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

their sky. They mined and garrisoned flying mountains, and had for millennia, but they never called them
home.

The Ch'axanthu were different. They'd evolved on a planet more or less similar to Earth, but their bodies
and minds could adapt to microgravity environments. And by now the great majority of them lived in a
myriad such environments, spread throughout the systems they had made their own.

And that, Corin reflected (not for the first time), was the problem: their lack of vulnerability.

Humanity had learned what vulnerability was in the early fourth millennium, as the gentlemanly limited
warfare of the Age of the Protectors had given way to the Unification Wars. When total, high-intensity
war was waged with interstellar-level technology, the populations of Earthlike planets survived only by
grace of their economic value to potential conquerors. And the few Ch'axanthu-inhabited planets were no
more survivable in the face of antimatter warheadsтАФand the far cheaper relativistic rocksтАФthan human
ones.

But the Ch'axanthu could afford the loss of those sitting-duck worlds. The habitats where most of them
lived were too numerous, too scattered and too mobile for convenient destruction. And they could wage
a kind of spaceborne guerrilla war that had never been possible for humans. It had taken three disastrous
campaigns for the Empire to learn the lessonтАФstill publicly unacknowledgedтАФthat the Ch'axanthu were,
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as a practical matter, unconquerable.

Equally belated, and equally unadmitted, was the realization that they'd never posed a threat in the first
place. . . .

Taking refuge from the thought, Corin let his eyes stray to the virtual window behind the admiral's desk.
This office was deep within the sector headquarters. Tanzler-Yataghan preferred a more picturesque
view than a simple transparency would have afforded, and the holo image showed the suburbs of the city
outside the base, as though seen from a tall building. It was spring in Santaclara's northern hemisphere,
asтАФby sheerest coincidenceтАФit also was on Old Earth, whose standard year was the ordinary measure
of time, however ill-fitting it might be in terms of local seasons. Hills, cloaked in subtropical vegetation
whose species had originated on Earth or the unknown Luonli homeworld, stretched away toward distant
smoky-blue mountains. Among that bright-flowering greenery nestled villas in this world's traditional style,
with red-tiled roofs and fountained courtyards. The classical Old Earth cultures the early interstellar
colonizers had sought to preserve had been diluted beyond those colonizers' recognition by centuries of
population movementsтАФboth the spectacular forced variety and the ongoing process of individuals
"voting with their feet"тАФbut they had left a legacy of distinctive planetary and regional styles. The element
of Old Earth's heritage that the histories characterized as "Hispanic" hadn't totally failed to leave its
imprint on Iota Pegasi and the other sectors of the old "People's Democratic Union." There had been so
many such cultural forms and textures on the planet of humankind's birth. Too bad, what the Zyungen had
done to it . . .

Corin dismissed the always-depressing thought and turned his attention back to his new commanding
officer. His name advertised his descent from the Sword ClansтАФpartial descent at any rate, for there
were few unmixed ones left by now, almost two and a half centuries after their return from their doomed