vfvtymrf: переводы

→Now forty, Skelly thought that list also applied to life. You started with a festering problem. Someone initiated a change. The system reacted to that pressure. And then, bang, you had your solution. It had always been his method. He’d been the one to initiate changes, whenever possible, starting back on the battlefield. It was why he’d volunteered for everything. Whenever battlements were too dangerous to storm, Skelly risked his life to burrow beneath, planting the explosives that made the decisive opening. He did that and more.

→He didn’t fault himself for that. He was the product of a system that built only to destroy, as he saw it. He’d learned from the best—and learned well. Everything always came down to that simple list, taught to him during his first day in military demolitions: Pair your ordnance with your initiator. Ignition leads to reaction leads to detonation. Whether applied to compounds of baradium or its tremendously more powerful isotope, baradium-357, those steps referred to a series of complex reactions that had the same simple result.

→The problem was that blowing things up was the only thing Skelly had ever been taught to do.

→The Republic and the Confederacy had been partners in the same corrupt game. The Empire was probably just another iteration of all that, to Skelly’s thinking; no more or less immoral. To corporate oligarchs, political allegiances were just another change of clothes. This decade, central rule was in fashion. Something else would come along soon. The beast had to be fed, with lives and limbs on the battlefield and with the sweat and blood of the workers.

→The Clone Wars were yet another thing to be upset about. Everything about that conflict had been a lie. The Separatists had been this big enemy, and yet when the Empire was declared they’d melted away as if at the push of a button. The big corporations had staged the whole thing, Skelly was sure. Wars sold more ships, more weapons, and more medical devices. And in the Clone Wars, even the soldiers on both sides were manufactured goods.

→And most of all, he hated his right hand, for being useless and forcing him to do the finely detailed work with his left. He could just bear to look at the fake hand now; it had been curled into a claw most of the time since that terrible day back in the Clone Wars.

→It was slow, painstaking work—and hard to do neatly when he was irritated at the universe and everyone in it. Kanan, of course: Skelly’s mouth still hurt from the man’s punch. Who did he think he was? Tarlor plagued him, too—along with all his managerial kind, especially since Dalborg had recently busted him down from explosives supervisor to lowly demolitions placement tech.

→Skelly simply sighed, then returned his attention to the crystal column he was kneeling beside. Having prepared a suspension of baradium bisulfate in putty, he began caking a ring of the pasty substance all around the stalagmite’s base.

→Tarlor loomed over him. “Skelly, get those charges set!”

→If Skelly could get his research to Vidian, the Empire would understand—and it surely had the power to stop what the mining companies were doing.

→Skelly saw it as deliverance. The top government inspector—coming right to him? Well, not to him, of course, but this was close enough. And better still, it was Denetrius Vidian. A business mogul under the Republic, true, but perhaps the only one Skelly respected. Vidian fed on blundering corporations, profiting from fixing their mistakes. Vidian’s famous treatise, Forget the Old Way, was the only business holo Skelly owned.

→All were currently in a tizzy. For hours, arriving workers had reported the Empire spurring them along, even circulating a tale of the Star Destroyer blowing up a freighter captain for slacking. Now word had come through Tarlor that the Emperor’s top efficiency expert, Count Vidian, would be inspecting.

→“Hurry up! Hurry up!”

→Skelly looked back in annoyance as Tarlor Choh rushed about the cavern, egging workers on. A tall light-skinned fellow, Tarlor was Dalborg Mining’s imbecile for Zone Thirty-Nine—not to be confused with all the other imbeciles managing their firm’s efforts in this underground pocket. There were official imbeciles in all the other zones, too, Skelly knew—and not one of them had a whit of sense.

→“Sorry,” Hera whispered over the fallen trooper’s shoulder. “Charm doesn’t work on everyone.”

→The stormtrooper studied her for a moment—and then saw the blaster she was wearing. She moved before he did, delivering a high kick that knocked the blaster from the startled stormtrooper’s hands. Seeing his weapon clatter away, he lunged for it. She easily sidestepped him—and pivoted, leaping onto the armored man’s back. Losing purchase on the crystalline floor, he stumbled, her full weight driving his head into the side wall. His helmet cracked loudly against the surface, and he slumped motionless to the ground.

→“I forgot.” Dark eyes looked down demurely, then back up. “Can you believe it? My first day!”

→“Where’s your badge?”

→“I work here,” she said, approaching as if nothing was wrong. “I may be in the wrong place. It’s my first day.” She smiled.

→“Who are you?”