"Chelsea Quinn Yarbro - Crown of Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Yarbro Chelsea Quinn)

Tira Bouriere leaped upright in bed as her eld-
erly cousin Helga burst in from her own small
room of the suite, shouting, "He's dead! Your
sainted father is dead, child!"


Behind Helga, the holovision the old woman had
been watching still cast its faint light over the room.
The royal suites on two of the four penthouse
towers around the quadrangle had visual access
to most of the High Secretary's palace. Other
women her age might have spent their free time
in gossip, but Helga considered her station тАФ
companion and chaperone to the High Secre-
tary's eighteen-year-old daughter тАФ put her
above that. Instead, she spied on the goings and
comings, the talk and the actions, of all those liv-
ing in the sprawling warren of the palace, seat of
government and home to the elite of the Pact
which ruled four thousand worlds.


Tira pushed her way through the gauze that
wrapped her bed like a cloud. "Helga, what's
happened?" she asked. She'd heard the words,
but there was no sense to them.


Helga flopped onto a loveseat, hyperventilat-
ing. Cousin by convenience, the connection was
too diffuse to be recognized тАФ except that the
office of High Secretary drew to it relations the
way honey draws flies. Even Helga's Bouriere
surname came from her maternal line, and that
three generations ago.


"Helga!" Tira repeated.


Helga stared at her from the loveseat. "Your
sainted father," she repeated in a whisper. The
utter despair in the old woman's eyes and voice
penetrated to Tira's understanding where the
words themselves had not.


"Oh, no. Not my father." For a moment hys-
teria threatened to overwhelm Tira's normal
good sense. Then, as if a relay had switched in