"Steve White - Emperor of Dawn" - читать интересную книгу автора (White Steve)

armorplast.Ass , he thought dispassionately in its direction. Then he departed from the now-deserted
dome.
***

"Well, Commander, your record speaks for itself." Vice Admiral Julius Tanzler-Yataghan looked up from
the hardcopy and gazed across his desk at the newly arrived officer. "Yes, very impressive indeed. And
you've certainly come quite a distance."

"I have that, sir," Corin replied. The Ursa Major frontier was on the far side of the Empire. It had been a
journey of almost two months. "At least it gave me time to adjust to my new leg."

"Ah, yes. I would hardly have realized it was regrown if your record didn't describe the circumstances
under which you lost it." The admiral indicated the citation which contained the description. Fleet uniform
regulations prescribed that decorations be worn only with full dress. Corin was wearing the gray tunic
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and trousers of planetside service dress. So his chest was bare of the medal the citation had
accompanied. "It must have been an appalling experience, Commander. You're certainly due for
reassignment to a quiet sector like this one. Of course," he added with a little too much emphasis, "we
here also do our part. We're not far from the Cassiopeia and Perseus regions, where the threat of a
Tarakan incursion can never be ignored. Indeed, you might say we were standing guard against different
aspects of the same threat. As His Imperial Majesty has explained, it is necessary to prevent the
Ch'axanthu from joining forces with the Tarakans and presenting us with a . . . yes, a second front."

"Yes, sir." There wasn't much else Corin could say, for the admiral was reciting the official line. But his
mind leaped across a light-century and contemplated the beings he'd fought: compact bipeds little more
than half human-average height, with huge dark eyes. In addition to high intelligence, they had
astonishingly dexterous hands with two mutually-opposable "thumbs" almost as long as the five "fingers,"
and it was unsurprising that they were master technologists. They had colonized several systems before
humankind had left its homeworld. But those colonists had traveled at the slower-than-light rates
permitted by ordinary physical laws, for by some fluke the Ch'axanthu had never discovered the
time-distortion drive on their own. And, having acquired it from some Beyonders or other, they'd shown
no interest in using it to expand their sphere much beyond its long-established limits. They'd merely
consolidated their already-colonized systemsтАФsystems of which they'd made far more intensive use than
humans would have.

And that was why three invasions by the incomparably larger Empire had failed so dismally.

Long before the first interstellar probe had departed from Earth, it had been recognized that Homo
sapiens' muscles, bones and immune system would not allow indefinite relinquishment of weight. Until the
advent of artificially generated gravity fields, long-range space voyaging had required dodges like spinning
a portion of the ship to produce angular acceleration. But not even that had permitted realization of the
old dreams of colonizing asteroids and deep-space habitats . . . for the colonists had lost interest in
reproducing.

Humans, it seemed, had a psychological need for Earth or a planet like itтАФa need unsuspected by the
early space-colonization enthusiasts. At a minimum, they needed such a planet floating huge and blue in