Like Palpatine, the men of the Ancient Houses preferred resigned obedience to defiance, and until she found some way in which to actively escape Leia guessed her best course would be to rack up all the points with these people she could.
They were quite heavily armed, with stunguns as well as blasters.
She still felt shaky, strange, and a little dizzy, though moving helped. Having no desire for a guaranteed three hours’ worth of headaches and nausea, Leia decided to bide her time.
Roganda, Irek, and Ohran Keldor occupied a small chamber one level up, cold despite the heating unit placed discreetly in a corner. The walls were draped with black; Leia had the momentary impression of the sort of meditation chamber used by some Dathomir sects, which used silence, dimness, and a single-point source of firelight to concentrate the mind.
A cluster of candles was grouped on the polished wooden table at which Irek and his mother sat. With such discretion as to constitute almost an apology, a quarto-size terminal was set up on a bench just within the range of Irek’s peripheral vision, where Ohran Keldor was keying rapidly through a series of calculations and what looked like sensor reports. There were four glass balls of the type Leia had seen in several places in the crypts, set on stands in the corners of the room so that Irek’s chair was directly where lines drawn between them would cross.
Irek raised his head, stared at her with arrogant, furious blue eyes. “I’ve had enough trouble from you,” he said, his juvenile voice cold, and Leia was aware of Lord Garonnin’s angry frown at the rudeness and lèse-majesté. “Now you will tell me. Why wouldn’t your droid obey me in the crypts? What had you done to it?”
“You’re dismissed,” said Roganda quickly, signing to Garonnin and Elegin—Leia saw the look that passed between them as they left.
True, Roganda was in a hurry—but as a child Leia had had it impressed upon her that no person of breeding was ever in such a hurry as to speak brusquely to a social superior.
Inferiors, of course—and those whom circumstance had placed in the power of a Lord—were jolly well on their own.
She turned to face Roganda, her eyes cold. “What guarantees can you give me that I’ll be returned to Coruscant safe and sound?”
“You dare ask for guarantees!” yelled Irek, slamming his fist on the table, and Roganda held up her hand.
“I can guarantee you that unless you tell us what you did to your droid that enabled it to escape my son’s influence,” she said, with quiet viciousness, “you’re going to be blasted out of existence in very short order, along with every living thing in Plawal. Because the Eye of Palpatine is not responding to my son’s commands.”
“Not responding?” said Leia, startled. “I thought your son commanded it to come here.”
“I did,” said Irek sullenly.
“Not … exactly,” corrected Keldor. The little man looked harried, his bald head shining with sweat in the glow of the console lights. “We knew that part of the original activation signal relay to trigger the Eye of Palpatine had been destroyed somewhere in the vicinity of Belsavis. By tapping into the strength of the Force, Lord Irek was able to reactivate the relay and bring the battlemoon here, where it will be close enough for him to control its on-board programming directly.”
He cleared his throat uneasily, and avoided both Roganda’s eyes and Leia’s. “The thing is, Princess, the Eye of Palpatine—a fully automated ship, one of the few designed with a completely automatic mission control in order to obviate security leaks—was originally programmed to destroy all life on the planet Belsavis. Shell out of existence anything that resembled a settlement.”
“Because the Jedi were here,” said Leia steadily.
Keldor’s eyes avoided hers. “The Emperor took whatever steps he felt necessary to reduce the risk of civil war. Whatever else can be said about them, the Jedi were potential insurgents who he felt could not be trusted with power.”
“And he could be, I suppose?” Leia looked across at Roganda. “You were one of the children here, weren’t you?” she asked. “It was your family they were attacking.”
“We change with the times, Princess.” Roganda folded her delicate hands, the topaz of her ring a sulfurous star in the candle’s light. Away from her chief of staff, and the Senex Lords whom she sought to impress, all semblance of that shy defenselessness was gone. In its place was a cool vituperative scorn, the power-loving contempt that Leia guessed sprang from envy of those who had looked down on her, and desire to get her own back.
“If I’d followed the strictest traditions of my family I’d have been destroyed, as they and my older brother Lagan were destroyed. As it was, I adapted those traditions.”
“You followed the dark side, you mean.”
That stung her. The winglike brows lifted. “What is the ‘dark side,’ Princess?” There was a good deal of Irek in her chilly voice. Here was another one, thought Leia, who could not conceive of the possibility of being wrong. “Some of us think that fanatic adherence to every jot and quibble of an antiquated code is, if not dark precisely, at least stupid. And from all I’ve heard, the ‘dark side’ seems to be anything that disagrees with the hidebound, divisive, every-tree-and-bush-is-sacred teachings that shackled the Jedi gifts—and shackled every political body that had anything to do with the Jedi, whether they agreed with them or not—like an iron chain.”
She gestured, with the small hand that had never done any work in the woman’s life, as if summoning the spirit of the clammy old man in the black robe whose pale eyes still sometimes stared at Leia in her dreams.
“Palpatine was a pragmatist. As am I.”
“And you don’t think that pragmatism—as you call that form of selfishness—isn’t exactly what the dark side is?”
“Madame,” said Keldor—leaving it unstated whom he was addressing—“to be strictly pragmatic … we have very little time. The Eye of Palpatine will be in range of this rift, its principal target, in a matter of forty minutes.” His cold colorless eyes fastened on Leia’s face, gauging her.
Like Moff Tarkin, she thought. Trying to figure out what would cause her to break.
“Now, it’s very possible that you will escape the destruction by virtue of concealment in these tunnels. But I assure you”—and that flicker of spitefulness crept into her voice again—“everyone in the valley will die. That presumably includes your husband. And in every other valley on this planet. What did you do to your droid?”
“I didn’t do anything,” said Leia quietly. “After his attempt on our lives last night he had to be rewired.”
“You changed its schematic!” Irek was shocked. “But a droid can’t run if you change its schematic!” He looked in horror from his mother to Keldor, as if for confirmation of this fact. “Old Man Magrody said that every droid has a standard schematic, and—”
“Professor Magrody,” said Leia, “obviously didn’t hang around much with spaceport mechanics.”
“But that can’t be the reason!” Irek slewed in his chair to face Keldor again. “Nobody rewired the Eye—”
“That we know about.” The chubby little man glanced once more at his sensor screen, and in the shadowy fragments of light his face looked suddenly fallen in, as if someone had let the air out of him. Leia could almost hear his battle against panic in his voice. “But the fact is, my lord Irek, we don’t know if the damage to the activation relays was the only reason the Eye of Palpatine didn’t rendezvous with the assault wing here thirty years ago. It’s just possible that enemies of the New Order did learn what the relays were supposed to summon, and did get a saboteur on board. If part of the computer core was damaged, for instance, in an attempt to overload the reactors—”
“Can you fix it?” Roganda put a hand on her son’s wrist, to forestall whatever he was getting ready to say with his intaken breath. “Take a ship up there and disable the mission command center?”
Keldor’s eyes shifted. Leia could almost hear him estimating the possible strength
of the rock above and around them, measuring it against the firepower of the Eye’s torpedoes …
“Of course I can.”
“And if you can’t,” Leia snapped sarcastically, “I suppose you figure you’ll be safer up on the ship than down here?”
Roganda’s eyes met Irek’s.
“I blew out the central servo on the landing silos,” said the boy. Then, defensively, “You told me to!”
“Theala Vandron’s ship is still on the ice pad.” Roganda got to her feet, nodded to the portable terminal in the corner. “Bring that,” she said. She paused, considering Leia for a moment, then said, “Bring her. If you can’t get that battlemoon disarmed we’re going to need a hostage.”
Irek’s lightsaber flashed out, flame-colored in the darkness of the black-draped room. He stepped close to Leia, the cold cautery of the blade hissing faintly as he brought it toward her face. “And you’d better not try anything,” he said, a glitter of evil glee in his smile. “Because I don’t think we need a hostage that badly.”
The corridor outside was empty.
Garonnin, thought Leia desperately, pushing aside the last traces of the drug’s breathless dizziness. There has to be some way to alert Garonnin that he’s being betrayed …
She cast a swift look toward the red alarm buttons every dozen meters or so along the wall, wondering if Irek’s reflexes were up to slicing her in two if she lunged for one.
She rather suspected that they were.
“I warn you, Madame,” panted Keldor, hurrying at Roganda’s side with his portable terminal bundled up under his arm and straps hanging in every direction. “The gunnery computer was a semi-independent entity from the central mission control computer—the Will. If there’s been a problem with the Will itself, it may not even let us on board, much less permit us into the central core.”
“You mean we may not be able to stop the Eye, or control it afterwards?” Her obsidian-black eyes glittered like a snake’s, furious at the stupidity that dared to unravel her plans.
Keldor flinched. “There is that possibility.”
“Then wait here.” Roganda ducked through a nearby door in a swirl of white skirts, and Irek stepped closer to Leia and lifted his lightsaber threateningly. The concubine reappeared a moment later with a heavy black box slung over one shoulder by a carrying strap. Her scornful eyes flicked to Leia. “More pragmatism,” she said dryly. “If there’s one thing I learned in getting out of Coruscant ahead of the Rebels, it was: Never be without money.”
The spite was back in her voice, clearer now; spite and a world of unspoken resentment, the resentment of a woman who has known what it is to be poor. Just as if, thought Leia, she herself hadn’t run ragged through the stars with a price on her head.
But Roganda wasn’t seeing that. Roganda was seeing the Emperor’s levee, too; seeing the last Princess of Alderaan, privileged and pampered, whose aunts wouldn’t deign to speak to her: the scion of all those Ancient Houses who looked down their noses at her choice of wine …
And Leia raised her head in just the attitude she herself had hated in every spoiled rich brat she’d gone to school with, and summoned every ounce of their whiny jeers into her voice.
“You’ll need it,” she sneered, “if your witless incompetence at this stage gets the heads of all the Ancient Houses killed.”
Roganda slapped her. The blow wasn’t hard, but Leia grabbed the little concubine’s wrist, shoved her between herself and Irek, and flung herself the two or three meters down the corridor that separated her from one of the red alarm buttons on the wall. She smacked it hard with the heel of her palm and whirled, raising her hands as Keldor brought up his blaster …
And before Keldor had the chance to rethink his automatic response of not shooting in the event of surrender, Lord Garonnin appeared down the corridor at a run, blaster in hand.
“My lady? What …?”
“They’re deserting you!” yelled Leia. “Running out! That battlemoon’s going to blow the daylights out of this place and they’re taking off in the last ship!” And, whirling, she aimed a single hard lance of the Force at the latch of Roganda’s black box.
Panic, lack of training, and the exhaustion and disorientation of the drugs caused her aim to misfire slightly, but the result was the same. The strap snapped and the box—which Leia could tell was extremely heavy—crashed to the floor, the latch sprang open …
And gems, currency, and negotiable securities spilled across the floor between Roganda and her aristocratic security chief.
After an endless second of staring into Roganda’s white face, Garonnin said softly, “You faithless drab,” and, with his free hand, brought up his comlink.
It was the last conscious movement he made. Irek stepped forward with preternatural lightness and severed him, right shoulder to left hip, the lightsaber cutting and cauterizing flesh and bone like a hot wire passing through clay.
Leia stretched out her hand, Garonnin’s blaster flying free of his dying grasp and into her palm. Even as it did so she flung herself to the floor in a long roll, Keldor’s blaster bolt spattering viciously against the rock where a moment ago she’d been standing; then she plunged down the nearest corridor, heard Irek yelling, “Kill her! She’ll tell the others!” and the clatter of pursuing feet.
Leia took a flight of stairs two steps at a time, fled down a corridor, past deserted rooms or sealed doorways, musty and lit by the intermittent radiance of glowpanels faded with age. She ducked through what she thought was another passageway and found herself in a long room whose single bay window looked out into the lamp-twinkling outer darkness—fleeing to the embrasure, beyond the heavy plex she saw the jut of rocky overhang, the dense curtain of vines … and a hanging bed of vine-coffee plants, gleaming with worklights, not three meters away.
Hanging beds. The supply platform. An emergency ladder to the bottom of the rift.
She was prepared to shoot out the window latches but it wasn’t necessary; they were stiff, but not locked. Shouts, running feet outside … Her breath was still short and uneven from the stimulants they’d given her but she knew she had no choice. Leia squirmed her way through the narrow opening to the minimal rock of the sill—being very careful not to look down—grabbed a handful of vine, and swung.
The vine jerked and gave half a meter under her weight, but somehow the huge steel basket of the bed was safely, easily under her. She grabbed a support cable and clung, releasing the vine, gasping and trembling all over. Lights glowed above her, below her, and all around, illuminating the other beds in the dark. Leia looked up to the dark mazes of tracks, the rags of fog drifting among the cable-and-pulley arrangements that held up the gondolas of the beds and above it all the cold white fragments of wind-thrashed ice skating across the plex of the dome itself. She knew she shouldn’t look down but did … a swirling sea of fog, broken by dark trees and the fragile lamps of a sunken city.
A tremendously long way down.
Lightly, she ran along the duckboard that stretched the length of the bed.
The supply station affixed to the cliff wall itself, with its own thick beds festooned in vines, seemed impossibly far away.
The steel gondolas that supported the hanging beds were ten or twelve meters by six, filled with earth and overflowing with the heavy, thick-leaved coffee- or silk-vines. This was a coffee bed, tight clusters of dark beans half hidden among the striped leaves, the bittersweet smell of the foliage thick in her lungs. Narrow catwalks ran between the beds, little more than chain ladders wound on reels that extended or contracted as the beds were raised and lowered, or could be unhooked and drawn in completely if a bed was brought laterally around to one of the supply stations on the rift wall. The thought of crossing one turned Leia absolutely cold, but it was the only means of making her way from bed to bed until she reached the station …
The bed jarred, shook, swayed. Turning, she saw that Irek had swung from the window as she had, and was running lightly down the duckboar
ds to her, lightsaber shining redly in his hand.
Leia fired her blaster and missed, the boy ducking nimbly and vanishing among the vines. Rather than face him—not knowing exactly what she’d have to face—she fled, ducking and scrambling across the first of the spider-strand catwalks, clinging to the safety line that formed a spindly railing for the bridge. She half expected Irek to cut the bridge behind her and try to spill her off, but he didn’t, probably knowing she could hang on to the ladder and climb. She felt his weight on the catwalk behind her but didn’t dare stop and turn until she had the next bed swinging and rocking beneath her feet; then she turned, in time to see him spring off the catwalk and into the vines.
She fired again but the blaster jerked in her hand, almost loosening her grip, and she ducked the whining slash of the blade close enough that she could feel its cold. The coffee vines tangled her feet but she moved lightly, ducking his cuts, weaving and springing away. She dodged again, as behind her two of the heavy stakes that held the vines uprooted themselves and slashed at her head like thrown clubs—he was attempting to drive her over the edge. Her second shot missed, and she could feel the pressure of his mind on hers; her lungs laboring, her throat tightening. Consciously she relaxed them, opened them, thrust aside what he was trying to do to her …
A blaster bolt whined, took a piece out of the steel rim of the basket, and left a mass of acridly smoking vines between them. Irek startled back and looked around; Leia fired from a distance of less than two meters and only at the last second did his mind try to rip the blaster again from her hand. The bolt seared a smoking rent in the shoulder of his coat, and at the same moment Keldor’s voice yelled, “I’ve got her! I’ve—”
Irek lunged at Leia in response, driving her toward the edge, and then there was a shattering crack from the plex overhead and the pane cracked, frigid air pouring down through the hole the blaster had made and turning instantly to a swirling column of fog in which snow fragments sparkled viciously in the starry lights.
Star Wars: Children of the Jedi Page 37
