"Huff, Tanya - Valor 01 - Valor's Choice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Huff Tanya)

Valor 01
Valor’s Choice
Tanya Huff

E-Book Version 0.9
Most formatting & spelling errors rectified
Scanned by Bodafon
21st April 2004

If your like this book, please buy it.
The author deserves the royalties.





Copyright © 2000 by Tanya Huff. All Rights Reserved.
Cover art by Jody Lee. For color prints of Jody Lee's paintings,
please contact: The Cerridwen Enterprise
P.O. Box 10161 Kansas City, MO 64111 Phone: 1-800-825-1281
DAW Book Collectors No. 1148. DAW Books are distributed by Penguin Putnam Inc.
All characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to persons living or dead
is strictly coincidental.
If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this "stripped book."
First Printing, April 2000 5 6 7 8 9
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This one's for Sheila, 'cause she was willing to take a chance.
And for Gord Rose and David Sutton and Leslie Dicker and all the other men and women who actually do the work in military organizations worldwide.
Also for my father who, during the Korean War, made Chief Petty Officer. Twice.




PROLOGUE
A writer and philosopher of the late twentieth century once said, "Space is big." There are three well-known corollaries to this. The first is that the number of planets where biological accidents occurred in the correct order to create life is small. The second is that the number of planets where life managed to overcome the odds and achieve sentience is smaller still. And the third is that many of these sentient life-forms blow themselves into extinction before they ever make it off their planet of origin.
If space is big and mostly uninhabited, it should be safe to assume that any life-forms who really didn't get along could avoid spending time in each other's company.
Unfortunately, the fact that said life-forms could avoid each other doesn't necessarily mean that they would.
When the Others attacked systems on the borders of Confederation territory, Parliament sent out a team of negotiators to point out that expansion in any other direction would be more practical as it would not result in conflict. The negotiators were returned in a number of very small pieces, their ship cleverly rigged to explode when it would do the most damage.
The Confederation found itself at a disadvantage. Its member races had achieved an interstellar presence only after they'd overcome the urge to destroy themselves or any strangers they ran into. Evidence suggested the Others had flung themselves into space without reaching this level of maturity. Clearly, in order to survive, the Confederation would have to recruit some more aggressive members.
Humans had a bare-bones space station and a shaky toehold on Mars when the Confederation ships appeared. Some fairly basic technology by Confederation standards, combined with the information that the Others were heading Earth's way, convinced humanity to throw its military apparatus into space where they took to interstellar warfare the way the H'san took to cheese.