drawn the more amorally ambitious middies toward them. In
doing so they had pushed away what Michael, at least, saw as the better elements of the middy
berth, those who wanted to earn their rank on their own merit, not because of whom they knew.
Not wishing to be seen in the same light as Astrid and OzzieтАФneither by Michael nor by the
rest of the ship's officersтАФsix of the middies hardly spoke to Michael. That two of these, Sally
Pike and Kareem Jones, had been among Michael's circle of friendly acquaintances at Saganami
Island, made this ostracization confusing as well as painful.
But there was nothing Michael could say to them that wouldn't make the situation worse, so
he hauled his way through his day, wondering if what he was feeling was anything like what he'd
heard about the isolation of command.
***
At fourteen, after several very intensive sessions with DinahтАФsessions that were represented
to a pleased Ephraim as preparing Judith to resume her childbearing dutiesтАФJudith had been
initiated into the very small, highly secret, and slightly mystical Sisterhood of Barbara.
The Sisterhood took its inspiration from Barbara Bancroft, the woman who had foiled the
Masadan plot to destroy all life on Grayson following the failure of their attempt to seize control
of it. Even before she was captured by Ephraim, Judith had heard of Barbara, for on Grayson she
was revered as the planet's savior. The Barbara of whom Judith heard from the Faithful was a
completely different person: evil, conniving, traitorous, faithless, and blasphemous.
Indeed, the Faithful's version of Barbara Bancroft was so horrendous that initially Judith
wondered that the Sisterhood had taken "this Harlot of Satan" as their patron. After a few secret
meetings with Dinah and her cell, Judith understood that it was precisely because Barbara was so
vilified that these brave Masadan women named themselves for her. However else Barbara
Bancroft was represented by the Masadans, the one thing the Faithful could not say of her was
that she was cowardly. Moreover, Barbara had won in her battle against Masadan tyranny. She
had paid a terrifying price for that victory, but she had won.
The Sisterhood had two goals. The first was to educate and, when possible, to protect other
women. That protection was granted to any woman, but the educational benefits were only
extended to those women who had been tried and found perfectly trustworthy. Maintaining
secrecy was made easier in that any woman who so much as learned to read a few simple lines or
do more complex mathematics than could be worked out by counting on fingers was considered
suspect by the Elders of the Faithful.
Tales of the punishments doled out to those who had transgressed were told in the nursery,
repeated in sermons, and reinforced in a hundred little ways. There was even a sub-set of the
Faithful who viewed these simple arts as the first step down the slippery slope to technological