other aliens of Hweg Shul the Arcona who operated one of the
majie-processing plants and a couple of Sullustans who owned the biggest
branswed towers in the district. Luke noticed that all were vaguely
ostracized by most of the Newcomer humans. He'd encountered this a number of
times at the shop, this unspoken prejudice against the non-human species of
the Core worlds. Stupid, when you thought of their technologies. But then
the prejudices of the Empire had been stupid and had, in fact, brought about
its downfall.
More synthdroids guarded the door. He doubted that most of the people in the
room realized that the guards weren't alive or human.
They were realistic to the smallest degree, though the hair was a
give-away--perfect, human, but with the oddly dead look that replants
frequently had--and the smell. Everyone in the room smelled of sweat, of
beer, of coffbine; of the salt of work and life. Synthflesh, until it grows
into organic matter as a patch, requires no nourishment and excretes no
by-products. Luke recalled an article he'd read about Loronar Corporation's
efforts to make synthdroids that would be acceptable to scentcued species
like the Chadra-Fans and Wookiees.
There were even humans who reacted badly to the deeply buried anomaly of
something that looked like a human and smelled like nothing.
The conclusion of the article, as he recalled, was that the project was low
on the Loronar priorities list. Chadra-Fans and Wookiees had little
purchasing power and were considered an insufficient market to take the
trouble over, even at a hundred thousand credits a throw'.
"Arvid." Gerney Caslo jostled over to them through the crowd as people began
to settle themselves on the edges of the low daises that were scattered
around the room and on the compressed chairs set between.
The whole place had been carpeted in a kind of dense industrial weave, which
lent it an odd hybrid look. What had been food niches were now filled with
the sort of cheap knock-off artwork available to the wealthy on thinly
settled worlds bad holos of famous sculp ture, sometimes edited to
substitute the faces of the new owner and his or her family, or cheap little
sixteen-color-lights displays that ran through their cycles in a minute and
a half. Luke had seen some beautiful sand-glazed Oldtimer pottery, and
wondered that neither Seti Ash-gad nor his father, after all those years on
the planet, had thought to include it in the house.
Had the elder Ashgad so much resented this world that he'd have none of its
works? But surely the son, who had been born there, or at least raised there
he didn't look more than forty--wouldn't share the prejudice to the same
degree? Or was Ashgad's other house, his dwelling in the Mountains of
Lightning, more his than his father's?
"We're looking for a couple of boys for a job," Caslo went on, speaking from
the corner of his mouth like a bad guy in a holovid.
"There's a drop coming in tomorrow night."
"Where?"
"Ten Cousins."
Luke had heard Croig speak of the place. The Cousins in question were tsils,
the crystal chimneys standing in a ring instead of a line, markers of some
unknown geological process. A smuggler's dream, a formation easily
identified on a scan but small enough to search in a night.
"Can you use Owen here, too?" Arvid nodded to Luke. "He's working for Croig.
He could use the cash."
Booldrum Caslo, a thickset, smooth-faced little man with heavy
sight-amplification equipment bolted into his head, grinned, "Anyone who
works for Croig could use cash."
Caslo studied Luke for a moment, then nodded. "We can use as many as we can.
I hear it's a good-size cargo. You got that speeder of yours running yet?"
Luke nodded, though running was a matter of interpretation.
"You'll work pickup, then," said Caslo. Arvid sniffed as the older man
walked away.
"Doesn't trust you as a perimeter guard."
"Hunh."
"To keep the Therans away," explained Gin, coming over and perching on the
edge of the dais where they sat. "Oh, the Listeners
sometimes get word of drops and try to stop them, but mostly I think it's
just keeping tabs on whatever's going on. Mostly they seem to concentrate on
. . ."
The lights dimmed, save for a single one on the main dais, set unobtrusively
in what had been an olympian feeding niche. A curtain at the back of the
room parted, and Seti Ashgad stepped through.
Do not trust him, Callista had said. Do not meet with him, or accede to any
demand he makes.
WhyS.
It was the first time Luke had seen the man face-to-face, though on the
Borealis he'd glimpsed him and his escort in passing. He had not been born
when Ashgad's father had been exiled by the Emperor Palpatine, but his
teenage interest in the Rebellion had made him familiar with the older
politician's easygoing charm and chameleon promises from holos.
The old man must be in his eighties now, thought Luke, watching the son
mount the dais and exchange jokes and pleasantries with those in the
audience who knew him best.
He hadn't heard Croig or anyone at the Blue Blerd of Happiness speak of the
older man at all. Yet he'd defeated the (possibly Jedi) Hutt, taken over his
power and his house. So he must have been a remarkable man. Was he dead, or
just retired to the house in the Mountains of Lightning?
"Now, now', we can't have any of that," Ashgad was saying, to a raucous
suggestion that Republic troops would soon be on hand to "settle for" the
Therans. Good-natured sarcasm dripped from his deep voice.
"They're the majority, after all, you know. It's their planet."
"It's our planet, too!" yelled Gerney Caslo, springing to his feet.
"We bust our backs putting plants on this motherless rock. Don't that
count?"
"Does it?" Ashgad swept the crowd with a green eye suddenly cold and angry.
"I thought so. I was optimistic enough to assure you I could do something
about that. It appears that I was wrong."
Silence fell, but Luke felt anger pass like ground lightning through the
crowd.
"As you know," said the politician, now suddenly the focus of the entire
quiet room, "I had high hopes. Through connections I was able to obtain a
meeting, not with some politician, not with some bureaucrat, not with some
committee member, but with Leia Organa Solo herself--not," he added
bitterly, "that she was at all enthusiastic about coming, as she made clear
to me from the outset."
They'd called the senior Ashgad the Golden Tempter. Luke knew, listening to
his son, what he must have sounded like. Ashgad used his voice like a master
artist used a light organ, evoking nuance, shade, twilight, and brilliance
with the slightest shifts of tone and volume.
"I apologize," went on Ashgad, "for my enthusiasm and for my folly. I owe
you all that apology, for raising hopes not destined to be fulfilled." He
gestured, and another man--at this distance Luke couldn't tell whether it
was a synthdroid or not, though there was something
suspiciously smooth
about the way he moved--slipped through the curtain and set up a holo player
in the niche.
"Perhaps I should let Her Excellency tell you in her own words."
The light in the chamber dimmed still further. The holo of Leia was of
crystal-clear quality, appearing almost solid in the near darkness, as if
she were bathed in radiance from an unseen source. The scale was
perfect--life-size, so that she truly seemed to be in the room, hands folded
on her knees, the heavy folds of her robe of state spread around her. The
Noghri bodyguards squatted on their bunkers, nearly a dozen strong, like
shadows behind her. Her chin was up, and she spoke with a cold precision
Luke had only heard her use when she was truly angry.
"I'm afraid that any help from the Republic is out of the question, Master
Ashgad," she said. "The Republic cannot afford to be seen to support a
minority-any minority by prospective planetary councils still undecided
about joining. Too much trade depends on our maintenance of the status quo
and too many people see the efforts of the Rationalists on your planet as
disruptive, unruly, and criminal."
A buzz stirred the crowd. Beside Luke, Gerney Caslo mutttered,
"Criminal--I'll show you criminal, honey!"
"Criminal to make an honest living pumping water . . ."
"What's disruptive about wanting medicine for my son . . . ."
Leia's image went on, "I understand your problems, Master Ashgad.
But the Republic must look at the larger picture. And, quite frankly, the
discontent of a handful of settlers on a world that isn't even a
member of the Republic is not worth the two billion credits it would
cost--not to mention the damage done to the Republic's image--should we
intervene in your quarrel."
Her last words were drowned in a rising roar. Someone yelled, "Festering hag
witch, what in blazes does she know?" and Luke was on his feet, his whole
body aflame with rage, not at the man who had shouted insults at his sister
but at the man who stood on the dais, just visible beside the glimmering
holo, his head bowed in pious resignation and regret.
Luke yelled, "Liar!" but his voice was drowned in other outcries, and before
he could draw breath for another shout he realized that to protest that the
holo was faked would only reveal his own identity and make it impossible for
him to locate Callista. The holo was as much a fake as the cheap sculptures
in the niches, holographically altered to resemble family members. For one
thing, even before Leia had eliminated the bodyguards, she had never
appeared in public with the Noghri.
When "Leia" rose from her chair Luke was sure of it the chair itself was
nothing like those in the Borealis's conference room or indeed anywhere on
the executive flagship at all. The crimson robe was one she'd worn on a
dozen state occasions over the past few years, easily copied. Luke had never
seen it done this effectively, but presumably a really good slicer could get
a holo of Leia's face and alter the movement of the lips to mesh with any
voder-modified script.
But all this, he realized, was something he'd learned over the course of
years with the Rebellion, years of dealing with the sophisticated
technologies and scientific neepery available on Coruscant and its inner
worlds. As a kid on Tatooine--and had he grown to adulthood there, as Uncle
Owen and Uncle Owen's friends had--he'd had no more suspicion that truth
could be skillfully edited than he'd had the ability to fly.
They believed what they saw.
They believed Seti Ashgad.
And they were furious.
Ashgad was up on the dais artfully giving the impression that he was
mollifying the crowd without in any way lessening their outrage.
Luke slipped past the synthdroids by the door, crossed through the smaller
chamber beyond, his boots making no sound in the carpet, too angry to
remain. He was aware of the synthdroids watching him--their Central Control
tinit, wherever it was, was undoubtedly programmed with the faces of every
Rationalist on the planet. But no one stopped him.
He stepped through a pair of long windows to the outside, breathing hard
with fury, and made his way through the thickets of blueleaf and aromatic
shrubs to the street. The wind had died to a dull hammering with the coming
of full darkness. The voices in the dining hall still echoed in his ears,
yelling vituperation at his sister.
Beyond the edges of the settlements, the tsils glistened like spikes of ice
in the cold-eyed starlight of the wastes. The ground was lustrous with
frost, and the cold was like iron. He felt the Force all around him,
breathing--waiting.
There were people out there in the waste, not far away. Though they bore no
lights he sensed them dimly eddies, stirrings in the Force.
Therans?
Probably. Watching Seti Ashgad's house.
Release your anger, his father had said. Release your anger.
He had meant it then as a lure, a come-on--use your anger in combat--a
fool's trick.
But now Luke truly released his anger, let go of it let it rise like steam,
to be absorbed and defused by the stars. There was entirely too much anger
afoot that night anyway, deliberately being stirred up, raised like a
magician raising power back in that house. Rid of it, Luke was able to think
clearly again, to ask questions. And the chief question was What does Seti
Ashgad stand to gain?
Under pouring rain, the port of Bagsho on Nim Drovis crawled with troops.
Han had alerted the Med Center from orbit that he had fifteen critical cases
of radiation sickness on board. Ism Oolos, the Ho'Din physician he'd talked
to over subspace, awaited him in the docking bay with an emergency team,
surrounded by a squad of uniformed Drovians who seized Han's arms the minute
he came down the Falcon's ramp, shoved him up against the nearest wall, and
searched him none too gently.
"Is this really necessary?" demanded Dr. Oolos indignantly; Han also
expressed himself to the head of the Drovian squad along the same lines but
with considerably greater emphasis.
"Doc, if you'd seen some of the armaments coming in for the Gopso'o tribes,
you wouldn't be asking that." The Drovian sergeant pulled out its esophageal
plug to make the remark, and shoved it back in with a squish. Since the
onset of high-tech civilization in the wake of Old Republic military bases,
most Drovians--who had been a pastoral network of tribes when contacted--had
acquired the habit of sucking zwil--a cake-flavoring agent common to
Algarine cuisine--through the mucous membranes of their breathing tubes via
fist-size spongy plugs saturated with the stuff. Four-fifths of the soldiers
wore plugs of various sizes and the air was thick with the dreamy,
cinnamon-vanilla scent, where it wasn't heavy with the odors of wet
vegetation, mildews inadvertently imported from every corner of the galaxy,
and the oily smoke of burning.
"You must excuse us." Dr. Oolos ducked his bright-tentacled head as he
accompanied Han, the sergeant, two troopers,
and the med team back up the
ramp. "The Gopso'o have been restless for months--ances-tral enemies of the
Drovians . . ." He lowered his soft voice and his twenty-five-meter height
to speak without the sergeant hearing. "Not a particle of difference between
them, you understand, except that they have been at blood feud for,
literally, centuries. I have heard the original issue was whether the root
word for truth is in the singular case or the plural, but so many atrocities
were committed on both sides that, of course, it barely matters now. The
Drovians were the ones who made interstellar contact first, so, of course,
they're the dominant tribe, but . . ."
"They're killing each other over a festering grammatical construction?"
Han couldn't keep his voice down. Dr. Oolos winced and gestured him quiet,
but it was too late. The Drovian sergeant grabbed Han's arm in a viselike
pincer "I'm killin' those moldspawns because they killed my family, see?
Because they disemboweled Garnu Hral Eschen, because they tore the flesh off
the bones of the children of Ethras, because they .
. ."
"All right," said Han hastily, as the sergeant was dragging him closer and
closer to the muzzle of its gun. "Uh--Chewie . . ." He turned just in time
to make it appear to the Wookiee, emerging from the door of the bridge, that
he was in no actual danger and manufactured a cheerful grin. "Chewie, this
is Sergeant . . ."
"Sergeant Knezex Hral Piksoar." The sergeant shoved its plug back into its
breathing apparatus again; a little thread of greenish mucus squirted out
around the side to join the glistening crust that caked the lower part of
its face.
"it's necessary that they be permitted to search the ship," the Ho'Din
informed them gently. "It's purely a formality. With local unrest as violent
as it has been, and with forty deaths from the plague so far on the Republic
base . . ."
"Forty?" Han stared up at the willowy form towering over him, aghast.
"I fear so. It's why I questioned you so closely before I was permitted to
give you medical clearance to make planetfall.
Authorities here have put the whole base under quarantine."
Hral Piksoar allowed them into the first of the several storage holds Han
had converted to emergency sick bays. It held its weapons trained in four
directions while Dr. Oolos and his team passed swiftly from victim to
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