Avenger911: переводы

→"And they weren't joking about sending their Admiral Gold Peak to inquire into matters on the ground in New Tuscany."

→"And?" Rajampet's eyes turned warier than ever and he seemed to settle back into his chair.

→"What?" Rajampet settled the last couple of centimeters into his chair, and his expression was as perplexed as his voice. "What are you talking about?"

→"I was in the middle of a meeting with the Attorney General's people," Rajampet replied, without apologizing for his earlier comment. "They still aren't done with all the indictments for those damned trials, which means we're only just now getting that whole business with Technodyne sorted out. I promised Omosupe and Agatá"--he twitched his head at Omosupe Quartermain, Permanent Senior Undersecretary of Commerce, and Permanent Senior Undersecretary of the Treasury Agatá Wodoslawski--"a recommendation on the restructuring by the end of the week. It's taken forever just to get everyone assembled so we could sit down and talk about it, and I don't appreciate being yanked away from something that important."

→"Sir," Captain Loretta Shoupe told Augustus Khumalo quietly, "Communications is picking up an all-ships transmission from an Admiral Keeley O'Cleary. She wants to surrender, Sir."

→Another two and a half minutes oozed into eternity while light-speed limited transmissions sped towards HMS Hercules and Quentin Saint-James. Then--

→Forty-five more seconds ticked past. A minute. Ninety seconds. Then, abruptly, every surviving Solarian starship's wedge went down simultaneously.

→* * *

→"Holding Charlie launch, aye, Sir," Lewis replied, and Terekhov sat back in his chair, waiting.

→"Spot the Charlie pods but hold launch," Terekhov said.

→Lewis' finger stabbed a key at his console, and twenty seconds later, every one of the Bravo launch missiles detonated as one, millions of kilometers short of their targets.

→"Executing Exclamation Point, aye, Sir!"

→"Execute Exclamation Point," he said.

→Sir Aivars Terekhov watched a third of the superdreadnought icons on his plot blink virtually simultaneously from the glaring crimson of hostile units into the purple crosses of dead ships . . . ​or into nothing at all. His arctic blue eyes didn't even flicker at the proof of how utterly outclassed the Solarian League Navy truly was, but his nostrils flared. He gazed at the display for almost a full minute, absorbing the results, watching the sudden disintegration of the Solarian wall's formation as individual captains tried to avoid the debris of slaughtered consorts or swerved in frantic, independent evasion patterns as the Bravo launch swept towards them. Then he turned to look at Stillwell Lewis.

→* * *

→Archimedes, Andreas Vesalius, Hipparchus, Leonardo da Vinci, Gregor Mendel, Marie Curie, Wilhelm Roëntgen, Alfred Wegener, Avicenna, al-Kawarizmi . . . ​every one of the Alpha launch's twenty-three targets--thirty-two percent of Crandall's total wall of battle--was reduced to splinters and wreckage in that single inconceivable, exquisitely synchronized explosion.

→Nor did van Heutz's ship die alone. Her squadron mates Joseph Lister, Max Planck, and Joseph Hutton died with her. Like Buckley, Hutton at least avoided immediate and total destruction, but Lister and Planck were less fortunate. Lister shattered, breaking into three distinct pieces; Planck simply disappeared in a flash of white-hot fury.

→Those missile-born talons gouged and tore. Energy mounts and missile tubes, counter-missile launchers, radar arrays, point defense clusters, boat bays, gravitic sensors, impeller nodes--all of them shattered, exploding into tattered ruin in a single catastrophic moment, faster than a man could have blinked. In less time than it would have taken to cough, Sandra Crandall's flagship was transformed into a broken wreck, a splintered hulk, coasting onward under momentum alone, with three quarters of her crew wiped out of existence.

→Those missile-born talons gouged and tore. Energy mounts and missile tubes, counter-missile launchers, radar arrays, point defense clusters, boat bays, gravitic sensors, impeller nodes--all of them shattered, exploding into tattered ruin in a single catastrophic moment, faster than a man could have blinked. In less time than it would have taken to cough, Sandra Crandall's flagship was transformed into a broken wreck, a splintered hulk, coasting onward under momentum alone, with three quarters of her crew wiped out of existence.

→Jacomina van Heutz clung to the arms of her command chair as her shock frame hammered her. The fleeting instant in which the Manticoran missiles could bring their lasers to bear against her ship's sidewalls as they penetrated the Solarian formation with a closing velocity which had climbed to seventy-three percent of light-speed was far too brief for any of Joseph Buckley's damage to register on merely human senses as individual hits. It was all delivered in one stroboscopic lightning bolt of devastation, too sudden and intense for even the ship's computers to register or sort out.