"Allen, Roger MacBride - Chronicles of Solace 3 - Shores of Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Allen Roger Macbride)

Koffield looked next to Norla Chandray, second-in-command of theDP-IV, and the closest friend Koffield had—or had ever had.Or would it be fairer to say “closest thing to a friend”? he asked himself. Koffield was well aware that he was not an easy man to get to know, let alone understand. He might be flattering himself to assume that she considered him a friend.

Norla was a far from ordinary woman, for all of her ordinary appearance. She had not yet spent so much time in temporal confinements and timeshafts and relativistic velocities as to make it too difficult to compute her self-chronologic, her bio-chron age. She was roughly thirty-three, and looked it. A bit above average height, well proportioned, the privations of the last few years having burned away any excess weight—and perhaps a bit more. She had the pale-skinned complexion of many star travelers. Her hair was light brown, cut short. Her solemn brown eyes were set in a round face with a snub nose and a mouth that smiled only rarely, but did so very well.

Norla, more than anyone else, had stood by him, had kept him moving forward. He—none of them—would have gotten this far, if not for her.

Jerand Bolt, Dixon Phelby, and Sindra Chon—the last remaining crew of theDom Pedro IV . Bolt and Chon were replacements. Of the crew that had started the seemingly routine journey to Solace, all those long decades ago, Phelby alone remained. All the other original crew were gone. Some had illegally jumped ship, unwilling to risk staying longer on a ship that must have seemed under a curse. Some departed legally, even honorably. Four had been killed, and at least some blame for all four deaths could be laid at DeSilvo’s door.

Finally, Wandella Ashdin, the historian and expert on DeSilvo who had finally gotten her wish and met the object of her study, who she had thought was long since dead. She had been somewhat disappointed by the experience. Wandella Ashdin was old and allowed herself to look that way, with grey hair, wrinkles, and all. Her watery pale blue eyes were set in an angular, square-jawed face. She was perhaps the most disorganized scholar Koffield had ever met—but she was capable of hard and serious study as well, and her results were solid, even if her notes were often illegible, or misfiled. The journey to this place had wrought great changes in her—or perhaps merely brought forgotten, tougher-minded parts of her back up into the light. Gone was the fuzzy-minded academic, breathless at the chance to learn more about her hero. In her place sat a determined and professional scholar, dispassionately studying her subject, passionately seeking the truth.

And, not present: Yuri Sparten, witting spy and unwitting pawn of the SCO Station Security Force, assigned to watch Koffield on behalf of the SSF—and on behalf of other services, probably including Koffield’s old outfit, the Chronologic Patrol’s Intelligence Service. Koffield did not know or care why Sparten was not present, or what Sparten was doing.

If the lad chose to stay away from a meal or two, then it would help everyone else’s digestion. He wouldn’t be likely to offer much in the way of interesting or useful conversation if they forced him to attend. If he wanted to play the part of the surly teen who refused to come out of his room, then so be it.

DeSilvo took his seat and looked around the room. “Greetings to you all,” he said. “Before we begin the meal proper, an announcement. The project to light the NovaSpot over Greenhouse is proceeding according to schedule. They are within a week of Ignition Day—the day they will actually ignite the NovaSpot. All seems to be going well.”

DeSilvo was telling them a great deal more than he was saying. They all knew that the “report” he had received had come from one of the covert listening devices he had built into any number of facilities in the Solacian system—and that the report had been sent to him via a true faster-than-light communications system.

The FTL drive, the FTL communications system, and any number of other wonders were among the technologies DeSilvo had stolen—or perhaps, more accurately, excavated—from the wreckage of the Dark Museum, the Chronologic Patrol’s storage place for suppressed technology. He was telling them all what marvelous toys he had, toys he would be willing to share—if only they all cooperated.

And he was saying more beyond even that. The Ignition Project had, after all, been DeSilvo’s idea. It had been his doodle on a slip of paper that had set it all in motion, albeit a century after he had made the drawing. He had managed to remind them all of the project a half dozen times already. A reproduction of the doodle hung on the wall behind him.

It was clear that, in his mind at least, the sketch on the back of an envelope was the thing that mattered, and not the herculean efforts, or the massive engineering projects, that had made it all possible. The man had a sure instinct for claiming credit—just as sure as his instinct for demonstrating his power.

And, it would seem, a fairly good instinct for moving on when a performance was falling flat. He might be oblivious to many things, but Oskar DeSilvo could tell when an audience wasn’t happy. He glanced around the table, cleared his throat, and looked down at the datapad in front of him. He went on hurriedly. “Right now I believe that luncheon is the matter at hand.”

The meal went about as well as it might under such circumstances, with chitchat in low voices between various pairs of diners, very little general conversation, and no conversation at all that involved Oskar DeSilvo—or Anton Koffield. Koffield could only hope he was being excluded for somewhat different reasons than DeSilvo. He was seated between Wandella Ashdin and Norla Chandray, and he knew both of them had a lot on their minds.

There was to be a general meeting the next day, and Wandella was supposed to do a presentation. It was a summing-up of the events that had brought them all here. Koffield had the impression that it was going to amount to a criminal indictment of their host, the man whose food she was eating, the man who held their lives in his hands. The task would be enough to leave anyone preoccupied. No wonder the woman was doing little more than toying with her food.

Koffield had considered the idea of taking on the presentation himself, but had soon realized it would be self-indulgent to do so, and bad leadership besides. If Wandella’s presentation was the case for the prosecution, and if DeSilvo spoke for himself, then it was all but inevitable that he, Koffield, the group’s leader, would be something between jury foreman and judge—and executioner, too?he asked himself with grim humor.

Besides which, quite a strong case could be made that Koffield was one of DeSilvo’s main victims. That, too, made it inappropriate for him to present the case against. Certainly the group would look to him for guidance in deciding what to do. Assuming they could do anything. After all, to stretch the analogy completely out of shape, their sort-of defendant was also the absolute ruler of this place. He was their jailer, not their prisoner.

All in all, Koffield was quite happy to get out from under the duty of reciting DeSilvo’s history to the group. Koffield shoved his plate away from him, barely aware that he had eaten anything. What was wrong with him, that made him fret over such trivial decisions and leadership choices? “Captain Marquez,” he said, speaking down the length of the table. “You said something earlier about doing some work on theCruzeiro do Sul after lunch. Could you use an extra pair of hands?”

“Absolutely, Admiral. I was going to ask for your assistance in any event. I believe the bomb you disarmed is still aboard. It makes me nervous having it there. Could you help me remove it?”

It was a remarkably offhand way to discuss a booby-trap bomb on a spacecraft, but then, in the larger scheme of their situation, a deactivated bomb in the engine room seemed a minor nuisance at best. “I’d be delighted,” Koffield replied, standing up from the table. “If you’ll all excuse us?”

There was a murmur of assent from the rest of the party.

Koffield looked to their host at the other end of the table. “Thank you for a splendid lunch,” Koffield said. It was close to the first remark anyone had addressed to DeSilvo since the meal had started.

“My pleasure, Admiral. Please, both of you, go and do your work.” Marquez stood up as well, bowed absently to the ladies at the table, pointedly did not acknowledge DeSilvo, and led Koffield out of the room.

The two of them had not gone ten meters down the hall when Marquez chuckled and turned to Koffield. “I don’t know about you, but I’m going to feel more relaxed taking that bomb out than I have so far taking my meals with that son of a bitch.”

Koffield smiled. “I was just thinking the same thing,” he said. “Living and working with him is going to take some getting used to.”