"Tatooine Ghost (Troy Denning)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Denning Troy)

seconds... or minutes... his eyes now the lifeless blue of ice. Leia grew
cold, and frightened, and the mask dissolved back into the black nothingness
of space, leaving her to stare out once again into the mind-stabbing
brilliance of the Tatoo system's twin suns.
Chapter 1

Instead of bed, where she usually awoke from her dreams, Leia found
herself slumped forward in her crash webbing, ears hissing with static and
eyes aching from the glare of two
G-class suns. Han and Chewbacca were still busy at their stations, Han
plotting approach vectors and Chewbacca setting sensor filters. The planet
Tatooine was just drifting into view, its yellow sodium-rich sands glowing so
brightly it resembled a small sibling star in orbit around the big twins. A
metallic hand tapped Leia's shoulder. She turned to see C-3PO's photoreceptors
shining at her from the adjacent passenger seat.
"Pardon me for asking, Princess Leia, but are you well?"
"Don't I look well?"
"Oh dear," C-3PO replied, a diplomatic subroutine activating in response
to her tone of voice. "Why yes, you do look as splendid as ever, but it seemed
for a moment as though you might have overloaded your primary circuits."
"My circuits are fine."
"I'll need to confirm that later." Han twisted around and glanced over
his seat with the same crooked smile that had alternately charmed and worried
Leia since their first meeting on the Death Star. "Princess."
"Oh, really?" Leia straightened herself in her chair without fully
realizing she was doing it. With his tough-guy good looks and eyes sparkling
with trouble, Han still made her sit up and take notice. "And you think you
can read my schematics?"
"Sweetheart, I know your schematics by heart." Han's smile faded, and his
expression grew concerned. "Threepio's right. You look like you've seen a
ghost."
"Something like that. A bad dream."
Han looked doubtful. "I've sat in that chair. That chair isn't
comfortable enough for dreamsЧgood or bad."
"It's been a long trip," Leia said, perhaps a little too quickly. "I must
have nodded off."
Han regarded her a moment longer, then shrugged. "Well, see if you can
stay awake." He looked forward again, to where the twin suns were slowly being
eclipsed by Tatooine's steadily swelling disk. "Until the sensors come up, we
need to keep an eye out for other traffic."
Leia gazed out the canopy and began to search for the rapidly swelling
silhouette of blocked starlight that would mean an approaching vessel. Her
thoughts remained focused on the strange dream. It had a similar feel to the
Force-vision she had experienced nearly five years earlier at Bakura, when her
father had sent an apparition begging for the forgiveness she would neverЧ
could neverЧgrant. But that had been his doing, not hers.
Han's hand rose into view between the pilot and copilot's seats, pointing
toward a blocky silhouette floating some distance to one side of Tatooine's
yellow disk. The twin suns were now completely hidden behind the planet, and
Leia could see that the tiny silhou ette was growing larger as they