"Timothy Zahn - The Mandalorian Armor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

time," he told the dead man.
His advice was too late to do that one any good. In
his own memory bank, Dengar filed away the image of the
corpse, with its clawing fingers and mouth full of sand,
as further proof of what he'd already known The guy who
comes along after the battle's over is the one who cleans
up.
In more ways than one. He stood at the top of the
dune, shielding his eyes from the glare of Tatooine's
double suns, and scanned across the wide declivity in
front of him. The forms of other warriors and bodyguards,
sprawled across the rocky wastes or half-buried like the
one left a few meters behind, showed that he'd found the
still and silent epicenter of all that fatal action he
had so wisely avoided.
More evidence Bits and pieces of debris, the
wreckage of the repulsorlift sail barge that had served
as Jabba's floating throne room, lay scattered across the
farther dunes. Scraps of the canopy that had shaded
Jabba's massive bulk from the midday suns now fluttered
in the scalding breezes, blaster fire and the impact of
the crash having torn the expensive Sorderian weftfabric
to rags. Dengar could see a few more of Jabba's
bodyguards, facedown on the hot sand, their weapons
stolen by scavenging Jawas. They wouldn't be fighting
anymore to protect their boss's wobbling bulk. Even in
this desiccating heat, Dengar could smell the sickly
aftermath of death. It wasn't unfamiliar to him-he'd been
working as a bounty hunter and general-purpose mercenary
long enough to get used to it-but the other scent he'd
hoped to catch, that of profit, was still missing. He
started down the slope of the dune toward the distant
wreckage.
There was no sign of Jabba's corpse, once Dengar
reached the spot. That didn't surprise him as he used a
broken-shanked scythe-staff to poke around the rubble.
Soon after the battle, he'd seen a Huttese transport
lifting into the sky; that'd been what had guided him to
this remote spot. The ship undoubtedly had had Jabba's
body aboard. Hutts might be greedy, credit-hungry slugs-a
trait Dengar actually admired in them-but they did have a
certain feeling toward the members of their own species.
Kill one, he knew, and you were in deep nerf waste. It
wasn't sentimentality on the part of the other Hutts, so
much as a wound to their notorious megalomania, mixed
with a practical self-interest.
So much for Luke Skywalker and the rest of them,
thought Dengar as the point of the staff revealed sticky
and distasteful evidence of Jabba's death. As if that
little band of Rebels didn't have enough trouble, with