hell_sing: переводы

→4/Dranok

→The last thing Nickter saw before he blacked out was Scabrous turning away from him, swinging his arm across the long counter above the pump, sending the flowers and their vessels crashing to floor.

→Nickter arched forward and screamed. The pain owned him: he surrendered to it utterly. It became a vast, all-encompassing neutron star, and as it sucked him forward he saw Scabrous watching him through the cage.

→Then the pain he'd been enduring up till now became abruptly, horribly worse. It slammed through his body, gouging through every millimeter of his nerve endings, turning them white-hot.

→Staring at it, Nickter saw the black flower swirling in the reddish yellow fluid, its petals shredding as it dissolved. The pump let out a faint whining noise, like half a dozen odd vacuum parts called into dubious service. At first he felt nothing except for the odd vibration of the tubes in his back.

→Then he pressed a button on the pump.

→Scabrous lifted his hand. "There is still one way in which you may yet prove useful. That is the offer I make to you, one of redemption. "

→"It was Lussk!" Nickter burst out. "He used the Force on me, he..."

→"You were humiliated today at the temple, Wim Nickter-humiliated badly. You have shown yourself to be weak and easily defeated. "

→Scabrous glanced at him, as if hearing him for the first time. When he finally spoke, his voice was low and resonant, deeper than Nickter remembered. There was an awful intimacy to it, as though the Sith Lord were whispering directly in his car.

→Rattling around inside the cage, Nickter stared at it. The flask was full of murky reddish yellow liquid. Next to the pump sat a small black pyramid covered in lines of engraved text-what he realized, through his pain and fear, had to be a Sith Holocron. They'd learned about it at the academy, but he'd never actually seen one before.

→Nickter squirmed in the cage. None of this made any sense, and the irrationality only intensified his mounting terror. He was sweating profusely now-it was dripping off him in big, oozing droplets. The urge to beg, to grovel, to bargain for his life, or at least for an end to the pain, was almost irresistible. The only thing that stopped him was the suspicion, based on everything he'd heard about Scabrous, that the Sith Lord wouldn't even listen. Scabrous stood behind the cage, alternating his attention between the flowers and the Holocron. Finally he selected a flower, opened the glass chamber on top of the pump, and dropped it inside.

→Standing outside the cage, staring down at him, was a tall, broad- shouldered, black-robed figure that blended almost imperceptibly into the shadows. Nickter already knew exactly who it was, even before the flickering torchlight of the room revealed the man's face-a long, bony sculpture of bone and half-lidded eyes, the famous curvature of the peaked upper lip, how it always seemed to be smiling slightly at some secret thought. A fresh spasm of apprehension leapt through him, raising hackles across his back. The eyes were the worst part, he thought: how almost silver they were, how they seemed to glitter with a feverish accumulation of ambition and indifference.

→Scabrous still didn't answer. He wasn't even looking at Nickter anymore. He had walked around behind the cage now, where the tubes ran between the wire bars into what looked like some kind of mechanized pump with a wide flask mounted on top.

→"What... what is this?" he asked, aware of how different his voice sounded already, high-pitched and wobbly. "What did you do to me?"

→Groping around behind him, Nickter felt something cold and smooth and hard sticking out of his skin just above the base of his spine. He looked around and saw what Scabrous had been looking at-it was some kind of tube, implanted directly into a vertebra. The sticky ring of exposed flesh around the wound site felt raw and hot, swollen, and it burned when he touched it. Sliding his hand upward, he felt another tube above it, and another, coming out of his back, all the way up to his neck. There were at least six of them protruding out of him, as big around as his linger. He realized that he could feel them pulsating inside his spinal canal-that was the source of the gnawing pain.

→"What is that?" Nickter asked. "What are you doing?"

→He could smell himself, the stale cheap grease of panic and perspiration seeping through his skin. The pain in his back had intensified from a throb to a sharp stabbing agony that shot down his ribs and up into his neck. It was getting worse by the second, like the sting of sweat in an open wound. Whatever injury had been inflicted upon him, it was deep, and whole packs of nerve receptors-those obedient trauma hounds-were circling back and forth, busily delivering the bad news.

→The Sith Lord didn't answer. But the eyes kept staring down at him... past him, somehow, as if there were something else inside the cage with him.

→"Lord Scabrous, " he said, or tried to say. His mouth felt parched, and his lungs couldn't seem to get enough air. "What am I doing here?"