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

well, y'know, scavengers prefer the, the, er, the tongue." Nausea bloomed below Mace's ribs. His
fingertips tingled. He stared down at the woman's image. Those marks on her face-he had thought they
were just marks. Or some kind of fungus, or a colony of mold. Now his eyes made sense of them, and
he wished they hadn't: dull gold-colored lumps under her chin.
Brassvine thorns.

Someone had used them to nail her jaw shut.

He had to turn away. He realized that he had to sit down, too.

The agent continued, "Our station boss got a tip and sent me to check it out. I hired a steamcrawler from
some busted-out jups, rented a handful of townies who can handle heavy weapons, and crawled up
there. What we found. well, you can see it. That data wafer-when I found it." Mace stared at the man as
though he'd never seen him before. And he hadn't: only now, finally, was he truly seeing him. An
undistinguished little man: soft face and uncertain voice, shaky hands and allergies: an undistinguished little
man who must have resources of toughness that Mace could barely imagine. To have walked into a
scene that Mace could barely stomach even in a bloodless, translu cent laser image; to have had to smell
them-touch them-to pry open a dead woman's mouth.

And then to bring the recordings here, so that he could live it all again- Mace could have done it. He
thought so. Probably. He'd been some places, and seen some things.

Not like this.

The agent said, "Our sources are pretty sure the tip came from the ULF itself." Palpatine glanced a
question. Mace spoke without taking his eyes off the agent. "The Upland Liberation Front, sir. That's
Depa's partisan group; 'uplanders' is a rough translation of Korunnai-the name the mountain tribes give
themselves." 'Korunnai?" Palpatine frowned absently. "Aren't those your people, Master Windu?" 'My.
kin." He made himself unclench his jaw. "Yes, Chancellor. You have a good memory." 'A politician's
trick." Palpatine gave a gently self-deprecating smile and waved a dismissive hand. "Please go on." The
agent shrugged as though there was little more to tell. "There have been a lot of. disturbing reports.
Execution of prisoners. Ambushes of civilians. On both sides. Usually they can't be verified. The jungle.
swallows everything. So when we got this tip-" 'You found this because somebody wanted you to find it,"
Mace finished for him. "And now you think-" Mace turned the data wafer over and over through his
fingers, watching it catch splinters of light. "You think those people might have been killed just to deliver
this message." 'What a hideous idea!" Palpatine lowered himself slowly onto the edge of his desk. He
appealed to the agent. "This can't be true, can it?" The agent only hung his head.

Yoda's ears curled backward, and his eyes narrowed. "Some messages. most important, is how they are
framed. Secondary, their content is." Palpatine shook his head in disbelief. "These ULF partisans-we ally
ourselves with them?

The Jedi ally with them? What sort of monsters are they?" 'I don't know." Mace handed the wafer back
to the agent. "Let's find out." He slotted it into a port on the side of the holoprojector and touched a
control.

The holoprojector's phased-wave speakers brought the jungle around them to life with noise: the rush of
wind-rattled leaves, skrills and clatters of insect calls, dim dopplered shrieks of passing birds, the howls
and coughs of distant predators. Through the eddies and boils of sound drifted a whisper sinuous as a
riversnake: a human or near-human whisper, a voice murmuring in Basic, sometimes comprehensible for