"JAMES LUCENO. SABOTEUR" - читать интересную книгу автора

Maul spent a full day in frigid temperatures and howling winds, waiting for
Bruit and his men to arrive. Armed with blasters and an assortment of more
powerful weapons, they raced from the shuttle that had delivered them from
Dorvalla's equator and stormed the underground base. Accompanying them was a
male Falleen and several aliens who answered to him, including the four
saboteurs Maul had deceived in the cantina.
Frustrated to find the base deserted, they began a search for clues as to the
mercenaries' whereabouts. For too long Maul was convinced that he would have to
intrude on their sloppy search and rub their noses in the evidence he had so
artfully sown. But ultimately they discovered it on their own.
Maul was inside his ship when Bruit and the rest reboarded the shuttle and
launched, presumably for Riome. The thought of the impending contest invigorated
him. He thrilled at the prospect of being able to participate.

Riome loomed white as death in the blackness of space.
In his smaller and faster craft, Maul arrived ahead of Bruit's mixed squad of
would-be avengers. His ship hugged the snow-covered terrain, racing over rolling
foothills and skirting the edge of a turbulent gray sea studded with islands of
craggy ice. Maul had seen no sign of the clan's Interdictor ship in orbit, and
assumed that the mercenaries had concealed it in the asteroid field coreward of
Riome.
In establishing a base, the mercenaries had found the warmest spot on the small
world. It was an area of active volcanism, with immense glaciers pocked with
ice-blue light, and patches of coarse grassland, through which bubbled dark
pools of magma-heated water. The base itself was a series of interlinked
semicylindrical bunkers that had once sheltered a team of scientists. Through
the long intervening years, the scientists' abandoned droids and equipment had
become outlandish ice sculptures.
Maul landed his ship a kilometer from the base. As on his first visit, he found
no evidence of a radar installation. He watched Bruit's shuttle drop from azure
skies, fly over the complex, and set down on a circle of permacrete, alongside a
disk-shaped Corellian freighter and a gunship of equal size.
The Toom clan could not have been unaware of the shuttle's arrival, but Bruit
had managed to catch the mercenaries unprepared nevertheless. His force of
twenty emerged from the shuttle aboard a troop carrier equipped with both
repulsorlift engines and weighty tracks for surface-effect locomotion. The clan
rallied a quick defense, loosing blaster bolts from retrofitted firing holes and
a self-contained laser cannon emplacement. The aggressors answered with the
troop carrier's top-mounted repeater blasters and rocket launchers, making it
abundantly clear that they were resolved to win the day.
Cyan laser bolts clipped the carrier's repulsorlifts and sent it coiling deeply
into the snow. Clothed in cold-weather gear and helmets fitted with tinted face
bowls, Bruit's legion leapt from ranks of bench seats. A direct hit from the
laser cannon blew the carrier to pieces. Molten bits of alloy fountained into
the thin air, sizzling as they showered to the frozen ground.
The forces of the mining companies fanned out and began a methodical advance on
the bunkers, finding shelter behind boulders that had been carried down the
mountainsides by glaciers. What Bruit didn't know, however, was that the base
couldn't be taken by a frontal assault-not, in any case, by a mere handful of
men wielding twenty-year-old weapons. The lead bunker had been fortified with