"Steve Perry - Battle Surgeons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

told it to move.
The admiral glanced down at his desk and the moun-tain of flimsies and datapads there. Bleyd set to
work. It would be best to have a clear mind, unencumbered by trivial business, so that he could concentrate
on his plans. He had to keep things running smoothly; there was far too much at stake for any mistakes to
be made at this point. Bleyd thought of the billions of credits he would realize from the Hutt's scheme.
Those billions would buy him the top floor of a monad in Corus-cant's prestigious equatorial belt, and
servants to cater to his every whim. The means to accomplish all this was
thereтАФall he had to do was be brave enough to seize the opportunity.

Den Dhur swaggered into the cantina.
It wasn't much of a swagger, but after all, he was a Sullustan, waist-high to and only half the weight of
most of the patrons within. It was understandable that conversation didn't cease and heads turn to mark his
progress. He could live with that.
What was harder to live with were the lights and the noise. There were fluorescent globes on every
table, and a quadro unit near the door was pounding out some-thing loud and thumping and syncopated that
they called music these days. Big milking surprise, he told himself; a noisy cantina. Who'd have
thought? But the fact that it was unremarkable didn't make it any less unpleasant.
Added to the wail blasting from the speakers were the patrons. Most of them were military and all were
chat-tering loudly, which only added to the cacophony. Like all Sullustans, who had evolved for
underground living, Den had relatively large eyes and sensitive ears com-pared to most sentients. He was
wearing polarized droptacs and sonic dampeners, but even so, he knew he was going to have a walloping
headache if he stayed in here too long. Still, he was a reporter, and places like this were where the most
interesting stories could be heard. Assuming one could hear anything through this d i n . . .
 He ascended the ramp, designed for shorter and leg-less species, to the bar, gaining enough height to put
him on eye level with the tender, whom he signaled with a wave.
The tender, a phlegmatic Ortolan, came over. He looked at Den without speakingтАФat least, without
speaking anything Den could hear. Most Ortolans con-versed in ultrahigh or ultralow frequencies. Even the
Sullustan's ears, sensitive as they were, weren't as good as the blue-furred flaps the tender sported. Den
was sure the chunky, long-nosed alien wore sonic dampeners as good as his own, if not better.
Fortunately the dampeners had selective blockingтАФ either that, or the Ortolan was good at lip-reading,
be-cause when Den said, "Bantha Blaster," the tender promptly began pouring liquids into a glass, building a
swirly orange-and-blue concoction. He was pretty good, Den noted. In a matter of moments the Ortolan
handed the drink to Den. "On the tab," the tender said, his voice low and resonant.
Den nodded. He took a long, slow sip. Ah ...
The first drink of the day was the best. After a few more, you couldn't really taste them.
He had enough swallows to blunt the harsh edges of the lights, then looked around. First thing a good
re-porter did upon spacing to a new planet was find the lo-cal watering holes. More stories came out of
cantinas than anywhere else. This one certainly wasn't much: a dilapidated foamcast building in the middle
of a swampтАФmost of the planet seemed to be either jungle or swamp, Den had noticed on the shuttle
coming downтАФset up to serve the clone troops, soldiers, and as-sorted support staff; the latter mostly
medics, given that this was a Rimsoo.
Lightning flickered outside, leaving, in his eyes, a mo-mentary faint blue afterglow to everything. Thunder
boomed almost simultaneously, hurting his ears even with the dampeners. If the weather here worked the
same way it did on most planets Den was familiar with, the rumbles dopplering through the sky meant
immi-nent rain. He watched as most of the cantina's occu-pants repositioned themselves. Uh-huh. Roof
leaks. The regulars undoubtedly knew the spots where the wa-ter would drip through. He watched gaps
opening in the crowd as they shifted to new areas, their movements al-most unconscious. Rain's coming,
don't stand there, you'll get drenched. Unless, of course, you were a water species, in which case the leaky
spots were prized. One person's trash, another person's treasure ...
Another thunderclapтАФa sound easily differentiated from that of artillery, if you'd been in and out of war