Star Wars - Planet Of Twilight (41 page)

“She's right. This is Ashgad's. I installed the components myself.”

Caslo blustered angrily, “Which doesn't mean you didn't compose this yourself, girl.” But others were pulling the papers from his cousin's hands, reading the memoranda, the deals, the concessions.

"An installation in Thornwind Valley? Six-month forcible recruitment?

A man can't live a week up there!"

“Mandatory labor pool?”

“Transfer of matriel--isn't the real word for that theft?”

“Price freeze standardization on Spooks?”

“At sixty-seven creds?”

“Occupation fleet . . . who said anything about an occupation fleet?”

“The occupation fleet is in orbit now,” said Luke. He pointed upward.

Several of the Rationalists had electrobinoculars and focused them skyward, where far overhead pinlights of brightness flared in the star-prickled twilight sky.

Under the spate of exclamations and curses, Leia threw her arms around Luke in a fierce hug. “What about Dzym. Ashgad's . . .”

“I know about Dzym,” said Luke.

“If there's really a battle going on up there--if the Council really did manage to get ships to stop Getelles's fleet--he'll still try to lift off in the Reliant with all the drochs he can take.”

“The lift programs aren't installed.”

“Any competent engineer can do that.” She looked up quickly as Liegeus emerged from the Chariot, dodged through the milling men and women, the angrily stirring cables and beams, the lawless Force winds. "Liegeus .

. . I“ She flung her arms around him, and he held her tight, graying head pressed to hers. ”My dear child, I'm so glad to see you safe! I never, never in my life thought you'd try to escape . . ."

“Then you didn't know me very well.” She grinned at him and a moment later he grinned back.

“Well--I suppose I did know you'd try it.” He shook his head.

“Listen, Liegeus, how much does Ashgad know about the software on that vessel?” demanded Luke. “How much of an education has he had? Can he install it. Can he get the thing off the ground?”

“Of course he can,” said Leia impatiently. “Seti Ashgad was one of the top hyperdrive engineers of the Old Republic. The original Z-95s were his design!”

“His design?” Luke stared at her blankly. “They were making Z-95s fifty years ago!”

“Seti Ashgad is the original Seti Ashgad!” said Leia. “Dzym's been keeping him alive all these years.”

There was a rising clamor, men and women jostling and shoving aside Gerney Caslo's heated protests of Ashgad's good intent. Sheets and streamers of hardcopy were flourished in dust-covered, blood-covered hands, though Luke noticed that Umolly Darm and Aunt Gin were collecting the documents and tucking them into the safety of their pockets.

The Theran cultists had come down from their defensive positions on the gun shielding to join in the fray. With a yell of fury, Caslo broke from the mob and, with a nimbleness Luke wouldn't have given him credit for, seized a belt of grenades and sprang to the top of a broken girder, scrambled up another one toward the muzzle of the cannon.

Leia yelled, “Stop him!” but it was too late. Someone fired a blaster rifle just as Gerney hurled the grenades. A dozen lines of cold light stitched the man like deadly needles, but no one had thought to fire at the grenades he threw. They went over the stained black rim of the shielding. A moment later a deep, shuddering concussion shook the building, jarring everyone from their feet. White smoke belched from the cannon mouth. Gerney's body was trampled as people scrambled up the sides of the shielding to look.

Around them, there was sudden stillness as the Force storm relaxed its grip.

Leia swore. Luke's hand stole to the red, swollen marks the drochs had left on his flesh, and he shivered.

“Can you fix it?” he asked Liegeus softly.

“I don't know. I don't have tools.”

“Umolly and Aunt Gin'll have some . . .”

“It won't be in time,” said Leia. “There's an armored Headhunter in the same hangar and an old Blastboat. You can mount the main turret guns in the Headhunter; that'll give you enough firepower to bring him down.”

“The place'll be guarded . . .”

"The synthdroids are gone. Dead. I put them out of commission before I escaped and I don't think Ashgad's had time to get them back online.

Come on."

Luke bolted back to the Chariot. Aunt Gin and Arvid were already tearing loose the antigravs from the two lifter platforms that had gotten the Rationalists to the top of the tower, affixing them to the black assault speeder's sides.

Only when the Mobquet had disappeared over the parapet did the battered metal doors of the stairway into the tower itself open, and Callista step forth.

“Liegeus?” She held out her hand to the philosopher. The earpiece of the ancient intercom system still hung around her neck. “We've got tools down here.”

“And they'll be about as much good as those silly arrows,” stated Aunt Gin fiercely, bustling over with her toolkit. She shoved the enormous, rusty box into Liegeus's hands. “Take this, son. I for one haven't spent ten years on this crummy rock to see it get taken over by those cheats at Loronar.”

She led the way into the tower. Liegeus paused on the top step, studying Callista's face. Comparing the thin, tired features with those of the woman who had been Taselda's slave, the woman Beldorion had taken prisoner. “I'm pleased to see you well, after all that--er--un-pleasantness,” he said gently. “I owe you a kind of thanks, for opening my eyes to what Ashgad was doing, though I never thought I should be so mad as to say so. You were right.”

Callista shook her head. “You were afraid for your life,” she said.

“All the knowledge could have done was hurt you, which it looks like it did. I'm only glad you were able to take care of Leia.”

“After having not taken care of you?” There was a self-deprecating wrinkle behind the genuine shame in his eyes, and Callista smiled.

“I can take care of myself. Most ladies can.”

“How well I know. You know your young man is looking for you.”

Callista said softly, “I know.”

“Quite honestly, Madame Admiral, that's all I'm able to tell you.”

Threepio made one of his best human gestures, spreading his arms, palms out, at precisely the correct angle and positioning to indicate a friendly helplessness, a complete willingness to divulge whatever lay in his power.

And his digitalized recognition of human body language indicated to him that Daala was not buying it one credit's worth.

But she said, her harsh voice slow, “My title is 'Admiral,” droid, not 'Madame Admiral.“ I was--an officer of the Imperial fleet on exact parity with others of my rank, and you will employ that usage whenever you address me.”

Her eyes were like ash--burned out, exhausted, defeated. Threepio did not think he had ever seen such ruin, such bitterness, on a human face.

“Once, Tarkin and I together could have ruled the Empire,” she continued slowly. “Looking back on it, I can't even remember why. All I seek, now, is a place to live out the rest of my life where I will not be disturbed. I thought I had found such a place on Pedducis Chorios, a world in a neutral sector, with amenable local authorities, beyond the interference of those ham-fisted, brainless, contentious madmen who are engaged in the final throes of tearing to pieces what was once the finest system of government this galaxy has known. I want no more of it, or of them.”

Her hands lay smooth over the arms of her chair, her knees together, the square bones of the joints and the hard bulge of muscle clearly defined where the drab trousers tailored to the flesh. Threepio's copious databanks contained a great deal of very alarming information about this woman one of the most brilliant commanders in the Imperial fleet, but a mad bantha, a loose gun firing at random in battle. A woman of formidable competence and terrifying anger.

“And now I come to take up the advisory position I and my partners have been offered by the Pedducian Warlords,” she continued in that quiet voice, whose hoarse timbre spoke of burning gases inhaled in the last battle on board the Knight Hammer, the battle in which Callista had destroyed her flagship and in which she and Callista had both been thought to perish. “And what do I find?”

Threepio had never been good at distinguishing rhetorical from actual questions.

“Invasion, the Death Seed plague, wholesale rebellion, looting . . .”

“Be silent.”

He logged the interchange in his Later Study file under the heading of “Determinative Cues to Separate Rhetorical from Actual Questions.”

It was his duty as a protocol unit to achieve perfection in that area, and he was aware that it would probably prolong his period of usefulness as well.

“I find droids who have clearly been at large for some time in this sector, droids whose function is to accurately record all data taking place around them, whose answers to my questions are so comprehensively riddled with holes and omissions that they lead me to suspect that there is something going on.”

She rose to her feet, and touched a wall hatch. With silent efficiency the panel revolved, exhibiting a complete and up-to-date electronic analysis kit. She activated the data screens with three taps of those long, square-tipped fingers, and unhooked a coaxial cable.

“Fortunately, many, many years ago I had a friend who taught me how to communicate with droids.”

Threepio said, with genuine interest, “How very kind of him,” but Artoo, quicker on the uptake, made a nervous attempt to back away, thwarted by the restraining bolt that Daala's Sergeant-at-Arms had taken the precaution of installing on both droids before bringing them into her presence. Daala checked over the various interfaces and cables added by poor Captain Bortrek and finally hooked her own coax into one of the ports he had space-taped to Artoo's side.

She flipped a switch on the analysis kit; Artoo quivered and gave a faint, protesting wail.

“Now,” said Daala, her green eyes narrowing. “Tell me what's happening in the Meridian sector.”

“What the blazes are those things?” Lando flipped through half a dozen data sectors, then cut back immediately to another screen of scan field to check on the next pass of the vicious, needlelike attackers. “And how much damage did that one do?”

Chewbacca yowled something through the comm from the rapidly freezing rear quarter, where he was floating near the ceiling to fix burned-out wiring through hissing masses of emergency foam. “Those things are the things that're gonna appear on our headstones, pal,” said Han.

“The most i can figure is they're some kind of CCIR technology, like synthdroids,” said Lando, brown hands flicking and scrambling over the shield controls while Han whipped and pivoted the Millennium Falcon through the desperate series of zigzags and loop the loops that was the only possible defensive strategy against the things. “The Antemeridian fleet isn't anywhere near us, they can't possibly be guiding them in the usual sense of the word.”

Around them, the Courane and the Fire-eateand the light explorer Sundance, in which Kyp Durron had shown up to assist--were doing the same, snaking and weaving in a desperate attempt to remain in position near Nam Chorios until the actual invading fleet showed up to fight.

Only the fact that they'd made orbit before the arrival of the gnatlike attackers, with barely forty minutes to spare, let them hold any kind of position at all.

“Are you kidding?” said Han. "You know what a synthdroid costs?

That's crazy!"

“I know synthdroid technology is based on a kind of programmable crystal, and that's what kicks up the price . . . Blast!” he added, as there was a jarring flash and more red lights went up on the board.

“Chewie, we've got another hit, starboard shield--yeah, I know about the hole in the port shield!”

Stars whirled and flashed past the viewport as Han put the vessel through another series of evasions. He wondered as he scratched past another line of laser light, perilously close to the main shields on the ship's spine, how' long he could keep up this pitch of alertness and activity, not to mention how much more of this kind of activity the power supplies could take. Though everything was a spangled flash of stars and blackness, he had seen, in a rare moment of pause, the Fire-eater drifting helpless and being cut to pieces by the Needles at their leisure. He could only pray that the crew was already dead or at least unconscious from anoxia.

Lando, who could never leave an explanation unfinished, added, “If somebody's synthesized those crystals, or found a way to get them cheap, there's no problem.”

“There's a problem for us!” yelled Han. How did you fight things like that? After long concentration and plenty of practice he'd managed to hit two of them, but with so many wasted shots it wasn't worth it. They could only evade, until the toll of the speed and hyperquick reactions wore them down.

The Needles, as far as he could tell, were tireless.

“One thing's for sure,” yelled Lando, "they sure want that rock.

You got any ideas how we're gonna deal with the main fleet when they show up?"

“I'll think of something.”

There was a jarring concussion from somewhere in the ship, and more red lights went on.

“Moff Getelles.”

Daala sat back from the primary readout screen, letting it go black.

The lesser screens still held the record of Attoo's long, persistent battle to retain the secret files concerning Leia's disappearance, her doubts concerning the integrity of the Council, and all the information for which Yarbolk Yemm had been chased and shot at across half the sector. The little droid rested tipped back on his two main limbs, a posture curiously evocative of defeat. Cables and wires trailed from the various ports and interface hatches, short-circuiting through his defenses to every portion of his memory.

Threepio felt sorry for him and considerably apprehensive for his own safety as well.

It did not take an interrogation unit to deduce that this tall, redhaired woman sitting so motionless in her black chair was very, very angry indeed.

“The quibbling, incompetent, boot-licking, corset-laced little sand maggot,” she said, in a perfectly soft conversational tone. "Still has his sycophant Larm on a leash, i see--with whom he shared the test results at the Academy, when he was promoted to captain over my head.