"Survivors Quest (Timothy Zahn)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

look behind her. Most of the cantina's nonsmuggler patrons had already made a
quiet exit, she noted, or else had gathered into groups on either side of the
confrontation, staying well out of the potential lines of fire. Of more
immediate concern was the group of about twenty humans and aliens who had
spread themselves out in a semicircle directly behind her, all of them with
weapons trained on her back.
All of them also showing varying degrees of wariness, she noted with a
certain malicious amusement. Her reputation had apparently preceded her. "You
throw an interesting party, Huxley," she said, turning back to face the
smuggler chief. "But you don't really think you're equipped to deal with a
Jedi, do you?"
Huxley smiled. A very evil smile. A surprisingly evil smile, actually,
given the circumstances. "Matter of fact, yeah, I do." He raised his voice.
"Bats?"
There was a brief pause. Mara reached out with the Force, but all she
could sense was a sudden heightened anticipation from the crowd.
Then, from across the room ahead and to her right came the creak of
machinery. A section of floor in a poorly lit area at the far end of the bar
began to rise ponderously toward the ceiling, revealing an open-sided keg lift
coming up from the storage cellar below. As it rose, something metallic came
into view, its shine muted by the patina of age.
Mara frowned, trying to pierce the gloom. The thing was tall and slender,
with a pair of arms jutting out from the sides that gave it a not-quite-
humanoid silhouette for all its obvious mechanical origins. The design looked
vaguely familiar, but for those first few seconds she couldn't place it. The
lift continued to rise, revealing hip-bone-like protrusions at the base of the
object's long torso and a trio of curved legs extending outward beneath them.
And then, suddenly, it clicked.
The thing was a pre-Clone Wars droideka?one of the destroyer droids that
had once been the pride of the Trade Federation army.
She looked back at Huxley, to find that his smile had widened into a
grin. "That's right, Jade," he gloated. "My very own combat droideka,
guaranteed to blast the stuffing out of even a Jedi. Bet you never expected to
see one of those here."
"Not really, no," Mara conceded, running a practiced eye over the
droideka as the lift reached the top and wheezed to a halt. It had arrived
fully open in combat stance, she noted, instead of rolled into the more
compact wheel form used to move into position. That could mean it wasn't able
to maneuver anymore.
Did that mean its guns wouldn't track, either? Experimentally, she leaned
back in her seat.
For a moment nothing happened. Then the droideka's left arm twitched, its
twin blasters shifting angle to match her movement.
So the weapons could indeed track, though they appeared to be under
someone's manual control instead of a central computer's or anything on board
the droideka itself. In the dim lighting, she couldn't tell whether or not its
built-in deflector shield was functioning, but it almost didn't matter. The
thing was armed, armored, and pointed straight at her.
Huxley was right. Even the Jedi of that era had gone out of their way to
avoid fighting these things.