The Death Seed! Leia"s breath left her, as if with physical shock.
Seven hundred years ago that plague had wiped out millions.
Whole sectors had relapsed into primitive subsistence, as those who understood machinery and s.p.a.ceflight had perished wholesale...
It was the casualness of Dzym"s tone that galvanized Leia into action.
She rose from the divan, pulled the cloaklike folds of her robe more closely around her-the sunlight held no heat-and made her way shakily to the far end of the terrace. Perhaps twenty-five meters below her, just above where the walls of the great, rambling house merged into the harsh basalt of the bluff itself, another terrace ran the length of that side of the building and curved around the face of the cliff.
Heavy hedges of brachniel and 1oak grew from planters of imported soil as windbreaks around two sides, brilliant and alien green against the gray permacrete. A sort of gazebo stood at one end of the terrace, the shade densely black within. A complex system of mist jets and pipes mitigated somewhat the dryness of the air. By the way Ashgad turned, Leia guessed that Dzym sat within the gazebo"s shade.
There was a third being on the terrace, stretched out on a black-and-orange air-duvet under a veritable rainshower of air misters, and Leia flinched with revulsion at the sight of it, and the sound of its gluey, tuba ba.s.s.
"Dzym"s right." It rolled over, flexed its gelid length-at roughly twelve meters, it was the longest Hutt Leia had ever seen. It was ma.s.sive, without Jabba"s obesity; like a young Hutt in its agility and speed but grown to the size of an old one. "You couldn"t have gotten past the medical scans without them. And only droids would have taken the vessels into hypers.p.a.ce without a second jump coordinate."
Hypers.p.a.ce!
Marcopius. Ezrakh. Captain Ioa. Those poor children of her honor guard...
Threepio and Artoo.
Sickness and horror swept her, replaced a moment later by a burning rage.
"Yes, but at a hundred thousand credits apiece!"
"Cheap at the price." The Hutt shrugged. "Dymurra thought it was worth the expenditure. I agree with him. It wasn"t enough to have Liegeus put through that "Mission accomplished, we"re leaving for Co-ruscant"
message, or even the faked transmissions from the jump point.
We couldn"t bring those vessels here. We couldn"t destroy them without the risk of telltale debris. And what do you care, anyway?" Dymurra paid for the synthdroids, not you."
"And that makes it all right?" Ashgad turned impatiently from the railing to face the huge, reclining shape. "With an att.i.tude like that, it"s no wonder you"re no longer ruling this territory, Beldorion."
"Anyway," rumbled Beldorion cryptically, "the price is about to come down on them, isn"t it? And what"s three hundred thousand credits, if you can get rid of all evidence of where Her Excellency is and what became of her?" Once Rieekan goes into a coma, the Council"s going to be chasing its tail for days, each member trying to keep the next from being named successor."
He swelled up a little and produced a burp of cosmic proportions, leaking green drool from his mouth and releasing a vast breath of gases that Leia could smell from the terrace above. He rolled a little and delved with one tiny, muscular hand into a washtub-size porcelain bowl of some kind of pink-and-orange snack food that rested on the duvet at his side. Even Ashgad turned his face aside in disgust.
"And don"t speak to me about not ruling this Force-benighted planet anymore," the Hutt added, around a mouthful of small, squirming things.
"No one forced me-me, Beldorion the Splendid, geldorion of the Ruby Eyes-to retire. I ruled this world longer than your petty Empire existed, and I ruled it well."
He shoved another handful of whatever it was into his enormous mouth.
Some of it escaped and made it nearly to the edge of his duvet before he tongued it up. "So don"t tell me I was too wasteful or too lazy to know what I"m talking about." He extended one hand, and Leia felt it.
The Force.
A silver cup, probably kept in some kind of cooling bowl under the gazebo"s black shade, floated into sight and drifted across toward the stubby, outstretched yellow fingers with their golden rings.
And all around her, Leia felt the air change, as if the iridescent sunlight had thickened or changed its composition: Itchy, swirling, angry.
Beldorion the Hutt had been trained as a Jedi.
And against his use of the Force, there was a stirring, a reaction, a movement in the Force itself that Leia, though only marginally adept with her Jedi powers, felt like sandpaper on the inside of her skull.
Leia"s knees felt weak, and she retreated to the divan again, catching the head of it for balance, shivering within the garnet weight of the state robe.
The Borealis, sent into hypers.p.a.ce blind and unprogrammed, never to emerge.... But if what Dzym said was true, if the Death Seed plague had been on board, that was just as well.
She had had the Death Seed. She shook her head. It was impossible, according to the records no one recovered.
And Minister Rieekan, her second-in-command in the Council .. When Rieekan goes into his coma...
I have to warn him. I have to warn someone...
She dropped onto the divan, shaking in every limb with weakness and shock. Panic and rage struggled against the thickness of the sweetblossom that clogged her brain, a fury to escape, to outwit them.
And the drug whispered its reply, Of course you should. But not just now.
Something in the pocket of her robe pressed into her thigh, hard and uncomfortable. Leia frowned, trying to recall what she"d carried with her in the garment"s bulky folds to the meeting with Ashgad. The answer was, of course, Nothing. The velvet garment of state was sufficiently heavy without adding weight to it.
But in that case, who could have put something there, and when She fished and fumbled around until she found the pocket in the lining, originally designed to carry a recording device or, depending on who the wearer planned to meet, a hold-out blaster.
Clumsy with the effects of the sweetblossom, her fingers closed on metal.
It was her lightsaber.
She brought it out, stared at it in a kind of shock. Touched the switch, the quivering laser blade humming faintly, pale blue and nearly invisible in the odd, morning light.
Luke"s voice came to her, Keep up with your lightsaber practice. You need it. And like an echo, the voice of the Anakin she had never heard, We have the Power...
She pushed the ugly dream from her mind. But she couldn"t push from her the knowledge of what they were: The grandchildren of Darth Vader, with only the teaching of Law and Justice between the New Republic and that terrible dream. She remembered all the efforts that had been made to kidnap them, to use them, to twist them into tools for greed or obsession. And all the while people a.s.sumed that she would teach them better, teach them not to use their powers for selfishness or impulse, while she watched the jackals of the broken Empire and the members of her own Council squabble and s.n.a.t.c.h and waste time and lives.
And Luke kept urging her to take up that personal, frightening power: the power of Palpatine. The power to have it all her own way.
She touched the switch again. The shining blade was gone.
Artoo. Dimly she remembered Threepio"s despairing wails into the comm, and as she slid toward cold darkness, the soft clickety-whirr of the astromech"s servos near her. Artoo knew I was in danger. He helped me the only way he could.
She closed her eyes, fighting tears.
I will kill them, she thought, the cold fury breaking through the sluggishness of the drug. Ashgad, and Dzym, and that foul Hutt, and Liegeus with his drugged drinks and phony concern. Whatever they"re up to, I"ll destroy them.
Before Liegeus came back, she thought, she"d better check out her room for whatever escape she could find.
The air was softer indoors, subtly modified to escape the piercing dryness. That meant magnetic shields on the doors and windows-not cheap-and some kind of mist generators in the ceilings. Away from the jewellike refractions of the sunlight the shadows were thick, and the ma.s.sive walls sheltered a sour muskiness that no air-conditioning could disperse.
Anyplace a Hutt occupied smelled of Hutt, of course. n.o.body ever liked that heavy, rotted odor. On Tatooine, Leia had learned to hate it, though her experience of living in Jabba"s palace had served her well during her negotiations with Durga the Hutt on Nal Hutta. She was one of the few diplomats who could deal with highly odorous species like Hutts and Vordums unjudgmentally and relatively unflinchingly. One couldn"t, she knew, discredit their intelligence just because their digestive enzymes were set up to deal with everything from tree roots to petroleum by-products.
There were bugs, too. She saw them, tiny and purplish brown, skittering along the densest shadows at the base of the wall and under the small, roughly constructed chest of drawers that was the room"s single other piece of furniture. Most storage was in wall niches, natural in a world where only intensive agriculture on the part of its unwilling inhabitants centuries ago had been able to eventually produce woody plants large enough to make furniture out of. The niche doors and the old-fashioned manual outer door of the room were high-impact plastic.
There were bugs in most of the niches, fleeing even the muted indoor light.
Leia shivered with distaste as she shut the doors again.
In the end she tore strips from the heavy interfacing between the velvet of the robe and its silken lining to bind the lightsaber to the small of her back under her long, Billowing red-and-bronze figured gown.
Liegeus Vorn had worn a sort of loose tunic, trousers, and vest, probably standard in an economy poorly supplied with raw materials or the leisure for frivolity in fashionable fit. At a guess, whatever clothing they gave her to wear would be too big. Every hand-me-down she"d ever gotten from the Rebel pilots during the years on the run had been so.
Moving around the room to search had cleared her mind a little. Luke, she thought. Luke getting into the B-wing, sliding the c.o.c.kpit closed-Luke"s spirit thanking her for the final touch of farewell.
She had no idea where Ashgad"s house was in relation to the city of Hweg Shul, which according to the Registry was the only large settlement on the planet. Even given fairly primitive transportation they could be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. If Ashgad had ships of at least planet-hopper capability-not to speak of synthdroids-he probably had landspeeders as well.
She scratched the back of her wrist, where a small red bug bite showed her that whatever those little bugs were, they were pests. The sleepy temptation still lay heavy on her, to return to the divan on the sunlit terrace, to sit blinking out over that endless nothingness of glittering gravel, contemplating its colors: grayish whites, pinks, dusky blues, and green like unpolished tourmaline, an endless bed from which the sun glare winked like a leaden kaleidoscope.
I can"t, she thought, shaking straight her gown again and pulling on the velvet robe. When the drug wears off a little more i"ll have to put out a call to Luke.
If Luke hadn"t contracted the plague on the ship. If his B-wing hadn"t smashed into the planet with his dead or dying body aboard.
She leaned her forehead against the handleless corridor door. I got out of the Termination Block of the Death Star, she thought grimly. I can get out of here.
"You"re to leave her alone!" Ashgad"s voice, m.u.f.fled and distant, came to her through the door.
Dzym"s reply, soft though it was, sounded shockingly near. The secretary must have been less than a meter from the door. "What can you mean, my lord?
"I mean Liegeus told me you"d visited her." Ashgad"s voice grew louder, even though he was keeping his tone down. The tap of his boots brought him to where Dzym must be standing. She could almost see him, towering over the smaller man. "Stay away from her."
"She is a Jedi, Lord," murmured Dzym, and there was a note in his voice, a dreamy greediness, that twisted Leia"s stomach with nauseated panic. "I was only seeking to keep her under control."
"I know what you were seeking to do," replied Ashgad shortly.
"The sweetblossom will keep her under control without help from you.
You"re not to go near her, understand? Skywalker"s her brother. He"ll know if she dies."
"Here, Lord?" Dzym"s voice sank to a whisper. "On this world?"
"We can"t take the chance of the Council naming a successor. Until everything is accomplished, let her alone."
His boots began to retreat. There was no sound from Dzym. He hadn"t budged, standing next to the door. She heard Ashgad stop, probably looking back. Still in arm"s-reach of her, Dzym murmured, "And then?"
She could almost see him rubbing his gloved hands.
There was a long silence. "And then we"ll see."
Luke hung for several minutes in the seat restraint, getting his breath.
Part of his mind he kept stretched out to the Force, manipulating the power of fusion and heat to keep the small impulse fuel reserves from exploding; part he extended, listening, probing across the harsh landscape for signs of danger.
People were on their way.
His mind picked up the radiant buzz of hostility. Theran fanatics, almost certainly. He hung at a forty-five-degree angle above the jagged jumble of what was left of the control board, seat, and flooring; the tiny s.p.a.ce stank of leaked coolants and crash-foam. Huge gaps in the hull where the metal had buckled on final impact let through slabs of thin, fragmented-looking light. Sand and pebbles had come through, too, and lay in tiny dunes and pools among the wreckage. Dust made a shimmering scrim in the air.
Luke wound his left arm in the straps, twisted his body so that his right hand could reach the snap locks on his harness. Swinging down and bracing his feet on the wrecked console, he experienced a moment of surprise that he was still alive, much less relatively unhurt, barring a wrenched shoulder, strap bruises, and the general sense of having gone over the side of Beggar"s Canyon in a not very well constructed barrel.
The locker where he"d stowed food, water, a blaster, and spare power batteries was well and truly jammed shut.
And judging by the angry vibration in the Force, company would be arriving in five minutes or less.
Luke had used the kinetic displacement of the Force on occasion to open locks, but the door itself was jammed. He pushed up his right sleeve; shifted the relative strength of his robotic right hand to its highest; and, bracing the heel of his hand against the crumpled metal of the locker door, bent the least-solidly stuck corner inward until the triangular gap was large enough for him to reach through and fish out the water flask, with the intention of getting the weapon next because he could already hear the hum of badly tuned speeder engines and the clashing crunch of padded hooves on gravel.
He couldn"t get purchase on the blaster in time to free it before the weight of springing bodies rocked the fighter. Shadows fell across the gaps in the buckled hull as Luke snaked his arm free empty-handed, sprang to his feet, and slithered through the smaller split in the other side of the tiny c.o.c.kpit moments before the crashing racket of expanding-gas percussive weapons echoed like thunder in the tiny s.p.a.ce, and a shower of high-velocity stone pellets spattered the s.p.a.ce where he had been.
There were a lot of attackers: Twenty or twenty-five, Luke estimated, dropping to the gravel in a long roll to get back under the shelter of the broken S-foil. Men and women both, as far as he was able to tell, for in the sharp cold they were wrapped in thick vests and jackets, sometimes covered by ragged burnooses, their heads further protected by veils or wide-brimmed hats. In addition to the scatterguns they had bows-both autobows and primitive longbows-as well as short javelins, and they surrounded the wrecked B-wing completely.
Luke didn"t want to have anything to do with any of them.
There are a thousand ways to use the Force in a fight, Callista"s old master, Djinn, had told her. And a thousand and one ways to use the Force to avoid a fight. Luke now used something Djinn had taught her, and she him, so simple a use of kinetic displacement that he was embarra.s.sed not to have thought of it himself years ago. His mind jarred at the gravel underfoot, and the gravel coughed forth dust.
A lot of dust.
The problem with that trick was that you had to be ready for it yourself.
Luke had already picked his line of retreat through the closing ring of Therans and was dragging up the neck of his flightsuit to cover his nose and mouth, squinting his eyes for what protection he could find, even as he launched himself out of the shelter of the B-wing. He"d always had a good sense of direction, and Yoda had drummed into him an almost supernatural ability to orient himself in an emergency. He knew in which direction the Theran speeders and riding-beasts lay and made for them amid a roar of gunfire and a rain of projectiles, half-seen ghostly bodies rushing about in all directions in the sudden gray-white obscurity of suspended grit.
The field effect of the dust was an extremely localized one, rapidly dispersing in the remains of the dying wind. The Theran speeders lay outside its plumy, smoking ring, as grubby a collection of fifth-hand makeshift junkers as Luke had seen this side of the Rebellion"s worst days: aged Void-Spiders, XP-291s, and something that looked like the offspring of a Mobquet Floater and a packing crate engineered by a gene splicer who"d had too much glitterstim. Among them a dozen cu-pas were prancing and yammering, the brightly hued, hot-weather cousins of tauntuans whose pea-sized intellectual powers made the snow lizards appear to be candidates for sentient status-and doctoral degrees-by comparison.
Mindful of the water he carried, and the unknown distance he"d have to travel before he reached civilization, Luke flung himself into the best-looking of the speeders, checked the fuel gauge, reached back to slash the lines of the two cu-pas tied to the stern, rolled out the other side, and dashed to the next-best one he could find, a raddled XP-38A.
That one had more juice in its batteries. He cut loose the cu-pas attached to that one, too-they immediately made tracks for the horizon, gronching and wibbling like enormous pink-and-blue rubber toys-and slammed the speeder into gear, driving his mind and the Force against the ground again like an enormous, stamping foot.
More dust bellled up, engulfing the Therans who rushed from the first dust cloud in his direction and sprayed him with gun pellets and curses.
The speeder slashed out of the dust cloud, and Luke put it into a long turn, heading back into the nearest canyon of the monstrous, glittering ma.s.sif through which the B-wing had descended.
The shadows swallowed him in a winding maze of dry wadis, chasms, and cracks.
He could tell when he got too far from the wreckage to hold the heat fusion of the fuel tanks in stasis by the power of the Force. The explosion boomed out over the empty plain, bounced through the dirty jewels of the hills like a flat, heavy word of thunder.
Luke hoped the Thetans-if those people were, in fact, the fanatic cultists of whom Leia had spoken-had gotten away from the craft before it blew.
Later, in the shelter of a fantastically splintered notch somewhere near the top of the ridge, Luke saw the white flicker of a laser cannon firing skyward again, like threads of perfectly straight lightning pointed into the dull navy blue of the jeweled, arid sky. In time, their target came into view, weaving and dodging in what was clearly an extremely complex preprogrammed pattern: One of the small bronze mini-hulls of the Light of Reason, detached in orbit and making its way separately into the atmosphere.
Shading his eyes against the shimmering brilliance that radiated from the iridescent gravel, Luke knew when ground control cut in to guide the fragment. Every civilian Luke had ever talked to-Leia included, for years-claimed that a program was as good as a live operator, but he didn"t know a single pilot who couldn"t distinguish the difference.
Not one who"d survived more than a few firefights, anyway.
The mini-hull came in under the lowest point of the gun station"s att.i.tude, leveled off parallel to the rolling adamant of the plain, and streaked away to the north. Far away Luke could descry another threadlike flash of laser brightness in the sky.