trembling. "I can't explain. It's . . . it's something few people would
understand."
The fear in his eyes was terrible to see, and her heart went out to him in
pity. She put her hand over the cold, slender fingers. "Try me," she urged.
Liegeus got quickly to his feet, and backed to the door. "I . . ."
Then he shook his head. "Beldorion may invite you to tea or to supper
again," he said. "Don't go, or make sure that I go with you. Just remember
to spend as much time as you can on the balcony, in the sunlight, and you'll
be all right."
The door opened, and he stepped through. In the instant before it closed
Leia met his eyes again, and saw in them longing, and grief, and a terror
that had swallowed nearly everything within the man's soul.
She said quietly, "Thank you," and the metal panel swished between them. A
moment later the outer locks clicked.
After he had gone, Leia sat for a moment, gathering her breath and her
courage. Then she got up, crossed to the dresser where she kept her gown,
the pins and jewels that had been in her hair, the folded-up mass of the red
velvet robe. Two of the flat-backed cabochon jewels from the
robe's chest piece, picked loose, gave her enough purchase to bend the end
of one of the hairpins into a makeshift manual screwdriver. It took her five
minutes to open up the comlink, and recalibrate the beam.
Picking a simple keypad lock by means of a micron beam was an excruciatingly
tedious process, but she had all day, and nothing else to do. Judging by the
number of holovids he'd brought, Liegeus didn't expect to be free of his
duties on the Reliant until evening.
Lock picking was one of those skills she'd acquired in her years with the
Rebellion, one of the minor guerrilla survival skills pilots had taught one
another, just in case, like making explosives out of certain brands of game
tokens, or tinkering water filters from sand and flight-suit liners.
Something simple that might just save your life.
Winter--who'd taught her this particular trick, which she in turn had
learned from an outlaw slicer on Coruscant--had said, "Be sure to write down
every combination as you try it. Sure as little hawk-bat eggs, the minute
you get bored and quit writing them down, you'll score, and then you won't
remember what the combination was."
Leia wrote them down, laboriously, with another hairpin scratching in the
soft buttonwood back of one of the drawers pulled from the chest.
An hour and a half after noon, as far as she could judge from the angle of
the sunlight, the lock opened.
With the sensation of having been unexpectedly knocked breathless she
stepped back, closed the doors, let the lock click over again. She had to be
sure it would open at need--that it hadn't been a fluke. If they caught her
outside and she couldn't get back in, she would be incarcerated indeed.
It opened a second time. Leia slipped the converted comlink into her pocket,
not without a qualm. But the likelihood of encountering Dzym was marginally
less than the likelihood that she'd have to get back into this room on less
notice than the ten minutes it would take to switch the beam over from comm
to micron. She reached back to feel the comforting hardness of the
lightsaber tied around her body beneath her shirt and stepped out into the
hall.
Luke had said to her, over and over on those occasions on which she'd put
aside the pressing demands of state to train with her brother's pupils, The
eyes are the most dangerous of the senses, because you'll believe them
first. Pausing at the foot of the stair, Leia shut her eyes, slowed her
breath, and listened deeply to the house around her.
Reached out with her mind, as Luke had taught her. Felt for the flow and
movement of the Force.
It was everywhere, a singing vast as light. The ocean of light, Beldorion
had said, utterly unlike anything she had experienced on Yavin, on Coruscant
. . . anywhere that she had ever tried this.
Strong and frightening, as if something huge stood just behind her shoulder,
watching her with sad wisdom.
Is there a reason to fear this? she thought, holding her fear in check. A
minute passed, two. Beneath that deep, humming strength, she was able to
sort out true sound in the rooms around her.
Beldorion's thick voice came from his quarters close-by "Beautiful,
beautiful! All that, from just those unprepossessing little glet-mites!"
And the harsh, nasally whine of a Kubaz's inflection "It's all in
finding the correct solution, you see, Master." That would be the chef, she
thought. The unworthy heir of the great and lamented Zubindi Ebsuk. "tinder
ordinary circumstances, of course, glet-mites would never have contact with
a solution of hall d'main excretions--their worlds aren't even in the same
Sector! But it so happens that the hormones contained within halles d'main
are the exact physiological complement of the glet-mite teleological systems
. . ."
And under it a cheepin& tiny voices protesting. Leia shivered.
Of Dzym she could hear nothing. Did he make sound, when he tooveda.
Pressed to the harsh plaster of the wall, she ignored the sudden jab of a
droch bite on her ankle, probed deeper with her mind. There was a kind of
heavy vibration somewhere in the house, the steady whine, as of machinery.
The house generator, of course. Liegeus had said Dzym wasn't capable of
"that kind of thinking," to cut into the household computer and make it tell
what the security keypad numbers were .
Leia wondered how good their security was.
Whether it was the smell of Hutt or revulsion over the drochs or just
overwrought nerves, she was feeling light-headed by the time she found her
way out of the dim, curtained quarters of the Hutt to a door into what was
clearly Set? Ashgad's portion of the house, the long, sun-flooded chamber
that looked out onto the terrace below her own balcony.
Here the ceilings were higher, the heavy, heat-trapping curtains drawn back
from the line of transparisteel panels that gave onto the terrace.
There was an airy functionality about the place, with its immobile
wood-and-leather chairs, its desk put together from planks of but-tonwood,
its simple sideboard. The monitor screen in the niche above the desk was
new, Leia saw, a high-definition Sorosuub X-80--they'd had to cut the niche
bigger for it, and so recently that the chipped-out plaster hadn't yet had
time to discolor. Leia paused in the doorway to listen again--If Dzym's mind
doesn't work in terms of computers, how did he get a job as secretary?--then
crossed to the desk and brought out the board, keying in quickly a request
for systems shell. Once she knew the type of system she pulled up data on
the house itself.
Wiring diagrams showed her the shaft that led down through the heart of the
mesa, to the garage from which she'd seen Ashgad's hench men take that
elegant--and nearly new--black speeder at dawn. After a little puzzling she
identified where she was and where the head of the shaft lay on the other
side of the house near the docking bay and its co
mpound of workshops and
labs.
She ran a print, then called up another instruction and asked for further
data. The docking compound beyond those blast doors she'd seen was enormous.
For a world where equipment of any sort was scarce, there seemed to be no
shortage of it there.
A complete complement of the extremely expensive equipment that charged the
antigrav coils of speeder buoyancy tanks. A major computer system hooked to
an independent generator and dedicated to hyperspace engineering. Liegeus's
holo faking works Good grief! Millions of separate data clips, far beyond
hobby or art. That, too, had to have been part of their plan, and might
explain why in five days there'd been no attempt at rescue.
Another system centered in this very room--probably, thought Leia, behind
the slatted cupboard doors to her right. She got up, still reading down at
the backup systems screen high-security locks with backup wiring on various
doors, including, she saw with a certain annoyance, that of the lift from
this level down to the garage.
She ran a zoom check on the schematic. No such backup existed on the lift
shaft's repair stairway. Her calf muscles would ache, but she could do it.
She keyed a further command to open the combinations on file. Yes, she'd
gotten that of her chamber door correct--silly, but it gratified her to have
her skill officially confirmed. It was listed as having been changed shortly
after dawn that morning, probably the moment Set? Ashgad disappeared into
the morning glow. She ran a print, folded the sheets of plast together,
stuffed them into the pocket of her trousers, and went to investigate what
was behind the slatted doors that rated a separate power backup.
It was a CCIR board. The central control unit for synthdroids--How many of
the things did he have. Leia counted wiring for two dozen.
Two dozen?
She tried to remember what she'd learned about synthdroids from her one tour
of the Loronar Corporation facility on Carosi's larger moon. That had been
during the Daysong uproar about the relative
rights of synthflesh. Synthflesh, Leia recalled, was supposed to retain
automatic immunities to virus and antibodies, but obviously they'd gotten
around that one. She did remember the officials of Loronar telling her that
CCIR technology operated on near-instantaneous transmission between a
special variety of programmable-matrix crystals.
Was that an intrinsic part of the plan, she wondered, or just a convenience?
Leia returned to the computer. Every second she remained in this room
increased the likelihood of encountering Dzym, or Liegeus, or Beldorion, but
this might be the only chance she had. It was hard to know what else she
might need. She ran a compressed print of a Corevide scan on the names she
had overheard Dymurra. Getelles.
Reliant. When it was over she copied the information to a wafer, shoved both
the wafer and the formidable sheaf of flimsiplast into the thigh pockets of
her trousers, and replaced the plast in the printer with fresh so that it
would not be obvious that some two hundred sheets had been printed out.
Heart beating hard enough to sicken her, she closed her eyes again, probing
at the stillness of the house.
She heard nothing, but she wasn't sure if she was doing this right or not.
If she'd had more training--if she'd concentrated more on it--could she have
reached through this strange, heavy miasma of the Force to summon Luke.
That way lay despair, and she shook the thought away.
She studied her first printout of the wiring schematic again, identifying
the lift shaft, the stairway that wound down its side. By overlaying the
schematic of the backup systems, she could easily identify the room that
contained both the CCIR terminal, and the main computer station The room
where she now stood.
Through that door. Down another flight of steps to a round reception area
that contained nothing more important than an enormous light sculpture and a
couple of artificial waterfalls. The lift doors opened there, as did the
access hatch for the maintenance stairs.
She glanced over her shoulder at the wide transparisteel panels leading onto
the terrace, aware of how secure the light made her feel, how safe. As she
headed toward the reception area, the doors to the lift and the access
stairs, she found herself hoping that the room would have transparisteel.
It didn't. It was dark, save for the flamboyant rainbows of the light
sculpture, whose colored patterns twinkled and flashed in the murmuring
waterfalls, half-seen in the gloom. It stank of drochs and Hutt, and Leia
dared not touch what she thought were the glow panels, for fear of
activating something that would reveal to others where she was.
Picking her way between the pale mushroom shapes of cushioned furniture
years unused, by the dim reflections of the light sculpture, she thought,
The stairs will be unlit.
She pulled her shirt out of the waistband of her trousers, fumbled
underneath to untie the lightsaber from around her body. The cold laser
blade didn't give much light, but at least, she thought, it was better than
groping downward in utter dark.
"True Jedi can see in the dark, bartim," Beldorion had rumbled to her once a
day or two ago, when he'd asked her to join him for lunch and a bask on the
terrace--she no longer even remembered how the subject of Jedi powers had
arisen. "They see not with their eyes--they see with their noses, with their
ears, with the hairs of their head, and with their skins. You have neglected
your training, little princess." He'd shaken a tiny bejeweled finger at her.
"They used to have us run races in the Caves of Masposhani, miles below the
ground. Used to drop us on the dark sun worlds of Af'El and Y'nybeth, where
there is no spectrum of visible light. But the great Jedi, the Masters--Yoda
and Thon and Nomi Sunrider--they could summon light, could make metal glow
so that their puny little friends wouldn't stumble either. They'd hold a
pin--so . . ." He'd reached one slimy hand to pluck a hairpin from her head,
Leia flinching but too dazed with the drug to pull back.
The Hutt had held the pin between thumb and forefinger, vast ruby eyes
looking past it into hers. And she saw', like a dream she'd dreamed and
forgotten, a fragment of his memory, a man's thin face, bone-thin and
horribly scarred within a great gray tousle of hair, holding a hairpin as
the Hutt was holding hers, the metal curve of its upper end incandescent and
shedding light enough to see the pillars and frescoes of the room in which
he stood.
Leia had shivered, as the memory vision died Shivered to think of
all that ancient learning, all the techniques and knowledge that Luke had
been so painstakingly trying to jigsaw together for years, sunk in the mucky
well of the Hutt's indolent mind. All that unlimited power, put, not to evil
use, as Vader and Palpatine had put it, but to the service of utter
pettiness, even as he could think of enslaving her for no better purpose
than to regain his rule over defenseless farmers or to
beat an old rival who
had no more actual power than he.
The lightsaber weighed heavy in her hand. You must learn to use your powers,
Luke had said. We need champions of the Force. There aren't so many of us
that we can afford to choose.
But every time she thumbed the toggle, every time the cold, clear sky-hued
blade hummed to life, Leia saw only shadows the shadow of Vader. The shadow'
of Palpatine. The shadows of her own anger, her own impatience, and the
righteous certainties she had come to distrust.
And now, the moldy shadows of Beldorion and the pettiness of greed.
The shadows of the future she feared, when Anakin, Jacen, Jaina--those three
incalculable fragments of her body and her life came to the age when they
would choose either the light or the dark.
Still, at the moment she had no other option. She activated the blade, and
pushed open the discreet access hatch that led into the service stairs.
Something she couldn't see clearly whipped out of sight down the first curve
of the flight. The smell of drochs was choking. The dim glow of the
lightsaber's blade showed her only the faintest of outlines a meter around
her, the steep little wedge-shaped stairs--cut into the rock of the mesa
itselfthe descending curve of the ceiling close over her head.
Right hand clutching the weapon's haft, left hand touching the centerpost of
the stairs, she moved downward, the scald of adrenaline cold fever in her
veins. She didn't know what she'd do if she reached the garage to find one
of the synthdroid servants on guard there or if there were no landspeeders
to steal. From the high balcony outside her room she had looked west and
north as far as she could and had seen nothing but the wastelands of crystal
mountains and endless, glittering plains.
There might, of course, be a resort casino and greenputt playing field a
hundred meters south of this place. She could almost hear her friend
Callista's wry, soft comment, and her heart ached with the hope that Luke
would somehow find her, here on this world. But I wouldn't bet the tent on
it. just the memory of the kind of thing Callista would say made her smile,
the ironic image giving her courage in the darkness.
She stopped.
There was something sitting on the step ahead of her, just beyond the range
of the cold blade's light.
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