"Like she might be working at Madame Lota's House of Flowers down on Spaceport Row."
Leia wondered why it hadn't crossed her mind before. "Dressed like that?"
He gave her his crooked grin. "I suppose you're dressed for your job?"
She brushed a dismissive hand over the plain dark linen of her shirt, the knockabout cotton fatigue pants, and high-laced boots. "She wouldn't have been on the path by the MuniCenter last night if she were working the bars." The pile of hardcopy Artoo had made for them that first day strewed the bed between them. Nowhere was Roganda Ismaren listed on any employer record of any packing plant in Plawal.
"And if she'd followed me there from the marketplace, for instance, she wouldn't have been dressed like that at that hour."
While she was speaking, Han rose and walked out to the balcony, took aim at a small clump of ferns a few meters away in the orchard, and fired. The ferns sizzled into oblivion. He flipped the safety back on and tossed the weapon to Leia. "Good as new. So what did you find in the town records?"
It seemed like a thousand years ago. Returning last night to find a soaked and exhausted Han patching Chewie's cuts had driven from her mind the web of speculation fed by the records themselves, and after Mara's subspace call, her mind had been on other things.
"Not... what I was looking for," said Leia slowly. "No mention of the Jedi, or of Plett himself, though it's obvious they were behind the different kinds of plants growing here and that they set up the archiving programs--the Municipal Records time-shares off the Brathflen/galactic/imperial Fruits computer, but all the archiving programs look like they were originally designed for some kind of four-sixty model, which puts it back to the date the Jedi were here. Naturally, nobody knows where that original computer went to but my guess is it got sold for chips and wire to Nubblyk when the new one was put in."
"Good guess," muttered Han. "Not what I want to hear, but a good guess. Any record of what happened to Nubblyk?"
She shook her head. "He just disappeared one night about seven years ago. His nightclub was taken over by his "associate" Bran Kemple, who also took over his import and export business on Pandowirtin Lane. Slyte's on the record as having bailed out Drub McKumb twice from charges of running stuff in through the Corridor. Kemple never bailed out McKumb at all. After Kemple took over, McKumb is listed as having been bailed out once by Mubbin the Whiphid--this was right after Slyte disappeared--though at no time is McKumb ever listed as having legally landed a ship at the port. Now the interesting thing is..."
Chewbacca appeared in the doorway with an interrogatory growl, and gestured out into the front room, where a signal was coming in on the subspace.
The code was for Leia, and the image was scrambled.
Leia punched in the unscrambler sequence, and the dazzling buzz of green, brown, and white pixels resolved itself suddenly into the image of Admiral Ackbar.
"This may not mean anything, Princess," said the Calamarian in his soft, rather sibilant voice. ”Still, I thought you ought to know about it. I've received reports from operatives in the Senex Sector and the adjoining portions of the Juvex Sector. They say that the heads of six or seven of the old Houses--the ones who've been lying low, staying out of the border fighting and not committing to the warlords of the Empire--have all gone "on vacation"...without taking their families or their mistresses."
"Oh, yeah?" Han raised his brows. "Now, that's serious."
The admiral folded his squamous hands, a ghostly image in the subspace holo, like a statue wrought of mist in the receiver cubicle. "This is curious enough, but it coincides almost exactly with the "vacations" taken by the uncommitted ex-governors of Veron and Mussubir Three, and with representatives of the Seinar Corporation and a high-up member of the Mekuun family. Drost Elegin--the head of House Elegin--evidently took his family but left them on Eriadu."
"That's a sort of epidemic of rudeness all of a sudden," remarked Han, standing behind Leia with folded arms. "Any troop movement?"
"None so far." The Calamarian touched the slim stack of report wafers on the desk just visible at his side. "Nothing from the larger warlords, but our operatives on Spuma seem to think there's increasing recruitment in basic trooper levels into Admiral Harrsk's fleet, and sources within the Seinar Corporation say there's some kind of major funding in the wind-Seinar is ordering new equipment to produce energy cells and stepping up thermal fabric production. But nothing concrete. Still, considering how close Belsavis lies to the Senex Sector, Your Excellency, you may want to consider coming into a more protected area."
"Thank you, Admiral," said Leia slowly. ”We're... almost finished here." She brought the words out reluctantly. Her chief of staff was right, she knew. If the self-styled Lord High Admiral Harrsk was moving or about to move, she was in a desperately exposed position on Belsavis, and something about the assassination of Stinna Draesinge Sha triggered warning sirens in the back of her mind.
But she sensed some darker riddle, some deeper and deadlier puzzle, than she'd first come seeking on this world of fire and ice.
The Jedi and their children had been here.
Roganda Ismaren, once the Emperor's concubine, had come here... Why?
And why did something snag in her mind just now, some trace of something she had heard?
Drub McKumb had worked his way desperately, through blinding nightmares of agony and confusion, halfway across the galaxy to warn her and Han about something.
And someone here had thought it worthwhile to murder them while they slept.
Admiral Ackbar was still watching her face anxiously through the wavery light of the subspace transmission, so she said, "We'll be returning soon."
"Will we?" asked Han as the admiral's image faded.
"I don't... I don't know," said Leia softly. "If there's some kind of trouble brewing among the old Houses of the Senex Sector I think we'll have to. They've kept quiet... even under Palpatine all they wanted was to be left alone, to rule the so-called natives on their planets however they wanted to..."
"I've heard that before," said Han grimly. ”The big corporations just love governments like that."
Leia sniffed. "Ask us no questions and we'll hand you no responsibilities. Yes." She folded her arms uneasily, prowled past Chewie and Artoo's quest game and back into the bedroom, to stand with one shoulder against the window jamb, staring out into the mists of the orchard where that morning she'd seen Roganda Ismaren, nearly invisible among the trees. Of course the woman had every right to take refuge here, beyond the frontiers of the New Republic.
The fact that it was "close" to the Senex Sector meant little. It was close only in interstellar terms. It wasn't anyplace any of those ancient aristocrats, those cold-eyed and elegantly groomed descendants of ancient starfaring conquerors, would come. She remembered Drost Elegin from her days at Court, and tried to picture that disdainful dandy in this provincial world of fruit pickers and backwater smugglers. They'd even considered Coruscant déclassé... "So many bureaucrats, my dear," Aunt Rouge had said.
A white-sleeved arm reached around from behind with her abandoned cider glass.
"So what was the other interesting thing?"
"Oh," said Leia, startled. Han leaned against the frame next to her, looking down with quizzical hazel eyes.
"Yes," said Leia, remembering. "All along, there's something about this business of droids going haywire that's bothered me."
"Bothered you?" Han jerked his head in the direction of the living room, where Artoo's holographic geofigures were rapidly burying Chewbacca's enraged Hero. "He tried to--”
"But why did he try to?" Leia asked. ”Yes, I know colonies frequently operate with substandard machinery, but in the records I found literally dozens of unexplained malfunctions a year. Even a rough count shows the number has increased dramatically over the past several years." She gestured back toward the bed, with its scattered counterpane of Artoo's readouts. "Last night, before Artoo's attack on us, when I was looking at
the records up at the MuniCenter I wasn't connecting it with anything. I think I'd like to recheck the causes of those malfunctions. If it was a function of the climate, that would have been constant, not increasing."
"Not necessarily, if their stuff's wearing out."
"Maybe," agreed Leia. "But they're listed on Artoo's readouts as "unexplained." That means they checked for the obvious things, like age and dampness."
A few years ago Han would have dismissed it as coincidence. Now he said, "So what do you think it was?"
"I don't know." Leia ducked under his arm, crossed to the bed, and fetched her blaster and its holster. "But I think I'd like to talk to the head mechanic at Brathflen and see whether those malfunctions were just a fried wire, or whether they involved chains of specific, unexpected actions."
"Like welding the windows shut and putting blasters on overload."
"Yeah," said Leia softly. She gathered the readouts, stowed them in the cupboard. "Like that. Want to come?"
Han hesitated, then said, "If we're getting out of here soon, I think I'm going down to the Jungle Lust"--he made a suggestive wiggle with his hips--"and have a couple words with Bran Kemple. You want to come, Chewie?" There was more behind the request than friendly companionship--the last time Artoo had beaten Chewbacca at quest, the game console had ended up hurled through the nearest window, and Artoo seemed well on his way to another victory now.
"He may know something about how and when and mostly why Nubblyk made tracks out of here, and if he took a ship with him when he left. You're not taking him with you, are you?" he added, as Leia, following him into the living room, crossed to touch Artoo's domed top.
Leia hesitated. She had had it in mind as a matter of course, but then, it hadn't been her scantly covered anatomy Artoo had been firing bolts of electricity at not twelve hours ago.
"Whatever his problem was last night, we don't know if we've solved it yet." Han was checking his blaster as he spoke, in spite of the fact that he'd tested and retested it not half an hour before. "If Goldenrod was here he might get some sense out of him, but since he isn't, I say leave him here with that restraining bolt on him till we can get him checked out by somebody better than the local toaster repairman."
Chewbacca snarled and aimed a swat at him with one enormous paw, and Han threw up his hands and grinned. "All right, all right. You did a swell job on him, Chewie; he'll make point five past lightspeed now and can outmaneuver Imperial patrols..."
They descended the ramp together: Han, Leia, and the Wookiee. Han gave Leia a quick, hard kiss at the foot of the ramp, and she waved to them as they disappeared into the shifting rainbows of the fog. But when they were out of sight Leia turned back, climbed again to the house, and walked over to the little astromech droid sitting beside the deactivated quest console.
"Artoo?"
The droid bobbed forward, extending his front "leg," and gave a timid whistle. His top swiveled to regard her with the round red eye of the visual receptor.
Leia often wondered what she looked like through it, and how the shape that was her--the shapes that were Luke and Han and Chewie and the kids--appeared to the astromech's digitalized consciousness.
"You can't tell me what happened?"
A wretched whistle, begging for understanding.
"Did someone tell you to do it?" she asked. ”Program you somehow?"
His cap swung wildly and he rocked a little on his base.
"All right." Leia touched his cap again. ”All right. We'll be out of this place pretty quick. And I'll ask the mechanic about what happened to you. Look..." She hesitated. Yes, Artoo was only a droid, but she knew he'd been hurt by Han's mistrust. "I'll be back..."
No! No! No!
His desperate whistling and rocking stopped her halfway to the door.
Trust your feelings, Luke had said to her many times since she had submitted to his greater wisdom as a teacher. Raised to trust her brain, her intellect--raised to trust information and systems--Leia found this difficult sometimes, when things looked wrong but felt right. She could almost hear her brother's voice, see him standing beside the little droid.
Trust your feelings, Leia.
Artoo had tried to kill both her and Han not twelve hours ago.
Han would choke.
But then, she thought, her love for Han was the greatest triumph she'd ever seen of "looks wrong, feels right." So he didn't have any room to talk.
She fetched a bolt extractor from Chewbacca's toolkit in the next room and removed the restraining bolt from Artoo's casing. ”Let's go. This way the mechanic won't have to come back here to have a look at you."
She added to herself, I hope I don't regret this.
Due to vague uneasiness about taking the less traveled roadways through the orchards again, she turned her steps to the slightly longer route through the town market. The fog was thinner here and the proximity of the buskers, hucksters, and shoppers reassuring. As she climbed toward the bench from this direction, the oddly patchwork structures of the older part of town fell behind her. Only the white prefabs remained, crammed together here into apartment blocks for the packers and shippers, the clerks and mechanics, though lichen, ferns, trailing vines, and even small trees grew out of every chance projection and ledge offered by an uneven fit of the plastene blocks.
She wondered what the place had been like, when the Mluki had inhabited their massive stone houses clustered against the bottom of the bench, farming their small crops and occasionally going up to hunt on the ice.
Not so foggy, certainly, without the dome, and not so hot, though the jungly rift held the heat well. The orchards wouldn't have extended as far as they did now. There would have been clumps of dense jungle around the warm springs, nothing at all down at the bottom of the valley, where the mudflats, caldera, and steaming gas vents of the rift's true bottom poured forth more minerals than unengineered plants were capable of digesting.
Exactly the sort of place a heat-loving, plant-loving, beauty-loving Ho'Din would seek out.
She remembered her vision of Plett, tall and willowy, his flowerlike cluster of headstalks faded nearly white. A gentle face, with that look in his eyes Luke had had when he'd come back from servitude to the Emperor's vile clone.
Was this a refuge he had chosen, a place to repair, to rest? How had he learned about it, for that matter? The galaxy was filled with planets, worlds, star systems still unexplored, and unless a system was on someone's computer, it didn't exist. Roganda might possibly have heard of the place at Court...
Although now that she thought about it, that troubled Leia, too.
And how had Plett liked having the peace of his experiments disrupted by the influx of...
How many?
Nichos had spoken as if there was a fair-sized gang of children.
Leia had had almost a year of raising two enterprising Jedi babies... with Anakin just arrived to provide his own variety of mayhem. After years of quiet meditation, how had the aged reptiloid coped with a swarm of them, of all ages, running up and down the tunnels of his crypts, following their own leaders even where their parents had warned them not to go because of the kretch...
She stopped in her tracks, Nichos's deep voice sounding in her ears.
The older kids... Lagan Ismaren and Hoddas Umgil...
Lagan Ismaren...
Roganda Ismaren's... brother? Her age was certainly right. A few years older than Leia-a few years younger than Nichos--she would be old enough to remember the world where she had lived.
That meant that Roganda Ismaren--Palpatine's concubine and member in good standing of his Court--had come from the blood and the heritage of the Jedi Knights.
The Emperor had been hideously strong in the Force. He couldn't have been unaware.
Anger flushed through Leia like the shock of a burn.
She lied.
Leia had suspected the other woman had been lying about something, but she realized with sudden clarity that it had all been an act--all
of it, down to the sweet, frightened tones of her voice. An act calculated to play on her pity.
If Roganda was Force-strong the Emperor might have used her, certainly, might have coerced her... but he'd never have simply passed her around to his guests.
She came here seven years ago, thought Leia, quickly turning her steps back toward town. She wasn't sure what she should do now--certainly not go anywhere near the woman herself, and she was gladder than ever she'd turned down that invitation to coffee--but she wanted at least to find Han, to send word to Ackbar, to look again through the records Artoo had run out to see if they included port arrivals in the year of Palpatine's death...
But as she crossed through the small square at the head of Roganda's narrow street, she saw something that hit her in the pit of the stomach like a club.
Emerging from between the dark foundations, the white plastic buildings, she saw, across the street and quite clearly, Lord Drost Elegin walking with Dr. Ohran Keldor.
Leia looked aside at once, as if studying the small stand of sweetberry that someone had planted in the waste space between two buildings. But as Luke had taught her--had tried to teach her, in her hectic intervals between trying to be a mother, trying to be a diplomat, trying to keep the New Republic from falling to pieces and her children from dismantling poor See-Threepio--she extended her senses, identifying footfalls, breathing, voices... the sense and essence of what people were...
Ohran Keldor and Drost Elegin.
Here.
They vanished into the fog almost at once. She crossed the narrow street, Artoo trundling behind, followed the sound of the feet, the sense of their presence, cutting ahead through an alley and watching as they passed across its mouth.
There was no chance of mistake.
Drost Elegin's hair had grayed a little from the days when he'd been one of the most notorious playboys of the Emperor's Court, in and out of the Court Gazette for scandals about gambling, dueling, amorous affairs--he'd mockingly called her Madame Senator and Little Miss Inalienable Rights. Only his brother's position in the Imperial navy had saved him from severe reprisals after the last of his major scandals--that, and the power his family wielded. The flesh of that hawk face had begun to sag, but the tall, gawky-graceful form and beaky features were unmistakable to anyone who'd ever seen them.
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