"Matthew Woodring Stover - Clone Wars - Shatterpoint" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stover Matthew Woodring)

anyway for the system transit.

Mace sat as far from the others as the shuttle's limited space allowed.

The Jedi Master wore clothing appropriate to his cover: a stained vest of Corellian sand panther leather
over a loose shirt that used to be white, and skintight black pants with wear patches of gray. His boots
carried a hint of polish, but only above the ankle; the uppers were scuffed almost to suede. The only
parts of his ensemble that were well maintained were the supple holster belted to his right thigh, and the
gleaming Merr-Sonn Power 5 it held. His lightsaber was stuffed into the kitbag beneath his seat,
disguised as an old-fashioned glow rod.

The datapad on his lap was also a disguise: though it worked well enough for him to encrypt his journal
on it, most of it was actually a miniature subspace transmitter, frequency-locked to the band monitored
by the medium cruiser Halleck, onstation in the Ventran system.

The Korunnal Highland swung into view: a vast plateau of every conceivable shade of green, skirted by
bottomless swirls of cloud, crisscrossed by interlocking mountain ranges. A few of the tallest peaks were
capped with white; many of the shorter mountains plumed billows of smoke and gas. The eastern half of
the highland had already rolled through the terminator; when the shuttle passed into the planet's shadow,
gleams of dark red and orange specked the world like predators' eyes beyond the ring of a campfire's
light: open calderae of the highland's many active volcanoes.

It was beautiful. Mace barely noticed.

He held the recording wand of the fake datapad and spoke very, very softly.

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU [Initial Haruun Kal Entry]: Depa's down
there. Right now.

I shouldn't be thinking about this. I shouldn't be thinking about her. Not yet. But-She's down there. She's
been down there for months.

I can't imagine what might have happened to her. I don't want to imagine.

I'll find out soon enough.

Focus. I have to focus. Concentrate on what I know is true while I wait for the mud to settle and the
water to become clear.

A lesson of Yoda's. But sometimes you can't wait.

And sometimes the water never clears.

I can focus on what I know about Haruun Kal. I know a lot.

Here's some of it: HARUUN KAL (Al'har I): sole planet of the AL'HAR system. Haruun Kal is the
name given to it in the language of the indigenous human population, the Korunnai (uplanders). It
translates to Basic as "above the clouds." From space, the world appears to be oceanic, with only a few
green-topped islands rising from a restless multicolored sea. But this is deceptive: the sea that these
islands punctuate is not liquid, but an ocean of heavier-than-air toxic gases, which plume endlessly from