"Michael Stackpole "Rogue Squadron"" - читать интересную книгу автора

I was from Kessel?"
Corran blinked in surprise. "Why would that make any difference to me?"
She laughed and tapped the CorSec insignia on the side of the fighter with a
knuckle. "You were with CorSec. You sent people to Kessel. As far as you're
concerned, everyone on Kessel is either a pris-oner or a smuggler who ought to
have been a prisoner. And when the prisoners and smugglers lib-crated the planet
from the Imps, well, that didn't change anything in your eyes, did it?"
Setting the hydrospanner on a safe spot, Corran raised his hands. "Wait a
minute, you're jumping to a lot of conclusions."
"Maybe, but tell me, you didn't know I was from Kessel?"
'Well, I did."
"And tell me that didn't make a difference
to you."
"It didn't, honest."
"I bet."
The firm set of her jaw and the way she folded
her arms across her chest told Corran she didn't be-
lieve him. There was a fair amount of anger in her words, but also some hurt.
Anger he could deal with-there wasn't a smuggler or criminal who hadn't been
angry when he was around. The hurt, though, that was unusual and made Corran
feel un-comfortable.
"What makes you think I hold your coming from Kessel against you?"
"The way you act." Lujayne's expression soft-ened a bit, and some of the anger
drained away, but that just let more anxiety and pain bleed into her words. "You
tend to keep to yourself. You're not as-sociating with the rest of us-beyond a
narrow cir-cle of pilots you think are as sharp as you are. You're always
watching and listening, evaluating and judging. Others have noticed it, too."
"Ms. Forge, Lujayne, you're making meters out of microns here."
"I don't think so, and I don't want to be judged for things over which I had no
control." Her chin came up and fire sparked in her eyes. "My father volunteered
to go to Kessel under an Old Republic program where he taught inmates how to
move back into society upon their release. My mother was one of his students.
They fell in love and remained on Kessel-they're still there, along with most of
my brothers and sisters. They're all good people and their work with inmates was
designed to make your job easier by giving criminals other skills so they'd not
return to crime when they were released."
Corran sighed and his shoulders slumped. "I think that's great, I really do. I
wish there were thousands of people like your parents and kin doing that son of
work. The fact is, though, that even if I'd known that, I'd still have gone
after you in the exercise."
"Oh, my being from Kessel had nothing to do with it?"
He almost dismissed her question with a glib de-nial, but he caught himself and
she clearly noticed his hesitation. "Maybe, just maybe, it did have something to
do with my flying. I guess I decided that if you were from Kessel and could fly,
you had to be a smuggler, and it was important for me to fly better than you
could."
She nodded once, but her expression did not shift from one of concern to smug
triumph as he had expected it would. "I believe that, and I can under-stand it.
Still, there's something more there, right?"
"Look, I'm sorry if what I did made you look bad in the exercise, but I really