"Elizabeth Moon - Familias 05 - Rules of Engagement" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moon Elizabeth)

they looked away, not as if they were embarrassed, but as if they had
seen all they wanted. Their gaze wandered the room steadily; they
ignored the litter of plates and cups before them.
The steward brought out a platter of sandwiches, pastries, and
raw vegetable slices arranged in a fan-shaped pattern. Esmay ate a
sandwich of thinly sliced cattleope spread with horseradish sauce,
several carrot sticks, and was considering one of the curly pastry things
which smelled so deliciously of cinnamon and hot apples when the
blonde woman erupted.
"I'm not quitting!" she said, loudly enough that Esmay could not
fail to hear. She was sitting upright now, her face flushed slightly. With
that flush Esmay could spot the irregular patches of fresh healing . . . she
had been in a regen tank to repair some kind of injury to her face
and—Esmay could not help looking—hands and arms.
The older man, with a cautionary glance at Esmay, rumbled
something she could not hear.
"No!" the blonde said. "It's something else—something important.
I know—" Then she too looked around, met Esmay's eyes, and fell
silent for a moment.
Some instinct prompted Esmay to look not merely down,
but—under lowered lids—across at the other table. The three men there
now made sense . . . their dismissive assessment of her, their constant
surveillance of the room. These were the bodyguards of someone who
hired the best—or to whom the best were, by custom, assigned.
Whom were they guarding? Surely not the young woman . . . if
they had been, they had failed in some way or she would not have been
hurt. A lieutenant commander? Hardly . . . unless he were not a
lieutenant commander at all.
She glanced back at the young woman, and surprised by an
expression on both faces so alike that it had to imply a relationship. Her
eye, trained on a planet where families mattered, and where she had
been expected to recognize even the most distant Suiza cousin, picked
out now the similarities of bone and proportion, as well as behavioral
quirks like the sudden lift of eyebrow that both older man and younger
woman showed at that moment.
"Brun . . ." That carried, in part because the tone was so like the
pleading tone her own father had used. Her mind caught on the unusual
word. Brun. Wasn't that—? She clamped her mouth shut on the apple
tart. If that was the blonde girl who had been involved in the Xavier
affair, then her father was the present Speaker of the Grand Council . . .
the most powerful man in the Familias Regnant. What could they be
doing here?
Speculation having outrun data, she munched steadily through the
tart, studiously ignoring the argument which continued, in lower voices,
at the other table. She struggled to remember all the snippets of rumor
she'd heard about Thornbuckle's wild youngest daughter . . . a spoiled
beauty, a hotheaded fool who had plunged into the thick of intrigue with
no training, an idiot who'd ended up dead drunk and naked in a
rockhopper's pod in the aftermath of a battle. But also something about
being, in some obscure way, Admiral Vida Serrano's protйgй, because