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 scrap 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 Aldera below the palace where you were raised, or the Starboys in their heyday … or your husband,” he added diffidently. “I have scrap 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 reassuringly 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 reassuring 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 glass 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.
She shook her head, clearly puzzled. “You okay, Owen? What happened?”
Luke hesitated. It was impossible to explain matters of the Force to those unaware of its existence and, given Taselda’s attempt to control him—and Officer Snaplaunce’s account of her attempt to kidnap Callista—in the town he was very careful to whom he spoke. “It’s nothing.”
He took the crystal from Darm’s hand, and held it to the nearest window once more. The threadlike gray striations in the Spook’s heart had changed their orientation, forming two starlike blotches where the terminals had touched.
“If that Spook had had the proper color,” said the prospector with rueful amusement, “I’d just have done myself out of a hundred credits. They can program them, realign the structure to act as a receiver.” She fl
ipped the pale arrowhead of quartz in her hand, then tossed it to Luke.
His hand jerked back, and the crystal fell to the floor and shattered into glittering slivers. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry …”
She kicked the fragments casually out of sight under the recharger. “Not to worry. Like I said, it wasn’t anything they’d take, but even the tiny ones can be reoriented like that with an ion zap.” She frowned at him again, studying his face, which still, Luke feared, showed too much of the sickened shakiness he felt inside. “You sure you’re okay?” She probably meant, thought Luke, that it wasn’t like him to drop things—and after years of a Jedi’s hair-trigger physical training it certainly wasn’t.
Whatever their other properties, the Spook crystals somehow seemed to be foci or triggers for the Force.
“Yeah,” said Luke, and rubbed his temples, trying to gather his wits. “Yeah, I’m fine.” No wonder the planet reverberated with the Force. Could they be used to …?
“There’s a meeting tonight,” went on Darm, her voice breaking into the half-formed train of thought. “Seti Ashgad’s back. Turns out he met with some bigwig in the Republic, how do you like that? We’re all going to his place tonight—you know it? That big old joint that used to belong to some Hutt who ran things around here way long ago. Pretty fancy, but it must get fairly exciting during ground lightning. If you wanted to go I could get you in, introduce you around. People will be there from as far away as Outer Distance. If your friend’s still in settled territory at all, someone will have seen her.”
“Thanks,” said Luke, his sense of confusion, of despair, returning at the mention of her presence on this world. He’d walked past Taselda’s house two or three times in the past twenty-four hours, carefully—had walked past Ashgad’s, too. At least this would be a way in without rousing the suspicions of the too-intelligent Officer Grupp. “I’d like that.”
Darm waved his thanks away, with the easy friendliness of communities where humans—or at least humans of a certain persuasion—feel that they have to stick together. “We’ll find her for you,” she said. “Sooner or later, somebody’ll know. Tonight at twenty hours, then. I’ll come by here at quarter of. Arvid and Gin’ll probably be there as well.”
Luke nodded. After Umolly Darm had left he knelt and touched the broken fragments of crystal with his fingertips, trying to recapture—trying to understand—what it was exactly that he’d felt. But they were only bits of silicon, like the rubbish heaped in all the corners beneath the repair shop’s stilts.
So Taselda’s enemy—whose house had been taken over by Seti Ashgad—had been a Hutt.
An evil Jedi? wondered Luke. Or was that just another of her lies.? A “crime boss,” Grupp had called him, but that could be only a layman’s description of something he did not understand.
Could Hutts be born, imbued with the Force?
There was a time when someone would have asked that about the Khomm people as well, until Luke’s pupil Dorsk 81 had made his appearance on Yavin Four.
Had Taselda tried to get Callista to break in and search for her lightsaber?
Ashgad’s palace itself, though typical of Hutt dwellings in its burrowlike arrangement of rooms leading out of rooms, round doors, and feeding niches in every available wall, had been in human ownership long enough to have had windows put into it and been cleansed many times. As Luke, Arvid, and Aunt Gin struggled against the millrace of the evening wind, Luke fingered Taselda’s sketch map in his pocket.
“You know anything about the meeting, Grupp?” asked Arvid, as the paunchy cop fell into step beside them. Grupp shook his head.
“Far as I can tell nobody did. I did sort of wonder where he’s been these past few months.” Howling out of the fast-falling darkness, the wind thrust them this way and that, making it almost impossible to speak. “Snaplaunce and I have been keeping an eye out here and most times there’s been nobody.”
Luke didn’t think it likely that a prisoner—especially one who’d already attracted the man’s notice—could be kept here undetected. Nevertheless, when they entered the house, he took the occasion to slip away from the others and make his way to the old kitchen courtyard.
Though sheltered by its high walls from the wind, the place gave him the willies for reasons he couldn’t quite define. On one side, wide transparisteel showed him a long room embellished with what he vaguely recognized as state-of-the-art culinary esoterica: Four types of electronic stoves; freeze and slow dryers; dehydrators and rehydrators; bowls and measures and work surfaces of every conceivable size and material; bottles, boxes, and sacks on shelves that reached to the ceiling. A glutton’s heaven, but little more.
Across the court the corresponding chamber was shuttered close. Opening its door, Luke had a dim vision of glass-enclosed vats of every size, tanks of oxygen and methane, feeder-tubes, shunts, and apparatus to which Luke could put no name. He couldn’t imagine the purpose of such a display, but the whole long room resonated with ugliness and evil.
But there was no sign of Callista, no sign of any prisoner. The doorway to the treasure vaults that Taselda had described stood shut behind an iron grille, grille and door both covered with a thick blanket of podhoy of clearly many years’ growth. He reached out with his mind, calling Callista’s name, searching for some trace of her in this place. But whether because of her loss of ability to use the Force or because of the strange, thick presence of the Force in the ether of the planet or simply because she was not and had never been there, he felt nothing.
A tall, androgynous individual whom Luke recognized as one of Ashgad’s synthdroids—either a member of the party who’d escorted him aboard the Borealis or an identical creation—appeared behind him and inquired politely, “May I help you?”
Luke meekly allowed himself to be herded back to the others in what had clearly been the house’s banqueting chamber in earlier times, the biggest room in any Hutt’s dwelling. It was now filled with men and women, some of whom Luke recognized from the abortive attack on the gun station. Others he knew by sight from his brief tenure at Croig’s Fix-It Barn. Their clothing marked them all as Newcomers, following standard cut and fashion in the Core worlds even if they could no longer acquire the usual materials, and there was more diversity in complexion than he’d seen in the limited Oldtimers gene pool.
Croig was there, grayish, orange-eyed, and glum, keeping close to his brother (or sister—the Durosian word was the same) and the two or three other aliens of Hweg Shul: the Arcona who operated one of the majie-processing plants and a couple of Sullustans who owned the biggest branswed towers in the district. Luke noticed that all were vaguely ostracized by most of the Newcomer humans. He’d encountered this a number of times at the shop, this unspoken prejudice against the nonhuman species of the Core worlds. Stupid, when you thought of their technologies. But then the prejudices of the Empire had been stupid and had, in fact, brought about its downfall.
More synthdroids guarded the door. He doubted that most of the people in the room realized that the guards weren’t alive or human. They were realistic to the smallest degree, though the hair was a giveaway—perfect, human, but with the oddly dead look that replants frequently had—and the smell. Everyone in the room smelled: of sweat, of beer, of coffeine; of the salt of work and life. Synthflesh, until it grows into organic matter as a patch, requires no nourishment and excretes no by-products. Luke recalled an article he’d read about Loronar Corporation’s efforts to make synthdroids that would be acceptable to scent-cued species like the Chadra-Fans and Wookiees. There were even humans who reacted badly to the deeply buried anomaly of something that looked like a human and smelled like nothing.
The conclusion of the article, as he recalled, was that the project was low on the Loronar priorities list. Chadra-Fans and Wookiees had little purchasing power and were considered an insufficient market to take the trouble over, even at a hundred thousand credits a throw.
“Arvid.” Gerney Caslo jostled over to them t
hrough the crowd as people began to settle themselves on the edges of the low daises that were scattered around the room and on the compressed chairs set between. The whole place had been carpeted in a kind of dense industrial weave, which lent it an odd hybrid look. What had been food niches were now filled with the sort of cheap knock-off artwork available to the wealthy on thinly settled worlds: bad holos of famous sculpture, sometimes edited to substitute the faces of the new owner and his or her family, or cheap little sixteen-color-lights displays that ran through their cycles in a minute and a half. Luke had seen some beautiful sand-glazed Oldtimer pottery, and wondered that neither Seti Ashgad nor his father, after all those years on the planet, had thought to include it in the house.
Had the elder Ashgad so much resented this world that he’d have none of its works? But surely the son, who had been born there, or at least raised there—he didn’t look more than forty—wouldn’t share the prejudice to the same degree? Or was Ashgad’s other house, his dwelling in the Mountains of Lightning, more his than his father’s?
“We’re looking for a couple of boys for a job,” Caslo went on, speaking from the corner of his mouth like a bad guy in a holovid. “There’s a drop coming in tomorrow night.”
“Where?”
“Ten Cousins.”
Luke had heard Croig speak of the place. The Cousins in question were tsils, the crystal chimneys standing in a ring instead of a line, markers of some unknown geological process. A smuggler’s dream, a formation easily identified on a scan but small enough to search in a night.
“Can you use Owen here, too?” Arvid nodded to Luke. “He’s working for Croig. He could use the cash.”
Booldrum Caslo, a thickset, smooth-faced little man with heavy sight-amplification equipment bolted into his head, grinned, “Anyone who works for Croig could use cash.”
Star Wars: Planet of Twilight Page 17
