"Steve Perry - Battle Surgeons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

Well. If her sojourn on this world was to be her trial by fire, the test that would determine whether or not
she had what it took to be a Jedi Knight, she would proba-bly know before too—
The transport slewed in a sudden yawing turn, inertia shoving Barriss hard into the seat. The ship's
internal gravity field had obviously been turned off.
"Sorry 'bout dat," the pilot said. "Dere's a Sep'ratist battery in dis sector, an' every now and den dey try
t'track one'a us an' knock us down. Standard procedure to t'row in a few 'vasive maneuvers on de way
down. Kanushka!"
The exclamation of surprise in the Kubaz's native tongue drew Barriss's attention. "What?"
"Big battle goin' on, off t'starboard. Coupla mech units an' troops goin' at it—dere, y'see? I'll do a
fly-over—we're high 'nough, dey can't hit us wit' hand weapons. Hang on."
The pilot made a broad turn to the right. Barriss looked down at the scene. They were, she estimated,
about a thousand meters high, and the air was reason-ably clear; they were below the main spore strata,
with no clouds or mist to block her view.
As a Jedi Padawan, she was knowledgeable in the ways of war. And she had been trained in personal
com-bat with her lightsaber from an early age, so her obser-vation was more critical than most.
The trooper units moved across a field of short, stubby plants, with the sun at their backs—a sound
tac-tical move when facing biological opponents, but of lit-tle use against battle droids, whose
photoreceptors could easily be adjusted to tune out glare. There were perhaps two hundred troopers; they
had a slight numer-ical advantage over the droids, which, Barriss esti-mated, had maybe seventy or eighty
units on the field. From this height, the crescent attack formation of the Republic force was apparent as it
sought to envelop the droids and gain superiority in field of fire.
The battle droids were mostly of the Baktoid Bl se-ries, as nearly as she could tell from high overhead.
There were also several B2 super battle droids, which were basically the standard model with an armored
cas-ing overlay and more weaponry. They had broken into quads, each unit of four fanning out to deal with
the tactic of envelopment, concentrating its fire on the same section of troopers.
Classic formations on an open battlefield, she knew,
just as she knew that the outcome would be decided by which side could instigate the most accurate
firepower the fastest. She could almost hear the voice of her Mas-ter echoing in her memory:
It does not matter how fast you are if you miss the target. It is the one who hits the most who will
have the victory .. .
Blaster beams lanced through the engaging forces, which were now separated by no more than a short
sprint's distance. Vapor boiled up from misses that hit vegetation, and small fires quickly flared here and
there. Troopers fell, seared black and smoking, and battle droids ground to a halt, scorch marks and flashes
of electricity on their white metal chassis marking where blasterfire had struck.
It was all eerily silent, no sound reaching this height as the pilot slowed to give her a longer look.
It appeared that the Republic forces would win this engagement—both sides seemed to be losing
combat-ants at the same rate, and in such a case, the side with the larger force would win—though the
victory would be costly. A unit that lost eight out of ten troops won only in the technical sense.
"We can't hang 'round," the pilot said. "D'filters'll be in d'red in 'nother fifteen minutes an' we're five
away from Rimsoo Seven. I like t'have a margin 'f error."
The shuttle craft gained speed, and they left the battle behind.
Barriss mused on what she had seen as the transport shot over lowland vegetation and steaming,
miasmic swamps. Whatever else this assignment might be, it cer-tainly was not going to be dull.
Jos was snatching a few precious moments of sleep in the cubicle he shared with Zan when he heard the
trans-port's approach.
At first, only half awake, he thought it was another medlifter bringing in more wounded, but then he
real-ized the repulsor sound was pitched differently.
It has to be the new doc, he thought. No one else in their right mind would make planetfall on
Drongar without being ordered to.
He pushed through the osmotic field that covered the cubicle's entrance; it had been set to let air circulate