Star Wars - Planet Of Twilight (7 page)

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 the 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 years 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 risk of telltale debris. And what do you care, anyway?“ Dymurra paid for the synthdroids, not you.”

“And that makes it all right?” Ashgad turned impatiently from the railing to face the huge, reclining shape. “With an attitude like that, it's no wonder you're no longer ruling this territory, Beldorion.”

“Anyway,” rumbled Beldorion cryptically, “the price is about to come down on them, isn't it? And what's three hundred thousand credits, if you can get rid of all evidence of where Her Excellency is and what became of her?” Once Rieekan goes into a coma, the Council's going to be chasing its tail for days, each member trying to keep the next from being named successor."

He swelled up a little and produced a burp of cosmic proportions, leaking green drool from his mouth and releasing a vast breath of gases that Leia could smell from the terrace above. He rolled a little and delved with one tiny, muscular hand into a washtub-size porcelain bowl of some kind of pink-and-orange snack food that rested on the duvet at his side. Even Ashgad turned his face aside in disgust.

“And don't speak to me about not ruling this Force-benighted planet anymore,” the Hutt added, around a mouthful of small, squirming things.

“No one forced me--me, Beldorion the Splendid, geldorion of the Ruby Eyes--to retire. I ruled this world longer than your petty Empire existed, and I ruled it well.”

He shoved another handful of whatever it was into his enormous mouth.

Some of it escaped and made it nearly to the edge of his duvet before he tongued it up. “So don't tell me I was too wasteful or too lazy to know what I'm talking about.” He extended one hand, and Leia felt it.

The Force.

A silver cup, probably kept in some kind of cooling bowl under the gazebo's black shade, floated into sight and drifted across toward the stubby, outstretched yellow fingers with their golden rings.

And all around her, Leia felt the air change, as if the iridescent sunlight had thickened or changed its composition Itchy, swirling, angry.

Beldorion the Hutt had been trained as a Jedi.

And against his use of the Force, there was a stirring, a reaction, a movement in the Force itself that Leia, though only marginally adept with her Jedi powers, felt like sandpaper on the inside of her skull.

Leia's knees felt weak, and she retreated to the divan again, catching the head of it for balance, shivering within the garnet weight of the state robe.

The Borealis, sent into hyperspace blind and unprogrammed, never to emerge .... But if what Dzym said was true, if the Death Seed plague had been on board, that was just as well.

She had had the Death Seed. She shook her head. It was impossible, according to the records no one recovered.

And Minister Rieekan, her second-in-command in the Council . . When Rieekan goes into his coma . . .

I have to warn him. I have to warn someone . . .

She dropped onto the divan, shaking in every limb with weakness and shock. Panic and rage struggled against the thickness of the sweet-blossom that clogged her brain, a fury to escape, to outwit them.

And the drug whispered its reply, Of course you should. But not just now.

Something in the pocket of her robe pressed into her thigh, hard and uncomfortable. Leia frowned, trying to recall what she'd carried with her in the garment's bulky folds to the meeting with Ashgad. The answer was, of course, Nothing. The velvet garment of state was sufficiently heavy without adding weight to it.

But in that case, who could have put something there, and when She fished and fumbled around until she found the pocket in the lining, originally designed to carry a recording device or, depending on who the wearer planned to meet, a hold-out blaster.