"Scott Westerfeld - Succession 2 - Killing Of Worlds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westerfeld Scott)

every networked machine on the planet— diaries, market mainframes, pocket phones,
traffic computers—was amalgamating into a single emergent consciousness: Alexander.
Captain Zai had to act quickly.

Given the chaos of the rescue attempt, it will never be clear if the Child Empress
was killed by her Rix captors or by the Imperial Apparatus; theories of the
Emperor's involvement have never been decisively proven. Easier to confirm is why
Laurent Zai refused the Blade of Error, flying in the face of tradition. Although he
was from an ancient and gray military family, sworn to the Emperor's service, he had
recently sworn a different sort of loyalty to Nara Oxham, a Senator from the
anti-Imperial Secularist party. The two were in secret contact, he at the Rix frontier
and she at the capital, throughout the beginning of the Rix War. When she asked Zai
not to kill himself, he assented. Love, in this case, was a stronger force than honor.

The rescue attempt had come too late for Legis. The Rix compound mind emerged
within the planet's infostructure, an alien intelligence in possession of a hostage world.
But Alexander was cut off. The polar facility that maintained Legis's interstellar
communications remained in Imperial hands. Alexander was alone, save for a single Rix
commando who had survived the rescue attempt. With the help of omnipresent
Alexander and her hostage/lover Rana Harter, this Rixwoman disappeared to the far
north to await the compound mind's next move.

On board the Lynx, Captain Laurent Zai faced a mutiny, an attempt by gray
members of his crew to enforce the Error of Blood. Though he and his able first
officer, Katherie Hobbes, easily thwarted the mutineers, a farmore dangerous threat
approached. Another Rix ship, a battlecruiser of far greater firepower than Zai's
frigate, had entered the Legis system. Although officially pardoned by the Emperor
for his Error of Blood, Zai was ordered to engage the battlecruiser to prevent it from
making contact with the compound mind, a suicide mission, the Emperor no doubt
assumed.

Of course, Laurent Zai could not have imagined the fate that awaited Legis XV if
the Lynx should fail.

The Emperor probably planned a nuclear attack from the moment the Rix mind came
into existence. Total annihilation of the Legis infostructure offered three advantages
to the sovereign. He could destroy the compound mind, rally the Empire behind another
costly war with the Rix, and, most importantly, maintain the secret that had underlain
his rule for sixteen centuries, a secret grasped by Alexander in its first hours of
consciousness. Against the objections of Senator Oxham and the anti-Imperial parties,
the Emperor's hand-picked War Council approved the attack by a narrow margin,
providing political cover for this desperate act.

But Laurent Zai and the Lynx proved far more resourceful, and luckier, than anyone
might have expected.




Prologue