"The Crystal Star (Vonda McIntyre)" - читать интересную книгу автора (McIntyre Vonda N)

Star Wars

THE CRYSTAL STAR


by Vonda n. McIntyre

Chapter
1

The children had been kidnapped.
Leia ran headlong toward the glade, leaving behind the courtiers and the
chamberlain of Munto Codru, leaving her attendants, leaving the young page
who--completely against protocol--had stumbled into Leia's receiveg room,
bleeding from nose and ears, incoherent.
But Leia understood her: Jaina and Jacen and Anakin had been stolen.
Leia ran, now, through the trees and down a soft mossy path that led into
her children's playground. Jaina imagined the path was a starship course, set
to hyperspace. Jacen pretended it was a great mysterious road, a river.
Anakin, going through a literal phase, insisted that it was only a path
through the forest to the meadow.
The children loved the forest and the meadow, and Leia loved exclaiming
in wonder at the treasures they brought her: a squirmy bug, a stone with shiny
bits trapped in its matrix--rare jewels, perhaps! - - or the fragments of an
eggshell.
Her vision blurred with tears. Her soft slipper snared in the tangled
moss. She stumbled, caught herself, and plunged onward, holding the skirts of
her court robe high.
In the old days, she thought, in the old days, I'd be wearing boots and
trousers, I wouldn't be hampered and tripped by my own clothing!
Her breath burned in her throat.
And I'd be able to run from my receiveg room to the forest glade without
losing my breath!
The green afternoon light shifted and fluttered around her. Before her,
the light brightened where the forest opened into a water-meadow, the meadow
where her children had been playing.
Leia ran toward it, gasping, her legs heavy.
She was running toward an absence, not a presence, toward a terrible
void.
She cried out to herself, How could this happen? How is this possible?
The answer--the only way it could be possible - - terrified her. For a
short time, her ability to sense the presence of her children had been
neutralized. Only a manipulation of the Force could have such an effect.
Leia reached the meadow. She ran toward the creek where Jaina and Jacen
had splashed and played and taught little Anakin to swim.
A crater was ripped into the soft grass. The leafy blades had been
flattened into a circle around the raw patch of empty dirt.
A pressure bomb! Leia thought in horror.
A pressure bomb had gone off, near her children.
They aren't dead! she told herself. They can't be, I'd know if they were