Blossom made you accept almost anything, she thought, revolted. Even lying down in bedding that you knew was alive with parasites. She was bitten all over from sitting in the dim chamber at tea with Beldorion the Splendid, too.
They had released the Death Seed. If they could control it, or thought they could control it, through Dzym, it was an easy guess what their negotiations with Moff Getelles and Admiral Larm were. Curse them, she thought. Curse them!
Dzym was somehow a key. He could lay it on them somehow—transmitted by the synthdroids?—and call it off, as he had called it off of her. She remembered the ecstasy on his face, and at other times, his air of paying attention to something else, listening to something else, like a man counting down time.
And yet, what was the point?
But did Moff Getelles really think that he was strong enough to take over the Meridian sector, once quarantine and containment procedures got under way? To hold it in the face of a concerted Republic effort to drive him out?
And for what purpose? Pedducis Chorios, that nest of smugglers and Warlords, would be impossible to control effectively. Durren’s planetary coalition was solidly behind the Republic. Budpock had been one of the Rebellion’s most loyal supporters. Nam Chorios was a waterless, lifeless, poverty-stricken rock.
To complete the Reliant, Ashgad had said.
But she’d seen the Reliant. It was not a planet-killing Dreadnought, but a midsize freighter. Boxes … of both kinds. What kind of payload could a midsize ship carry that would make this all worthwhile, even were the gun stations to be eliminated?
Leia shivered, and rubbed her wrists, where the memory of Dzym’s cold hands remained.
The door chime sounded politely. Leia swung around, startled, drawing the comforter close around her and sliding her hand toward the lightsaber concealed among the pillows.
But it was only Liegeus, bowing shyly in the doorway, a porcelain pitcher of water in his hands. “I’m pleased you’re feeling better, my dear.” His eyes went—as Leia’s had, automatically—to the empty pitcher beside the bed. She had drunk all the water the minute she’d realized it wasn’t drugged.
By his gentle smile she saw that he knew.
“I couldn’t bear to see you killing yourself like that, in this climate.” He held out to her the glass goblet. “Ashgad’s never noticed any difference. I’ve brought you some holovids, too; imprisonment without them is only bearable if one is drugged.”
Leia studied the man’s face warily across the rim. “And what now?” she asked softly. “What happens to me while he’s gone? Or was that why he left, so that it wouldn’t be his fault?”
“No,” said Liegeus quickly, “no, of course not. He isn’t a bad man, my dear.”
“He is the worst kind of man.” Leia turned her face aside. The words, Death Seed, lay close to the tip of her tongue and she knew she must not say them, must not let even Liegeus know how much she knew. He might stand up to Beldorion for her sake, but she knew—she had seen—that he was unable to stand up to Dzym. And who could blame him for that?
He was like Greglik, she thought. She was fond of him, she pitied him, but she knew she could not trust him.
“No,” insisted the holo faker. “Ashgad …” He hesitated. “I understand what’s making him … do all of this. And it … I can’t explain.”
Her long dark braid whipped as she turned back to him, to meet the utter wretchedness of his gaze.
“I can’t,” he said. “But please, trust me.” Sitting beside her on the divan, he fumbled in the pocket of his lab smock, brought out a black cylinder half again the length of his palm and perhaps twice the thickness of his thumb. “This is for you,” he said. “I’ll have to have it back just before he returns, you understand.”
Leia turned it over in her hands. A comlink. Dedicated circuitry, at a guess—there wasn’t a keypad. Probably made of standard components, though. And old, like everything else on this planet. The new ones were half that size and you needed micron tools to work on them.
“I’ve changed the combination on the door pad,” Liegeus went on. He didn’t quite glance back over his shoulder, but almost. “He shouldn’t be able to get in here.” He didn’t say of whom they spoke—he didn’t need to. “He has no computer skills, he can’t … do that kind of thinking. Whatever he tells you, don’t let him in. If he tries to come in, or if he does manage to, somehow, use the comlink. I’ll only be moments away, in the …” He stopped himself—at a guess, from saying something that would reveal to her that there was a ship under construction on the premises. Why the secrecy about that? What part did it play in their plan? “In the other part of the house.”
He made a move to turn away, and Leia caught his sleeve. “Who is he?” she asked. “What is he?”
The dark eyes looked quickly away, and she saw the too-sensitive mouth flinch. “He is … what he is. He’s a native of this world …”
“There are no natives of this world.” Leia felt his hand cold under the grip of her fingers. “Before the Grissmaths started shipping political prisoners here there was nothing but stones. What is it he wants to do with me? What is it he tried to do, that night? You said Beldorion sold him someone he had enslaved. For what purpose? And what became of him?”
“Nothing,” said Liegeus quickly. She looked down and saw his hands were trembling. “I can’t explain. It’s … it’s something few people would understand.”
The fear in his eyes was terrible to see, and her heart went out to him in pity. She put her hand over the cold, slender fingers. “Try me,” she urged.
Liegeus got quickly to his feet, and backed to the door. “I …” Then he shook his head. “Beldorion may invite you to tea or to supper again,” he said. “Don’t go, or make sure that I go with you. Just remember to spend as much time as you can on the balcony, in the sunlight, and you’ll be all right.”
The door opened, and he stepped through. In the instant before it closed Leia met his eyes again, and saw in them longing, and grief, and a terror that had swallowed nearly everything within the man’s soul. She said quietly, “Thank you,” and the metal panel swished between them. A moment later the outer locks clicked.
After he had gone, Leia sat for a moment, gathering her breath and her courage. Then she got up, crossed to the dresser where she kept her gown, the pins and jewels that had been in her hair, the folded-up mass of the red velvet robe. Two of the flat-backed cabochon jewels from the robe’s chest piece, picked loose, gave her enough purchase to bend the end of one of the hairpins into a makeshift manual screwdriver. It took her five minutes to open up the comlink, and recalibrate the beam.
Picking a simple keypad lock by means of a micron beam was an excruciatingly tedious process, but she had all day, and nothing else to do. Judging by the number of holovids he’d brought, Liegeus didn’t expect to be free of his duties on the Reliant until evening.
Lock picking was one of those skills she’d acquired in her years with the Rebellion, one of the minor guerrilla survival skills pilots had taught one another, just in case, like making explosives out of certain brands of game tokens, or tinkering water filters from sand and flightsuit liners. Something simple that might just save your life. Winter—who’d taught her this particular trick, which she in turn had learned from an outlaw slicer on Coruscant—had said, “Be sure to write down every combination as you try it. Sure as little hawk-bat eggs, the minute you get bored and quit writing them down, you’ll score, and then you won’t remember what the combination was.”
Leia wrote them down, laboriously, with another hairpin scratching in the soft buttonwood back of one of the drawers pulled from the chest. An hour and a half after noon, as far as she could judge from the angle of the sunlight, the lock opened.
With the sensation of having been unexpectedly knocked breathless she stepped back, closed the doors, let the lock click over again. She had to be sure it would open at need—that it hadn’t been a fluke. If they caught her outside and
she couldn’t get back in, she would be incarcerated indeed.
It opened a second time. Leia slipped the converted comlink into her pocket, not without a qualm. But the likelihood of encountering Dzym was marginally less than the likelihood that she’d have to get back into this room on less notice than the ten minutes it would take to switch the beam over from comm to micron. She reached back to feel the comforting hardness of the lightsaber tied around her body beneath her shirt and stepped out into the hall.
13
Luke had said to her, over and over on those occasions on which she’d put aside the pressing demands of state to train with her brother’s pupils, The eyes are the most dangerous of the senses, because you’ll believe them first. Pausing at the foot of the stair, Leia shut her eyes, slowed her breath, and listened deeply to the house around her. Reached out with her mind, as Luke had taught her. Felt for the flow and movement of the Force.
It was everywhere, a singing vast as light. The ocean of light, Beldorion had said, utterly unlike anything she had experienced on Yavin, on Coruscant … anywhere that she had ever tried this. Strong and frightening, as if something huge stood just behind her shoulder, watching her with sad wisdom.
Is there a reason to fear this? she thought, holding her fear in check. A minute passed, two. Beneath that deep, humming strength, she was able to sort out true sound in the rooms around her.
Beldorion’s thick voice came from his quarters close-by: “Beautiful, beautiful! All that, from just those unprepossessing little glet-mites!”
And the harsh, nasally whine of a Kubaz’s inflection: “It’s all in finding the correct solution, you see, Master.” That would be the chef, she thought. The unworthy heir of the great and lamented Zubindi Ebsuk. “Under ordinary circumstances, of course, glet-mites would never have contact with a solution of hall d’main excretions—their worlds aren’t even in the same Sector! But it so happens that the hormones contained within halles d’main are the exact physiological complement of the glet-mite teleological systems …”
And under it a cheeping, tiny voices protesting. Leia shivered.
Of Dzym she could hear nothing. Did he make sound, when he moved? Pressed to the harsh plaster of the wall, she ignored the sudden jab of a droch bite on her ankle, probed deeper with her mind. There was a kind of heavy vibration somewhere in the house, the steady whine, as of machinery. The house generator, of course. Liegeus had said Dzym wasn’t capable of “that kind of thinking,” to cut into the household computer and make it tell what the security keypad numbers were.
Leia wondered how good their security was.
Whether it was the smell of Hutt or revulsion over the drochs or just overwrought nerves, she was feeling light-headed by the time she found her way out of the dim, curtained quarters of the Hutt to a door into what was clearly Seti Ashgad’s portion of the house, the long, sun-flooded chamber that looked out onto the terrace below her own balcony. Here the ceilings were higher, the heavy, heat-trapping curtains drawn back from the line of transparisteel panels that gave onto the terrace. There was an airy functionality about the place, with its immobile wood-and-leather chairs, its desk put together from planks of buttonwood, its simple sideboard. The monitor screen in the niche above the desk was new, Leia saw, a high-definition Sorosuub X-80—they’d had to cut the niche bigger for it, and so recently that the chipped-out plaster hadn’t yet had time to discolor. Leia paused in the doorway to listen again—If Dzym’s mind doesn’t work in terms of computers, how did he get a job as secretary?—then crossed to the desk and brought out the board, keying in quickly a request for systems shell. Once she knew the type of system she pulled up data on the house itself.
Wiring diagrams showed her the shaft that led down through the heart of the mesa, to the garage from which she’d seen Ashgad’s henchmen take that elegant—and nearly new—black speeder at dawn. After a little puzzling she identified where she was and where the head of the shaft lay on the other side of the house near the docking bay and its compound of workshops and labs.
She ran a print, then called up another instruction and asked for further data. The docking compound beyond those blast doors she’d seen was enormous. For a world where equipment of any sort was scarce, there seemed to be no shortage of it there.
A complete complement of the extremely expensive equipment that charged the antigrav coils of speeder buoyancy tanks. A major computer system hooked to an independent generator and dedicated to hyperspace engineering. Liegeus’s holo faking works: Good grief! Millions of separate data clips, far beyond hobby or art. That, too, had to have been part of their plan, and might explain why in five days there’d been no attempt at rescue.
Another system centered in this very room—probably, thought Leia, behind the slatted cupboard doors to her right. She got up, still reading down at the backup systems screen: high-security locks with backup wiring on various doors, including, she saw with a certain annoyance, that of the lift from this level down to the garage.
She ran a zoom check on the schematic. No such backup existed on the lift shaft’s repair stairway. Her calf muscles would ache, but she could do it. She keyed a further command to open the combinations on file. Yes, she’d gotten that of her chamber door correct—silly, but it gratified her to have her skill officially confirmed. It was listed as having been changed shortly after dawn that morning, probably the moment Seti Ashgad disappeared into the morning glow. She ran a print, folded the sheets of plast together, stuffed them into the pocket of her trousers, and went to investigate what was behind the slatted doors that rated a separate power backup.
It was a CCIR board. The central control unit for synthdroids—How many of the things did he have? Leia counted wiring for two dozen. Two dozen?
She tried to remember what she’d learned about synthdroids from her one tour of the Loronar Corporation facility on Carosi’s larger moon. That had been during the Daysong uproar about the relative rights of synthflesh. Synthflesh, Leia recalled, was supposed to retain automatic immunities to virus and antibodies, but obviously they’d gotten around that one. She did remember the officials of Loronar telling her that CCIR technology operated on near-instantaneous transmission between a special variety of programmable-matrix crystals. Was that an intrinsic part of the plan, she wondered, or just a convenience?
Leia returned to the computer. Every second she remained in this room increased the likelihood of encountering Dzym, or Liegeus, or Beldorion, but this might be the only chance she had. It was hard to know what else she might need. She ran a compressed print of a Corewide scan on the names she had overheard: Dymurra. Getelles. Reliant. When it was over she copied the information to a wafer, shoved both the wafer and the formidable sheaf of flimsiplast into the thigh pockets of her trousers, and replaced the plast in the printer with fresh so that it would not be obvious that some two hundred sheets had been printed out. Heart beating hard enough to sicken her, she closed her eyes again, probing at the stillness of the house.
She heard nothing, but she wasn’t sure if she was doing this right or not. If she’d had more training—if she’d concentrated more on it—could she have reached through this strange, heavy miasma of the Force to summon Luke?
That way lay despair, and she shook the thought away.
She studied her first printout of the wiring schematic again, identifying the lift shaft, the stairway that wound down its side. By overlaying the schematic of the backup systems, she could easily identify the room that contained both the CCIR terminal, and the main computer station: The room where she now stood.
Through that door. Down another flight of steps to a round reception area that contained nothing more important than an enormous light sculpture and a couple of artificial waterfalls. The lift doors opened there, as did the access hatch for the maintenance stairs.
She glanced over her shoulder at the wide transparisteel panels leading onto the terrace, aware of how secure the light made her feel, how safe. As she headed toward the re
ception area, the doors to the lift and the access stairs, she found herself hoping that the room would have transparisteel.
It didn’t. It was dark, save for the flamboyant rainbows of the light sculpture, whose colored patterns twinkled and flashed in the murmuring waterfalls, half-seen in the gloom. It stank of drochs and Hutt, and Leia dared not touch what she thought were the glow panels, for fear of activating something that would reveal to others where she was. Picking her way between the pale mushroom shapes of cushioned furniture years unused, by the dim reflections of the light sculpture, she thought, The stairs will be unlit.
She pulled her shirt out of the waistband of her trousers, fumbled underneath to untie the lightsaber from around her body. The cold laser blade didn’t give much light, but at least, she thought, it was better than groping downward in utter dark.
“True Jedi can see in the dark, barúm,” Beldorion had rumbled to her once a day or two ago, when he’d asked her to join him for lunch and a bask on the terrace—she no longer even remembered how the subject of Jedi powers had arisen. “They see not with their eyes—they see with their noses, with their ears, with the hairs of their head, and with their skins. You have neglected your training, little princess.” He’d shaken a tiny bejeweled finger at her. “They used to have us run races in the Caves of Masposhani, miles below the ground. Used to drop us on the dark sun worlds of Af’El and Y’nybeth, where there is no spectrum of visible light. But the great Jedi, the Masters—Yoda and Thon and Nomi Sunrider—they could summon light, could make metal glow so that their puny little friends wouldn’t stumble either. They’d hold a pin—so …” He’d reached one slimy hand to pluck a hairpin from her head, Leia flinching but too dazed with the drug to pull back.
Star Wars: Planet of Twilight Page 21
