"JAMES LUCENO. SABOTEUR" - читать интересную книгу автора

blast doors, and the coarse grass apron that fronted it was impregnated with
fragmentation mines and other traps.
Maul decided that he had to show himself.
He appeared briefly on a rise, east of the base, a two-legged stranger dressed
in a long cloak, deep black against the snowfield. The assailants took him for
one of the clan and immediately opened fire. Maul propelled himself over the
rise with leaps and bounds, though scarcely of the sort of which he was capable.
Bruit did the wise thing and split his team, figuring, as Maul predicted he
would, that the lone enemy knew another way into the base.
Maul kept himself in plain sight, dodging the blaster bolts fired by his
pursuers, without using his lightsaber. He couldn't have been a better guide if
he had been one of them. Briefly hidden by a snowdrift, he called on the Force
to twirl himself deeply into the white wave. From the depths of his
self-excavated tomb, he heard Bruit's men dash for the relatively undefended
entrance to which he had led them.
Maul waited until he was certain that the last of them had disappeared through
the entrance. Then he corkscrewed out of the ice cavity and followed them
inside. The sibilant reports of blasters and the acrid smell of fire and
cauterized flesh had brought his blood to a near boil, and he came close to
drawing his lightsaber and rushing headlong into the fray. But slaughter was not
his intent. His Master's plans would be better served if the miners and the
mercenaries killed each other-though Maul might yet have to dispose of the
ultimate victors.
Judging by the way the assault was progressing, it was Bruit's forces that would
be left standing at the end. Despite being outgunned and outnumbered, the
miners' assault was invigorated by the wrath of the betrayed. Even with a third
of their group already wounded or dead, Bruit and his InterGalactic analog
persevered, continuing to bring the fight to the Toom clan, which held the rear
of the bunker, behind overturned laboratory counters and assorted pieces of
instrumentation.
Explosions from the front bunker indicated that Bruit's teammates had blundered
their way into the minefield. Shortly, the survivors were turning their weapons
loose against the blast doors in an attempt to burn their way through.
Maul scampered along the long wall of the central bunker and found a place from
which he could observe the fighting. To contain his eagerness, he gave himself
over to evaluating the combat techniques of one contestant or another, making
something of a game of anticipating who would be killed by whom, and at just
what moment. His predictions grew more and more accurate as the opposing sides
drew closer together.
A powerful detonation rocked the front bunker. The blast doors slid open with a
prolonged grating sound, and five assailants stormed through a swirling cloud of
dense smoke. Two were cut down before they had gone ten meters. The rest angled
for the sides of the bunker and began to work their way forward.
The ferocity of the fighting made it apparent that neither side would tolerate
surrender. It was a battle to the death-as Maul preferred it, in any case. His
attention was drawn time and again to Patch Bruit. For all the disorder in his
life, Bruit's displays of daring made him deserving of the lofty position he
held in Lommite Limited. Maul was impressed. He didn't want to see Bruit fall to
the mercenaries, who were nothing more than the blasters they cowered behind.
Bruit and the Falleen led the final charge, their combined forces going hand to