place longer than that, once the gun stations weren't there to limit
imports? Or did Ashgad just want to seize the gun stations for himself and
keep the status quo for his own profit?
The planet itself was dirt poor. Its only export seemed to be the
rather friable Spooks, and having lived for several days on topatoes, smoot,
and blerd exudum, Luke couldn't imagine anyone paying the shipping costs to
acquire any of those delicacies. But having been raised there, Ashgad might
very well desire only the power that he knew.
Was that logical? he wondered that evening, as he waited in the darkness of
the Blue Blerd's yard. Ashgad had been raised on the planet, true, but he
had been raised by a father who had dreamed of taking over control of the
Senate himself. Had Palpatine not become Emperor, Seti Ashgad might very
well have done so. Hardly the man to raise a son who sought only to rule
what was almost literally a barren ball of rock.
Only minutes after the easing of the evening's torrential winds, he saw the
line of speeders make the corner between the buildings in ghostly silence.
Six of them, shadows only, running without lights above the
machinery-cracked permacrete of the roadbed into the hangar yard. He
recognized Arvid's lopsided Aratech with the crude bal-ance-leg beneath it,
and Umolly Darm's skip. Gerney Caslo was riding up beside the prospector, a
small, black, vicious-looking blaster rifle cocked up against his thigh. A
couple of volunteer guards rode cu-pas behind them, blaster rifles slung in
the ready position, faces blacked and eyes glittering in the watery flicker
of the stars.
"Fourth in line," whispered Gerney, and tossed Luke a small, flat can of the
dark camouflage paint that hunters used to take the glint off their weapons.
"Rendezvous at Ashgad's if we get split up. Overload the charges on anything
you pick up, if it looks like the Therans are going to be able to take it
away from you." Luke blacked his face, and touched up the crude pair of
infrared goggles he'd been lent by Aunt Gin with the camo paint. A dozen or
more riders met them among the topato towers, the rounded, chubby bipeds
moving with surprising quiet.
Luke noted that these guards, too, were extremely well armed.
Ashgad was putting out a lot of money to get himself in the position of
leader of the ruling faction of the planet, he thought as they left the
towers and slowly rising antigrav balls of newer cultivation, glided between
the scrubby fields of brope and the algal meadows where bierds grazed like
wrinkled lapis mountains. The smell of growing plants faded in his nostrils
as the sterile prickle of the wastelands crept over his skin.
There was something he didn't know. Some piece of information he didn't have
that would make sense of this.
The wastelands stretched out around them like a blanket of salt.
The terrible velvet weight of the Force grew heavier on his mind.
Few on the planet seemed to be aware of the Force's presence here, thought
Luke. No one at all seemed to realize that there was some kind of invisible
life, some unseen civilization here, silent among the dazzling, wind-scoured
canyons. Was Ashgad. Was that what he sought to control here?.
Or like Taselda's enemy, did he seek to control the Force itself?.
Ahead of them Luke saw the red-orange spark of laser cannon illuminate the
spine of the hills. As if in answer another glinted, sixty degrees around
the horizon. Before them, the loose ring of the crystalline Cousins pointed
mutely at the stars.
Tiny, tiny in the hard black vault overhead a pinlight exploded, faded.
Someone in one of the other speeders cursed the Therans, called them fools
and fogeys, and worse things yet for their refusal to welcome outside
influences to their world. Raised as he had been, Luke understood.
Nobody he'd known as a boy and a teenager had ever considered the rights of
the Jawa or the Sand people to the territory occupied by the human colonists
of Tatooine, and every one of his adult acquaintances in those days would
have been outraged had either indigenous species asserted its undoubted
majority rights to determine policy for the planet as a whole.
Stop the import of farming equipment, metal, chips, just because nine-tenths
of the population of the planet thought it was vrong for trade to come down
out of the skies?. Ridiculous! Why don't you just forbid us to use tools at
all and be done with it?.
He scratched at a droch bite, slowed his newly repaired speeder as a flicker
far up in the sky signaled a red-hot meteorite in entry, a minute capsule of
smuggled goods. The mounted guards scattered, minuscule yellow lights from
their sensors and heat detectors briefly outlining their camouflaged faces,
cu-pas silent, muzzled and booted in the dark.
Caslo marked where the capsule came down, every driver triangulating on the
ten icy pinnacles, and they raced for them over the vast flat, glittering
dish of the plain.
Equipped with primitive retros, the capsule hadn't even buried itself in the
twinkling gravel. A percussion rifle crackled somewhere far off, and Luke
sensed the distant presence of more riders. He wondered, as Caslo scrambled
down the side of the smoking impact crater a hundred meters from the nearest
tsil, how' Ashgad managed to pay for weapons for his followers. Had
Palpatine left revenues in the hands of his rival? When rocks dance. But the
weapons Ashgad was buying were all new or near new, the most modern, the
most expensive that bore the Loronar double-moon logo. "All the finest--all
the first." The man had money from somewhere.
Had Callista entered his house? Learned from Taselda, perhaps, where the
money came from and where it was being sent? Was that why she'd fled Hweg
Shul?
Men were handing crates up out of the pit, passing them to the drivers.
A flurry of shots in the flat distance told Luke of approaching Therans ,
held off by the ragged perimeter of guards. Someone gave Luke a bale of
blaster rifles, which he stowed in the back of his Theran speeder; a crudely
tied together bunch of spare energy cores.
So they were getting at least some secondhand, thought Luke, turning the
sleek black-and-red cylinders over in his hand before stashing them in a
corner. Even at smuggler's prices, those would be cheaper than new, and
Ashgad was clearly out to arm every man and woman of the Rationalist Party.
They were passing rifles up singly now. He caught one thrown to him, held it
briefly in the dim glow of the speeder's console lights to see the make. His
mind went back to the gun station, to the embattled, dirty Therans ducking
through the shadows of the crazy superstructure, the gawky, dancerlike
figure in red swinging down on the cable to throw the grenade.
The gun was a white-and-silver BlasTech, this year's model, small, solid,
and familiar in Luke's hands. He knew it well. They were the type of guns
with which the entire Honor Guard of the New Republic had been newly
outfitted only last month. He'd practiced with them, to while away time, on
boar
d the Borealis.
Luke turned it over, and his blood went cold in his veins.
On the butt was the silver coding plate of the Honor Guards, marking the
weapon as the property of the New Republic, assigned to the flagship itself.
The gun had come off the Borealis.
"Yo, Lars!" somebody called from the ground. "Asleep at the switch?"
Luke stashed the weapon quickly, caught another handed up to him. He didn't
need to hold this one to the console lights, his fingers found the coding
plate by themselves. When he carried the next several guns to the back of
his speeder he flicked on the glowrod to check the others.
There were a couple from the Adamantine, but most of these had come off
Leia's flagship.
There was one--a Flash-4 with a custom grip and a lanyard ring--that he
recognized as the one Han had given Leia herself.
I have to escape.
From the corner of her balcony that overlooked the dawn-colored crystal
flatlands far below, Leia watched the luxurious black landspeeder that bore
Seti Ashgad and his two bodyguards dwindle and perish with the distance. He
had avoided her since the kidnapping--probably, she thought, because he
knew' himself unable to sustain the masquerade of being his own son before
someone who had studied holos of him as she hadbut she had always been
conscious of his presence and protection.
His plan, whatever it was, was clear in his mind, and at least for the
moment he had to keep her alive.
But Dzym and Beldorion had plans of their own.
Three days. If she lasted that long.
For the first time in days, she had awakened with her mind clear.
The water Liegeus had brought her last night had been clean. Whether that
had been an oversight or some kind of gift to her, she knew she had to take
advantage of it without delay.
On the threshold of her room she paused, blanket wrapped around her over the
thin white nightshirt she wore, long chestnut hair hanging in a braid down
her back. Around her--around the high cinder-gray
walls of Ashgad's fortress, the spiky, crystalline rocks of the plateau--the
greater mountains towered, huge chunks and teeth and masses of crystal, like
enormous jewels flashing in the eternal twilight, reminding her of just how
steep a drop it was, to the glittering plain below.
Her heart twisted inside her with a sick terror, an awful almost-wish that
they'd kept her under the soporific peace of the blossom.
Closing her eyes, she reached out with her mind and heart, formed the image
of Luke. He'd come for her once before, when she was trapped in the
Termination Block of the Death Star; when she was weak and sick after
torture, numb with a grief that it was years before she'd actually feel. I'm
here to rescue you, he'd said.
She would have smiled at the memory, had the fear in her not been so great.
In her mind she cried his name Luke! sending it echoing, blazing out across
the emptiness of air and crystal and early light. Luke!
He had to hear. He had to.
But in the still cold, the deep, heavy movement of the Force seemed to
surround her, filling her with the alien sense of its presence.
It was like the sound of the sea, drowning all other voices in its great
voice.
Luke wouldn't hear. She was trapped there alone.
She shook the fear away almost at once, and with it the horrible
recollection of the man Dzym's hands on her face, the dreadful, sinking
coldness of death.
Luke wouldn't hear. He wouldn't come. She had to figure out what to do and
what was going on.
They had released the Death Seed.
She returned to the shadowy bedchamber, sat on the end of the bed where the
sunlight fell on it, and drew her feet up under the blanket.
She felt a droch bite her and scratched furiously, the insect dropping from
the bedding into the dazzling carpet of mottled light. It curled itself into
a tight brown-black pellet no bigger than a pinhead and died.
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 somehov--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 Kebellion'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.
mate." 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
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