"Dark Lord - The Rise Of Darth Vader (James Luceno)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Luceno James)

talking among themselves the way seasoned warriors often did before battle.
Alleviating misgivings with inside jokes; references Shryne couldn't begin
to understand, beyond the fact that they were grim.

The gunship's inertial compensators allowed them to stand in the bay
without being jolted by flaring anti-aircraft explosions or jostled by the
gunship pilots' evasive maneuvering through corkscrewing missiles and
storms of white-hot shrapnel. Missiles, because the same Separatists who
had manufactured the clouds had misted Murkhana's air with anti-laser
aerosols.

Acrid odors infiltrated the cramped space, along with the roar of the
aft engines, the starboard one stuttering somewhat, the gunship as battered
as the troopers and crew it carried into conflict.

Even at an altitude of only four hundred meters above sea level the
cloud cover remained dense. The fact that Shryne could barely see his hand
in front of his face didn't surprise him. This was still the war, after
all, and he had grown accustomed these past three years to not seeing where
he was going.

Nat-Sem, his former Master, used to tell him that the goal of the
meditative exercises was to see clear through the swirling whiteness to the
other side; that what Shryne saw was only the shadowy expanse separating
him from full contact with the Force. Shryne had to learn to ignore the
clouds, as it were. When he had learned to do that, to look through them to
the radiant expanse beyond, he would be a Master.

Pessimistic by nature, Shryne's reaction had been: Not in this
lifetime.

Though he had never said as much to Nat-Sem, the Jedi Master had seen
through him as easily as he saw through the clouds.

Shryne felt that the clone troopers had a better view of the war than
he had, and that the view had little to do with their helmet imaging
systems, the filters that muted the sharp scent of the air, the earphones
that dampened the sounds of explosions. Grown for warfare, they probably
thought the Jedi were mad to go into battle as they did, attired in tunics
and hooded robes, a lightsaber their only weapon. Many of them were astute
enough to see comparisons between the Force and their own white plastoid
shells; but few of them could discern between armored and unarmored Jedi-
those who were allied with the Force, and those who for one reason or
another had slipped from its sustaining embrace.

Murkhana's lathered clouds finally began to thin, until they merely
veiled the planet's wrinkled landscape and frothing sea. A sudden burst of
brilliant light drew Shryne's attention to the sky. What he took for an
exploding gunship might have been a newborn star; and for a moment the
world tipped out of balance, then righted itself just as abruptly. A circle