chernidar: переводы

→Well, the strike team’s leader thought grimly, our lords and masters are about to find out these serfs aren’t very happy with them. And they’re not going to be very happy with us in a few minutes.

→One thing Dubroskaya was confident of was that the stories they had heard—like the ones about what had happened to Josef Byng in New Tuscany—had obviously grown in the telling. There had to be at least some core of truth to the wild tales of disaster, but the destruction of dozens of SDs while the Manties got off scot free? Ridiculous! Still, the SLN had clearly taken losses and, presumably, retreated from the system in the face of unexpectedly heavy resistance, and that was more than bad enough for Oxana Dubroskaya. The fact that a Solarian fleet had failed to take its objective for the very first time in the SLN’s history was a sobering—and infuriating—thought, and she was determined not to let overconfidence lull her into creating her own disaster, which was one reason she was less than enthralled by Dueñas’ strategy. She and her staff had analyzed the badly garbled bits and pieces of information they had as carefully (and pessimistically) as possible, however, and it seemed evident that the Manties must have managed to get more system-defense missile pods into the system than Crandall had realized. They’d probably been longer-ranged than Crandall had expected, too, judging by the limited accounts they had. That was the only explanation they could come up with…and as she’d just pointed out to the governor, missile pods in Spindle weren’t going to help them in Saltash.

→Those rumors were a lot more fragmentary than she would have preferred, but they did seem to strongly suggest that Fleet Admiral Sandra Crandall’s visit to the Spindle System hadn’t gone very well. The only problem was that no one in Saltash had a clue as to how badly it might have gone. The battle (if a battle had actually been fought at all) had taken place little more than two months earlier, and there simply hadn’t been time for any reliable account of it to reach a backwoods star system like Saltash.

→“Even assuming there’s any truth to the rumors about Spindle, Governor,” she said, “we’re not picking up anything that could be transporting the missile pods they’d need to equalize the odds here in Saltash.”

→Dubroskaya contented herself with a silent nod, although she wasn’t sure “reasonable” was a word Damián Dueñas should be throwing around at a time like this. Impounding the merchant vessels of a sovereign star nation and jailing their entire ships’ companies without trial or bail didn’t strike her as meeting the dictionary definition of that adverb, either, no matter what theoretical justification for it he might have concocted. On the other hand, the decision wasn’t hers to make, and she wasn’t going to shed any tears about pinning the Manty upstarts’ ears back the way they needed.

→“Damn,” Dueñas said mildly after a moment. “I’d hoped to get some additional reinforcements in here before they turned up.” Dubroskaya stiffened visibly, and the governor shook his head quickly. “That’s no reflection on you or your ships, Vice Admiral, I assure you. But I’d be happier if we had an even greater margin of superiority. One thing these people have already demonstrated is that they’re not exactly likely to be reasonable.”

→The system governor didn’t look very surprised, she thought. Unhappy, yes; but not surprised.

→“I don’t see how it could be anyone else with that accel, Sir,” Dubroskaya agreed.

→“Manties,” he said.

→Understanding blossomed in Dueñas’ eyes.

→“Sir, our Rampart-class destroyers are only half that big, and their maximum acceleration rate, with zero safety margin on the compensator, is only five-point-zero-nine KPS squared.”