Great, Han thought. So there"s a Destroyer-or a fleet of Destroyers-rovin around out here someplace. Just what I needed to make my day complete.
The crew they found in the outer holds were dead. Under the white mounds of frost and ice it was difficult to tell, but Han thought these were men and women who"d died during the initial battle. In addition to the ruptured coolant lines and dangling wires indicative of major systems blowouts, the holes in the outer hull through which Han and the Wookiee climbed were too huge for the emergency sealant systems to cope with. The blast doors had shut at once, to save the atmosphere in the rest of the ship, and Chewbacca had to cut out the switch boxes to manually let himself and Han through.
Beyond, the bodies were simply white with frost. They glittered softly in the dark, hundreds of them, oriented along the corridors like iron filings in a magnetic field, crawling inward to the warmer heart of the ship as the cold seeped through the breached insulation and killed them as they crawled.
They lay facedown. Han was glad of it. He"d seen men and women who had died of cold, and mostly their faces were peaceful. Still, picking his way among the corpses like some clumsy intruder in his green plast e-suit, he would just as soon not see their faces.
Farther in, a few panels still glowed with power, candle-dim spots of amber or red. Radiation warning lights were on all over the ship, and a garbled female voice from the tannoy repeated over and over, with the pleasant persistence of a droid, that radiation levels were critically high, and all crew members were advised to implement antiradiation procedure D-4 in mitigation. After seven or eight times through the announcement Han wanted to find that droid and hammer it into tiny fragments, but it went on as a demented background to the escalating h.e.l.l of the search as long as he and Chewie remained on the dying ship.
There was enough heat now to make their suits smoke-the gauges on his wrist showed Han that they were just a touch below the freezing point of alcohol-and the dead were not so thick on the floors. Into his helmet mike he said, "They"re in the reactors."
Chewie nodded. Night caught on the snows of Hoth, Han had slit open the body of his dead tauntaun so that its lingering warmth might keep his friend Luke from dying of cold and shock. What remained of the (2orbantis crew, by the same expedient, had made their way inward, to crouch by the fading heat of the reactors in a last despairing bid to outlast the cold until rescue could arrive. This was where Han and Chewie found them, radiation burned as if they"d been rolled in a supernova, seventeen of them still alive among twisted heaps of the dead. Two more died during the agonizing process of loading them onto antigrav tables from sick bay and struggling out across the windswept waste and up the cliffside to the Falcon with them: One by one, fifteen exhausting journeys that left Han and Chewbacca numb with fatigue as they rigged salvaged life-support equipment in holds originally stocked with the smuggled glitterstim and rock ivory that had been Han"s stock-in-trade years ago. On the last of the journeys to get extra stasis fluids and antishock drugs, Han downloaded the vessel"s logs.
"Where do we take them? asked Lando, as he guided the bucking, heeling freighter up through the insanity of the atmosphere again. Han stood slumped for a moment in the doorway of the bridge, almost too tired to move. It was one of the few times he"d seen his friend shocked out of his c.o.c.kiness, quiet in the face of catastrophe. Then he crossed to the auxiliary controls, stumbling with fatigue as he walked. "Hey, I can do this, man," added Lando, looking up quickly. "You go back there and lie down. Some of those guys in the holds look better than you do."
Han gave him a universal gesture and dropped into the chair, but beyond this he made no attempt to help in liftoff. It had taken nearly ten hours to transfer all the survivors, and he knew he was far too tired to be at the controls of anything more complicated than a self-conforming chair.
Battered as he felt, it itched him to see anyone handling the Falcon but himself.
"Bagsho is probably our best bet." He shut his eyes, leaned his forehead on his fists in an attempt to block out the memory of the reactor core, the huddled shapes of the bodies pressed against one another in the small pockets of heat from the coils. Most of those who"d survived were the ones who"d had time to put on some kind of protective clothing, but there were over a dozen in radiation suits who"d died anyway, blind, burned husks of flesh. There"d been no chance, none whatsoever, that Leia had been anywhere on or near that vessel since she"d snipped the ceremonial ribbons at its maiden launch.
His near-hysterical desire to double-check every corpse in the reactor chamber, every corpse in the ship, was, he knew, only that: hysteria.
But he couldn"t stop seeing her there: flesh burned purple and slick, hair gone, eyes gone...
He pulled a deep breath and made himself continue, fairly casually, "The sector medical facility"s there, and a small base. At least we can check in about enemy movements in this sector. I didn"t see signs of really heavy artillery but it takes more than just a couple of planet-hoppers to put out a cruiser."
"Enemy?" Lando didn"t turn his head-he was concentrating hard on keeping the Falcon from being flipped into eternity by the tearing forces of the stratosphere, but there was a world of gesture in his voice. "What enemy?
The partisans in Durren? That crazy wildcat pirate fleet or invasion or whatever it is that"s supposed to be hitting Ampliquen? The palace coup that"s going on in Kay-Gee? There isn"t..."
Something hit the Falcon like the zap of a live wire.
Solo gave a yelp of protest and was diving for the control panel even as the lurch of impact hurled him off his feet. Behind him down the corridor he heard Chewie roar. Lando yelled, "What the...?" and Solo scrambled to hands and knees, almost made it to his feet when another impact jolted him halfway across the bridge.
"Where are they coming from?"
"There"s nothing out there!" screamed Lando, slamming the controls into a straight-up dive that took them out of the final whirling shrouds of the atmosphere and into the black of s.p.a.ce. Another laser beam caught the shields and overload lights went on like a red-and-amber Winterfeast display over the main console. Han was already piling up the ladder to the gunnery turret, cursing and wondering if this had anything to do with Leia"s disappearance, with the dying battlecruiser on the planet below", or if this was just some little dividend from bored galactic G.o.ds who thought Solo had had it too easy lately.
There was nothing on the targeting screen.
Another laser bolt hit them and the readout showed a thin patch the size of a sabacc table in the port underside shield.
Solo cursed and hit the recalibrate switch. At the same moment Lando"s voice yelled in his earjack, "You see "em?"
Solo saw.
They were like microscopic dust on the monitor-Blast it, those things couldn"t be more than a couple of meters long!" Each was about the bulk of a laser cannon, barely large enough to accommodate a pilot.
How the blazes did they get them out here? Where was their command base?"
Another jarring impact, and the stars veered wildly as Lando evaded.
Against the black of s.p.a.ce he saw only a quick gleam through the turret ports. Whatever they were, they were painted matte black and bore no lights at all.
Blast it, they were everywhere! Solo got off a scattering of shots but it was like trying to hit gnats with a smashball club. At the same time his hands jammed the controls before him, ratcheting down to the lowest calibration, trying hard to get a look at the things. "Where are they coming from?" he shouted again into the comm.
"There"s nothing on the scan!" yelled Lando"s voice back. "No base, no ship..."
"Well, they sure couldn"t come through hypers.p.a.ce at that size!
Blast it!" Another hit, and the thin patch in the shield was registering as a hole now. Han tried to get off another couple shots, but Lando was flipping and swerving the ship to cover the open shield.
Han hoped those guys in the holds were still strapped in tight. Not that any of them was conscious enough to care.
"Drones?"
"You can"t send a drone through hypers.p.a.ce! And that"s no drone shooting!
The methane storms of Damonite fell away behind them, a glowing acid yellow disk against the blackness that whirled past the gla.s.sine ports as Lando dropped and cut and dodged. Han wasted another couple of shots and had a quick look at something as the Falcon swept through a little gaggle of the attacking ships.
Were they ships at all? thought Han; Did they have live pilots? He wasn"t sure. They were maybe two and a half meters long and less than a meter through, fulgin cylinders bristling with the k.n.o.bs of what looked like miniaturized laser cannon. What did they have in there, little guys the size of his thumb?
"Get us outa here!" he yelled, though he knew for a fact that was exactly what Lando was trying to do.
The tiny ships surrounded them like a cloud of piranha-beetles, whipping and following every move and quite effectively impeding any chance of breaking into hypers.p.a.ce. Another red light went on, meaning another shield had gone. There was a perceptible jar, and from the gun turret Han saw the white flicker of lightning spread across the whole surface of the Falcon below and around him as the shields tried to compensate. At the same moment Lando yelled in his earjack, "They"re not going for the decoy transmissions, so they can"t be drones!"
"I"m gonna clear us a path!" Han yelled back, as a blast of white at the corner of his eye told him the miniature ships had taken out some part of the Falcon"s upper structures. "Straight through seven by six bearing zero, punch it on three?
"Han, old buddy, what...?"
"Do it!" At the same moment he hit every fore cannon he had, straight columns of white destruction flowing out in an almost continuous burst at seven by six. Like a pittin chasing its shadow, the Falcon followed the path of the light, faster and faster, Han watching the slow-growing flare of destruction ahead of them and calculating by feel rather than by instrumentation when the last possible moment would be to jump without hurling themselves into their own fire. The little bronze toothpick ships came pouring back in the wake of the blast, firing at the now-steady target following the heels of the light.
He counted, "One... two..." ("This had better work...) The last of the shields went in a flare of white, and red glare bathed Han"s face from the sides, white from the front as the Falcon dove toward the laser ruin ahead...
"Three!"
Lando hit it-he had reflexes like a tingball set-and the stars stretched into lines of white.
"I never thanked you." Leia stepped through the tall arch that led from her small terrace into the shadowy chamber. Liegeus, who had come in with a synthdroid bearing food and another pitcher of water, paused in the act of setting them down, shook his head.
"Don"t," he said, and the pain in his voice, the shame, told her a thousand things that he hadn"t meant. Their eyes met for a time. Then he said to the synthdroid, "You may go."
The door swished shut behind it. Leia could see the dark patch of necrosis on the back of its neck, and smell the faint stink of rot in its wake. She didn"t know how to ask what she wanted to know without raising suspicions, so she only said, "Why are you here? How did you come here?
Beldorion called you a philosopher."
"And I am," sighed Liegeus. He made a move as if he would fuss with the water pitcher, the covered dish of aromatic and exquisitely cooked insect life, but let his hand fall to his side again. He faced her.
"A wanderer. A blot on the familial escutcheon. They don"t speak my name.
Alas, it has also been my misfortune to be a competent designer of artificial intelligence systems for s.p.a.cecraft, and a very, very good holo faker."
"A holo faker?"
"Of course, my dear. it was my art, my hobby-the source of my joy and the material for a thousand silly pranks in my youth. The bane of my existence, now: Beldorion has drafted me into editing and retap-ing his formidable library of Huttese p.o.r.nography. Even my stint on Gamorr, ghost-writing love poems for the boars to pa.s.s off as their own when they go courting in the wintertime, wasn"t so fearful."
Leia laughed, like sudden summer breaking the ice lock of her fears, and Liegeus laughed, too. For a moment she thought he might have reached out and taken her hand, but he drew back at the last moment, saying instead, "Is there something you"d like me to make for you? I have digitalized holo sc.r.a.p of every imaginable background, face, animal, and bit of furniture that"s ever been recorded: motions, sounds, the slightest variations of movement. You would not know that you weren"t there. I can give you the hatching of the glimmerfish by starlight, in the lake of Aidera below the palace where you were raised, or the Starboys in their heyday... or your husband," he added diffidently. "I have sc.r.a.p of him, you know. And your children."
It gave Leia a queer pang to hear him say so, but she knew that Han was a public figure, the children were public figures and had been holo-taped tens of thousands of times. Liegeus"s dark eyes were like those of a dog who fears to be kicked-he was afraid, she realized, that he"d offended her, and she reached out rea.s.suringly and touched his hand.
"No," she said. "Thank you, no. It would hurt too much, I think."
He opened his mouth to give her a rea.s.suring lie, as he had before when he"d brought her water, but closed it instead, the lie unsaid. Their eyes met again, she in the light and he in shadow. He began to say something else and lost his nerve, and before he could find it again the door opened and the synthdroid returned.
"Master Vorn, Master Ashgad wishes to speak with you on the terrace."
Leia followed him inside the chamber, and to the door, and was careful, when he took his departure, not to let herself be seen as she crept back to the railing of the balcony, where she could hear every word said on the terrace below.
"I trust everything is proceeding on schedule? came Ashgad"s voice.
"It is, sir. I can begin bringing the core up the day after tomorrow; I"m feeding in escape trajectories to establish an exit program now."
"Try to set the work forward as much as you can, Liegeus," said Ashgad.
"The longer we delay, the more possibilities exist for something going wrong. We"re bringing in boxes tonight, both kinds. See they"re properly stored."
Liegeus"s voice was almost inaudible. "Yes, sir."
"It will be up to you for the next three days," Ashgad went on. "I"m leaving in the morning for Hweg Shul, to start things in motion there.
I should be gone..."
"Leaving".," Liegeus sounded aghast.
"Oh, things will be all right." Ashgad spoke rather quickly, like a man who hopes things will be all right. In the five days Leia had been under his roof she had neither seen nor spoken to the man; he evidently did not like being brought face-to-face with the victims of his crimes.
"Beldorion will be in charge, but you"re not to permit him to come near Her Excellency. I heard about that little incident yesterday, and I"ve had words with him. He knows it"s not to be repeated."
"But will he honor his word?" asked Liegeus, clearly alarmed. "If he tried yesterday to gain control over her, he may..."
"He"ll do what he"s told," snapped Ashgad. "As will Dzym."
"No," said Liegeus softly. "He won"t. And Dzym won"t."
"You worry too much," said Ashgad, too loudly and too swiftly.
"I"ll be back in three days."
"But-"
"I said, don"t worry about it!"
Leia heard his footfalls retreat and felt through her knees on the terrace"s tiles the heavy whoosh of a closing door. She sat back against the railing, feeling curiously sick with dread.
Ashgad was leaving. She would be alone in this house with Beldorion.
And with Dzym.
"You find your friend".," Luke raised his head quickly from the valves he was cleaning-in a dust-heavy atmosphere like Nam Chorios"s, engines needed almost constant regrinding and refitting-as the doorway of Croig"s Fix-It Barn darkened, and he grinned a greeting at Umolly Darm.
The prospector had the grimy look of one just into town from the wastelands, her baggy trousers and thick, padded jacket pregnant with dust. Beyond her, in the street, Luke saw her heavy X-3 Skid piled high with a load of boxes, crystals glimmering like great heaps of broken blue-and-violet gla.s.s in the thin sun.
"Not yet," he said. He wasn"t terribly surprised to see Darm. Arvid had told him when he"d recommended him for the job as mechanic at Croig"s that it was the biggest repair shop in Hweg Shul, which meant on the planet. And it was big, for Hweg Shul, meaning it housed about thirty repair bays that refitted anything from pumps to speeders to small household appliances for little more than the cost of a cheap lunch for his workers. Like every other Newcomer building it sat on stilts-the T-47 being worked on in the next bay had shorted all its coils from being too close to the ground during the recent storm.
Croig was a Durosian, and Luke was positive he had connections to half the smugglers in the sector.
"What can I do for you?" He set aside the valves and crossed the dirty, oil-streaked floor. Unshaven and clad in the local mix of homespun and blerd-leather, after three days in Hweg Shul, Luke had so completely blended with the scenery that even Taselda"s tame fanatics would not have noticed him in the street.
Darm handed him a banthine sonic drill. "Ruptured core sheath," she said.
"I don"t know whether you can do anything with it or not.
And I wanted to ask your boss if I could bring in the skid after I unload it-again. We"re sending a shipment up tonight, or trying to. Loronar"s got a pick-up cruiser in high orbit."
"Loronar?" asked Luke, suddenly curious. "You sell the crystals to Loronar Corporation?" The way Arvid had spoken, he"d gotten the impression of a small-time operation-Darm digging around in the desert for crystals to make some kind of obscure optical or medical equipment, useful only to high-level boffins at the university research labs.
Loronar was anything but small time.
"Sure." Darm dug in the pocket of her sand-scored red vest and fished forth a hunk of crystal the length and width of two of Luke"s fingers, and perhaps twice the depth. "Smokies we call them, or Spooks.
This one"s a little small for what they want, and they look for better color than this-see how pale it is? - - but they"ll buy as many as we can ship. Watch this. Hold it up to the light?"
Luke nodded.
"See the shadows in it? Those gray lines? Now watch." She carried it across the bay floor to where the heavy coils of the recharger-smuggled in piecemeal and Croig"s pride and joy-crouched like a greasy metal monster in the corner, the center of an organic-looking nest of cable and tube. Gingerly-the recharger had been set up in a corner of the room to protect it from sand, and because it was in the dark, it was always crawling with drochs-Darm pulled out a recharger block, set the terminals against the crystal, and thumbed the switch.
Luke flinched, appalled and disoriented, though Darm didn"t appear to feel anything: The disturbance in the Force axed his brain like a scream.
The woman regarded him in surprise as he fell back a step, trembling.
"What is it"
"You didn"t feel that?" His mind was still ringing with it, though it had ended in a split second, even before she turned off the switch. Sweat stood out on his face and he felt vaguely sick.