"James Doohan - Flight Engineer Volume 2 - The Privateer-" - читать интересную книгу автора (Doohan James)

faced the smaller table with its single unpadded seat. All too reminiscent of that previous occasion.
Well, some of the faces have changed.
And this time he had a personal reason for anxiety. After all, he had left his post in the middle of a battle with the
Mollies and their alien Fibian allies.
And you can never be too sure that the powers that be won’t decide to make an example of someone, despite
things turning out right in the end, Raeder mused. Someone like me, for instance. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to
obey orders. It was just that he kept being the one on the spot who knew what his commanders didn’t. . . .
The fact that he looked a little like a recruiting poster—square chin, blue eyes that the newsvids insisted on calling
“volcanic,” black hair, pale complexion–didn’t help either. He looked like a self-centered hotshot, you had to admit
that.
He’d left his post for the best of reasons, naturally; risking his life to save a precious five-month supply of enemy
antihydrogen that would certainly have been lost without his interference. It was an open secret that the
Commonwealth’s supply of A-H was running perilously low. And without antihydrogen fuel, the Commonwealth
couldn’t continue to exist and the war with the Mollies would be over. And he’d saved what remained of the
Dauntless, the ship transporting it, and the life of a very fine engineer.
Which made him a hero.
Bigtime.
The captain had recommended him for a Stellar Cross.
A corner of his mouth twitched up.
Y’know Raeder, sometimes you worry too much.
On the other hand, there was a nasty undercurrent here that kept him shifting in his seat no matter how he
reassured himself. Someone in this room was going to be damn lucky to walk out of it with nothing worse than a
reprimand. Of that he was perfectly sure.
Because just now Admiral Einar Grettirson, the presiding officer, was grilling Captain Jill Montoya of the
Dauntless with an attitude that raised the hairs along the back of Peter’s neck.
“Cap-tain Montoya,” Grettirson drawled, thick gray eyebrows drawn down over ice blue eyes, “you lost a total of
one thou-sand seven hundred and ten of your people, as well as twenty-five Speeds in this action. Did you not?”
“Yes, Admiral,” she answered stiffly.
And no one could have tried harder to save them, Peter thought resentfully. Captain Montoya had actually carried
one wounded crew-woman to the lifeboats on her back.
But Grettirson was a well-known martinet, and a slave to the book; it was rumored that he slept with a copy of the
Commonwealth Standard Manual of Operations under his pillow.
Montoya had managed to get her crippled ship to the edge of Ontario Base’s defensive perimeter, and with the
antihydrogen.
To me, Peter thought, that kind of a save says, “Wow! What a leader!”
“And just how do you explain such cat-a-strophic losses?” Grettirson asked, his thin, ascetic face as cold as space.
Clearly the admiral doesn’t agree with my assessment. Peter shifted in his chair again, drawing Grettirson’s
glittering eye. He froze instantly, like a buck under the eye of a hungry mountain lion. Oops.
Not that the admiral was a total monster; he was simply convinced that today’s subordinates emerged from a very
inferior mold to the one that had shaped him.
Peter examined the other members of the board, trying to read reactions in their impenetrable expressions. Vice-
Admiral Paula Anderson he knew from Cynthia’s hearing, and he felt her to be intrinsically fair. Commodore Wayne
Gretsky and Commodore Margaret Trudeau of the Intelligence Corps were complete unknowns. But Marine General
Kemal Scaragoglu was a power, if not truly a known factor. Conspiracy, rumor and paranoia followed him around
like besotted puppies.
Scaragoglu was so Machiavellian that he even looked like an African copy of the sixteenth-century statesman. He
had the same tight-lipped, sharp-eyed intensity, coupled with a high-bridged nose and sharp chin; some said it was
biosculp. Raeder didn’t think so; he figured the Marine general was more likely a reincarnation of some extremely
successful condottiere.
“And how is it,” Admiral Grettirson was saying, “that neither you nor your chief engineer thought of Commander