risk of telltale debris. And what do you care, anyway?" Dymurra paid for the
synthdroids, not you."
"And that makes it all right?" Ashgad turned impatiently from the railing to
face the huge, reclining shape. "With an attitude like that, it's no wonder
you're no longer ruling this territory, Beldorion."
"Anyway," rumbled Beldorion cryptically, "the price is about to come down on
them, isn't it? And what's three hundred thousand credits, if you can get
rid of all evidence of where Her Excellency is and what became of her?" Once
Rieekan goes into a coma, the Council's going to be chasing its tail for
days, each member trying to keep the next from being named successor."
He swelled up a little and produced a burp of cosmic proportions, leaking
green drool from his mouth and releasing a vast breath of gases that Leia
could smell from the terrace above. He rolled a little and delved with one
tiny, muscular hand into a washtub-size porcelain bowl of some kind of
pink-and-orange snack food that rested on the duvet at his side. Even Ashgad
turned his face aside in disgust.
"And don't speak to me about not ruling this Force-benighted planet
anymore," the Hutt added, around a mouthful of small, squirming things.
"No one forced me--me, Beldorion the Splendid, geldorion of the Ruby
Eyes--to retire. I ruled this world longer than your petty Empire existed,
and I ruled it well."
He shoved another handful of whatever it was into his enormous mouth.
Some of it escaped and made it nearly to the edge of his duvet before he
tongued it up. "So don't tell me I was too wasteful or too lazy to know what
I'm talking about." He extended one hand, and Leia felt it.
The Force.
A silver cup, probably kept in some kind of cooling bowl under the gazebo's
black shade, floated into sight and drifted across toward the stubby,
outstretched yellow fingers with their golden rings.
And all around her, Leia felt the air change, as if the iridescent sunlight
had thickened or changed its composition Itchy, swirling, angry.
Beldorion the Hutt had been trained as a Jedi.
And against his use of the Force, there was a stirring, a reaction, a
movement in the Force itself that Leia, though only marginally adept with
her Jedi powers, felt like sandpaper on the inside of her skull.
Leia's knees felt weak, and she retreated to the divan again, catching the
head of it for balance, shivering within the garnet weight of the state
robe.
The Borealis, sent into hyperspace blind and unprogrammed, never to emerge
.... But if what Dzym said was true, if the Death Seed plague had been on
board, that was just as well.
She had had the Death Seed. She shook her head. It was impossible, according
to the records no one recovered.
And Minister Rieekan, her second-in-command in the Council . . When Rieekan
goes into his coma . . .
I have to warn him. I have to warn someone . . .
She dropped onto the divan, shaking in every limb with weakness and shock.
Panic and rage struggled against the thickness of the sweet-blossom that
clogged her brain, a fury to escape, to outwit them.
And the drug whispered its reply, Of course you should. But not just now.
Something in the pocket of her robe pressed into her thigh, hard and
uncomfortable. Leia frowned, trying to recall what she'd carried with her in
the garment's bulky folds to the meeting with Ashgad. The answer was, of
course, Nothing. The velvet garment of state was sufficiently heavy without
adding weight to it.
But in that case, who could have put something there, and when She fished
and fumbled around until she found the pocket in the lining, originally
designed to carry a recording device or, depending on who the wearer planned
to meet, a hold-out blaster.
Clumsy with the effects of the sweetblossom, her fingers closed on metal.
It was her lightsaber.
She brought it out, stared at it in a kind of shock. Touched the switch, the
quivering laser blade humming faintly, pale blue and nearly invisible in the
odd, morning light.
Luke's voice came to her, Keep up with your lightsaber practice. You need
it. And like an echo, the voice of the Anakin she had never heard, We have
the Power . . .
She pushed the ugly dream from her mind. But she couldn't push from her the
knowledge of what they were The grandchildren of Darth Vader, with only the
teaching of Law and Justice between the New Republic and that terrible
dream. She remembered all the efforts that had been made to kidnap them, to
use them, to twist them into tools for greed or obsession. And all the while
people assumed that she would teach them better, teach them not to use their
powers for selfishness or impulse, while she watched the jackals of the
broken Empire and the members of her own Council squabble and snatch and
waste time and lives.
And Luke kept urging her to take up that personal, frightening power the
power of Palpatine. The power to have it all her own way.
She touched the switch again. The shining blade was gone.
Artoo. Dimly she remembered Threepio's despairing wails into the comm, and
as she slid toward cold darkness, the soft clickety-whirr of the astromech's
servos near her. Artoo knew I was in danger. He helped me the only way he
could.
She closed her eyes, fighting tears.
I will kill them, she thought, the cold fury breaking through the
sluggishness of the drug. Ashgad, and Dzym, and that foul Hutt, and Liegeus
with his drugged drinks and phony concern. Whatever they're up to, I'll
destroy them.
Before Liegeus came back, she thought, she'd better check out her room for
whatever escape she could find.
The air was softer indoors, subtly modified to escape the piercing dryness.
That meant magnetic shields on the doors and windows--not cheap--and some
kind of mist generators in the ceilings. Away from the jewellike refractions
of the sunlight the shadows were thick, and the massive walls sheltered a
sour muskiness that no air-conditioning could disperse.
Anyplace a Hutt occupied smelled of Hutt, of course. Nobody ever liked that
heavy, rotted odor. On Tatooine, Leia had learned to hate it, though her
experience of living in Jabba's palace had served her well during her
negotiations with Durga the Hutt on Nal Hutta. She was one of the few
diplomats who could deal with highly odorous species like Hutts and Vordums
unjudgmentally and relatively unflinchingly. One couldn't, she knew,
discredit their intelligence just because their digestive enzymes were set
up to deal with everything from tree roots to petroleum by-products.
There were bugs, too. She saw them, tiny and purplish brown, skittering
along the densest shadows at the base of the wall and under the small,
roughly constructed chest of drawers that was the room's single other piece
of furniture. Most storage was in wall niches, natural in a world where only
intensive agriculture on the part of its unwilling inhabitants centuries ago
had been able to eventually produce woody plants large enough to make
> furniture out of. The niche doors and the old-fashioned manual outer door of
the room were high-impact plastic.
There were bugs in most of the niches, fleeing even the muted indoor light.
Leia shivered with distaste as she shut the doors again.
In the end she tore strips from the heavy interfacing between the velvet of
the robe and its silken lining to bind the lightsaber to the small of her
back under her long, Billowing red-and-bronze figured gown.
Liegeus Vorn had worn a sort of loose tunic, trousers, and vest, probably
standard in an economy poorly supplied with raw materials or the leisure for
frivolity in fashionable fit. At a guess, whatever clothing they gave her to
wear would be too big. Every hand-me-down she'd ever gotten from the Rebel
pilots during the years on the run had been so.
Moving around the room to search had cleared her mind a little. Luke, she
thought. Luke getting into the B-wing, sliding the cockpit closed--Luke's
spirit thanking her for the final touch of farewell.
She had no idea where Ashgad's house was in relation to the city of Hweg
Shul, which according to the Registry was the only large settlement on the
planet. Even given fairly primitive transportation they could be hundreds of
thousands of kilometers away. If Ashgad had ships of at least planet-hopper
capability--not to speak of synthdroids--he probably had landspeeders as
well.
She scratched the back of her wrist, where a small red bug bite showed her
that whatever those little bugs were, they were pests. The sleepy temptation
still lay heavy on her, to return to the divan on the sunlit terrace, to sit
blinking out over that endless nothingness of glittering gravel,
contemplating its colors grayish whites, pinks, dusky blues, and green like
unpolished tourmaline, an endless bed from which the sun glare winked like a
leaden kaleidoscope.
I can't, she thought, shaking straight her gown again and pulling on the
velvet robe. When the drug wears off a little more i'll have to put out a
call to Luke.
If Luke hadn't contracted the plague on the ship. If his B-wing hadn't
smashed into the planet with his dead or dying body aboard.
She leaned her forehead against the handleless corridor door. I got out of
the Termination Block of the Death Star, she thought grimly. I can get out
of here.
"You're to leave her alone!" Ashgad's voice, muffled and distant, came to
her through the door.
Dzym's reply, soft though it was, sounded shockingly near. The secretary
must have been less than a meter from the door. "What can you mean, my lord?
"I mean Liegeus told me you'd visited her." Ashgad's voice grew louder, even
though he was keeping his tone down. The tap of his boots brought him to
where Dzym must be standing. She could almost see him, towering over the
smaller man. "Stay away from her."
"She is a Jedi, Lord," murmured Dzym, and there was a note in his voice, a
dreamy greediness, that twisted Leia's stomach with nauseated panic. "I was
only seeking to keep her under control."
"I know what you were seeking to do," replied Ashgad shortly.
"The sweetblossom will keep her under control without help from you.
You're not to go near her, understand? Skywalker's her brother. He'll know
if she dies."
"Here, Lord?" Dzym's voice sank to a whisper. "On this world?"
"We can't take the chance of the Council naming a successor. Until
everything is accomplished, let her alone."
His boots began to retreat. There was no sound from Dzym. He hadn't budged,
standing next to the door. She heard Ashgad stop, probably looking back.
Still in arm's-reach of her, Dzym murmured, "And then?"
She could almost see him rubbing his gloved hands.
There was a long silence. "And then we'll see."
Luke hung for several minutes in the seat restraint, getting his breath.
Part of his mind he kept stretched out to the Force, manipulating the power
of fusion and heat to keep the small impulse fuel reserves from exploding;
part he extended, listening, probing across the harsh landscape for signs of
danger.
People were on their way.
His mind picked up the radiant buzz of hostility. Theran fanatics, almost
certainly. He hung at a forty-five-degree angle above the jagged jumble of
what was left of the control board, seat, and flooring; the tiny space stank
of leaked coolants and crash-foam. Huge gaps in the hull where the metal had
buckled on final impact let through slabs of thin, fragmented-looking light.
Sand and pebbles had come through, too, and
lay in tiny dunes and pools among the wreckage. Dust made a shimmering scrim
in the air.
Luke wound his left arm in the straps, twisted his body so that his right
hand could reach the snap locks on his harness. Swinging down and bracing
his feet on the wrecked console, he experienced a moment of surprise that he
was still alive, much less relatively unhurt, barring a wrenched shoulder,
strap bruises, and the general sense of having gone over the side of
Beggar's Canyon in a not very well constructed barrel.
The locker where he'd stowed food, water, a blaster, and spare power
batteries was well and truly jammed shut.
And judging by the angry vibration in the Force, company would be arriving
in five minutes or less.
Luke had used the kinetic displacement of the Force on occasion to open
locks, but the door itself was jammed. He pushed up his right sleeve;
shifted the relative strength of his robotic right hand to its highest; and,
bracing the heel of his hand against the crumpled metal of the locker door,
bent the least-solidly stuck corner inward until the triangular gap was
large enough for him to reach through and fish out the water flask, with the
intention of getting the weapon next because he could already hear the hum
of badly tuned speeder engines and the clashing crunch of padded hooves on
gravel.
He couldn't get purchase on the blaster in time to free it before the weight
of springing bodies rocked the fighter. Shadows fell across the gaps in the
buckled hull as Luke snaked his arm free empty-handed, sprang to his feet,
and slithered through the smaller split in the other side of the tiny
cockpit moments before the crashing racket of expanding-gas percussive
weapons echoed like thunder in the tiny space, and a shower of high-velocity
stone pellets spattered the space where he had been.
There were a lot of attackers Twenty or twenty-five, Luke estimated,
dropping to the gravel in a long roll to get back under the shelter of the
broken S-foil. Men and women both, as far as he was able to tell, for in the
sharp cold they were wrapped in thick vests and jackets, sometimes covered
by ragged burnooses, their heads further protected by veils or wide-brimmed
hats. In addition to the scatterguns they had bows--both autobows and
primitive longbows--as well as short javelins, and they surrounded the
wrecked B-wing completely.
Luke didn't want to have anything to do with any of them.
There are a thousand ways to use the Force in a fight, Ca
llista's old
master, Djinn, had told her. And a thousand and one ways to use the Force to
avoid a fight. Luke now used something Djinn had taught her, and she him, so
simple a use of kinetic displacement that he was embarrassed not to have
thought of it himself years ago. His mind jarred at the gravel underfoot,
and the gravel coughed forth dust.
A lot of dust.
The problem with that trick was that you had to be ready for it yourself.
Luke had already picked his line of retreat through the closing ring of
Therans and was dragging up the neck of his flightsuit to cover his nose and
mouth, squinting his eyes for what protection he could find, even as he
launched himself out of the shelter of the B-wing. He'd always had a good
sense of direction, and Yoda had drummed into him an almost supernatural
ability to orient himself in an emergency. He knew in which direction the
Theran speeders and riding-beasts lay and made for them amid a roar of
gunfire and a rain of projectiles, half-seen ghostly bodies rushing about in
all directions in the sudden gray-white obscurity of suspended grit.
The field effect of the dust was an extremely localized one, rapidly
dispersing in the remains of the dying wind. The Theran speeders lay outside
its plumy, smoking ring, as grubby a collection of fifth-hand makeshift
junkers as Luke had seen this side of the Rebellion's worst days aged
Void-Spiders, XP-291s, and something that looked like the offspring of a
Mobquet Floater and a packing crate engineered by a gene splicer who'd had
too much glitterstim. Among them a dozen cu-pas were prancing and yammering,
the brightly hued, hot-weather cousins of tauntuans whose pea-sized
intellectual powers made the snow lizards appear to be candidates for
sentient status--and doctoral degrees--by comparison.
Mindful of the water he carried, and the unknown distance he'd have to
travel before he reached civilization, Luke flung himself into the
best-looking of the speeders, checked the fuel gauge, reached back to
slash the lines of the two cu-pas tied to the stern, rolled out the other
side, and dashed to the next-best one he could find, a raddled XP-38A.
That one had more juice in its batteries. He cut loose the cu-pas attached
to that one, too--they immediately made tracks for the horizon, gronching
and wibbling like enormous pink-and-blue rubber toys--and slammed the
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