gadzilla: переводы

→Nor did it consider the need to provide search and rescue parties for the nine crippled superdreadnoughts which had not been totally destroyed.

→Solarian ships' companies, conversely, were even larger and more manpower-intensive than prewar Manticoran designs had been, and Sandra Crandall had entered the Spindle System with seventy-one superdreadnoughts, each with a ship's company of over six thousand. Even completely ignoring the rest of her task force, that had amounted to the next best thing to a half-million personnel. Tenth Fleet, on the other hand, had nowhere near that many people. A Roland-class destroyer like Naomi Kaplan's Tristram had a total company of less than seventy, and not a single one of them was a Marine. A Saganami-C, like Aivars Terekhov's Quentin Saint-James, was somewhat better off--at least each of them had a hundred and forty Marines available, but that was out of a total crew of only three hundred and fifty-five. For that matter, even one of the lordly Nikes, like her own Artemis, had a company of barely seven hundred and fifty. Which meant the total personnel of all Michelle's warships--including Khumalo's superdreadnought flagship and the four carriers of Stephen Enderby's CLAC squadron and their LAC groups--amounted to barely thirty-two thousand. Crandall's surviving forty-eight superdreadnoughts, alone, carried ten times that many men and women, and that didn't even consider the fifty thousand or so aboard her battlecruisers and destroyers.

→The one huge problem with the RMN's decision to adopt increased automation in order to reduce its warships' manpower requirements was that it worked even better than anyone had expected. There were very few warm bodies aboard modern Manticoran or Grayson cruisers or destroyers, and even superdreadnoughts had crews smaller than prewar battlecruisers. That was an enormous advantage in Fifth Space Lord Cortez's Sisyphean task of manning the navy's ships, but it also meant the smaller companies of the ships in question found it much more difficult to generate detachments for little things like, oh, boarding parties, for example.

→She snorted, grimacing at her own thoughts, but it was true. And, ironically, the direct consequence of one of the Royal Manticoran Navy's greater advantages.

→And now, Michelle Henke thought dryly as she stood on Artemis' flag bridge, hands clasped behind her, and watched the icons of Admiral Enderby's LACs move steadily towards their destinations, for the fun part. I know I shouldn't, but I can't help thinking everything would've been a bunch simpler if O'Cleary just hadn't surrendered for another salvo or two. As it is, we've got a hell of an interesting little problem here.

→Chapter Twenty-Three

→"I'm prepared to to give you the opportunity to comply with my reasonable demands without further loss of life or destruction, but the Solarian League Navy doesn't intend to permit an act of war against the League to pass unanswered. I have no doubt you have indeed been in communication with the League. I also have no doubt of where my own duty lies, however. Because I have no desire to see additional avoidable bloodshed, I will give you precisely three T-days from the moment my ships made their alpha translations to accept my terms. If you do not do so within that time, I will cross the limit and proceed exactly as I've described, and the consequences of that will rest upon your shoulders. In the meantime, I'm uninterested in any further communication of yours, unless it is for the purpose of accepting my terms. Good day, Governor."

→She paused very briefly, her smile thin and cold, as she deliberately raised the stakes. Then she continued in that same, cold voice.

→"In that case, Governor," Crandall responded, "I will advance upon the inhabited planet of your star system. I will engage and destroy every military starship in the system. And after I've done that, I'll land Marines on your planet and secure control of it in the name of the Solarian League until an appropriate civilian administration can be set up by the Office of Frontier Security. And, I feel confident, Frontier Security will continue to administer this world--and every other planet of your so-called Talbott Quadrant--until such time as the Solarian League's just requirements for accountability and redress are fully satisfied."

→Shavarshyan couldn't decide whether the ever so slight curl of Medusa's lip was deliberate or an involuntary response which had escaped her formidable self-control. In either case, the unstated contempt came through quite nicely.

→"And if I should happen to reject your ‘minimum terms'?"

→And then she sat there again, glaring at Medusa's image, while rage and fury fermented inside her.

→"I have no intention of sitting here for a solid T-month while you and your ‘Star Empire' redeploy your own warships, Madame Governor," the admiral said coldly. "My standing orders require what I believe my standing orders require, and the terms I've already stated are the minimum I'm prepared to accept."

→It was a pity Crandall wasn't paying attention.

→From the corner of his eye, Shavarshyan saw Ou-yang Zhing-wei purse her lips as that salvo went home. Medusa's confirmation that Manticore had not simply captured Sigbee's databases but hacked their most secure files was bad enough. The Manticoran's pointed suggestion that she knew far more about the League's official reaction to New Tuscany than Crandall possibly could had been even worse. Whether Bautista and Crandall were prepared to face the implications or not, Ou-yang clearly recognized the diplomatic minefield Task Force 496 was about to enter. And, just as clearly, she understood that no naval officer's connections were so good she couldn't be thrown to the wolves if she screwed up too egregiously. Crandall, fortunately for her blood pressure, if not for anything else, was too busy glaring at Medusa to notice the ops officer's expression. It was, perhaps, less fortunate that she was so totally infuriated that she also completely ignored Medusa's offer to put her into direct communication with her superiors on Old Terra. Clearly, the baroness was telling her it wasn't too late to take a deep breath and back down under cover of the diplomatic smokescreen of seeking guidance from above.

→She stabbed a button, and the display went blank.

→"I make this point only to clarify the fact that we're well aware you're acting at the present moment on your own authority," Medusa continued after a moment. "Mind you, I'm equally well aware that one of the functions of a flag officer this far from her star nation's capital is to do precisely that in moments of crisis. However, you would do well to consider that in this instance the Star Empire of Manticore has already communicated formally with the Solarian League on Old Terra about both New Tuscan incidents. I am in receipt of copies of the League's official responses to those communiques, should you care to view them. And if you would care to avail yourself of the Lynx Terminus, we would be quite happy to send your own dispatches directly to Old Chicago, should you wish to seek guidance from your superiors before we have another of those . . . ​misunderstandings, I believe you called them? I suspect those superiors might not be entirely pleased if some avoidable ‘misunderstanding' on your own part leads to a further regrettable escalation of the tensions between the Solarian League and the Star Empire."

→Her dark eyes glittered, and Shavarshyan inhaled sharply as the Manticoran's steely smile challenged Crandall to press her on that point in an official exchange both sides knew was being recorded.

→It was remarkable, Shavarshyan thought, still studiously pondering the facts and figures on his own display, how an eighteen-minute wait between exchanges undeniably robbed threats of immediacy and power while simultaneously distilling the pure essence of anger behind them.

→This time, neither party was prepared to retreat behind its wallpaper. Personally, Shavarshyan thought that was fairly foolish, given that they couldn't reduce the awkward intervals between exchanges even if they'd wanted to. Yet if it was arguably foolish for Medusa, it was much more obviously foolish for Crandall. She was an admiral in the Solarian League Navy--a Battle Fleet admiral--on what she'd intended from the beginning to be a punitive expedition, and there she sat, locking eyes--uselessly--with a com image which was nine minutes old by the time she even saw it. The image of the official representative of the star nation of neo-barbarians she'd set out to chastise.