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

The spy had been on this miserable soggy mudball of a planet for more than two standard months now, and
was intensely, seriously sick of it already. Two months since the agents in the higher echelons of the
Republic military had arranged for the transfer to this Rimsoo. Two months in the heat and the sun,
besieged con-stantly by all manner of flying pests . .. and the spores! Those irritating spores, constantly
clogging up every-thing. There were days when a filter mask was a neces-sity, or he would strangle before
he could walk the length of the base.
The spy missed home with an unnerving desperation. The mild weather, the ocean breezes, the subtle
scents of the fern trees ... the nostalgic ache was dismissed with a growl and a headshake. No point in
dwelling on the past. There was a job to do, and finally, the seeds that had been planted more than a year
before were starting to come to fruition.
Although the exact nature of the machinations by which Count Dooku had accomplished this grand
scheme were still unclear, ultimately they did not mat-ter. In fact, it was better to be ignorant so that, if
caught, not even drugs or hypnoscans could extract the truth.
Not that exposure was very likely. This new identity had been impressively documented, and the position
in the chain of command was high enough that almost every piece of important data coming through could
be evaluated. The confederacy had laid the groundwork well. The spy glanced at a wall chrono, then sat
down behind the large, impressive desk. Built into the desktop was a flatscreen that displayed various views
of the Rimsoo buildings, the transport ship hangar, and the bota-processing docks. There really wasn't too
much more to the place. Everything combined wouldn't be worth the waste of a single proton torpedo,
except for one thing: the bota.
The different flatscreen scenes showed everything looking normal. That would change soon enoughтАФin
just a few minutes, in fact.
A push of a button stopped the screen on the "space-dock"тАФmuch too grandiose a term for a slab of
ferro-crete ten meters squareтАФwhere the shuttle, bearing a load of processed bota, was about to lift off.
The spy watched as the transport rose silently on invisible repul-sor waves. It climbed quickly, building up
speed for a quick dash through the main spore strata to minimize damage. It reached the height of a
thousand meters in mere moments, dwindling to an all-but-impossible-to-see dot. Then the dot abruptly
bloomed, blindingly white, becoming for a second brighter than Drongar Prime.
A few seconds later, the rumble of the explosion rolled over the base, like tumbling, crashing breakers of
sound.
The spy couldn't feel any joy over this act. People had died in the doing of it, but it was necessary. One
had to cling to that. It was part of a distant, but important, goal. One had to keep that in mind.

Den Dhur was thinking hard. It would soon be time for him to go back to his cubicle and dig out the small
but powerful comm unit he had bought on the black market for his war assignments. It had cost him a pile
of credits, but it was worth it. Disguised as a portable en-tertainment module, it was actually capable of
sending a holocoded message packet through hyperspace on a bandwidth that was all but undetectable by
both Re-public and Confed monitor stations.
The problem was, there didn't seem to be a whole lot to report. While it wasn't general knowledge that
the Drongar engagement was primarily about claiming the bota fields, it wasn't a big surprise, either. Den's
prob-lem right now was that he didn't have a good story to follow.
That problem didn't last long.
Den was crossing the compound when he saw his shadow turn pitch black for a fraction of a second. He
turned and looked up carefully, squinting so as to max-imize the polarization factor in his droptacs. Even
with ambient light damped down, the bright spot overhead was intensely white, outshining the planet's sun.
For a horrified second he thought some other, nearby star had gone nova. That would be a milking hot
story, except that he wouldn't be around to report it.
He heard shouting, cries of shock and alarm, from be-hind him. Someone was standing beside him,
looking upтАФTolk, the Lorrdian nurse. "What happened?" she asked.
"Looks like the bota transport blew up."