"The New Rebellion (Kristine Rusch)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

Luke stood in the double doorway, and peered into the Hall. The sunlight
illuminated only one corner. Emergency glow panels revealed more destruction.
Most of the voting desks were covered with stone and shattered crystal.
The floor was a mass of debris. Freight droids, maintenance droids, and repair
droids waited in the back. No one had started the cleanup yet. Leia wanted it
to wait until the investigation was underway.
Luke had decided to do some investigating on his own.
Several things bothered him: Leia's insistence on the involvement of
former Imperials; Han's strange conversation with the missing smuggler; and,
most importantly, the disturbance in the Force that Luke, Leia, and the Solo
children had felt to varying degrees. Luke agreed with Han; he doubted the
direct involvement of the former Imperials. If they had all known, they would
have found an excuse to be away from the Hall at the time. Leia had a point
too. Most of the junior senators were uninjured. If she was right, and a
former Imperial or a group of former Imperials were involved, what greater way
to turn away suspicion than to be in the Hall during the explosion and
"miraculously" escape injury?
Luke stepped inside. Dust motes rose in the circle of sunlight. He had
been in so many places of destruction, seen so much devastation, and still it
didn't prepare him for this. This Hall was the working Chamber. It had housed
the Old Republic's Senate, and even Palpatine's redesign hadn't affected that
feeling of ancient and irrevocable law. It had been Leia's favorite room.
She had been below, at the podium, when the blast hit.
The podium was shattered. The circle on which it had stood was littered
in ceiling rubble. The repair crews outside had warned Luke that the building
was unstable. They weren't going to let him in without an escort, but he
insisted. He had to see this, and he had to see it alone.
A chill pervaded the air. It was the same kind of chill he had felt on
Yavin 4, the chill of quick, sudden death. So many lives, senselessly taken.
He stepped in deeper. Beneath the chill was that odd sense again, that
sense of betrayal. Betrayal was probably a common response to sudden death,
but this sense felt different. It felt-personal, like the betrayal Luke had
felt when Kyp had joined forces with Exar Kun. As if all in this room had died
at the hands of someone they once trusted.
Personal death. A bomb was an impersonal death.
He closed his eyes, let the Force flow through him, and felt for the
pockets of coldness. Voices swirled around him, remembered voices, calling for
help, shouting instructions. Shouts for friends, wails of the dying.
Pockets of cold.
He opened his eyes.
Not one large explosion. Several small explosions had detonated all at
once in this room. And the senators sitting closest to the detonations died.
Several planned executions?
A warning?
Or a destruction of the Hall that went awry?
He couldn't tell. But now he had something to tell Leia's investigators.
They should stop the search for one big cause, and search for several small
ones.
Rubble fell from the ceiling, clattering onto the ruined floor. He turned
and accidentally stepped into one of the pockets of coldness. The sunlight