"Michael Stackpole "The Bacta War"" - читать интересную книгу автора

below.
The Rebels refer to these fighters as squints, but in atmo-sphere I prefer to
think of them as winces. From the moment Ysanne Isard had appointed her to lead
the Thyferran Home Defense Corps aerospace wing, Erisi had lobbied hard to equip
her two squadrons with X-wings. While slower and slightly less agile than the
Interceptor, the X-wing's shields and ability to use proton torpedoes in
addition to its lasers made it a superior fighter.
It mattered not at all how eloquently I argued, what facts I used, Iceheart
would never have agreed to my request. Erisi realized her own sense of
superiority had collided full on with Isard's need to see anything and
everything Imperial as better than anything the Alliance had to oppose it. Isard
sees herself as the pinnacle of Imperial excellence and demands that ev-
erything else rises to her level. What I or others know counts as nothing to her
because we are not up to her standards.
Erisi really couldn't blame Isard for treating the Thyfer-rans and the THDC as
the Empire's stupid, inbred cousins. Though the Corrupter had already been en
route to Halanit when the Ashern raid took place, word of it had been
com-municated to the ship. Her cheeks burned as the image of her father slumped
naked in his chair exploded in her mind. Mor-tifying in the extreme, the
incident meant that the Corrupter's Imperial crew felt no reason to hide their
contempt for the THDC personnel on board.
The fact that her father had been involved hurt her deeply. What made it even
worse was that Iella Wessiri had been identified from the hologram. The Imps
took that as a sign that Antilles had entered into a full alliance with the
Ashern, but Erisi read more into lella's participation. Iella caused my father
to be embarrassed so as to get at me, to
avenge herself for my betrayal of Corran and the rest of the Rouges. This was a
message directed at me by her-a private declaration of war.
Erisi glanced at her monitor and snarled into the comm unit. "Four, close the
formation up." Behind her four In-tersceptors came a quartet of the
double-hulled TIE bombers. Her Interceptors were nominally flying cover for the
bomb-ers, though once they dropped their thermal detonators and proton bombs to
open up the main colony, the Interceptors' mission changed to engaging ground
targets and suppressing ire at the stormtrooper-laden shuttles that would
follow.
The TIE bombers swooped down through the air and spiraled in on their target.
Erisi and her flight came around to
follow them in. She couldn't help but remember countless
training exercises where she'd used an X-wing to stoop like a hawk-bat on such
lumbering craft. Two would be dead in my
initial pass and the others would die as they attempted to flee. Below her, the
bombers began their runs. The thermal
detonators fell lazily from the bombers as if harmless. Their explosions flashed
golden light through the glacier and bled
up into the great gouts of steam they produced. The light breeze below quickly
cleared the steam off, revealing a hole
roughly a kilometer around and nearly half that deep. Steam-ing water pooled in
the bottom of it, and Erisi knew the thermal detonators had cleared the glacier
down to the trans-paristeel canopy that protected the Halanit colony from the
harsh climate of their world.