rollerball floors, stretched kilometer after kilometer. Zones of broken rock
surrounded them, wall after brittle wall of toothed mountains uneroded by
rain or the roots of growing plants. In other places the dry sea floors were
covered for thousands of miles in faceted, quartzine
gravel that glared as if the world were one great cut-glass gem.
Crystal mountains flashed a bleached and broken reflection in the wan light
of the tiny, faded whitish sun, chains of them petering out into lines of
solitary crystal-rock chimneys, like widely spaced sentinels, far into the
shimmering, twilight wastes.
Light and glass, dizzying alien cloudless heights, and among it all, tiny
zones of green.
Luke's hands played fast through the orbital checks, then returned to the
subspace, signaling back to the Adamantine, the Borealis.
Nothing. They'd gone into hyperspace by this time, heading back to
Coruscant.
Death, his memory whispered. He had felt death, massive death, he thought.
His recollection of it was dim and dreamlike, and he could not be sure
where, or when, or from what direction the sensation had come.
But Leia was alive. Somewhere, wherever she was, she was alive.
He flipped his scanners to their widest range, but saw only the yellow speck
that would be Seti Ashgad's pieced-together planet-hopper, blinking along at
max sublight, heading for home.
His single B-wing should be too small to register on its scanners at this
distance, he thought. But it would be best to disappear into the planet's
magnetic field before Ashgad got any closer.
Do not meet with Ashgad.
Do not go to the Meridian sector.
Luke studied the scan again. This close to Antemeridian, it paid to be
cautious, though by all accounts Moff Getdies didn't have the firepower to
bump heads with the fleet at Durren, or the guts to try. And indeed, no sign
of any deep-space vessels disturbed the provincial calm of this portion of
the Meridian. Just the occasional orange flicker of planet-hoppers, small
traders, light cargo haulers going about their petty businesses between the
stars.
What did Callista know about Seti AshgadS.
He edged the B-wing into a lower temporary orbit and brought up the
coordinates for the town of Hweg Shul.
He would find her, he thought. He would see her again.
The long-range laser cannon took out his rear deflector shield and nicked
the stabilizer before he was even out of sight of blackness and stars.
It was only luck it didn't destroy the craft entirely, luck and probably the
difficulty in homing on a vessel at the bottom end of its target mass. Luke
flipped at once into evasive action, twisting, zagging, plunging toward that
vast glittering eternity of dimness and crystal through a flaming hovl of
atmosphere. A second bolt clipped the B-Wing's airfoil; and as he fought to
pull out of the crazy spin, Luke saw' the white lances of light slash upward
from the ragged line of slate-gray foothills.
So much for Seti Ashgad's information about the minimum mass needed to
activate the gun stations, thought Luke grimly. Was that what Callista had
meant about not trusting the man?
But Ashgad hadn't known Luke would even be on Leia's mission, let alone that
he'd be going to Hweg Shul. Nobody but Han and Chewie had known that. He
twisted the controls, trying to avoid sliding straight into one of those
white lances of killing light. The ground rushed upward, radiant, burning
with wan, reflected sun.
Blast, thought Luke, as the joystick lurched under his hands, don't quit on
me now.
There was enough play in the remaining stabilizer to land without killing
himself--just. The antigray cradles were still okay. But when he leveled off
he'd be a better target. He zagged right, left, dropped instinctively as a
beam slicked over his head. Those were live gunners, they had to be. No
autostation had that kind of response flexibility. Live gunners who knew
what they were doing.
Huge cliffs; mountains; towering terrifying, bare monuments of basalt and
crystals yawned fathomless below him. He plunged the big fighter down among
them, veered through narrowing chasms as a laser bolt splintered a black
column of rock a thousand feet high to his left and rained the craft with
fragments. The steady, howling winds of the higher atmosphere turned to
random hurricanes that smote him from every canyon and crevice. With its
long ventral airfoil the B-wing was almost impossible to control. Luke
pulled into a level slide, barely avoid ing another bolt and a toothed crag
of what looked like gray striated quartz, the glare of the sunlight from a
million million mirrors nearly blinding.
He was out of range of the gun stations, hidden in the mountains, plunging
down a long, scintillated canyon toward the wasteland beyond.
The stabilizer went, and Luke forced the controls over, reached out with his
mind to touch the Force, nudge the crazily plunging craft away from the rock
walls, past the jutting towers and razor-ridged hogbacks of stone, heading
for the blue notch of the canyon mouth.
Too low. No altitude. He'd never . . .
He put out all his will, all the strength of the Force, to lift the B-wing
over the last ridge of rose-gold shining glass, edge it down, down . . .
Wind slapped him like a monster hand. The B-wing veered wildly, then the
airfoil scraped and tore on the pebbled wilderness beyond the canyon. Rocks
and dust and fragments of crystal enveloped him in a whirlwind of heat.
Shaken nearly out of his bones, Luke held the controls steady, fighting to
see, hoping there was nothing ahead of him but more level gravel.
There was. A transparent boulder the size of a speeder caught what was left
of the airfoil. The whole craft slewed sideways, rolled, the delicate
S-foils buckling and snapping. Luke feared for one heart-tearing second that
his seat restraint would give way, and he'd break his neck on the console.
The belts held--there was an explosion of sealant and crash foam--the B-wing
rolled twice more, like a barrel, and came to a stop up against something
that sent up another splintering cloud of fragments and dust.
Then stillness, the moaning of the wind, and the dying pitter of pebbles
raining down on the laser-cracked hull.
"Here, Your Excellency."
Strong hands helped Leia sit up, put a cup into hers, held it steady while
she drank. "How are you feeling?"
She blinked. The divan had been moved out onto the terrace. Weak, strangely
colored sunlight lay in mosaics of glassy brightness across the
cinder-colored permacrete walls of the house that loomed over them, glinted
on the treeless lunacy of the heaped stone ridges, columns, pinnacles, and
buttresses that dwarfed the house on three sides and framed, on the fourth,
eternities of flashing gravel, as if the sea had sunk away long ago and left
its foam solidified into salt and glass.
It must be the crystals that pick up and reflect the sunlight, thought Leia,
looking around at the huge outcrops of them embedded everywhere in th
e rocks
of the mountains. The small sun gave only thready light in cobalt oceans of
sky. Dim stars shone even in the presence of its glow.
Because of the light thrown back by the rocks, there seemed to be no shadows
anywhere, or a confusing multiplicity of watered ones. The dry air tightened
her face, as it had not in the moister mini-climate of the house.
She turned from those bizarre distances to meet the anxious dark eyes of the
man who sat on the divan at her side.
It was Seti Ashgad's pilot.
A nice man, she thought at once. He reminded her a little of the pilot
Greglik for some reason, though the physical appearance could not have been
more dissimilar. Of medium height and slender build, this man had a sort of
saturnine darkness to him in utter contrast with the Rebel pilot's
flamboyant good looks. Maybe it was the nose--an elegant aquiline--or the
battered, deeply woven wrinkles around the eyes that spoke of a life lived
very hard.
More probably, she thought, it was somethin in the expression of the eyes.
Odd again, to think of the daredevil Greglik. This man's eyes were the eyes
of one who wouldn't harm so much as an insect or stand up to someone who was
taking shameless advantage of him for fear of hurt feelings. An escaper, she
thought. Not escape into drugs--he hadn't Greglik's unhealthy
complexion--but escape by simply not being there if he could manage to get
away.
But nice.
"I'm fine. I think I'm fine." Had Dzym been a dream? The slicing pain in the
sides of her neck, the hands that drew life from her, exactly as the
sickness had on the ship. The horrible impression she had had of some other
being under his clothing, some vile movement, tucked away where it didn't
show. "Where am I? What happened?" Her thoughts felt
as if she'd dropped them, and they'd rolled to the far ends of the room, and
exhaustion prevented her from gathering them up again.
"I'm afraid i can't tell you where you are, Your Excellency." He sounded
genuinely sorry about it. "You understand, it's better if you don't know. My
name is Liegeus Sarpaetius Vorn."
"Vorn . . ." With the greatest of difficulty, as if she were laboriously
constructing a house of cards by means of waldoes, Leia put things together
in her mind. "Liegeus Vorn--You were Seti Ashgad's pilot, weren't you. And
Dzym . . . Dzym was here. Is this Nam Chorios?"
"Dzym was here?" He held the vessel away from her reaching hands, his dark
brows knotting. "I think you've had enough of this, Your Excellency. I'll
get you some water."
He emptied the cup--which Leia thought had contained water--over the low
wall at the edge of the terrace. She sat up, watching it fall, the droplets
flashing and dwindling as they tumbled in slow motion past the walls of the
house, past the rocks of the bluff on which it stood, down to the broken
tumble of slate and scree and adamant two hundred meters below.
"Stay here in the sunshine," he urged gently. His voice was very soft,
almost inaudible, but deep and one of the most beautiful she had ever heard.
"I won't be a moment."
Leia remained where she was, not because he had told her to, but because the
warmth was pleasant on her face, like the slow return of health after a
terrible coldness.
The Borealis, she thought. What happened on board the Borealis?
She'd been ill. The memory of cold returned, the slow dimming down of every
system in her body. Or had that been later, when Dzym had come into the room
there?
Ashgad had apparently taken her off the ship, brought her to this place. She
recalled nothing about it. Had Captain Ioa thought she was dead But in that
case, they'd have brought her body to Coruscant, not here.
Han, she thought. Han will be worried sick. The children . . .
Other things were leaking back into her consciousness.
The blinking message light on the comm that no one had been there to
ansivet.
Yeoman Marcopius darting away down the corridor.
Admiral Ackbar saying, It looks as if there was an information leak at
Council level, and Representative Q-Varx tapping the malachite tabletop in
her private conference chamber with a stubby brown finger and saying, All
arrangements have been made for the secret meeting with Ashgad, Your
Excellency. Though he has no official position on the planet, this
conference could be the key to the entire policy of beneficial usage of
untapped planetary resources.
Do not meet with AshGad.
Do not Go to the Meridian sector.
What had happened to the Noghri.
The thought wended its way leisurely across her mind. She wondered, if she
were to go into the room behind her and try the door, whether it would open.
But, of course, she thought, locked or unlocked makes little difference. The
house itself seemed to be situated in an utterly deserted wasteland of
sawtoothed mountains and glaring, jeweled plain.
Voices rose to her from somewhere below. She recognized Seti Ashgad's "We'll
just have to go over Larm's head and talk to Dymurra.
Larm's an idiot anyway. He still has no concept of what we need to complete
the Reliant. Has any word come in on the subspace?"
The beautiful baritone carried strongly in the thin, dry air. Larm, thought
Leia. Moff Getelles had an admiral named Larm. She'd met him at the
diplomatic reception on Coruscant to celebrate Getelles's elevation to the
position, one of the last she'd attended at the Palace.
Larm was of the flat-backed, by-the-book, spit-and-polish, boot-kissing
school of soldiering, toadying Getelles and every other Moff and Governor
without ever relaxing his tough-warrior manner. He'd come up through the
fleet as Getelles's stringer, a dark-visaged and sternly efficient foil to
the new Moff's hail-fellow-well-met fairness and had been duly promoted over
the heads of several better-qualified candidates when Getelles had been made
Moff of Antemeridian.
Who Dymurra was she had no idea, though the name was familiar to her.
She couldn't make out the words murmured in reply, but the
purring voice pierced her, an arrow of cold under her solar plexus.
Dzym. She looked down at her hand again.
Soreness lingered on the sides of her neck, over the main arteries, but she
lacked the strength to put her hands up to feel. The cold of death lingered
in her mind, and something else, the aftertaste of nightmare.
That was why she felt so weak.
No, she thought. I feel weak because there was sweetblossom in the water.
"I suppose you're right." Ashgad's voice was quieter, but just as penetrant.
"Three synthdroids! When I think about how much even one of those things
costs . . ."
Dzym's voice was a little louder now. Knowing Ashgad's habit of pacing, Leia
assumed he was farther from his secretary than he had been a few' moments
before. "It could not be helped, my lord. Synthdroids were the only way we
could bring the Death Seed on board the vessels undetected."
The Death Seed! Leia's breath left her, as if with physical shock.
Seven hundred y
ears ago that plague had wiped out millions.
Whole sectors had relapsed into primitive subsistence, as those who
understood machinery and spaceflight had perished wholesale . . .
It was the casualness of Dzym's tone that galvanized Leia into action.
She rose from the divan, pulled the cloaklike folds of her robe more closely
around her--the sunlight held no heat--and made her way shakily to the far
end of the terrace. Perhaps twenty-five meters below her, just above where
the walls of the great, rambling house merged into the harsh basalt of the
bluff itself, another terrace ran the length of that side of the building
and curved around the face of the cliff.
Heavy hedges of brachniel and 1oak grew from planters of imported soil as
windbreaks around two sides, brilliant and alien green against the gray
permacrete. A sort of gazebo stood at one end of the terrace, the shade
densely black within. A complex system of mist jets and pipes mitigated
somewhat the dryness of the air. By the way Ashgad turned, Leia guessed that
Dzym sat within the gazebo's shade.
There was a third being on the terrace, stretched out on a black-and-orange
air-duvet under a veritable rainshower of air misters, and
Leia flinched with revulsion at the sight of it, and the sound of its gluey,
tuba bass.
"Dzym's right." It rolled over, flexed its gelid length--at roughly twelve
meters, it was the longest Hutt Leia had ever seen. It was massive, without
Jabba's obesity; like a young Hutt in its agility and speed but grown to the
size of an old one. "You couldn't have gotten past the medical scans without
them. And only droids would have taken the vessels into hyperspace without a
second jump coordinate."
Hyperspace!
Marcopius. Ezrakh. Captain Ioa. Those poor children of her honor guard . . .
Threepio and Artoo.
Sickness and horror swept her, replaced a moment later by a burning rage.
"Yes, but at a hundred thousand credits apiece!"
"Cheap at the price." The Hutt shrugged. "Dymurra thought it was worth the
expenditure. I agree with him. It wasn't enough to have Liegeus put through
that 'Mission accomplished, we're leaving for Co-ruscant' message, or even
the faked transmissions from the jump point.
We couldn't bring those vessels here. We couldn't destroy them without the
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