Lorien: переводы

→"I don't care who he's meeting with," Kolokoltsov said flatly. "Just tell him to be here."

→"Sir, Admiral Rajampet is meeting with that delegation from the AG's office and--"

→"Get hold of Wodoslawski, Abruzzi, MacArtney, Quartermain, and Rajampet," he went on. "I want them here in Conference One in one hour."

→"Maybe not, but there's going to be hell to pay over this one," he told her, completely unnecessarily. He wondered if he'd said it because he still hadn't recovered his mental balance.

→"No, Sir." Wang smiled back, but her own surprise--at the strength of his reaction, as much as at the news itself--still showed in her blue eyes. "I don't think anyone would be, under these circumstances."

→"That was a silly question, wasn't it, Astrid? I guess I'm not as immune to the effects of surprise as I'd always thought I was."

→He felt an uncharacteristic urge to rip the display unit from his desk and hurl it across the room. To watch it shatter and bounce back in broken bits and pieces. To curse at the top of his lungs in pure, unprocessed rage. But despite the fact that someone from pre-Diaspora Old Terra would have estimated his age at no more than forty, he was actually eighty-five T-years old. He'd spent almost seventy of those years working his way up to his present position, and now those decades of discipline, of learning how the game was played, came to his rescue. He remembered the Twelfth Commandment--"Thou shalt never admit the loss of thy composure before thine underlings"--and actually managed to smile at his chief of staff.

→And assuming the Manties aren't lying and manufacturing all this evidence for some godforsaken reason, any report from Byng has to've been routed by way of Meyers, he thought. If he'd shortcut the regulations and sent it directly by way of Mesa and Visigoth--like any admiral with a functional brain would have!--it would've been here eight days ago.

→Kolokoltsov grimaced and cut her off with a wave of his hand. Of course it hadn't. In fact, independent confirmation of the first New Tuscany Incident--he could already hear the newsies capitalizing this one--would take almost another entire T-month, if Josef Byng had followed procedure. The damned Manties sat squarely inside the League's communications loop with the Talbott Sector. They could get word of events there to the Sol System in little more than three T-weeks, thanks to their never-to-be-sufficiently-damned wormhole junction, whereas any direct report from New Tuscany to Old Terra would take almost two months to make the journey by dispatch boat. And if it went through the Meyers System headquarters of the Office of Frontier Security, as regulations required, it would take over eleven T-weeks.

→"Sir," she began a bit cautiously, "according to the Manties, this all happened at New Tuscany, and we still don't have independent confirmation of the first incident they say took place there. So--"

→Despite two decades' experience in the ways of the Solarian league's bureaucracy, which included as the Eleventh Commandment "Thou shalt never embarrass thy boss by word, deed, or expression," Wang actually blinked in surprise.