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

"Speaking very, very roughly, and assuming we get a firm grip on the computer technology so we
don't have to keep pestering Dahak with questions, we may be able to start on the hull in six years or so.
Once we get that far, we can probably finish the job up in another five."
"Damn. Oh, well. We won't be hearing from the Achuultani for another four or five centuries,
minimum, but I want that project completed ASAP, Ger."
"Understood," Hatcher said. "In the meantime, though, we ought to be able to put the first new
planetoids on-line considerably sooner. Their computers're a lot smaller and simpler-minded, without any
of Mother's wonder-what-the-hell's-in-'em files, and the other hardware's no big problem, even allowing
for the new systems' test programs."
"Okay." Colin turned to Tsien. "Want to add anything, Tao-ling?"
"I fear Gerald has stolen much of my thunder," Tsien began, and Hatcher grinned. Technically,
everything that wasn't mobile belonged to Tsien—from fortifications and shipyards to R&D to Fleet
training—but with so much priority assigned to rounding up and crewing Hatcher's planetoids there was a
lot of overlap in their current spheres of authority.
"As he and Dahak have related, most of the Bia System has now been fully restored to function. With
barely four hundred million people in the system, our personnel are spread even more thinly than
Gerald's, but we are coping and the situation is improving. Baltan and Geran, with much assistance from
Dahak, are doing excellent work with Research and Development, although 'research' will continue, for
the foreseeable future, to be little more than following up on the Empire's final projects. They are,
however, turning up several interesting new items among those projects. In particular, the Empire had
begun development of a new generation of gravitonic warheads."
 "Oh?" Colin quirked an eyebrow. "This is the first I've heard of it."
"Me, too," Hatcher put in. "What kind of warheads, Tao-ling?"
"We only discovered the data two days ago," Tsien half-apologized, "but what we have seen so far
suggests a weapon several magnitudes more powerful than any previously built."
"Maker!" Horus straightened in his own couch, eyes half-fascinated and half-appalled. Fifty-one
thousand years ago, he'd been a missile specialist of the Fourth Imperium, and the fearsome efficiency of
the weapons the Empire had produced had shaken him badly when he first confronted them.
"Indeed," Tsien said dryly. "I am not yet certain, but I suspect this warhead might be able to duplicate
your feat at Zeta Trianguli, Colin."
Several people swallowed audibly at that, including Colin. He'd used the FTL Enchanach drive,
which employed massive gravity fields—essentially converging black holes—to literally squeeze a ship
out of "real" space in a series of instantaneous transitions, as a weapon at the Second Battle of Zeta
Trianguli Australis. An Enchanach ship's dwell time in normal space was very, very brief, and even when
it came "close" (in interstellar terms), a ship moving at roughly nine hundred times light-speed didn't spend
long enough in the vicinity of any star to do it harm. But the drive's initial activation and final deactivation
took a considerably longer time, and Colin had used that to induce a nova which destroyed over a million
Achuultani starships.
Yet he'd needed a half-dozen planetoids to do the trick, and the thought of reproducing it with a
single warhead was terrifying.
"Are you serious?" he demanded.
"I am. The warhead's total power is far lower than the aggregate you produced, but it is also much
more focused. Our most conservative estimate indicates a weapon which would be capable of destroying
any planet and everything within three or four hundred thousand kilometers of it."
"Jesu!" Jiltanith's voice was soft, and she squeezed the hilt of her fifteenth-century dagger. "Such
power misliketh me, Colin. 'Twould be most terrible if such a weapon should by mischance smite one of
our own worlds!"
"You got that right," Colin muttered with a shudder. He still had nightmares over Zeta Trianguli, and if
the accidental detonation of a gravitonic warhead was virtually impossible, the Empire had thought the
same thing about the accidental release of its bio-weapons.