that comprised most of the sector.
"They're just taking the ships into hyperspace, period. Don't you seegt;.
The whole point has to be that Her Excellency vanishes, without a trace,
after she's seen to leave the rendezvous safely. They must have one
turbo-powered holo faker working for them." He put his hand to his chest, as
if to massage away some deep, troubling ache. "Hang on."
He eased forward on the levers, sweat sparkling in the cropped
suede of his hair in the doubled glare of amber and scarlet warning lights.
The small, boxlike craft slid through the magnetic portal and flipped
immediately down, around, avoiding the Borealis's stabilizers, picking up
speed while interacting with a far larger vessel, which was ripping along at
thousands of kilometers per second.
Threepio clutched at the back of the empty navigator's station, circuits
momentarily jammed with alarm. Artoo let out a long, trilling wail as the
scout boat whipped by inches from the bigger ship's secondary tanks. The
wake of the flagship's magnetic field tossed and dragged the little craft
like a chip in a riptide. Marcopius's dark hands flickered and danced from
levers to joystick to toggles as huge sheets of metal and rivets rocketed
past the observation ports, alternating with slabs of interstellar blackness
already shimmering with the light-shift effects of hyperspace sequence. Then
the scout boat plunged away, spinning dizzily, stars and ships and planets
reeling in a disorienting tumble past the ports. There was a blinding flash,
far too near for comfort, as the Borealis plunged into the glimmering void
of quasi-reality that was called "hyperspace" for lack of any better term.
Far to starboard, as Marcopius stabilized the spinning scout boat, the Light
of Reason had left orbit as well, streaking toward the Nam Chorios primary
like an incandescent teardrop.
"Shall we go after them?"
"And do what?" The young yeoman's hands were trembling where they lay on the
console. "Throw spitballs at them? This is a scout boat, not an E-wing.
Besides, we're too big to make it past those gun stations they were talking
about."
He nodded toward the viewport, where the Light of Reason was diminishing
into the stars. "Just looking at that ship I'd guess it comes apart and goes
down to the planet in self-powered sections, leaving the main reactor in
orbit. It's the only way they could get enough bulk or even limited
hyperspace capability."
He guided the scout boat in a long loop, began setting coordinates, an
expression of grim sorrow aging his face. "What do you know about Pedducis
Chorios? That's the nearest civilization."
"Well, it can't really be called civilized," said Threepio judiciously.
"The local Warlords have taken on so-called advisers--ex-smugglers, Imperial
renegades, Corporate sector mercenaries, fugitives from both Imperial and
Republican justice. I shudder to think what would happen to us if we went
there, or to Her Excellency if anyone there discovered the predicament she
was in."
Marcopius nodded, and made another adjustment. "It has to be the fleet
orbital base at Durren, then." He paused, trying to draw breath, his face
gray around the lips. "Are either of you programmed to handle one of these
once we get out of hyperspace?"
Artoo, who had released himself from his takeoff cradle, let out an
optimistic trill, and Threepio said firmly, "Oh, no, sir. Upon the single
occasion that we tried any sort of piloting at all, the results were most
unsatisfactory. Certainly the more modern craft are entirely beyond our
programming capacity. I'm a protocol droid, as you know, and though Artoo is
quite a competent astromech, I'm afraid he has his limitations in other
areas."
The young man nodded again, leaning his forehead on his fist, his breath
going out in a long sigh. Threepio could see he was still shivering With
shock or exertion, the droid supposed sympathetically.
Some humans were simply not as resilient as others.
Encouragingly, Threepio ventured, "It isn't that far to Durren, sir.
The ship should run well enough until we have to make orbit. If you wish to
lie down and rest, I can certainly wake you when you're required to pilot
the ship into base."
For a long time Yeoman Marcopius didn't answer. Then he murmured, "Yeah. I
guess that's how it'll have to be."
He got to his feet, staggering and catching himself on Artoo's stubby bulk.
The astromech rolled beside him, to help him to the narrow bunk in an alcove
just beyond the control room door. The young man groped blindly for the
blanket--Artoo extended his gripper arm and pulled it up over him, and
emitted a gentle trill of comfort and farewell as he rolled from the room.
Thirty minutes later, when Threepio returned to ask the youth how long it
would be before they could subspace the Durren base, he found Marcopius
dead.
The Force was everywhere, palpable, warming her like sunlight.
Lying--on a divan? On the toothed, fist-size crystals that carpeted the old
sea floor plains as far as vision could descry. -- Leia Organa Solo basked
in the warmth of the Force. So much warmer than the heatless fingernail of
the sun, she absorbed it through her skin, as if her body had been rendered
transparent like the amoebic Plasmars of dark Y'nybeth.
Someone was saying something to her, but she was deeply asleep and could not
make out the words.
She dreamed.
She was in her father's palace in Aldera. His study was a garden room,
looking through a double line of smooth, snow-white pillars to a small lawn
beyond whose curved railing the blue waters of the lake could be seen, the
endless plains of wind-combed grass beyond. The intoxicating smell of the
grass blew through on the warm winds, and she could hear the muted whisper
of the wind chimes among the pillars and the soft cooing and twittering of
the cairokas, the sounds of her childhood.
Her father was there. She was presenting her children to him, Jacen and
Jaina and Anakin grown to teenagers, wearing the faces she knew they would
one day wear.
"You've done well, daughter." Bail Organa extended a hand to touch Jaina's
heavy chestnut hair. The gold ring on his finger gleamed like a fragment of
the world's final sunset. "What have you taught them, these young Jedi of
the House of Organa?"
"I've taught them to love justice, as you loved justice, Father."
Leia's own voice sounded deep and quiet in the chamber's gentle twilight.
"I've taught them to respect the rights of all living things. I've taught
them that the Law is above any single being's will."
"But we know better." Anakin spoke in the breaking treble of an adolescent,
and there was an unfamiliar, ugly grin on his face as he stepped forward,
and a light in his crystal-blue eyes that Leia had never seen in waking
life. "We're Jedi Knights. We have the Power."
His light-saber licked out crimson from the shadow and slashed her father in
half.
Leia sprang back from the toppling pieces of the co
rpse, scream-ing---Why
couldn't she scream through the clogging weight of sleep.
Her father's body lay in pieces in the shadow, cauterized where the blade
had severed thorax from pelvis, only a trickle of brownish fluid worming
across the marble floor toward her feet. She cried something, she didn't
know what. Anakin, Jacen, and Jaina all turned to gaze at her.
All three had drawn lightsabers. Three blades gleamed, red and shining
columns of power, the light making six red flames in three pairs of demon
eyes.
"We're Jedi, Mother," Jaina said. "There's no Law for us. We can do whatever
we want."
Anakin said, "That's your gift to us. We're Jedi because you're Jedi, too.
We are what you are." He turned to look back at the pieces of Bail Organa's
body, the eyes open and staring in shock, the outstretched hand with its
golden ring. "And anyway he wasn't really your father."
Leia screamed "No! No!"
The images blurred to darkness and she heard Luke's voice. "Learn to use the
Force, Leia. You have to."
"Never!"
You have to.
She couldn't swear then that it was Luke's voice. The warmth of the Force
touched her, comforting, but it seemed that she could see it only through a
viewport or a doorway. She lay in shadow, and the shadow was cold.
She heard movement behind her head, and opened her eyes.
For a time there'd been a man named Greglik who'd piloted a reconditioned
ore hauler for the Rebel forces, back when they'd been moving from planet to
planet ahead of Admiral Piett's fleet. Greglik had been a good pilot but an
addict, whose addictions had deepened until he'd gotten himself and
seventeen Rebel fighters killed in a stupid collision with an asteroid.
She remembered him now'. One night in a temporary HQ on Kid-ron, when they
were watching for an attack, he'd told her about being an addict, about
mixing drugs to achieve the exact rainbow of mental damage to match any mood
he sought to erase.
"Glitterstim's all right if you're blue," he had said, his brown eyes
dreamy, like a man recalling the great love of his life. "Everything takes
on a rise, a buzz, a life, as if your whole body had been made new and your
whole future with it. And for those nights when you've got an itchy anger in
your soul against all the people who've robbed you or jeered at you, there's
pyrepenol. Two shots of pyrep and you'll spit on the Fates that spin your
life thread. When you're hurting for the girl who could have saved you
if-only, Santherian tenho-root extract's your poison gentle, gentle, like
the sun breaking clouds at the end of day."
He'd smiled, and Leia's contempt for the man had transmuted to pity, as she
comprehended for the first time all that he had done himself out of for the
sake of those easy illusions. He had been a handsome man, bronzed and fair
like a charming god, but sexless, as most addicts quickly became, and
without the courage to face a relationship or hold an opinion of his own.
"But sometimes there's nothing that'll do it but sweetblossom. It's a good
thing the blossom's not addictive," he'd added with a grin. "It could grind
galactic civilization to a halt in a week flat."
"It's that deadly?" Leia had asked.
Greglik had laughed. "My darling child, few drugs are that deadly.
It's what they get you to do to yourself that destroys you. Blossom is
exactly like sleep. A little of it--two drops, maybe--and it's like you've
just woken up, before your mind is in gear to do anything You just sit
around in your pajamas saying, I'll take care of business when I'm feelin a
bit more the thing. But, of course, you never do. Five drops is good for
endless sitting, curled up, comfortable, thinking nothing, watching
addercops spin webs or dust motes make patterns.
Your mind is perfectly clear, you understand, but the starter won't engage.
Seven or eight drops and you're paralyzed. Awake, but unmoving, unable to
move, like those mornings when you open your eyes but your entire body's
still asleep. A good way to get through--oh--days when things are happening
to you that you'd rather not feel."
Leia had thought at the time, Like seeing your world destroyed, and the
deaths of everyone you know? She'd dealt with that one by helping Luke and
Han escape with the Death Star plans, by setting in motion the events that
had blasted Grand Moff Tarkin and the Emperor's cherished superweapon into
stellar dust.
She'd changed the subject, and a few weeks later, Greglik had been killed.
She hadn't thought of him, or that conversation, in years.
But his words came back to her as she heard the soft snick of the door lock
unbolting and the rustle of clothing just beyond the line of her sight. She
tried in panic to turn her head and couldn't.
She couldn't move at all. Blossom, she thought.
Panic flooded her.
Someone was definitely approaching the divan on which she lay.
The heavy velvet robe of state she'd worn to her meeting with Ashgad still
wrapped her like a shroud of molded lead. There was a doorway or a long
transparisteel panel in the wall opposite her feet, and the end of the
trapezoid of blanched sunlight that fell through it touched her knees,
heating them uncomfortably under the velvet's folds. The wall around the
doorway was poured permacrete, lead colored and unplastered; beyond she
could see a paved terrace and a low permacrete wall and a hugeness of air
imbued with hard-edged, sugary light.
Clothing rustled again. She felt the vibration of someone grasping the
carved headboard of the divan.
Its legs scraped softly on the permacrete floor as the divan was drawn
backward, away from the rectangle of sunlight, into the deeper shadows of
the room.
Every atom of Leia's body screamed and thrashed and struggled to rise, to
fight--at least to turn her head. And every atom of the sweetblossom in her
system laughed at her and held her still.
The dragging stopped. Get up, get up, get up.
Dzym came around the head of the divan. He stood gazing down at Leia with
his large, utterly colorless eyes--(They were brown on the ship.
I know they were brown on the ship.)--and Leia saw that the skin of his
throat, where it was revealed by the open neck of his loose gray robe, was
purplish brown, shiny, and ever so slightly articulated.
Chitenous, not like human skin at all. When he sat on the divan beside her
and took her hands in his, she saw between the cuffs of his gloves and those
of his robe that his wrists were the same.
He saw she was looking at him and smiled, running a very long, very pointed
tongue over sharp brown teeth. While his eyes held hers he turned his
shoulder to her, so that she could not see his hands, and drew off his
gloves. She felt him lay them over her arm. Then he took her left hand
between both of his.
The terrible sinking, the slow ache in her chest were as they had been in
her stateroom on the Borealis. A growing, spreading coldness.
The seeping away of her breath.
I'm dying, thought Leia, as she ha
d then. She saw the secretary's thin, dark
lips part in what might have been a smile or only a satiated sigh.
Ecstatic, as he had been on the ship.
He stood and walked around behind her. Lifting aside her hair, he put his
hands to the sides of her neck. Something sliced her that wasn't pain and
wasn't cold, more terrifying than either.
She thought, Please, no more. She thought, Han . .
She thought, You'd better finish me off you squalid parasite, because if you
don't, by my father's hand I swear I'll break your stinking neck.
She sank into drowning darkness.
Voices cried out through the Force.
Hundreds of them--Luke felt their terror and despair. Dying, he thought ....
He thought also, in that first cold lance of panic, that Leia's was one of
them, terrified and alone. But in the clamor he couldn't be sure.
His hand flashed to the comm panel, calling up the far-off images of the
Borealis and its escort. Readouts showed them on their way to the Coruscant
jump point; a long-distance visual confirmed. Luke debated for a moment
trying to contact them--he had a scrambler in the B-wing's comm systems, but
the possibility of being overheard by Getelles's agents, or by those other,
nameless threats, held his hand.
Instead he cut into the pickup channel, and heard Leia's voice dimly making
her report to Rieekan and Ackbar "... successful conclusion to our
enterprise. We're on our way home."
Trouble elsewhere? he wondered. On Pedducis Chorios, perhaps? Or some other
world in the vicinity? Sometimes it was difficult to tell, with the Force.
It picked up and magnified some alterations in the life-tides of the
universe, distorted others. Even now, the tugging grief, the cold panic, he
felt had faded; he wasn't even sure exactly where it had come from.
He turned his eyes toward the growing violet star that was Chorios II, Nam
Chorios's primary. That speck of piercing white beside it should be the
planet itself.
A singing surge of the Force washed over him, filled him, sieved the tiny
craft like gamma rays. Like coming in to Dagobah that first time, looking at
the seething life readings of that strange world, he felt now in the
presence of a vastness he could not understand.
No wonder Callista was drawn to this place.
He touched the levers, accelerated into high orbit.
Now the planet was clearly visible. Wastes of slate, smooth and hard as
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