Ohran Keldor...
She felt as if her skin had been stuffed with red-hot pins.
She'd studied his holos until she could see his face in her dreams. His face, lit from below by the glow of the Death Star's activation consoles.
Ohran Keldor. Nasdra Magrody. Bevel Lemelisk. Qwi Xux, though Qwi Xux had been only their dupe...
So there was more here--far more--than just a woman hiding out.
Fog cloaked the two men as they took the paths that led through the orchards, where the rushing of water and the faint click and whirr of the tree feeders covered Artoo's soft, steady rumble. Now and then one of those huge, arachniform mechanicals would loom from the mists, picking its way across the path in front of her, intent on its tedious ministrations, and Leia wondered with a sort of chill viciousness if the droids belonging to the primary designer of the Death Star's autosystems ever malfunctioned.
Somehow she didn't think so.
The ground began to rise in a long, steady ramp. The mists thickened, darkened before them, solidifying into the dripping, vine-festooned monolith of the valley wall. Leia fell back, stepping into the lipana thickets at the bottom of the ramp, Artoo following gingerly onto the spongy ground. From here they were definitely committed: They were going to the lift shaft that led to the hangars, from which vehicles could be taken out onto the ice. She heard their voices fading away as they climbed...
"It seems a long, cold way to go around," she heard Drost Elegin say, in that bronze-and-velvet voice that every girl and woman at Court had seemed to believe when it said the words, I love only you... "If the tunnels connect with this smuggler pad..."
"The fewer people who know the way in from here the better. Even you, my lord." There was a world of implied offense on Keldor's part in the hasty addition of that last sentence. "And at this point, with Organa showing up as she has, we don't know who may be watching."
Whhish-kunk. Distantly the vapors stirred around the closing of the door.
Leia and Artoo stepped back on the path, climbed the ramp to the small curved bunker of quick-set permacrete molded into the cliff itself, the plain green sturdiplast door. Sturdiplast was a material designed only to keep minor fauna out of the bunker and the air-conditioning in. She listened through it with only minimal concentration until she heard the characteristic ping of the lift's arrival, and, tiny behind the thickness of the door, Elegin's voice asking, "Is it far out?" The last words were cut off, presumably by the lift doors.
Leia still counted out two minutes before inserting her card.
To her utter relief--despite the sound of the lift, for many years with the Rebel Alliance had turned Leia into a confirmed pessimist about things that could go wrong--the small lobby in the bunker was empty. She touched the summoning switch and looked swiftly around her.
A small metal door proved to be a locker, filled with gray mechanics' coveralls. She picked the smallest human-fit she could find, dug around in the pockets of the others until she located a billed cap, which she crammed on her head, shoving her hair up underneath.
Is it far out? If Elegin was asking, then Keldor knew... which meant Keldor had been here longer.
How much longer? And Elegin--meeting someone? Someone else who'd "gone on vacation" with wife and children and then dropped them off at a fashionable resort in order to take a fast ship elsewhere?
The lift doors opened. Leia stepped in, keyed to the hangar, the only possible destination. While the lift was ascending she flipped open Artoo's front hatch. Usually the droid was kept spotless, but Chewbacca's rough-and-ready engineering had resulted in a great deal of soot and grease, which she smeared on her face. After a moment's thought she transferred her blaster from her belt to the coverall's copious pocket. She hoped she could carry off the impersonation of an inconspicuous mechanic when she reached the hangar, but if she couldn't...
Elegin and Keldor, as she feared they might be, were just pulling on protective thermal suits preparatory to climbing into the smallest of the available ice walkers, a low-slung vehicle built along much the same lines of a tree feeder, whose dozen long legs were capable of both climbing over the rugged glacial terrain and spreading out to anchor in the face of the brutal winds. They'd heard the lift ascending and were watching as Leia came out, but the sight of the slight, shuffling figure in an unbelted gray coverall trailed by an astromech droid was apparently a reassuring one, because they climbed into the ice walker and slammed shut the cowl.
A moment later the bay doors cranked open. Leia shuffled over to the crew lockers at the far end of the hangar and pretended to canvass her pockets for keys until the walker moved into the bay.
The moment the doors shut behind it she pulled a pair of wires out of her inner pocket and flipped open Artoo's hatch again, hooking the bare ends in as Han had showed her once. ”Okay, Artoo," she said grimly. "Let's see how good a burglar you'd make."
They opened four lockers before they found a t-suit that fit her; the gloves in its pocket were clearly intended for a Bith. She reset the oxygen and temperature controls for human levels and checked the seals as she pulled it on. There were a couple of Ikas-Adno speederbikes of various models in the hangar but Leia regretfully passed them up. Antigrav vehicles moved fast, but in a high-wind environment like the glacier they were worse than useless. Instead she chose a very old Mobquet Crawler, mostly for its low profile and small engine, which would probably fail to register on a detector if Keldor was watching his trail. She dragged a couple of oil-stained planks over to make a ramp for Artoo, up the back between the high trapezoids of the treads.
"You set back there?" She climbed in, shot the canopy into place, and hit the latches. The inner bay door creaked open, warm air swirling the powder snow and ice crystals that still strewed the dirty concrete floor.
Artoo tweeped an affirmative.
"So let's see what's actually going on on this ball of ice."
The outer door opened. Bleak winds howled across the wilderness of rock and ice: bitter, vile, toothbreakingly cold, a Hell-winter that had already lasted for five thousand years.
Leia set homing coordinates, glanced back to make sure Artoo had hooked himself into the guidance computer, and set out across the frozen landscape in the distant ice walker's wake.
Chapter 16
In a way, you, Princess, are responsible for our choice of target...
She could see him still. A tall man, pale as bleached bone, a skull face above the olive-green uniform, and behind him the blue-green jewel of Alderaan burning like a dream against the velvet darkness beyond the viewscreen.
Ice spattered on the triple plex of the crawler's bubble, wind rocking the low-slung vehicle like the paw of a huge pittin batting at a slow-moving sludbug crawling across some hellishly vast kitchen floor. Leia, though her attention was focused on every shudder of the control bar, every fluctuation of the gauges--on the bobbing pattern of yellow lights that marked the ice walker's gawky, arachnoid limbs, far out ahead of her in the wind-torn desolation of the ice-was in the deeper part of her mind scarcely aware of it.
Her consciousness was back on the Death Star, on Moff Tarkin's colorless eyes.
"You, Princess, are responsible..."
... you are responsible...
Had she been?
She knew Tarkin.
She knew he despised Bail Organa and she knew he was aware of the opposition centered on Alderaan. She knew that under his self-satisfied efficiency he had a spiteful streak the width of the Spiral Arm and loved to tell people that his--or the Emperor's--most frightful retaliations were actually the fault of the victims.
Of the Atravis Sector massacres, he'd said, "They have only themselves to blame."
She knew, too, that as a military man he'd been dying to try his new weapon, to see it in action... to describe its performance to the Emperor and hear that pale cold voice whisper like dead leaves on stone, "It is well."
In her heart, she knew he'd intended Alderaan as his target all
along.
But in her dreams she was responsible, just as he said.
The lights were far out ahead of her on the ice, reeling and dodging among themselves with the motion of the walker's legs, like a pack of drunken firebugs. Away from the hot thermals that rose off the Plawal dome and cleared the dense roil of clouds, storm winds and blowing sleet covered the glacier, cutting visibility and darkening the already feeble daylight to a whirling, cindery gloom. Black bones and spines of rock, scoured bald by the winds, thrust like dead islands through narrow rivers of ice; drifts of snow packed high in places like wind-sculpted desert dunes, and in others the violence of storms had carved the ice underfoot into toothed, ridgy masses, like the waves of an ocean flash-frozen in the midst of storm.
Twice crevasses loomed before them, ghostly sapphire depths falling farther than her eye could easily judge in the shadowless twilight. The walker's longer legs had taken them in stride, and Leia cursed as she trundled the crawler along the rim for hundreds of meters, looking for a place where the chasms narrowed sufficiently to make the heart-stopping jolt over the emptiness. Rumbling back along the rim to pick up the choppy trail again, she prayed the wind-blown ice hadn't eradicated the walker's marks.
Ohran Keldor was aboard that walker. Ohran Keldor, who had helped design the Death Star.
Ohran Keldor had been aboard it, watching when Alderaan was destroyed.
Leia had more or less forgiven Qwi Xux, the Death Star's primary designer, when they had finally met, seeing the woman's stricken horror at what her abilities had wrought. It was a little hard to appreciate how anyone could be naive enough to believe Moff Tarkin's assurances that the Death Star was a mining implement, but she understood that the Omwat woman had been raised in a carefully constructed maze of ignorance, coercion, and lies.
And when she had seen the truth, she had had the courage to follow where it led her--not something everyone did.
But Ohran Keldor--and Bevel Lemelisk, and others whose names the Alderaan Alliance of survivors had collected--had known precisely what they were doing. After the destruction of Alderaan, they'd all been dropped at Carida, when the Death Star started its final voyage to destroy the Yavin base. But all of them had wanted to see the first test of their theories.
And Keldor was here.
And so was Drost Elegin, she thought, and in all probability the heads of those other old Houses, those planetary rulers who headed up the human--or humanoid--populations of planets settled long ago, rulers who'd hated the Senate's interference with their local power and who hated the Republic more. Those rulers who had only supported Palpatine because he could be bribed to a "gentleman's agreement" to let them run things as they pleased.
They are gathering...
Gathering around Roganda Ismaren, former concubine of the Emperor and child of the Jedi, and who knew what besides?
Out in the sooty maelstrom another light glowed briefly blue. It blinked away almost instantly, but Leia saw the moving tangle of the walker's leg markers turn in that direction. ”Got that, Artoo?" she yelled into the com, and barely heard the reassuring affirmative chirp. Course bearings flashed green on her readouts, and the wind slapped hard as she steered the crawler out from behind a twisted cliff of ice, like some impossible marble monolith thrown up by the restlessness of the volcanic line far beneath.
Her hands were shaking, and she was weirdly conscious of the heat of the blood in her veins.
In a way, it surprised Leia that nobody had mapped the location of the smuggler pads. Because of the intensive ion storms, high-altitude scans were out of the question, but a ground-level geothermic trace would have been possible. Possible, but not easy, she reflected, fighting the control bar as the crawler heaved up over a talus slope of rotting ice under the feet of another, older cliff. And probably not worth anybody's while.
The wind nearly took her off her feet when she climbed out of the crawler in the lee of the scoured black rocks that sheltered the pad. The t-suit was certified below the freezing point of alcohol, and still she felt the cold creep through it as she fought her way up the knife-edge crest of drift and rock to get her first clear look at her goal.
It wasn't a pad anymore.
Where a sort of bunker had been--precast permacrete and designed for little more than an inconspicuous staging point beside a clear space thermoblasted into the rock-hard glacier--Leia saw through the screaming sleet the low black walls of what the military referred to as a permanent temporary hangar, snow frizzing wildly away from a magnetic field that was clearly both new and extremely powerful. The old permacrete bunker had been added to by others, mostly perm-temps, low-built structures whose black walls blended with the rock of the ridge against which they backed. were it not for the magnetics they would have been buried by drifts in hours.
Leia muttered a word she'd picked up from the boys in the old Rogue squadron and edged her way down to the walls, slipping in the heavy pack snow, with Artoo's treads squeaking sharply in her wake.
The ice walker was gone. That didn't mean the hangar was deserted--Leia could see by the melt patterns that something had landed on the ice and been taken into the hangar less than three hours ago, and at a guess they'd have left crew. Above the battering howl of the wind it was difficult to extend her senses into the main shed, but the door to the smaller buildings adjacent to it was on the lee side, and those smaller buildings were empty, anyway. It was a matter of moments, even with gloved fingers in the deepening cold, to have Artoo hotwire the locks. The stillness when the door slid shut behind them was almost painful.
She pulled off her helmet, shook out her hair. The small annex's heating system was a relief, but she could still see her breath in the dim gleam that fell through the connecting passage to the main hangar itself.
The ship in the hangar was a Mekuun Tikiar model, sleek and dark and curiously reminiscent of the avian hunter for whom the model was named. Tikiars were a favorite, she knew, among the aristocratic Houses both in the Senex Sector and elsewhere.
Two crew. She leaned against the doorjamb, listening deeply, focusing her mind through the hazy brightness of the Force. Relaxed...watching a smashball game--illegally--on the subspace net.
The Dreadnaughts were getting pasted again.
Reassured, she surveyed the annex room behind her.
It was filled with packing crates. Stacks of them, piled around the lift doors, dark anonymous green plastene bare of destination but emblazoned with corporation logos and serial numbers.
Mekuun-made DEMP guns and heavy laser carbines. Seinar ion cannons. Scale-50 power cells, sized for the smaller, older TIE'S and Blastboats; smaller cells, C's and B's and Scale-20's by the dozen. Blaster size.
We've lost contact with Bot-Un again, she heard Jevax say.
That's where they're bringing in the men. The realization came to her, complete and logical. Bring them down the Corridor, come in high, drop fast, run along above the ice...
Communications between the rifts failed so frequently that it might be a week before anyone took an ice walker out across the glaciers to check. Or more.
"You getting all this, Artoo?" She pulled her helmet back on, braced herself as they slipped out to the frozen nightmare outside. She had to cling to the droid for support as they struggled back to the crawler, picked up the trail of the walker's huge grippers across the ice.
The astromech tweeped assent.
Ohran Keldor, last of the Emperor's fleet designers...
Designing something new? She shook her head. Only with an effort now could she see the almost obliterated tracks. Too expensive, beyond even the capacity of a coalition of the Senex lords, and the corporations they dealt with would be wary of backing them on major construction. Keldor had more probably been called in as a consultant on some older apparatus, maybe the very Jedi equipment Nubblyk and Drub had been looting and smuggling out all those years ago.
But her instincts whispered, No. Something bigger.
Something else.
Something they'd assassinated Stinna Draesinge Sha over, lest she hear something that would ring familiar from her own studies and notify the Republic of their danger.
The black rock outcroppings of the main ridge formed a wind trap east of the hangar itself. No one, thought Leia, grimly hanging on to the crawler's control bar, would have been able to track the site of the tunnel from the air. The pale sun's light barely penetrated the scudding clouds and only faint scuffs remained of the walker's tracks. She only saw the cave where they left the craft, and the permacrete pillbox that covered the shaft head itself, because of the puckery masses of dimples fast fading in the blowing snow.
New military structures at the landing pad but no improvements on the shaft head, thought Leia, maneuvering the crawler behind the last spur of rock out of sight of the walker in its cave. And bringing Elegin in the long, cold way around. Don't trust the Senex lords, do we?
Snow squeaked under Leia's boots as she crossed to the pillbox, and the hot air rushing out around her as the shaft head doors opened to Artoo's breaker program made her gasp. She stepped inside quickly, the droid at her heels, and the door slid shut once more. More crates filled the shaft head, bearing all the logos and labels she'd seen before: Mekuun, Seinar, Kuat Drive Yards, Pravaat--the massive consortium in the Celanon System that manufactured and sold uniforms to whoever cared to pay for them. The pale strings of battery-run glowpanels threaded around the room showed the floor scratched with fresh drag marks and spotted with oil leaked from secondhand droids.
Han. I've got to let Han know.
Kill you all, Drub McKumb had said. They're gathering. They're there.
Five sets of tracks marked the powdered snow that lay all over the cement floor, ending at the doors of the lift. Four humans and the broad, short, slightly rounded prints of what might have been a Sullustan or a Rodian. Leia recalled that many of the executive board of Seinar were of the rotund, flat-nosed Sullustan race.
Children of the Jedi Page 24
