Caslo studied Luke for a moment, then nodded. “We can use as many as we can. I hear it’s a good-size cargo. You got that speeder of yours running yet?”
Luke nodded, though running was a matter of interpretation.
“You’ll work pickup, then,” said Caslo. Arvid sniffed as the older man walked away.
“Doesn’t trust you as a perimeter guard.”
“Hunh?”
“To keep the Therans away,” explained Gin, coming over and perching on the edge of the dais where they sat. “Oh, the Listeners sometimes get word of drops and try to stop them, but mostly I think it’s just keeping tabs on whatever’s going on. Mostly they seem to concentrate on …”
The lights dimmed, save for a single one on the main dais, set unobtrusively in what had been an olympian feeding niche. A curtain at the back of the room parted, and Seti Ashgad stepped through.
Do not trust him, Callista had said. Do not meet with him, or accede to any demand he makes.
Why?
It was the first time Luke had seen the man face-to-face, though on the Borealis he’d glimpsed him and his escort in passing. He had not been born when Ashgad’s father had been exiled by the Emperor Palpatine, but his teenage interest in the Rebellion had made him familiar with the older politician’s easygoing charm and chameleon promises from holos. The old man must be in his eighties now, thought Luke, watching the son mount the dais and exchange jokes and pleasantries with those in the audience who knew him best.
He hadn’t heard Croig or anyone at the Blue Blerd of Happiness speak of the older man at all. Yet he’d defeated the (possibly Jedi) Hutt, taken over his power and his house. So he must have been a remarkable man. Was he dead, or just retired to the house in the Mountains of Lightning?
“Now, now, we can’t have any of that,” Ashgad was saying, to a raucous suggestion that Republic troops would soon be on hand to “settle for” the Therans. Good-natured sarcasm dripped from his deep voice. “They’re the majority, after all, you know. It’s their planet.”
“It’s our planet, too!” yelled Gerney Caslo, springing to his feet. “We bust our backs putting plants on this motherless rock. Don’t that count?”
“Does it?” Ashgad swept the crowd with a green eye suddenly cold and angry. “I thought so. I was optimistic enough to assure you I could do something about that. It appears that I was wrong.”
Silence fell, but Luke felt anger pass like ground lightning through the crowd.
“As you know,” said the politician, now suddenly the focus of the entire quiet room, “I had high hopes. Through connections I was able to obtain a meeting, not with some politician, not with some bureaucrat, not with some committee member, but with Leia Organa Solo herself—not,” he added bitterly, “that she was at all enthusiastic about coming, as she made clear to me from the outset.”
They’d called the senior Ashgad the Golden Tempter. Luke knew, listening to his son, what he must have sounded like. Ashgad used his voice like a master artist used a light organ, evoking nuance, shade, twilight, and brilliance with the slightest shifts of tone and volume.
“I apologize,” went on Ashgad, “for my enthusiasm and for my folly. I owe you all that apology, for raising hopes not destined to be fulfilled.” He gestured, and another man—at this distance Luke couldn’t tell whether it was a synthdroid or not, though there was something suspiciously smooth about the way he moved—slipped through the curtain and set up a holo player in the niche.
“Perhaps I should let Her Excellency tell you in her own words.”
The light in the chamber dimmed still further. The holo of Leia was of crystal-clear quality, appearing almost solid in the near darkness, as if she were bathed in radiance from an unseen source. The scale was perfect—life-size, so that she truly seemed to be in the room, hands folded on her knees, the heavy folds of her robe of state spread around her. The Noghri bodyguards squatted on their hunkers, nearly a dozen strong, like shadows behind her. Her chin was up, and she spoke with a cold precision Luke had only heard her use when she was truly angry.
“I’m afraid that any help from the Republic is out of the question, Master Ashgad,” she said. “The Republic cannot afford to be seen to support a minority—any minority—by prospective planetary councils still undecided about joining. Too much trade depends on our maintenance of the status quo and too many people see the efforts of the Rationalists on your planet as disruptive, unruly, and criminal.”
A buzz stirred the crowd. Beside Luke, Gerney Caslo mutttered, “Criminal—I’ll show you criminal, honey!”
“Criminal to make an honest living pumping water …”
“What’s disruptive about wanting medicine for my son …?”
Leia’s image went on, “I understand your problems, Master Ashgad. But the Republic must look at the larger picture. And, quite frankly, the discontent of a handful of settlers on a world that isn’t even a member of the Republic is not worth the two billion credits it would cost—not to mention the damage done to the Republic’s image—should we intervene in your quarrel.”
Her last words were drowned in a rising roar. Someone yelled, “Festering hag witch, what in blazes does she know?” and Luke was on his feet, his whole body aflame with rage, not at the man who had shouted insults at his sister but at the man who stood on the dais, just visible beside the glimmering holo, his head bowed in pious resignation and regret.
Luke yelled, “Liar!” but his voice was drowned in other outcries, and before he could draw breath for another shout he realized that to protest that the holo was faked would only reveal his own identity and make it impossible for him to locate Callista. The holo was as much a fake as the cheap sculptures in the niches, holographically altered to resemble family members. For one thing, even before Leia had eliminated the bodyguards, she had never appeared in public with the Noghri. When “Leia” rose from her chair Luke was sure of it: the chair itself was nothing like those in the Borealis’s conference room or indeed anywhere on the executive flagship at all. The crimson robe was one she’d worn on a dozen state occasions over the past few years, easily copied. Luke had never seen it done this effectively, but presumably a really good slicer could get a holo of Leia’s face and alter the movement of the lips to mesh with any voder-modified script.
But all this, he realized, was something he’d learned over the course of years with the Rebellion, years of dealing with the sophisticated technologies and scientific neepery available on Coruscant and its inner worlds. As a kid on Tatooine—and had he grown to adulthood there, as Uncle Owen and Uncle Owen’s friends had—he’d had no more suspicion that truth could be skillfully edited than he’d had the ability to fly.
They believed what they saw.
They believed Seti Ashgad.
And they were furious.
Ashgad was up on the dais artfully giving the impression that he was mollifying the crowd without in any way lessening their outrage. Luke slipped past the synthdroids by the door, crossed through the smaller chamber beyond, his boots making no sound in the carpet, too angry to remain. He was aware of the synthdroids watching him—their Central Control Unit, wherever it was, was undoubtedly programmed with the faces of every Rationalist on the planet. But no one stopped him. He stepped through a pair of long windows to the outside, breathing hard with fury, and made his way through the thickets of blueleaf and aromatic shrubs to the street. The wind had died to a dull hammering with the coming of full darkness. The voices in the dining hall still echoed in his ears, yelling vituperation at his sister.
Beyond the edges of the settlements, the tsils glistened like spikes of ice in the cold-eyed starlight of the wastes. The ground was lustrous with frost, and the cold was like iron. He felt the Force all around him, breathing—waiting.
There were people out there in the waste, not far away. Though they bore no lights he sensed them dimly: eddies, stirrings in the Force. Therans?
Probably. Watching Seti Ashgad’s house.
> Release your anger, his father had said. Release your anger.
He had meant it then as a lure, a come-on—use your anger in combat—a fool’s trick.
But now Luke truly released his anger, let go of it: let it rise like steam, to be absorbed and defused by the stars. There was entirely too much anger afoot that night anyway, deliberately being stirred up, raised like a magician raising power back in that house. Rid of it, Luke was able to think clearly again, to ask questions. And the chief question was: What does Seti Ashgad stand to gain?
11
Under pouring rain, the port of Bagsho on Nim Drovis crawled with troops.
Han had alerted the Med Center from orbit that he had fifteen critical cases of radiation sickness on board. Ism Oolos, the Ho’Din physician he’d talked to over subspace, awaited him in the docking bay with an emergency team, surrounded by a squad of uniformed Drovians who seized Han’s arms the minute he came down the Falcon’s ramp, shoved him up against the nearest wall, and searched him none too gently.
“Is this really necessary?” demanded Dr. Oolos indignantly; Han also expressed himself to the head of the Drovian squad along the same lines but with considerably greater emphasis.
“Doc, if you’d seen some of the armaments coming in for the Gopso’o tribes, you wouldn’t be asking that.” The Drovian sergeant pulled out its esophageal plug to make the remark, and shoved it back in with a squish. Since the onset of high-tech civilization in the wake of Old Republic military bases, most Drovians—who had been a pastoral network of tribes when contacted—had acquired the habit of sucking zwil—a cake-flavoring agent common to Algarine cuisine—through the mucous membranes of their breathing tubes via fist-size spongy plugs saturated with the stuff. Four-fifths of the soldiers wore plugs of various sizes and the air was thick with the dreamy, cinnamon-vanilla scent, where it wasn’t heavy with the odors of wet vegetation, mildews inadvertently imported from every corner of the galaxy, and the oily smoke of burning.
“You must excuse us.” Dr. Oolos ducked his bright-tentacled head as he accompanied Han, the sergeant, two troopers, and the med team back up the ramp. “The Gopso’o have been restless for months—ancestral enemies of the Drovians …” He lowered his soft voice and his twenty-five-meter height to speak without the sergeant hearing. “Not a particle of difference between them, you understand, except that they have been at blood feud for, literally, centuries. I have heard the original issue was whether the root word for truth is in the singular case or the plural, but so many atrocities were committed on both sides that, of course, it barely matters now. The Drovians were the ones who made interstellar contact first, so, of course, they’re the dominant tribe, but …”
“They’re killing each other over a festering grammatical construction?”
Han couldn’t keep his voice down. Dr. Oolos winced and gestured him quiet, but it was too late. The Drovian sergeant grabbed Han’s arm in a viselike pincer: “I’m killin’ those moldspawns because they killed my family, see? Because they disemboweled Garnu Hral Eschen, because they tore the flesh off the bones of the children of Ethras, because they …”
“All right,” said Han hastily, as the sergeant was dragging him closer and closer to the muzzle of its gun. “Uh—Chewie …” He turned just in time to make it appear to the Wookiee, emerging from the door of the bridge, that he was in no actual danger and manufactured a cheerful grin. “Chewie, this is Sergeant …”
“Sergeant Knezex Hral Piksoar.” The sergeant shoved its plug back into its breathing apparatus again; a little thread of greenish mucus squirted out around the side to join the glistening crust that caked the lower part of its face.
“It’s necessary that they be permitted to search the ship,” the Ho’Din informed them gently. “It’s purely a formality. With local unrest as violent as it has been, and with forty deaths from the plague so far on the Republic base …”
“Forty?” Han stared up at the willowy form towering over him, aghast.
“I fear so. It’s why I questioned you so closely before I was permitted to give you medical clearance to make planetfall. Authorities here have put the whole base under quarantine.”
Hral Piksoar followed them into the first of the several storage holds Han had converted to emergency sick bays. It held its weapons trained in four directions while Dr. Oolos and his team passed swiftly from victim to victim, injecting antishock and stabilizers, transferring the suppurating, hairless, muttering forms to stasis boxes on antigrav tables. The other two troopers disappeared down the hallways to continue their search for illegal weaponry. Han felt the back of his neck prickle at this violation, but knew that a Donnybrook at this point would result in not only himself, Lando, and Chewie spending the night in the local chokey, but these fifteen survivors in all probability continuing for hours longer in their nightmare pain.
For himself, he’d have taken a poke at Hral Piksoar in a heartbeat, the minute the goon laid a pincer on him. But he’d been through two parsecs of hyperspace hearing the feeble whispers of agony from the men and women hooked up to makeshift life support every time he walked down these corridors.
Maybe he was learning something from Leia, he thought, willing the flush of anger from his face.
“What’s the story?” he asked softly, as the treelike physician ducked through into the next hold. “You tell me there’s forty guys down with the plague on the base here; we get attacked by something I’ve never seen anywhere out there—a partisan revolt on Durren—somebody sure shot down these poor bastards …”
“Galactic Med Central is trying to contain the plague,” said Dr. Oolos worriedly. “Trying hard.” His head tendrils flexed uneasily, a hundred shades of crimson and scarlet ribbed and straked with violet; his dark eyes were filled with concern. “They bring them to us dying of no perceptible ailment—no virus, no bacteria, no poison, no allergy. Bacta-tank therapy only seems to accelerate the progress of the slow bleeding away of life.”
He shook his head, and glanced across at Sergeant Hral Piksoar, who was peering paranoically around the corner and into the hall. “With Gopso’o raids on the suburbs—bombings of public buildings—they’ve seized one minor spaceport already—the atmosphere here has been terrible, unbelievable.” He touched a gas mask hanging from his belt, and followed his team back into the corridor with the last of the victims, Han striding in his wake. “Take one of these with you if you plan to leave the vessel for any reason. The Gopso’o are rumored to be using bilal and rush gas in their attacks, though we haven’t had any documented cases yet at the center.”
“Think again if you think we’re gonna leave this vessel.” Lando Calrissian stepped through the door of the bridge as they passed it, dark face taut with anger but fear in his eyes. “My advice to you, old buddy, is to seal and lift.”
“Not without finding out something about what’s out there.” Leaving Lando and Dr. Oolos in the corridor, Han ducked back onto the bridge and scooped up the five wafers onto which he’d downloaded the unfortunate Corbantis’s log. “Can you get me an unscrambler for this, Doc? I need to know what and who axed that ship and anything else they might have seen out there before it happened.”
“I’ll certainly try.” Dr. Oolos held out his hand for the wafers—Han glanced at Sergeant Hral Piksoar, coming down the corridor toward them, and simply pocketed the information himself. Through the Falcon’s open boarding ramp the sound of shots could be clearly heard, the heavy, percussive cough of ion cannons almost drowning the harsher zap of blasters.
To Lando he whispered, “Don’t take the engines all the way down and keep an eye on the lift-off window. I’ll be back in two hours.”
Lando followed them to the doorway. The med team made a little caravan across the rain-pocked permacrete of the bay, water sluicing off the mist-filled coffins of the stasis boxes. Drovian guards surrounded them, weapons at the ready, as if they expected the burned, pain-racked husks inside to leap out with guns blazing in the cause of the Gopso’o
tribe. “And what if you’re not?”
Han ducked his head against the rain, which was as warm as bathwater as he stepped out into it. “If I haven’t linked with you by then,” he said, feeling for the comlink in his pocket, “take off. Tell Chewie whatever you have to, to keep him from coming to look for me.” By the sound of it the shots were closer, and a confusion of voices. The wet air was rank with smoke. “But find Leia. Whatever it costs.”
Human beings were most odd.
Given the capabilities of a high-quality protocol unit to reproduce any given language, complete with its inflections and tonalities. See-Threepio could, of course, duplicate nearly any of the thirty thousand songs popular in the Core Worlds over the past seventy-five standard years verbatim, note by note and tone for tone. It was not a function he filled particularly often, for there were automatons and semianimates with larger speaker units and better bass range who could do the job more efficiently, but he could do it. Postulating that on a relatively backward world such as Nim Drovis those in quest of entertainment would pay a certain amount per song (with the appropriate royalty percentage figured for members of the Galactic Society of Recording Artists), he had calculated that even in such a moderate establishment as the Wookiee’s Codpiece he and Artoo-Detoo should be able to earn enough in an evening to defray the costs of third-class passage to Cybloc XII.
But, as the assistant manager of that pink plush-lined cavern had phrased it, “You sound like a festerin’ jizz-box. I got a festerin’ jizz-box right over there in that corner.”
And Threepio, even had his programming permitted him to argue with a human, would have been hard put to find grounds for disagreement. Before seeking another resort of public entertainment, therefore, he gave the matter some thought.
It was, as usual for Nim Drovis, pouring rain, and those citizens for whom consumption of liquid befuddlement took precedence over defending their homes and families, if any, from the street fighting in sporadic progress all over the city were scarcely a promising lot. The denizens of the Chug ’n’ Chuck seemed to consist mostly of Drovian soldiers on three-hour furlough, professional mold-and-fungus removers—a hard-bitten lot with their flame and acid throwers slung over their backs, Drovian molds and fungi being what they were—a scattering of the small-time providers of goods and services prohibited at the more polite levels of society; and the joy-boys and lolly-girls associated with every species represented on the planet, together with their forbidding-looking business managers. Given their wholesale absorption of alcohol, sundry chemicals, and spice, Threepio did not hold high hopes for his and Artoo’s success in this venue, either, but he was surprised.
Star Wars: Planet of Twilight Page 18
