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

to his eyes. The rangefinder numbers skittered at the
bottom of his field of vision as he scanned across the
horizon.
This was a pointless trip, Dengar thought dis
gustedly. He leaned out farther from the keelbeam, still
examining the wasteland through the 'binocs. His bounty-
hunting career had never been such a raging success that
he'd been able to refrain from any other kind of
scrabbling hustle that chanced to come his way. It was a
hard trade for a human to get ahead in, considering the
number of other species in the galaxy that worked in it,
all of them uglier and tougher; droids, too. So a little
bit of scavenger work was nothing he was unused to. The
best would've been if he had found any survivors out here
that could either pay him for their rescue or that he
could ransom off to whatever connections they might have.
The late Jabba's court had been opulent-and
lucrative-enough to attract more than the usual lowlifes
that one encountered on Tatooine.
But the bunch of rubble Dengar had found out here-the
few scattered and pawed-over bits of the sail barge and
the smaller skiffs that'd hovered alongside as outriders,
the dead bodyguards and warriors-wasn't worth two lead
ingots to him. Anything of value was already trundling
away in the Jawas' slow, tank-treaded sandcrawlers,
leaving nothing but bones and worthless scrap behind.
Might as well just stay here, he thought. And wait.
He'd sent his bride-to-be, Manaroo, aloft in his ship,
the Punishing One, to do a high-altitude reconnaissance
of the area. Soon enough she'd be finished with the task,
and would come back to fetch him.
The knot of frustration in Dengar's gut was instantly
replaced with surprise as the keelbeam suddenly tilted
al most vertical. The strap of the electrobinoculars cut
across his throat as they flew away from his eyes. He
held on with both hands as the beam pitched skyward, as
though it were on a storm-tossed ocean of water rather
than sand.
Charred metal scraped tight against the ammo pouches
on his chest as the keelbeam rotated. As the beam twisted
about, Dengar could see the surrounding dunes heaving in
a slow, seismic counterpoint to the wrecked barge's
motion, cliff faces of rock and sand shearing away and
tumbling downward, slower clouds of dust stacking across
the suns' smoldering
faces.
At the center of the dunes, the slope grew deeper,
like a funnel with a black hole at its center. Another
shudder ran beneath the planet's surface, and the
keelbeam rolled almost sideways, nearly dislodging Dengar