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

Disease?
It was any longtime spacer's nightmare. But the "good-faith" team that
had come onboard yesterday from Seti Ashgad's small vessel had passed through
the medical scan; and in any case, the planet Nam Chorios had been on the
books for four centuries without any mention of an endemic planetary virus.
Everyone on the light of Reason had come straight from the planet.
Still, Wover pecked the Commander's code on the wall panel.
"Sir! Wover here. One of the midshipmen's down. The meds haven't gotten
here yet but..." Behind her the break room door swooshed open. She glanced
over her shoulder to see a couple of Two-Onebees enter with a table, which was
already unfurling scanners and life-support lines like a monster in a bad
holovid. "It looks serious. No, sir, I don't know what it is, but you might
want to check with Her Excellency's flagship, and the Light, and let them
know. Okay, okay," she added, turning as a Two-Onebee posted itself politely
in front of her.
"My heart is yours," she declared jocularly, and the droid paused for a
moment, data bytes cascading with a faint clicleety-cliclas it laboriously
assembled the eighty-five percent probability that the remark was a jest.
"Many thanks, Sergeant Wover," it said politely, "but the organ itself
will not be necessary. A function reading will suffice."
The next instant Wover turned, aghast, as the remaining Two-Onebee
shifted Barak onto the table and hooked him up. Every line of the readouts
plunged, and soft, tinny alarms began to sound. "Festering groats!" Wover
yanked free of her examiner to stride to the boy's side.
"What in the name of daylight...."
Barak's face had gone a waxen gray. The table was already pumping
stimulants and antishock into the boy's veins, and the Two-Onebee plugged into
the other side had the blank-eyed look of a droid transmitting to other
stations within the ship. Wover could see the initial diagnostic lines on the
screens that ringed the antigray personnel transport unit's sides.
No virus. No bacteria. No poison.
No foreign material in Koth Barak's body at all.
The lines dipped steadily toward zero, then went flat.
"We have a complicated situation on Nam Chorios, Your Excellency."
Seti Ashgad turned from the four-meter bubble of the observation
viewport, to regard the woman who sat, slender and coolly watchful, in one of
the lounge's gray leather chairs.
"We meaning whom, Master Ashgad>." Leia Organa Solo, Chief of State of
the New Republic, had a surprising voice, deeper than one might expect.
A petite, almost fragile-looking woman, her relative youth would have
surprised anyone who didn't know that from the age of seventeen she'd been
heavily involved in the Rebellion spearheaded by her father and the great
stateswoman Mon Mothma: With her father's death, she was virtually its core.
She'd commanded troops, dodged death, and fled halfway across the galaxy with
a price on her head before she was twenty-three. She was thirty-one now and
didn't look it, except for her eyes. "The inhabitants of Nam Chorios. Or only
some of them?"
"All of them." Ashgad strode back to her, standing too close, trying to
dominate her with his height and the fact that he was standing and she
remained in her chair. But she looked up at him with an expression in her