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

brown eyes that told him she knew exactly what he was doing, or trying to do,
and he stepped back. "All of us," he corrected himself.
"Newcomers and Therans alike."
Leia folded her hands on her knee, the wide velvet sleeves and voluminous
skirt of her crimson ceremonial robe picking up the soft sheen of the hidden
lamps overhead and of the distant stars hanging in darkness beyond the curved
bubble of the port. Even five years ago she would have remarked tartly on the
fact that he was omitting mention of the largest segment of the planet's
population, those who were neither the technological post-Imperial Newcomers
nor the ragged Theran cultists who haunted the cold and waterless wastes, but
ordinary farmers.
Now she gave him silence, waiting to see what else he would say.
"I should explain," Ashgad went on, in the rich baritone that so closely
resembled the recordings she had heard of his father's, "that Nam Chorios is a
barren and hostile world. Without massive technology it is literally not
possible to make a living there."
"The prisoners sent to Nam Chorios by the Grissmath Dynasty seem to have
managed for the past seven hundred years."
The man looked momentarily nonplussed. Then he smiled, big and wide and
white. "Ah, I see Your Excellency has studied the history of the sector." He
tried to sound pleased about it.
"Enough to know the background of the situation," replied Leia
pleasantly. "I know that the Grissmaths shipped their political prisoners
there, in the hopes that they'd starve to death, and set automated gun
stations all over the planet to keep them from being rescued. I know that the
prisoners not only didn't oblige them by dying but that their descendants-and
the descendants of the guards-are still farming the water seams while the
Grissmath homeworld of Meridian itself is just a ball of charred radioactive
waste."
There was, in fact, very little else in the Registry concerning Nam
Chorios. The place had been an absolute backwater for centuries. The only
reason Leia had ever heard of it at all before the current crisis was that her
father had once observed that the old Emperor Palpatine seemed to be using Nam
Chorios for its original purpose: as a prison world. Forty years ago it had
been rumored that the elder Seti Ashgad had been kidnapped and stranded on
that isolated and unapproachable planet by agents of his political foe, the
then-Senator Palpatine.
Those rumors had remained unproven until this second Ashgad, like a
black-haired duplicate of the graying old power broker who had disappeared,
had made contact with the Council in the wake of the squabbling on the planet
and asked to be heard.
Though there was no reason, Leia thought, to make this man aware of how
little she or anyone knew about the planet or the situation.
Do not meet frith Ashgad, the message had said, that had reached her,
literally as she was preparing to board the shuttle to take her to her
flagship. Do not trust him or accede to any demand that he makes.
Above all, do not go to the Meridian sector.
"Very good." He passed the compliment like a kidney stone, though he
managed a droll and completely automatic little chuckle as a chaser.
"But the situation isn't as simple as that, of course."