"JAMES LUCENO. SABOTEUR" - читать интересную книгу автора

Star WarsR: The New Jedi Order: Agents of Chaos I: Hero's Trial
Star WarsR: The New Jedi Order: Agents of Chaos II: Jedi Eclipse
Star WarsR: Cloak of Deception *

*Forthcoming










Nearly every world in the Videnda sector had something to recommend it-warm
saline seas, verdant forests, arable grasslands that stretched to distant
horizons. The outlying world known as Dorvalla had a touch of all of those. But
what it had in abundance was lommite ore, an essential component in the
production of transparisteel-a strong, transparent metal used galaxywide for
canopies and viewports in both starships and ground-based structures. Dorvalla
was so rich in lommite that one-quarter of the planet's scant population was
involved in the industry, employed either by Lommite Limited or its contentious
rival, InterGalactic Ore.
The chalky ore was mined in Dorvalla's tropical equatorial regions. Lommite
Limited's base of operations was in Dorvalla's western hemisphere, in a broad
rift valley blanketed with thick forest and defined by steep escarpments. There,
where ancient seas had once held sway, shifts in the planetary mantle had thrust
huge, sheer-faced tors from the land. Crowned by rampant vegetation, by trees
and ferns primeval in scale, the high, rocky mountains rose like islands,
blinding white in the sunlight, the birthplace of slender waterfalls that
plunged thousands of meters to the valley floor.
But what was once a wilderness was now just another extractive enterprise. Huge
demolition droids had carved wide roads to the bases of most of the larger
cliffs, and two circular launch zones, large enough to accommodate dozens of
ungainly space shuttles, had been hollowed from the forest. The tors themselves
were gouged and honeycombed with mines, and deep craters filled with polluted
runoff water reflected the sun and sky like fogged mirrors.
The ceaseless work of the droids was abetted by an all but indentured labor
force of humans and aliens, to whom the mined ore served as a great equalizer.
No matter the natural color of a miner's skin, hair, feathers, or scales,
everyone was rendered white as the galactic dawn. All agreed that sentient
beings deserved more from life, but Lommite Limited wasn't prosperous enough to
convert fully to droid labor, and Dorvalla wasn't a world of boundless
opportunities for employment.
Still, that didn't stop some from dreaming.

Patch Bruit, Lommite Limited's chief of field operations-human beneath a routine
dusting of ore-had long dreamed of starting over, of relocating to Coruscant or
one of the other Core worlds and making a new life for himself. But such a move