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

The bombers' second pass eliminated the canopy. The high-yield proton bombs
shattered the transparisteel shield, fragmenting the sheets at ground zero. A
shock wave rippled through the double-walled barrier, ripping whole
transpari-steel plates free from both layers as it went. The warm air from
beneath the shield rushed upward, blowing debris up and out, then condensed in
the frigid air. At the same time, around the hole's jagged edges, cold air
poured down into the colony.
Rolling her Interceptor up on the port stabilizer assem-bly, Erisi spiraled the
fighter down in through the hole the bombs had created. The chasm into which she
flew stretched out above and below her fighter like the grandest of Corus-cant's
boulevards. Long suspension bridges linked both sides of the chasm at various
levels and quickly icing-over water-falls splashed their way down into the
depths in front of her. Lights from hundreds of viewports dotted the chasm's
depths with yellow circles and squares.
Erisi hit the triggers on her lasers. A stream of green laser darts scored a
ragged line along one face of the chasm, pierc-ing the viewports and reducing
them to darkness. As she shot, she glanced at her primary monitor, waiting for
the missile warning alarm to be activated. It's going to be missiles or
turbolasers, and if they're going to use them, it'll have to be now.
She continued her flight deeper and deeper, strafing targets as she went. One
line of fire scattered a crowd on a balcony. Another swept across a foot bridge,
chasing a man who foolishly thought himself faster than a laser bolt. Near-ing
the bottom of the chasm, she chopped her throttle back and pulled up in a loop,
but not before filling the ice-crusted pools below with enough laser energy to
start them boiling.
She knew, with the canopy being breached and the ichthyoculture pools having
been transformed into giant
stewpots that the Halanit colony was dead. Those who didn't freeze to death
would starve-each a terrible way to die. She realized that her old comrades in
Rogue Squadron would be horrified at the carnage, as she would have been if the
Empire had carried this attack out on Thyferra, but she felt no re-morse for the
people doomed by her action.
They were already dead. Their need for bacta had been desperate, because without
it their marginal colony could not survive. They could not afford bacta because
their colony was so poor, hence anyone with enough neurons to form a syn-apse
would have seen that the only sensible thing to do was to abandon Halanit or
choose a method of exploiting the world to generate enough money so it could
sustain itself.
/ have no obligation to save the stupid from themselves. Even if we had given
them bacta, another crisis would have wiped them out. The fact that they refused
to face reality does not make it incumbent upon me to shield them from the
di-saster they so fervently court. Erisi's eyes narrowed as she started a
strafing run back toward the surface. And they com-pounded their stupidity by
consorting with thieves and using bacta for which they could not pay.
Despite the lack of fire defending the colony, she knew they were anything but a
defenseless, inoffensive community. Their accepting the bacta from Wedge and the
others was the equivalent of stabbing a knife into the Thyferran economy. If
Thyferra allowed them to do what they did, other worlds would similarly duck
their obligations. Other individuals would emulate Wedge, and pirates would
swarm over the bacta convoys. The rightful reward for providing a vital fluid to