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

bodyguard's face and throat, his face suffused with pleasure; Liegeus averted
his eyes and avoided touching him as he passed.
The closing door cut off the sight of them, and whatever Ashgad said
next.
"Oh, do something!" cried Threepio, and tried to get to his feet.
Artoo rolled over to him and extended his welder as a sort of lever arm
to help him up. "Why didn't you do something, you ignorant little adding
machine! We have to stop them! Guards! Guards! They're kidnapping the Chief of
State!"
The anteroom door swooshed wide at Threepio's touch. The protocol droid
hesitated over the body of Ezrakh, dead now, eyes staring in horror, then
turned helplessly away. With the opening of the door into the corridor he
stopped in alarm. Two other Noghri lay on the floor, one still breathing with
slow, harsh, stertorous gasps, the other utterly still. They bore no marks of
violence or struggle.
"Shuttle bay!" cried Threepio, punching the code on the wall comm.
"Shuttle bay! They have to be stopped!"
There was no answer but the whine of a signal blocker somewhere in the
system.
He hastened after Artoo, who hadn't even paused, trundling down the
corridor and making a little detour around the dead guards. "What can have
caused it? Symptomatic analysis indicates..."
Artoo stopped, with such suddenness that Threepio nearly can-nonaded into
him, over the body of a third Academy guard. He extended his gripper arm to
prod the young man's shoulder, and Threepio saw that this one, the bodyguard
Marcopius, bore on the side of his head the mark of a heavy blow.
"Yeoman Marcopius, Master Ashgad has kidnapped Her Excellency!" cried
Threepio, at the first sign of reviving consciousness.
Sitting up, the youth said a word that Threepio knew in close to a
million languages but was programmed never to utter in any of them.
"The vhole ship's been poisoned!" He rolled to his feet with a nimbleness
that caused the droid a momentary flash of envy.
"I beg your pardon, sir, but the symptoms are less those of poison than
of disease," reported Threepio worriedly. "Specifically, my data-banks show a
ninety percent correlation with the Death Seed plague of seven centuries ago.
But how such a thing came to pass..."
"Whatever it is, they're panicking down in the infirmary." The boy
scooped up his ceremonial weapon and strode so quickly along the corridor as
he spoke that the two droids could barely keep pace. "The engine crew sealed
themselves off. I caught that pilot of Ashgad's-if he is a pilot-doing
something with the transmission records..."
"They're going to do something to both vessels, something to destroy
them!" said Threepio. "They said they had to get their own ship out of range.
We're doomed!"
"Not if we can get to one of the scout boats, we're not."
Beyond the vast portal of the magnetic hatch, the stars were already
moving when Yeoman Marcopius and the two droids reached the shuttle bay floor.
The shuttle brig was already gone, a dwindling gray flake in the blackness.
The three bay guards lay dead on the floor, unmarked and peaceful. Far off the
Light of Reason was a tiny berry, a cluster of minute bronze, black, and