"Planet Of Twilight (Barbara Hambley)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

Star Wars

Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambly


send by: Anatoliy Ermolaev
upload : 21.VI.2005

For Ole and Nedra

The first to die was a midshipman named Koth Barak.
One of his fellow crew members on the New Republic escort cruiser
Adamantine found him slumped across the table in the deck-nine break room,
where he'd repaired half an hour previously for a cup of caffeine.
Twenty minutes after Barak should have been back to post, Gunnery
Sergeant Gallie Wover went looking for him, exasperatedly certain that he'd
clicked into the infolog banks "just to see if anybody mentions the mission."
Of course, nobody was going to mention the mission. Though accompanied by
the Adamantine Chief of State Leia Organa Solo's journey to the Meridian
sector was an entirely unofficial one. The Rights of Sentience Party would
have argued-quite correctly-that Seti Ashgad, the man she was to meet at the
rendezvous point just outside the Chorios systems, held no official position
on his homeworld of Nam Chorios. To arrange an official conference would be to
give tacit approval of his, and the Rationalist Party's, demands.
Which was, when it came down to it, the reason for the talks.
When she entered the deck-nine break room, Sergeant Wover's first sight
was of the palely flickering blue on blue of the infolog screen.
"Blast it, Koth, I told you..."
Then she saw the young man stretched unmoving on the far side of the
screen, head on the break table, eyes shut. Even at a distance of three meters
Wover didn't like the way he was breathing.
"Koth!" She rounded the table in two strides, sending the other chairs
clattering into a corner. She thought his eyelids moved a little when she
yelled his name. "Koth!"
Wover hit the emergency call almost without conscious decision. In the
few moments before the med droids arrived she sniffed the caffeine in the gray
plastene cup a few centimeters from his limp fingers. It wasn't even cold. A
thin film of it adhered to the peach fuzz beginnings of what Koth
optimistically referred to as his mustache.
The stuff in the cup smelled okay-at least as okay as fleet caffeine ever
smelled-and there was no question of alcohol or drugs. Not on a Republic
escort.
Not where Koth was concerned. He was a good kid.
Wover was an engine room regular who'd done fifteen years in merchant
planet-hoppers rather than stay in the regular fleet after Palpatine's goons
gained power: She looked after "her" midshipmen as if they were the sons she'd
lost to the Rebellion. She would have known if there had been trouble with
booze or spice or giggle-dust.