"Foster, Alan Dean - Splinter of the minds eye" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

"Don't make me make it an order, Luke."

Biting back his initial response, he hurriedly began a check of visual readout charts and records. "According to my information tapes, Mimban doesn't have a repair station, Leia. In fact," he added with a glance at the murky green-white sphere below and to one side, "Mimban might not even have an emergency standby station."

"It doesn't matter, Luke. I have to make the conference, and I'm going down while I still have some real control. Surely, in a system as populous as this one, any world with a breathable atmosphere's going to be equipped with facilities for emergency repair. Your data must be old or else you're searching the wrong tapes." A pause, then, "You can prove it by shifting your communicator monitor to frequency oh-four-six-one."

Luke adjusted the requisite controls. Instantly a steady whine filled the small cabin.

"Sound familiar?" she asked him.

"That's a directional landing beacon, all right," he replied, confused. Several further queries, however, revealed no records of a station on Mimban. "But there's still nothing in the listings on either Imperial or Alliance tapes. If we..." He broke off as a puff of gas glowed brightly from the Princess' Y-wing, expanded brightly and vanished. "Leia! _Princess Leia!_"

Her small ship was already curving away from him. "Lost lateral controls completely now, Luke! I've got to go down!"

Luke rushed to match her glide path. "I don't deny the presence of the beacon. Maybe we'll be lucky! Try to shift power to your port controls!"

"I'm doing the best I can." A brief silence, followed by, "Stop moving around, Threepio, and watch your ventral manipulators!"

A contrite, metallic, "Sorry, Princess Leia," sounded from her cabin companion, the bronzed human-cyborg relations 'droid See Threepio. "But what if Master Luke is correct and there is no station below? We could find ourselves marooned forever on this empty world, without companionship, without knowledge tapes, without... without _lubricants!_"

"You heard the beacon, didn't you?" Luke saw a small explosion whereupon the Y-wing dove surface-ward at an abruptly sharper angle. For a few moments only static answered his frantic calls. Then the interference cleared. "Close, Luke. I lost my starboard dorsal engine completely. I cut port dorsal ninety percent to balance guidance systems."

"I know. I've cut power to slow with you."

In the Y-wing's tiny cabin Threepio sighed, gripped the walls around him more firmly. "Try to set us down gently, please, Princess. Rough landings do terrible things to my internal gyros."

"They're not so good on my insides either," the Princess shot back, lips clenched tightly as she fought the sluggish controls. "Besides, you've nothing to worry about. 'Droids can't get spacesick."

Threepio could have argued otherwise, but remained silent as the Y-wing commenced a stomach-turning roll downward. Luke had to react rapidly to follow. There was one tiny positive sign: the beacon signal was not imaginary. It was really there, beeping steadily when he adjusted the controls on his board so that the signal was audible. Maybe Leia was right.

But he still didn't feel confident. "Artoo, let me know if you spot anything unusual on our way down. Keep all your sensory plug-ins on full power." A reassuring whistle filled the cockpit.

They were at two hundred kilometers and descending when Luke jumped in his seat. Something began pushing at his mind. A stirring in the Force. He tried to relax, to let it fill and flow over and through him just as old Ben had instructed him.

His sensitivity was far from perfectly attuned and he sincerely doubted he would ever attain half the command of the Force that Kenobi had possessed... though the old man had expressed great confidence in Luke's potential. Still, he knew enough to categorize that subtle tingling. It sparked an almost palpable feeling of unease in him, and it came from something (or several somethings) on the surface below. Yet he wasn't sure. Not that he could do anything about it now. The only concern of the moment was hoping the Princess' ship could set down safely.

But the sooner they left Mimban, the better he'd feel.

Despite her own problems, the Princess was taking the time to relay coordinate information to him. As if he couldn't plot her own course by himself. Instead, he tried to identify something he'd just spotted below them as they entered the outer atmosphere. Something funny in the clouds here... he couldn't decide just what.

He voiced his new concern to the Princess. "Luke you're worrying too much. You'll worry yourself to death at an early age. And that would be a waste of..."

He never did find out what worrying himself to death would be a waste of because at that moment they entered troposphere for the first time and the immediate reaction of both ships to the thicker air and air to ships was anything but normal.

It seemed as if they'd suddenly plunged from a cloud-dotted but unexceptional-appearing sky into an ocean of liquid electricity. Gigantic multicolored bolts of energy erupted from empty air, contacted the hulls of the two ships and fomented instrumental chaos where order had reigned seconds before. Instead of the blue or yellow-tinged canopy they'd expected to sail through, the atmosphere around them was drenched with bizarre, perambulating energies so wild and frenzied they bordered on the animate. Behind Luke, Artoo Detoo beeped nervously.

Luke fought his own instrumentation. It flaunted a farrago of electronic nonsense at him. The madly bucking X-wing was held in the grip of unidentified forces powerful enough to toss it about like a plaything. The chromatic storm vanished behind him as if he'd suddenly emerged from a waterspout, but his controls continued to exhibit what were probably permanent manifestations of the electronically addled.

A quick verbal survey revealed what he most feared: the Princess' fighter was nowhere in sight. Trying to control his drunken ship with one hand on the manual controls, Luke activated the communicator with the other.