"Michael Stackpole "The Krytos Trap"" - читать интересную книгу автора

not gain his freedom, of course--no one is that eloquent; but
perhaps you will win him some modicum of mercy when it
comes time for sentence to be passed."

2

High up in a tower suite, up above the surface of Imperial
Center, Kirtan Loor allowed himself a smile. At the tower's
pinnacle, the only companions were hawk-bats safe in their
shadowed roosts and Special Intelligence operatives who
were menacing despite their lack of stormtrooper armor or
bulk. He felt alone and aloof, but those sensations came nat-
urally with his sense of superiority. At the top of the world,
he had been given all he could see to command and domi-
nate.
And destroy.
Ysanne Isard had given him the job of creating and lead-
ing a Palpatine Counter-insurgency Front. He knew she did
not expect grand success from him. He had been given ample
resources to make himself a nuisance. He could disrupt the
functioning of the New Republic. He could slow their take-
over of Coruscant and hamper their ability to master the
mechanisms of galactic administration. A bother, minor but
vexatious, is what Ysanne lsard had intended he become.
Kittan Loor knew he had to become more. Years before,
when he started working as an Imperial liaison officer with
the Corellian Security Force on CoreIlia, he never would
have dreamed of finding himself rising so far and playing so





deadly a game. Even so, he had always been ambitious, and
supremely confident in himself and his abilities. His chief
asset was his memory, which allowed him to recall a pleth-
ora of facts, no matter how obscure. Once he had seen or
read or heard something he could draw it from his memory,
and this ability gave him a gross advantage over the crimi-
nals and bureaucrats with whom he dealt.
His reliance on his memory had also hobbled him. His
prodigious feats of recall so overawed his enemies that they
would naturally assume he had processed the information he
possessed and had drawn the logical conclusions from it.
Since they assumed he already knew what only they knew,
they would tell him what he had not bothered to figure out
for himself. They made it unnecessary for him to truly think,
and that skill had begun to atrophy in him.
Ysanne Isard, when she summoned him to Imperial Cen-
ter, had made it abundantly clear that learning to think and