Star Wars - Planet Of Twilight (26 page)

Equipped with primitive retros, the capsule hadn't even buried itself in the twinkling gravel. A percussion rifle crackled somewhere far off, and Luke sensed the distant presence of more riders. He wondered, as Caslo scrambled down the side of the smoking impact crater a hundred meters from the nearest tsil, how' Ashgad managed to pay for weapons for his followers. Had Palpatine left revenues in the hands of his rival? When rocks dance. But the weapons Ashgad was buying were all new or near new, the most modern, the most expensive that bore the Loronar double-moon logo. “All the finest--all the first.” The man had money from somewhere.

Had Callista entered his house? Learned from Taselda, perhaps, where the money came from and where it was being sent? Was that why she'd fled Hweg Shul?

Men were handing crates up out of the pit, passing them to the drivers.

A flurry of shots in the flat distance told Luke of approaching Therans , held off by the ragged perimeter of guards. Someone gave Luke a bale of blaster rifles, which he stowed in the back of his Theran speeder; a crudely tied together bunch of spare energy cores.

So they were getting at least some secondhand, thought Luke, turning the sleek black-and-red cylinders over in his hand before stashing them in a corner. Even at smuggler's prices, those would be cheaper than new, and Ashgad was clearly out to arm every man and woman of the Rationalist Party. They were passing rifles up singly now. He caught one thrown to him, held it briefly in the dim glow of the speeder's console lights to see the make. His mind went back to the gun station, to the embattled, dirty Therans ducking through the shadows of the crazy superstructure, the gawky, dancerlike figure in red swinging down on the cable to throw the grenade.

The gun was a white-and-silver BlasTech, this year's model, small, solid, and familiar in Luke's hands. He knew it well. They were the type of guns with which the entire Honor Guard of the New Republic had been newly outfitted only last month. He'd practiced with them, to while away time, on board the Borealis.

Luke turned it over, and his blood went cold in his veins.

On the butt was the silver coding plate of the Honor Guards, marking the weapon as the property of the New Republic, assigned to the flagship itself.

The gun had come off the Borealis.

“Yo, Lars!” somebody called from the ground. “Asleep at the switch?”

Luke stashed the weapon quickly, caught another handed up to him. He didn't need to hold this one to the console lights, his fingers found the coding plate by themselves. When he carried the next several guns to the back of his speeder he flicked on the glowrod to check the others.

There were a couple from the Adamantine, but most of these had come off Leia's flagship.

There was one--a Flash-4 with a custom grip and a lanyard ring--that he recognized as the one Han had given Leia herself.

I have to escape.

From the corner of her balcony that overlooked the dawn-colored crystal flatlands far below, Leia watched the luxurious black landspeeder that bore Seti Ashgad and his two bodyguards dwindle and perish with the distance. He had avoided her since the kidnapping--probably, she thought, because he knew' himself unable to sustain the masquerade of being his own son before someone who had studied holos of him as she hadbut she had always been conscious of his presence and protection.

His plan, whatever it was, was clear in his mind, and at least for the moment he had to keep her alive.

But Dzym and Beldorion had plans of their own.

Three days. If she lasted that long.

For the first time in days, she had awakened with her mind clear.

The water Liegeus had brought her last night had been clean. Whether that had been an oversight or some kind of gift to her, she knew she had to take advantage of it without delay.

On the threshold of her room she paused, blanket wrapped around her over the thin white nightshirt she wore, long chestnut hair hanging in a braid down her back. Around her--around the high cinder-gray walls of Ashgad's fortress, the spiky, crystalline rocks of the plateau--the greater mountains towered, huge chunks and teeth and masses of crystal, like enormous jewels flashing in the eternal twilight, reminding her of just how steep a drop it was, to the glittering plain below.

Her heart twisted inside her with a sick terror, an awful almost-wish that they'd kept her under the soporific peace of the blossom.

Closing her eyes, she reached out with her mind and heart, formed the image of Luke. He'd come for her once before, when she was trapped in the Termination Block of the Death Star; when she was weak and sick after torture, numb with a grief that it was years before she'd actually feel. I'm here to rescue you, he'd said.

She would have smiled at the memory, had the fear in her not been so great.

In her mind she cried his name Luke! sending it echoing, blazing out across the emptiness of air and crystal and early light. Luke!

He had to hear. He had to.

But in the still cold, the deep, heavy movement of the Force seemed to surround her, filling her with the alien sense of its presence.

It was like the sound of the sea, drowning all other voices in its great voice.

Luke wouldn't hear. She was trapped there alone.

She shook the fear away almost at once, and with it the horrible recollection of the man Dzym's hands on her face, the dreadful, sinking coldness of death.

Luke wouldn't hear. He wouldn't come. She had to figure out what to do and what was going on.

They had released the Death Seed.

She returned to the shadowy bedchamber, sat on the end of the bed where the sunlight fell on it, and drew her feet up under the blanket.

She felt a droch bite her and scratched furiously, the insect dropping from the bedding into the dazzling carpet of mottled light. It curled itself into a tight brown-black pellet no bigger than a pinhead and died.

Blossom made you accept almost anything, she thought, revolted.

Even lying down in bedding that you knew was alive with parasites. She was bitten all over from sitting in the dim chamber at tea with Beldorion the Splendid, too.

They had released the Death Seed. If they could control it, or thought they could control it, through Dzym, it was an easy guess what their negotiations with Moff Getelles and Admiral Larm were. Curse them, she thought. Curse them!

Dzym was somehow a key. He could lay it on them somehov--transmitted by the synthdroids--and call it off, as he had called it off of her.

She remembered the ecstasy on his face, and at other times, his air of paying attention to something else, listening to something else, like a man counting down time.

And yet, what was the point?

But did Moff Getelles really think that he was strong enough to take over the Meridian sector, once quarantine and containment procedures got under way? To hold it in the face of a concerted Republic effort to drive him out?

And for what purpose? Pedducis Chorios, that nest of smugglers and Warlords, would be impossible to control effectively. Durren's planetary coalition was solidly behind the Republic. Budpock had been one of the Kebellion's most loyal supporters. Nam Chorios was a waterless, lifeless, poverty-stricken rock.

To complete the Reliant, Ashgad had said.

But she'd seen the Reliant. It was not a planet-killing Dreadnought, but a midsize freighter. Boxes . . . of both kinds. What kind of payload could a midsize ship carry that would make this all worthwhile, even were the gun stations to be eliminated?

Leia shivered, and rubbed her wrists, where the memory of Dzym's cold hands remained.

The door chime sounded politely. Leia swung around, startled, drawing the comforter close around her and sliding her hand toward the lightsaber concealed among the pillows.

But it was only Liegeus, bowing shyly in the doorway, a porcelain pitcher of water in his hands. “I'm pleased you're feeling better, my dear.” His eyes went--as Leia's had, automatically--to the empty pitcher beside the bed. She had drunk all the water the minute she'd realized it wasn't drugged.

By his gentle smile she saw that he knew.

mate.“ He held out to her the glass goblet. ”Ashgad's never noticed any difference. I've brought you some holovids, too; imprisonment without them is only bearable if one is drugged."

Leia studied the man's face warily across the rim. “And what now?”

she asked softly. “What happens to me while he's gone? Or was that why he left, so that it wouldn't be his fault?”

“No,” said Liegeus quickly, “no, of course not. He isn't a bad man, my dear.”

“He is the worst kind of man.” Leia turned her face aside. The words, Death Seed, lay close to the tip of her tongue and she knew she must not say them, must not let even Liegeus know how much she knew. He might stand up to Beldorion for her sake, but she knew--she had seen--that he was unable to stand up to Dzym. And who could blame him for that'.

He was like Greglik, she thought. She was fond of him, she pitied him, but she knew she could not trust him.

“No,” insisted the holo faker. “Ashgad . . .” He hesitated. “I understand what's making him . . . do all of this. And it . . . I can't explain.”

Her long dark braid whipped as she turned back to him, to meet the utter wretchedness of his gaze.

“I can't,” he said. “But please, trust me.” Sitting beside her on the divan, he fumbled in the pocket of his lab smock, brought out a black cylinder half again the length of his palm and perhaps twice the thickness of his thumb. “This is for you,” he said. “i'll have to have it back just before he returns, you understand.”

Leia turned it over in her hands. A comlink. Dedicated circuitry, at a guess--there wasn't a keypad. Probably made of standard components, though. And old, like everything else on this planet. The new ones were half that size and you needed micron tools to work on them.

“I've changed the combination on the door pad,” Liegeus went on.

He didn't quite glance back over his shoulder, but almost. “He shouldn't be able to get in here.” He didn't say of whom they spoke--he didn't need to. "He has no computer skills, he can't . . .

do that kind of thinking. Whatever he tells you, don't let him in. If he tries to come in, or if he does manage to, somehow, use the comlink.

I'll only be moments away, in the . . ." He stopped himself--at a guess, from saying something that would reveal to her that there was a ship under construction on the premises. Why the secrecy about that?

What part did it play in their plan. “In the other part of the house.”

He made a move to turn away, and Leia caught his sleeve. “Who is he?”

she asked. “What is he” The dark eyes looked quickly away, and she saw the too-sensitive mouth flinch. “He is . . . what he is. He's a native of this world . . .”

“There are no natives of this world.” Leia felt his hand cold under the grip of her fingers. “Before the Grissmaths started shipping political prisoners here there was nothing but stones. What is it he wants to do with me? What is it he tried to do, that night?” You said Beldorion sold him someone he had enslaved. For what purpose And what became of him?"

“Nothing,” said Liegeus quickly. She looked down and saw' his hands were 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.