The Hutt had held the pin between thumb and forefinger, vast ruby eyes looking past it into hers. And she saw, like a dream she’d dreamed and forgotten, a fragment of his memory, a man’s thin face, bone-thin and horribly scarred within a great gray tousle of hair, holding a hairpin as the Hutt was holding hers, the metal curve of its upper end incandescent and shedding light enough to see the pillars and frescoes of the room in which he stood.
Leia had shivered, as the memory vision died: Shivered to think of all that ancient learning, all the techniques and knowledge that Luke had been so painstakingly trying to jigsaw together for years, sunk in the mucky well of the Hutt’s indolent mind. All that unlimited power, put, not to evil use, as Vader and Palpatine had put it, but to the service of utter pettiness, even as he could think of enslaving her for no better purpose than to regain his rule over defenseless farmers or to beat an old rival who had no more actual power than he.
The lightsaber weighed heavy in her hand. You must learn to use your powers, Luke had said. We need champions of the Force. There aren’t so many of us that we can afford to choose.
But every time she thumbed the toggle, every time the cold, clear sky-hued blade hummed to life, Leia saw only shadows: the shadow of Vader. The shadow of Palpatine. The shadows of her own anger, her own impatience, and the righteous certainties she had come to distrust. And now, the moldy shadows of Beldorion and the pettiness of greed.
The shadows of the future she feared, when Anakin, Jacen, Jaina—those three incalculable fragments of her body and her life—came to the age when they would choose either the light or the dark.
Still, at the moment she had no other option. She activated the blade, and pushed open the discreet access hatch that led into the service stairs.
Something she couldn’t see clearly whipped out of sight down the first curve of the flight. The smell of drochs was choking. The dim glow of the lightsaber’s blade showed her only the faintest of outlines a meter around her, the steep little wedge-shaped stairs—cut into the rock of the mesa itself—the descending curve of the ceiling close over her head. Right hand clutching the weapon’s haft, left hand touching the centerpost of the stairs, she moved downward, the scald of adrenaline cold fever in her veins. She didn’t know what she’d do if she reached the garage to find one of the synthdroid servants on guard there or if there were no landspeeders to steal. From the high balcony outside her room she had looked west and north as far as she could and had seen nothing but the wastelands of crystal mountains and endless, glittering plains.
There might, of course, be a resort casino and greenputt playing fields a hundred meters south of this place. She could almost hear her friend Callista’s wry, soft comment, and her heart ached with the hope that Luke would somehow find her, here on this world. But I wouldn’t bet the rent on it. Just the memory of the kind of thing Callista would say made her smile, the ironic image giving her courage in the darkness.
She stopped.
There was something sitting on the step ahead of her, just beyond the range of the cold blade’s light.
It was about the size of a pittin, sitting upright twenty or thirty centimeters high—glistening, crablike, cocking its long eyestalks at her with malign awareness. Sitting upright. Waiting for her.
Leia took another step, and extended the blade.
The thing swayed back. In the dense shadows it was extremely difficult to make out what it looked like, but glancing up, Leia saw that there were other things, things like long-legged spiders splayed out on the ceiling and walls, things like short-legged slugs that scooted along the walls, catching and eating the huge drochs that rustled in the shadows. As she watched, the upright thing on the step bent and turned, extruding what looked like a single spiky limb from itself to pounce on a particularly gross droch, catching it in a pincer that seemed to alter in shape and transform into a gulping mouth. For a moment she heard it purr, a soft little thrum of deep pleasure. Then it swung back, eyestalks swiveling to face her again. Sickened, overwhelmed with the sensation that this was an evil that could not be fought, Leia extended the lightsaber so that the glowing tip advanced on the crab thing.
Movement flickered in the corner of her eye and she swung around as something dropped from the ceiling, landing on her shoulder with a wet plop. Pain stabbed through her, like a droch bite but far worse. The soft-bodied thing that had fallen on her morphed out grabbing legs, hooks that sank into her flesh as she cried out and tried to pull it loose.
Weakness. Pain in her chest. Cold and dreamy sleep.
Something else fastened on her leg. The crab thing on the steps purred louder, a sound of dreamy pleasure. She felt as if she were dropping down in a lift bound for the center of the world.
She whipped the lightsaber around in her hand, shrinking in terror from the glowing blade that she knew could take her own arm off as she touched it to the parasite on her shoulder. It frizzled horribly and the pain it felt went through her like a knife, and in her dreamy, sickened weakness she felt it die. It was like a part of her own flesh dying. She turned the blade, fried the thing on her leg, taking the pain, taking the sense of black slipping death, and moved another step down.
The crab thing scuttered ahead of her, vanishing into the dark, save for the orange sparks of its eyes. Around the curve of the stair she could see the walls moving with them, all shapes, shifting one into the other, feeding on one another but all turning as one toward her with the awareness of the light. Leia backed up, catching her heel on the stair in her weakness and almost falling. Another one, whatever they were, dropped from the ceiling onto her neck, smaller, so that both the sinking weakness of dying, and the pain of its death, were less; but they were coming after her.
Two more bites. She felt like she would faint from lack of air. The crab thing’s soft throb of delight made her long to find it, cut it to shreds, wherever it was. Her hand fumbled with the lightsaber’s hilt, pain of a different sort lancing through her arm as the tiniest edge of the blade brushed her flesh in killing another parasite. If she fell, she thought, if she lost consciousness, she would die.
Clinging to the walls, sobbing, trying to breathe, fighting not to sink into that cool welcoming sleep, she stumbled upward, fifteen steps, twenty. The crab thing was following in the darkness behind, as if relishing, reveling in her exhaustion and pain. They’ll find me, she thought. I won’t be able to make it back to my room and they’ll find me.
Seti Ashgad was away, Seti Ashgad who had warned, Skywalker will know if she dies. She had tried, again and again, to call out to Luke, to send him signals with her mind, but wasn’t sure that he had heard. The humming, singing power of the Force in this world might have drowned out everything else. Only Dzym was there, silent in this silent house. If he finds me I shall die.
She fell through the door, lay panting, cold, unable to breathe or think, while the wan particolored glow of the light-sculpture flickered over her, and the lightsaber, its blade vanished with the relaxation of her grip, glinted an inch or so from her fingers. I have to pick it up. I have to stand up. To get out of here. To get back to my room.
Dying would be easier, she thought. She wondered if Luke really would know.
At least if I died, they could appoint a successor.
As an idea it had its merits. But in the slow-sinking dimness of cold that surrounded her, she heard movement, the heavy, thick, sluglike panting of Beldorion. Somewhere near, she thought. Heading this way.
Don’t let him find me, she prayed, trying to stand. She couldn’t, but on her hands and knees she crawled, across the darkened chamber, up the endless stairs. He would take her prisoner for his own purposes, Liegeus had warned—but in time he would trade her to Dzym, as he had some other poor slave.
She thought there were parasites still on her, the pain of them chewing her arms and thighs and back, the weakness draining her, sapping her strength away. But when she crawled into the long, narrow office where the computer was, and lay in the ghastly t
inted grayish purple bands of the setting sunlight, she felt better, and feeling herself after a time, found no sign of them.
I can’t let them find me, she thought. I can’t.
It took everything she had left to climb the stairs again, holding to the walls, exhausted and sick with the pain of the lightsaber burn. She collapsed again on the floor after letting herself in the room, and lay there for a long time, curled in a fetal position in the fading bars of sunlight, wanting only to sleep until the universe was made new.
In time she got up and hid the lightsaber, the wafer she had copied, and all the printouts under the duvet and pillows of her bed. She called out again, reaching out with her mind, but it was little more than a despairing whisper: Luke … then she did pass out, into dreams like the colorless wells of death.
“Igpek Droon,” boomed the deep voice of the masked and hooded passenger, and what looked like a bad prosthetic hand in a cheap black glove—so bad it might almost have been a droid’s jointed metal fingers under there—held out fifty-seven credits worth of various bars and tokens to the captain of the freighter Zicreex. “I’m in the employ of the Antemeridian Freight Lines. It’s necessary that my droid and I reach Cybloc XII as soon as possible.”
The captain counted the money, looked at the glowing yellow lenses that were visible through the full-face breathing mask that covered most of her prospective passenger’s head. Long, pale hair flowed out around it, giving it the eerie look of a decorated skull.
With the driving back of the Gopso’o rioters by government troops, every docking bay still operable in the port was jammed: with business people, stranded travelers, aliens of all sorts and descriptions fleeing the fire-ravaged city. Most were paying lots more than fifty-seven credits, but then, most were trying to get on to better vessels than the Zicreex, which would have been termed unprepossessing even by the charitable.
Captain Ugmush didn’t care. She had a human for an engineer who kept the thing running, and her several husbands, when they weren’t fighting one another, made a fair team for trading goods to the rougher worlds of the sector, which was about as good as Gamorreans could do in competition with more sophisticated species. Ugmush herself, her long hair dyed pink and her heavily muscled arms and breasts sporting fifteen parasitic morrts to demonstrate her strength and endurance, was aware that few aliens could stand to travel on Gamorrean ships. She knew it wasn’t likely she’d be besieged with offers as long as there was one other vessel in port.
“You got a deal.”
The black-robed alien who called himself Igpek Droon, clanking just faintly as he walked, made his way up the ramp and into the ship, trailed by his little R2 unit droid. Ugmush wondered if this person Droon might be talked into selling his droid when they got to Cybloc XII.
14
It was all there, in black on the pale green plast.
Seti Ashgad’s communication with Moff Getelles of Antemeridian, making arrangements to destroy the gun stations in return for weaponry and first cut of the profits when Loronar Corporation moved in on Nam Chorios to strip-mine it for its crystals.
Memos from Dymurra—who turned out to be CEO of Loronar for the Core systems—detailing which minorities, disaffected factions, and splinter groups would rise in revolt, suitably armed at Loronar Corporation’s expense, in order to split the Republic peace-keeping fleet and allow Getelles’s Admiral Larm to move in.
A comparison chart by Seti Ashgad, showing the trade-offs in cost between the expenses of weaponry, bribes, agitators, and planted atrocity stories against the first year’s profits on programmable CCIR crystals.
Details of the meeting, including a payoff to Councillor Q-Varg, coordinating Leia’s disappearance with the poisoning—not to death, the memo assured Getelles, so that no successor could be appointed without hopeless legal wrangling among the Council—of Minister of State Rieekan.
At no point in his letter did Ashgad mention the Death Seed plague of centuries ago. “The plague vectors do not appear on any sensor, since within the body they mimic exactly human electrochemical fields and tissue composition,” he said—which explained why they needed the quasi-living flesh of the synthdroids. “Once the illness has taken hold, even regenerative therapy has no effect. However, be assured that it is in my power to completely control the outbreak and spread of this malady, and I offer you my personal guarantees that it will not affect anyone other than those on the Republic ships and bases.”
And bases! thought Leia, breathless as if she had run for miles and hot with anger to the core of her being. Idiot! Idiot! “It is in my power to completely control the outbreak,” my grandmother’s left hind leg! Don’t you have any idea, any concept, of what will happen if there’s an accident? A miscalculation? Something you hadn’t thought of, Master Know-All Ashgad?
She was almost trembling with rage. Accounts were scanty of the original Death Seed, but huge segments of the population of dozens of spacegoing civilizations had perished before it had burned itself out. In places it had been combated, but she wasn’t sure how, or how effective those remedies had been. As far as she had experienced, Dzym, and Dzym alone, seemed to have any control over it.
She thought about Ezrakh, and Marcopius, and her eyes grew hot with tears. I will kill them. Rage made her tremble, made her wonder how quickly she could master the Force, how quickly she could build strength to wreak wholesale vengeance for the innocent. I will gather the Force together in my hands and I will bring it down on their heads like a thunderstorm.
Vader had done that.
And Anakin, in her dream.
She wrapped her arms around herself, fighting not to weep. It was better, she thought, not to know that you had the potential for that kind of power. Better not to know that you really could do that, if you wanted to turn your heart and your life over to your rage.
Han would be looking for her. Han would be with the fleet. It will not affect any but those on the Republic ships.
The Republic was in chaos. They’d dared poison poor Rieekan, for no better purpose than to cause trouble …
And for what?
Hands shaking, she shuffled through the flimsiplast pages.
There it was. Loronar Corporation’s plan to build a new facility on Antemeridias, for the manufacture of both synthdroids and something called Needles: controlled by the same CCIR crystals, programmable, long-distance miniweapons with infinite range and hyperspace rendezvous capability.
And the source of the crystals was Nam Chorios.
CCIR technology. Deep-space Needles, carving up the fleet like the Quamilla of the Kidron system carving up sodbeasts. And with Nam Chorios firmly in their sphere of influence, they’d have as many of those programmable crystals as they cared to use.
The Reliant. Paperwork was complete on that, too. A modified 1-7 Howlrunner hull, with extra capacity. Loronar Corporation had been making drops of components and materials for months. Ashgad’s requests and specs were very precise—Leia recalled her father saying that the man had been a ship designer himself—and his communications indicated where and when his Rationalist friends had picked them up. There were occasional indents for second and third drops where the gun stations had blown the incoming cargoes out of the sky. Liegeus Sarpaetius Vorn was mentioned as the vessel’s A.I. designer and programmer, but his chief value lay in expert holo faking. There were requests for specific digitalized scrap of her and of her flagship and escort, to be mocked up into transmissions describing the safe conclusion of the conference between Ashgad and herself, and the two vessels’ departure from the rendezvous point and entry into hyperspace.
Her stomach twisted with sick betrayal. He couldn’t not know what was going on. He couldn’t not know the dangers of the plague. Then bitter anger swept her, that she had liked the man.
Grand Moff Tarkin was probably good to his wife and children, too, if he’d had any, she thought, disgusted with her own naïveté. The man who pulled the lever on the Death Star that destroyed Alderaan
would undoubtedly have been kind to someone he cared for. Her hand closed tight on itself for a moment, her breath shaky with rage.
Then, face cold and still, she began looking through the plast sheets again, searching for something …
There. Invoices for the building of the Reliant. A charging mechanism for antigrav lifters and speeder buoyancy tanks, to make prospecting for crystals easier once the gun stations had been destroyed and the big trader vessel was free to take off. She studied the schematics for the vessel. A curious amount of shielding, she thought. Double and triple hulls with internal baffles—What kind of radiation did they think they were going to encounter?
Leia sat back, staring out the windows at the gaudy sunset sky.
She felt she’d slept longer, though by the light she’d only been out for a few hours. There was fresh water in the pitcher and signs that someone—probably Liegeus—had been in the room. She’d waked with a blanket over her, and was gladder than ever that she’d forced herself to conceal the flimsiplast and the lightsaber before finally passing out. When she had lain down she felt like she was dying.
In fact, the sensations had been curiously similar to her brush with the Death Seed.
But Dzym hadn’t been around. If Dzym had known where she was, and what she was doing, she certainly wouldn’t have waked up here.
She pushed up her sleeve. Her flesh was reddened in a few places and she had picked up a couple more droch bites, but there was no sign of violence. No sign of the broken capillaries, the bruising that the secretary’s fingers had left.
The purplish twilight of day was dimming into deeper night, windless and still with sunset. Leia thought about waiting until dawn, then shook the thought away. It wasn’t as if any natural predators walked Nam Chorios’s nights. Delay would only bring Ashgad’s return eight hours closer. If she acted now, there was a good chance they wouldn’t miss her until morning.
Leia got to her feet, unsteady at the knees. The water pitcher was of the vacuum type. A turn of the cap sealed it shut. It was heavy, hung over her shoulder by a makeshift strap of torn bedsheet. She rolled together two blankets and put on the two spare shirts Liegeus had given her. At the touch of them, her anger at him faded. He could not have known what he was getting into, and once in, it would have been too late.
Star Wars: Planet of Twilight Page 22
