Star Wars - Planet Of Twilight (42 page)

Selling out to Loronar Corporation, a gang of legalistic thieves who'd peddle their sisters to either side so long as they got paid Slime molds.

All of them. Ranats and Hutts have more honor."

Threepio made a quick examination of his Determinative Cues sub-file, but could not accurately ascertain whether a response was being solicited from him or not.

Daala slid from her chair to her knees, and began uncoupling the various cables from Attoo's innards.

As she worked she spoke, still softly, almost to herself. “I pity her, your Chief of State,” she said--speaking to Artoo, Threepio thought, slightly indignant. “She was Prince Bail Organa's daughter. A man of honor, by his own rights, who raised her to be honorable. We had honor in those days. Honor and courage.”

She stood and shook back her hair, which flashed like fire in the dim lighting of the office. Still her eyes were dead, but filled with the stony anger of the dead. "It was honor that drew me to the fleet.

Power, yes, but honor and courage as well. And now they have come to this. Maggots feeding off the corpse of the Empire. Ghouls selling it to procurers and money grubbers.

Tarkin would have died of shame."

She was looking in his direction, so Threepio ventured, “I have no conclusive data as to whether Loronar Corporation is in the business of procuration . . .”

“I was a fool.”

She touched the side of the electronic extraction kit, and it retreated soundlessly into the wall. “I was a fool to think that leaving them behind would be so simple as cursing them, and walking through the door. Maybe I've always been a fool.”

She returned to her chair, and touched an almost invisible toggle in its arm. "Yelnor.

Get me a conference with the captains of all the ships."

“Ships?” inquired Threepio, startled.

Daala raised her head, her poisoned eyes seeming to take in again that she was not alone in the room. “Ships,” she said. "I am the President of the Independent Company of Settlers, over three thousand of us, counting spouses and children. We who were loyal to the old ways, loyal to the order and efficiency that was the heart of the New Order.

Most were officers of the fleet, who sickened, like me, at this constant petty struggle for power, this stupid diplomatic bandying of words with upstarts and scum.

Some others--the heads of business and their families, civil servants.

We ask only to be let alone, and to that end we entered a contract with Warlord K'iin of the Silver Unifir for one and a half billion acres--the smallest of the three southern continents--on Pedducis Chorios, to colonize and to live as we see fit.

“And I have no intention,” she concluded, reaching out and tapping Artoo on his domed cap, “of seeing my investment-our investment--come to nothing because a boot-kissing, talentless, jumped-up catamite like Moff Getelles wants to be supported in comfort by Loronar Corporation for the rest of his sycophantic life. Even if pushing him out of the sector means saving your Chief of State--and her spineless alien trash of a Senatorial Council--from the embarrassment they so richly deserve.”

She flicked over another comm button. Viewscreens revolved into existence all along the wall before her, viewscreens bearing the faces of eight men--three of whom wore, like her, drab variations of em-blemless Imperial uniforms--and two women. Stern, disciplined faces, with those same bitter, burned-out eyes.

“My friends,” said Daala, “it seems that there is one battle yet to fight.”

“He's behind us.” Leia reared up to her knees, wind and dust tearing at her long hair, and adjusted Aunt Gin's electrobinoculars. Whipping and veering through the fathomless, glittering gashes of the canyons, scaling hogbacks of diamond scree or dropping down precipices ten and twelve meters deep to catch again on the Mobquet's antigravs, it was impossible to see behind them for more than thirty meters at the most, sometimes only half that. But Leia knew.

“Beldorion.”

She dropped back down into the sheltered cockpit, began checking loads on the flamethrowers and blaster rifles that Arvid and Umolly Darm had thrust in after them on their departure. She smiled a little grimly at the truly excellent quality of the weapons, all sleek, all new, all black and silver, and all bearing the discreet double-moon logo

LORONAR WEAPONS DIVISION

“All the finest--All the first.”

As a rule Leia discreetly avoided riding in any vehicle that Luke was driving; but for one of the first times in her life, she was grateful that her brother had developed the skill that had made him one of the best pilots of the Rebellion. And indeed, the Chariot was equipped with internal grav control as well, so she was able to prime and check everything without having her bones jounced out of her body every time the antigravs kicked in as they went over small cliffs--or big cliffs She was being very careful not to look. She might have been sitting on her own bed at home.

“How'd they import this thing, anyway?” she asked, looking around her at the comfortable black leather of the seats, the small, enclosed bar and the bank of electronic toys and communications equipment. “It's nearly as big as a B-wing itself.”

“According to Arvid, Loronar must have made seven or eight drops before they got past the gun stations.” Luke flung the Chariot over a chasm that was considerably deeper than he'd supposed, whipped in a long, banking curve over the near-vertical face of a crystalline canyon to take some of the stress, and headed up a ridge like a mating sun dragon taking to the sky. “At least Aunt Gin found pieces of wrecked ones two or three diffbrent times. She's made a fortune charging Ash-gad for repairs. She's bought parts from the Therans, too, so they've found some as well. All in the past year, she says.”

“While Q-Varx was putting together the meeting with the 'head of the Rationalists' on this world.” Leia shook her head. “I won't say I'd have trusted Q-Varx with my life, but he seemed sincere. Never in a million years would I have thought he'd be part of something like this.”

“Maybe he was sincere,” said Luke softly. “Maybe he sincerely thought that embroiling the whole sector in warfare and risking the spread of some plague he'd been told they could control were worth the rights of those who seek progress over stagnation. And he can't have known it was the Death Seed they'd be spreading.”

“He didn't,” said Leia. “But my point is that he should have. A man in that position can't afford to be that stupid.”

And all the while Luke was flicking the controls, stretching out his mind and the Force to feel the ground beyond the next ridge, to slip past obstacles before they came into view, he was thinking, There's something else. There's something I'm missinG.

There was life on the planet. Invisible, intangible, but intelligent, and lambent with the Force.

Don't let them. Don't let them.

Don't let who?

Why did he remember his vision last night, of stormtroopers and J awas?

Why did he feel that whoever it was, who had stood near the broken-down speeder in the canyon, watching him at his repairs, avaited him just beyond the next rise, around the next elbow of the rocky way?

But there was never anything there.

“And it's a sure thing,” he added, almost to himself, “that Q-Varx didn't know' about Dzym.”

The hangar doors were locked. So were the doors that led from the hangar to the stairway, up to Ashgad's house. Luke was of the opinion that half-power on the ion blaster should be sufficient for the second pair of doors, for the first had nearly disintegrated when Leia had fired at them full-force. But the first blast only dented the inner ones, so Leia turned up the blaster to full and let them have it again.

The noise in the enclosed space of the hangar was quite astonishing, and brother and sister waded to the resultant, gaping hole through a calf-deep rubble field and a choking cloud of dust.

“I told you three-quarters would do it.”

“We can't waste time.”

Leia might have learned diplomacy and patience with ambassadors, reflected her twin wryly, slinging one of the two flamethrowers into place over his shoulder, but it was quite clear that she still dearly loved the destructive force of small artillery fire.

“What did you do to the synthdroids.” Luke still couldn't get over the fact that there were virtually no human guards.

“Gutted the central controller.” Leia swept the whole steps before them, floor, walls, and ceiling, as far as the landing, with a blast of fire.

They both wore goggles picked up in the hangar, but Luke still had to blink hard to get his bearings back. The curled little black crusts that had been drochs crunched under their boots as they ascended to the landing. Leia fired again.

“We'll have to remember that if Loronar gets the Needles going. But any commander worth his ammo allowance is going to have the central controller locked up in the heart of the biggest battlemoon in the galaxy.”

“Yeah, well, you were locked up in the heart of the biggest bat-tlemoon in the galaxy, too.” Luke grinned across at her as they dashed up another installment of stairs.

“And unless we've got somebody on the inside willing to let us go again with a homing device stuck on our tails,” retorted Leia, pushing her goggles onto her forehead, “we'd better not count on that kind of luck again.” The jewels on her gold-headed hairpins glittered incongruously through the soot and filth. "There has to be a weakness to them.

One that doesn't involve access to the central controller."

The two halted in the doorway of the chamber, where Luke had met Dzym and had rescued Liegeus from the life drinker. The floor was a creeping sea of drochs. Brother and sister opened fire with the flame-throwers, swept the whole room in a licking, roaring sheet of yellow heat. It was like sprinting through an oven afterward, sweat rolling down their dust-streaked faces, the burned matter left after searing the soles of their boots.

The gateway that led through to the construction compound was locked, and Luke laid a hand on Leia's shoulder as she brought up the ion blaster again. “It's shielded.” The green column of his lightsaber hummed into existence at the touch of a switch.

Leia glanced back over her shoulder, toward the blown-out door of the stairway. Luke knew what it was, who it was, that she felt behind them.

He was there, Luke thought. He could almost see him, ascending each step with a heavy, coiling loop of his great wormlike body, eyes malevolent rubies in the dark. The dark hurricane of the Force swirled around him, uncontrolled, while in his mind the voice of Dzym whis pered, telling him that these humans, these pale little maggots, these defiant little play-Jedi, needed to be stopped at all costs.

Luke ran the lightsaber into the lock's works, tested the door switch.

It vibrated, but held. “There's another lock,” he said. “A hidden one, behind a wall-hatch . . .”

“Here.” She had her own blade out. Luke wondered how she had managed to keep that with her, when Seti Ashgad had taken her from the ship.

There was no time to ask, for the floor shivered suddenly with the force of liftoff, the amber lights all across the lintel of the door turning red. Luke gritted, “They're off!” and far above, over the top of the wall, they could see the square, gray shape of the Reliant spring skyward, lifters blazing, heading up the single corridor opened in the planet's defenses by the destruction of the Bleak Point gun station. At the same moment, Leia thrust her lightsaber into the second lock, and the door slid open, the hot winds of takeoff fountaining forth over the threshold in a torrent of dust.

A couple of Spook crystals lay on the permacrete, a trail from the cleared space where the boxes had been. There were drochs, too, tiny ones, dying in the glare of the pallid sunlight, where they had fallen out of whatever shielded container Dzym had carried them in.

And, on the other side of the open bay, stood the Headhunter, its engine hatch open, a gutted tangle of wires hanging down.

Luke swore, and raced across to it. Leia was already running toward the Blastboat, which was likewise gutted but otherwise unharmed. “Can you fix it?” she yelled, scrambling up to the canopy. “They didn't have time to cripple the guns.”

“I think so. The readouts on the central core look okay. They were in too much of a hurry .... Get me the toolkit from the bench.”

Leia sprang down, dashed to the repair bench, swung the red metal energy cart around, and dragged it over as Luke stripped off the remains of his shirt and began making a fast diagnostic. “Get the guns,” he yelled, from halfway within the hatch. “They just pull out once you undo the locks, but you'll have to reattach the cores . . .”

She snatched up an extractor and core couplers and raced across the permacrete to the Blastboat as if they were the children of the Rebellion again, with the Imperials coming in and code scramble blazing from every makeshift klaxon on the base.

Listening. Listening. Knowing what was coming, power and anger and the decayed dark sludge of what had once been genuine, trained ability to use the Force.

She had one gun pulled and dragged over to the Headhunter and was starting on a second when she knew she could afford to wait no longer.

Luke was buried in the hatches of the Z-95the Reliant ascending like an ash-colored plague angel to the rendezvous with the Loronar fleet . .

.

And she heard his breath. Stertorous, rasping, like the beat of gluey tides. The wave of ammoniac reek rolled across the permacrete, and the noxious shock wave of decayed Force. Leia dropped from the Blastboat and ran lightly toward the door, stripping off and dropping her jacket, unhooking and throwing aside her blaster, knowing what the Force could do to blasters.

Beldorion the Splendid moved fast. He crossed the outer court in a series of great bounds and slithers, huge muscle rolling beneath his squamous hide. Fluid leaked from his mouth and his eyes were twin balefires, glittering with a single, evil obsession that he did not even recognize as being not his own.

In the curtains of sun-glittering dust that filled the open gateway of the launch bay a woman stood, slender and tiny in the moving aura of misty light.