Star Wars - Planet Of Twilight (29 page)

It was now or never. She could afford no delay.

Ashgad's study first. There were two more things she needed to find out.

The study faced north, like her room. Its inner wall was currained in shadow, but the faded sunset reflected from the cliffs and faceted towers of crystal of the mountains beyond the plateau, and the ghostly crazy quilt of light lay across the white tiled floor with a strange radiance that was somehow comforting. Leia called up the main files, ran a scan-and-print on everything concerning the Death Seed. It was fifty or sixty sheets, double sided, closely spaced, and she shoved those into her bedroll with the rest of the printouts she'd gotten earlier.

Then she paged through the directories until she found what she needed maps of the area, elevations, travel guides. There was a village twenty kilometers away, on the other side of the mountain spur on which the fortress stood. Ashgad would look there, she thought. Odds were good they wouldn't have equipment strong enough to send a signal offplanet, anyway. Sixteen kilometers in the other direction was one of the gun stations, on a shoulder of the mountains called Bleak Point.

She thought she could reach it, keeping to the hem of the foothills for cover. Deserted it might be, its automatic systems guarding this world as they had guarded it for nearly a thousand years, but there would be equipment of some kind there that she might be able to use.

She checked the household plan again. Through that door, right up the hall where she had turned left before; a flight of stairs and a locked door whose combination, according to the computer, was 339-05't-001-6.

The antigrav tanks were stored behind the second door. The light in the sunset sky was dimming, and she felt an obscure pang of fear.

Though she knew Dzym was active in daylight as well as at night, by day she felt safer from him. Whoever and whatever he was, she wanted to be out of the house before full dark.

A thought crossed her mind. Turning back, she opened the slatted doors into the small chamber where the CCIR Central Control [Init stood, amber power lights glowing like eyes in the dark.

This would have to be fast, she thought. Liegeus would be working with the synthdroids in the docking compound. Beldorion would certainly have one or two about his quarters and maybe one in the kitchen with his grubby little Kubaz cook. The synthdroids' wholesale collapse would get them on her trail, but the only ones on her trail would be Liegeus and Dzym, not twenty-something centrally controlled and extremely mobile synthetic humans.

Her hand was on the toggle of her lightsaber when the swish of the outer doors froze her where she stood. The next second voices sounded in the room, and she barely had time to pull shut the slatted doors that concealed the Control [Init in its vestibule.

Three days! she wanted to scream. He said he'd be gone three days!

The voice was the voice of Seti Ashgad.

“I told you not to go near her!” he was saying, and Leia was shocked to hear how broken and shrill was his voice. An old man's voice.

"Skywalker's her brother, and a Jedi Knight. He'll know if she dies, and it's to() soon to have them know they can choose a successor!

Our whole plan will come adrift if . . ."

“You've told me that before.” Dzym's voice hissed in the twilight.

“Don't treat me like an imbecile, Ashgad. Are you telling me that you believe this puling little wreck over me? Are you?”

Leia turned one of the slats of the door, put her eye to it. No light had come up in the long study, and the fading daylight outside did not reach to its inner wall. She could make out faces, and the sharp white V of Ashgad's shirtfront . . . she thought he was wearing a gray or white cap of some sort, blurring into the blur of his face. Of Dzym she could distinguish almost nothing, save a slumped dark suggestion of evil, a gleam of eyes that reminded her unpleasantly of something else.

Other eyes, recently seen . . .

Liegeus stammered when he spoke. "I merely said--I thought when I found her yesterday afternoon . . . she hasn't wakened, my lord.

She's lying up there cold and barely breathing. I've checked on her all through today . . ."

“And you thought,” whispered Dzym, and the shadow of him shifted with the slow ophidian turning of his head, “you jumped to the conclusion that I had disobeyed my lord's request--that I would only wait until his back was turned . . .”

Leia thought he reached out one hand toward Liegeus's face.

Though it was difficult to make out what was happening she thought the halo faker fell back a pace, his back to the wall. Thought she heard him whisper, “Please . . .” with utter terror in his voice.

“Did you check the room?” asked Ashgad, rather quickly. “Could it have happened another way? Could another . . . ?”

“Of course not!” Dzym swung around on him, Liegeus stepping quickly out of his reach. "What other besides me has the strength? What other besides me is old enough, developed enough. I have told you.

Told you that and not to treat me as if I haven't a brain! Let us go to her and see if this whiner is even telling the truth."

Liegeus turned hastily, and Leia heard the swoosh of the door in the darkness; Ashgad said hoarsely, “Wait.”

It was hard to see, and the murmuring voices were barely audible, but Leia thought Liegeus had gone ahead, leaving Ashgad and Dzym alone in the darkening room. Ashgad spoke almost too low to hear, but she thought he said, “It was a long journey. I should have taken you.”

Dzym made no reply, or if he did speak, it was too low to hear.

“I'd have taken care of that woman in Hweg Shul somehow. Kept her from you. Kept her from talking. Next time . . .”

“There is no necessity,” whispered Dzym, “for 'next time.”

“When Larm's troops land I'll have her taken care of. I promise. You won't need to worry about her betraying you. No one believes her anyway. But I . . . look at me.” The shrill, old-man voice cracked, and Leia, without quite knowing how, realized that he wasn't wearing a cap, as she had thought. His black hair had grayed almost to whiteness. "I had to get out of there late last night, after the meeting. I had to . . .

to come back."

“To come back,” whispered Dzym mockingly. "To someone you don't trust.

To someone you think will disobey . . ."

“I never thought you disobeyed.”

“You believed the whiner.”

"II didn't. I was just--taken off-guard. We need him, Dzym, until this is over. He was the best we could get, one of the best halo fakers in the business. After Larm's troops land, after the Reliant's launch tracks are in, you can do with him what you will. But please.

Please don't be angry. Please . . .“ She didn't hear clearly what he said; she thought it was ”help me“ or maybe ”give me."

Dzym stepped sideways a little. Leia saw the sleek black topknot silhouetted against the glint of the computer's power lights, and the spidery motion of his gloved hands as he unfastened the breast of his robe. In the reflected gleam of the lights in which he now stood, she saw clearly that below his neck his skin changed. It was hard, chitinous, catching green and amber glints--broken and blotched, too, all over Dzym's bare chest and shoulders, with tubes and orifices and groping little mouthed nodules that had no business on any human form.

All those little mouths and openings gaped and stretched, dark matter running down, glistening. Dzym's human mouth opened as well, the long tongue groping like a serpent.

With a noise that was not quite a whimper, not quite a sob, Ashgad bent his head down. He pressed his mouth to the dark, chitinous chest, and with a horrible movement impossible for a human neck, Dzym moved his head around, tongue probing at Ashgad's nape. The thready radiance sheened on a trickle of blood. Ashgad made noises for a while--thin ones, small and desperate--then was silent. The silence lasted nearly a minute, though it seemed to Leia, trapped in the dark of the shuttered vestibule, to go on longer than that.

At last, barely audible, Ashgad whispered, “Thank you.” The crackle of age was gone from his voice. The room was fully dark now, and only the faintest stain of orange remained in the sky outside, but Leia thought his hair had darkened perceptibly, and when the two left the room, Ashgad moved like a young man. Leia thought, but couldn't be sure, that he wiped something from his mouth and chin.

She timed their footfalls ascending the stair, knowing she had only minutes now. The sky-colored blade of the lightsaber flashed to life in her hand, and she drove it deep into the center of the control unit in a vicious hiss of sparks and smoke. Then she caught up bedroll and pitcher and fled across the tiled floor, stabbing the combination of the locked door that led to the rest of the house, right down the hall, up the steps. Another combination, another door--a synthdroid standing in the laboratory beyond, blue eyes glazed and staring, androgynous mouth open as it staggered, numbly, from wall to wall. Leia brushed past it and it fell. Guilt touched her as she stepped past the body.

In driving her lightsaber into the Central Controller, she had mass-deactivated them, destroyed them . . .

They're not living, she told herself. No more living than a droid that might have been deactivated or its memory flushed. But the guilt remained, as if she'd wiped Artoo's programming or Threepio's.

They'll search, she thought. Ashgad and Dzym and Liegeus. They'll get Beldorion to use his Jedi perceptions, to touch the Force. To feel for the vibrations of her mind, if the sluglike mass of indolence still had the capability of doing so--if the weird, overwhelming vibration of the Force that filled this world would permit it.

The storeroom containing the antigrav units was exactly where the schematic said it was.

But only one unit was active. The rest--nearly a dozen--lay in boxes of styrene and goatgrass along the wall, dead, useless as so many rocks would have been.

Leia felt as if she'd had a bucket of cold water hurled in her face.

Her hands shook uncontrollably as she pulled the single unit whose lights were green from its shelf. It was a 100-GU unit--a speeder usually took four--and about half charged. She clicked it to neutral buoyancy and pulled it after her like a balloon on a string to the lab outside, where a synthdroid lay on the floor, eyes staring, near the half-assembled parts of a new buoyancy charger. The old one, on a table nearby, was an outmoded model held together by Y-bands and silver space tape. A scattering of antiquated, blown-out, and depleted tanks lay around it.

Next time they vote to have trade come in, I'm all for it, thought Leia grimly, as she dug through drawers. There was a belt reel of cable and a hook there, standard in mountainous terrain; also a small glowrod, and two rolls of silver space tape, which she threaded onto the makeshift bedroll strap. This business of never having the right equipment is ridiculous! She pocketed a couple of emergency mini-heaters, crossed the room at a run to the big double doors that the schematic had told her would lead to the docking bay.

As the schematic promised, the great permacrete pad that formed the southeastern quarter of Ashgad's compound overlooked open space on two sides. The Reliant sat on five short legs close by the workroom door through which she emerged. In smaller hangars to the side she made out the needlelike nosecone of an elderly Headhunter, and the blunt silhouette of a gutted Skipray Blastboat.

Synthdroids, fallen with equipment or tanks of Puffo-Shield in hand, lay about the Reliant in starlight like wet black heaps of laundry.

There was no light, for the Central Control [Init knew where every step and cable and piece of machinery lay, no matter which droid set it down, but it seemed to Leia that the great gulfs of air beyond the permacrete apron were filled with the softest echo of brightness, the glow of the merciless stars amplified by the wasteland of faceted ridge and scree.

Leia looked down from the edge of the apron and her heart froze. I can't.

It was easily three hundred meters to the base of that first, sheer drop. From there the slope tapered steeply, a shamble of diamonds, bled of color in the etiolated light. An antigrav unit's lifting capability was directly proportional to the distance from the surface of the ground.

The first drop might be so fast that when the lift finally kicked in, it might not do so soon enough or hard enough.

The cable wasn't even a quarter long enough, and with no way of detaching the hook, she might as well set off flares to announce in which direction she'd gone.

Behind her, in the dark bulk of the house, she saw a light go up, then another.

The image returned to her mind, of Ashgad bending his head down to the mouths and tentacles and groping, wormy nodules of Dzym's chitinous chest; of Dzym's ungloved, unseen hands on her face, her wrists. Of the cold sickness that pulled her down toward death.

Here in this high place, unshielded by any walls, she had the curious sensation of the Force being all around her, as if she stood not on a boat in the sea, but on the living ocean bed itself. Strong, strange, it called to her, she thought. Spoke in words she could not understand.

She checked the antigrav unit in her hands.

It wasn't enough. it is. The thought was warm wind breathing in her mind. It is.

You've got to be kidding!

Leia looked over the edge again. Darkness and starlight and scintil-lant wastes dropped away like a vast subconscious thought. She knew that the slight difference in weight wasn't going to have any effect on the immutable law of twenty-six point six meters per second per second, but nevertheless she dropped her bedroll first. The sealed pitcher would shatter and couldn't be risked.

What am I thinking about? she reflected cynically, as she ripped a double strip of space tape and fashioned a makeshift handle. I'm the one who's goin to smash to a million pieces.

The night around her, the subtly flashing darkness, whispered, You won't. We're here. Trust.

More lights sprang up like startled glowbugs on a summer evening, and she heard Ashgad's oratorial baritone call, “Liegeus! Here, at once!”