"David Weber - Dahak 03 - Heirs of Empire" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weber David)

Sherkan was safe to operate without extensive overhaul—but it had been Hatcher's expedition that
found her, and he'd been the one who'd had to tell Vladimir Chernikov.
So far, Survey Command had discovered exactly two once-populated planets of the Fourth Empire
which retained any life at all—Birhat, the old imperial capital, and Chamhar—and no humans had
survived on either. But much of the Empire's military hardware had survived, including many of its vast
fleet of enormous starships, and they needed all of those they could get. Humanity had stopped the
Achuultani's last incursion—barely—but defeating them on their own ground was going to be something
else again.
Unfortunately, restoring a derelict four thousand kilometers in diameter to service after forty-five
millennia was a daunting task, which was why Hatcher had been so pleased by Sherkan's excellent
condition. But the tests had missed a tiny flaw in her core tap, and its governors had blown the instant her
engineer brought it on-line to suck in the energy for supralight movement. The resultant explosion could
have destroyed a continent, and six thousand human beings had died in it, including Fleet Admiral Vassily
Chernikov and his wife, Valentina.
"Anyway," Hatcher went on more briskly, "we're coming along nicely on the other projects, as well.
Adrienne will graduate her first Academy class in a few months, and I'm entirely satisfied with the results,
but she and Tao-ling are still fiddling with fine-tuning the curriculum.
"On the hardware side, things are looking good here in Bia, thanks to Tao-ling. He had to put
virtually all the surviving yard facilities back on-line to get the shield operational—" Hatcher and the star
marshal exchanged wry smiles at that; reactivating the enormous shield generators which surrounded
Birhat's primary, Bia, in an inviolate sphere eighty light-minutes across had been a horrendous task "—so
we've got plenty of overhaul capacity. In fact, we're ready to start design work on our new
construction."
 "Really?" Colin's tone was pleased.
"Indeed," Dahak answered for the admiral. "It will be approximately three-point-five standard
years—" (the Fifth Imperium ran on Terran time, not Birhatan) "—before capacity for actual construction
can be diverted from reactivation programs, but Admiral Baltan and I have begun preliminary studies on
the new designs. We are combining several concepts 'borrowed' from the Achuultani with others from
the Empire's Bureau of Ships, and I believe we will attain substantial increases in the capabilities of our
new units."
"That's good news, but where does it leave us on Stepmother?"
"I fear that will require considerably longer, Colin," Dahak replied.
" 'Considerably' is probably optimistic," Hatcher sighed. "We're still stubbing our toes on the finer
points of Empire computer hardware, even with Dahak's help, and Mother's the most complex computer
the Empire ever built. Duplicating her's going to be a bitch—not to mention the time requirement to build
a five-thousand-kilometer hull to put said duplicate inside!"
Colin didn't like that, but he understood. The Empire had built Mother (officially known as Fleet
Central Computer Central) using force-field circuitry that made even molycircs look big and clumsy, yet
the computer was still over three hundred kilometers in diameter. It was also housed in the most powerful
fortress ever constructed by Man, for it did more than simply run Battle Fleet. Mother was the
conservator of the Empire, as well—indeed, it was she who'd crowned Colin and provided the ships to
smash the Achuultani. Unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately) she was carefully designed, as all
late-Empire computers, to preclude self-awareness, which meant she would disgorge her unimaginable
treasure trove of data only when tickled with the right specific question.
But Colin spent a lot of time worrying over what might happen to Battle Fleet if something happened
to Mother, and he intended to provide Earth with defenses every bit as powerful as Birhat's . . . including
a duplicate of Mother. If everything went well, Stepmother (as Hatcher had insisted on christening the
proposed installation) would never come fully on-line, but if Mother was destroyed, Stepmother would
take over automatically, providing unbroken command and control for Battle Fleet and the Imperium.
"What kind of time estimate do you have?"