"Timothy Zahn - Cobra 3 - Cobra Bargain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

"When you didn't show up, I decided to come and find you."

He grunted. "I hope you didn't drive all over Capitalia looking for me."

"Of course not. Where else would you be?"

"Visiting my past?" He glanced around the room.

"Working out tension," she corrected him. "Come on, Dad--I know you better than _that._"

He gave her a half-hearted smile, the mask sliding from his face as he did so to reveal the hidden
ache behind it. "You do indeed, my little Jasmine," he said quietly. "You always have."

She put her hand on his arm. "It's a mess, isn't it?"

He nodded. "Yeah. How are you and your sisters holding up?"

"Oh, we're doing all right. The real question is how are _you_ doing?"

He shrugged. "As well as can be expected. Better, after this," he added, waving a hand to take in
the Danger Room. "How much did Thena tell you?"

"The condensed version only. What happened, Dad?"

His eyes held hers for a minute, then slipped away to look around the room. "It was the stupidest
slop-headed thing you've ever seen," he sighed. "On _my_ part, I mean. This guy--Baram Monse, the
hospital ID'd him--just burst in and started yelling and cursing--anti-Cobra stuff, mainly. I
tried stunning him, but he was moving and I turned too slowly to get the sonic lined up properly."
He shook his head. "Anyway, he reached into his pocket and I figured he was going for a weapon. It
was too late to physically jump him... so I used my lasers."


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Across the room a maintenance robot trundled in through an access door and began picking up one of
the "dead" target robots. "And he didn't have a gun?" Jin ventured at last.

"You got it," Justin said, a touch of bitterness seeping into his tone. "No gun, no spray, not
even a tangler reel. Just a simple, harmless, unarmed crank. And I shot him."

Jin looked past him at the maintenance robot. "Was it a setup?" she asked.

From the corner of her eye she caught her father's frown. "What do you mean?" he asked carefully.

"Was Monse trying to goad you or Uncle Corwin into attacking him? Trying to make you look bad?"
She turned back to face him. "I don't know if you've seen the net yet, but an absolute flood of
condemnation hit the thing practically from the minute Monse was taken off to the hospital. That
wasn't reaction--those people had their rhetoric primed and ready to go."