have been able to accurately identify the sound of heavy artillery shelling,
the crash of crumbling walls, and the harsh clashing of human voices and
blasters.
The Gamorrean captain's three husbands, however, seemed to take their lady's
exclamation as a straightforward request for information, and went barreling
to the round portal that led onto the boarding ramp to see. All three
reached the entryway at the same moment and immediately undertook a slugging
match for precedence. Captain Ugmush, who had taken on another commission to
transport cargo offplanet and was waiting impatiently for delivery, heaved
herself from the bridge workstation, where she'd been checking through
projections of launch windows and hyperspace jump points, and proceeded to
break up the fight with slaps, squeals, and head bashing, following which
the entire family group piled out the door and down the ramp. Engineer Jos,
chained to his console, didn't even raise his eyes.
A further explosion that made the ship rock on its landing gear brought
Threepio nervously to his feet. "Captain Ugmush . . ." He realized his vocal
modulators had gone into default register and quickly reset them to the
deeper tone that, though it took up far more memory in mimicry of organic
resonators, exhibited less of the characteristic droid "metallic" quality.
"Captain Ugmush, do you really think you should leave the ship at this
moment?" He toddled toward the door as another flurry of shots and outcry
came echoing from somewhere uncomfortably close by. "In the event of an
emergency takeoff . . .
Oh, dear, Artoo . . ." His voice dropped back to default again. "Do you have
any idea how to get this model of vessel lifted off?"
The astromech, trundling toward the doorway in his wake, denied any
expertise in the piloting of the lumpy Gamorrean cubeship.
Threepio muttered, "Oh dear, oh dear," as he followed Artoo out the door and
down the ramp, hoping against hope that the situation outside wasn't going
to get any worse.
The moment he emerged at the foot of the ramp it became evident that it was
unlikely that it would--or could--get worse. The next bay over was in
flames, black oil smoke and thirty-foot columns of fire pouring skyward and
Gopso'o troops and Drovian government forces searing one another with
blaster fire and cannister grenades across the wreckage.
For a moment the docking bay in which the Zicreex lay was quiet.
None of the Gamorreans was to be seen. Then under the arcade a door opened
and a muddy, shabby little figure darted through. The fugitive slammed the
keypad to close the door behind him, pulled a crowbar from the nearest heap
of scrap under the arcade, and smashed the lock.
The effort was to little avail. It was clear that whoever was on the other
side of the door also had crowbars, battering rams, and grenades.
The fugitive dashed madly across the open permacrete, and Threepio said in
surprise, "Why, it's Master Yarbolk from the Chug 'n' Chuck!
Master Yarbolk! Over here, Master Yarbolk!"
The Chadra-Fan needed no further encouragement. He bolted past
them and up the entry ramp, instants before the doors gave way and an
exceedingly mixed congregation of Drovians--some wearing the Gopso'o
scalplock and others, though presumably sympathizers, not so decorated,
accompanied by a couple of Durosian and Devaronian lay-about spaceport
types--came smashing through. Someone yelled something about a stinking
traitor sellout swine, and Threepio, correctly interpreting the remark to
reflect on the fugitive Master Yarbolk, pointed toward the doorway that led
to the unburning bays beyond.
"That way!" he boomed in his alternate alien voice. "Unclean hairy undersize
journalist!" He hoped the invective was as acceptable to them as it was
informative.
Hollering imprecations, the mob smashed its way through the farther doors at
the same moment a twenty-centimeter shell struck the arcade between the
burning bay and the one currently occupied by the Zicreex.
Threepio let out a squeak of panic and retreated up the ramp as the Drovian
government forces scattered, regrouped, and fired on the Gopso'o who were
attempting to advance over the wreckage. At the same moment Ugmush and her
other doorway, and they added their mite to the battle, firing on the
Gopso'o as they lumbered across the permacrete and up the boarding ramp, an
assortment of parcels and packing boxes hung over their shoulders and backs.
Dirty pink curls flying and morrts clinging to her for their very lives,
Ugmush burst onto the bridge, screaming, "Get yourselves strapped in, you
stupid garbage eaters! What in sithfestering blazes do you think this is, a
luxury liner?" She flung herself down behind the console, jabbing keys and
flipping levers with far more speed than seemed possible in hands so huge.
"Close that festering boarding ramp, you muck-sodden flapdragon, do I have
to do everything on this maw-sapping ship? Jos, get us out of here! Fruck,
open fire on those festering Gopso'o--hang on, the lot of you! Bunch of
crab-sucking morrtless soap-using cheesebrains!"
She rammed the activation levers over, the engineer cut in the power
overrides, and in a roar of ground fire, ion cannons, and retro lasers, the
Zicreex was airborne and heading out of the ragged billows of smoke, flak
and wreckage like a spinning overweight glet-fruit shot from a catapult at
the sky.
Threepio, who hadn't had time to buckle himself down or even take a seat,
picked himself gingerly up and readjusted his breath mask, hoping that
either his robe hadn't come disarranged enough to exhibit his undeniably
droidlike legs, or that Ugmush had been too occupied with her velocity
computations to notice. Yarbolk, who like him had been hurled to the far
corner of the bridge, limped over to assist him in righting Artoo-Detoo, who
had rolled a considerable distance and whose distress lights were blinking
in several systems, including one of the bolted-on components they hadn't
been able to get rid of after disconnecting him from the Pure Sabacc. Most
of the distress lights went out. Artoo tweeped a wan thanks, and without a
word, los removed the elastic tie from his long hair and offered it to
Yarbolk to tie up some of Artoo's stray cables.
"Thank you---er--Igpek," said the Chadra-Fan. "I owe you one."
Ugmush turned in her seat, and glared at the furry little journalist out of
orange pinhead eyes. "And what the festering muck is that troublemaker doing
on my ship?" she demanded. "Don't you sapheads know there's a reward out for
him on seven systems?"
They were there.
Luke froze, lying under the pitted steel belly of the speeder.
Listening.
No sound.
But they were there, watching him. He knew' it. Even through the silent
trumpets of the Force in the deep stillness of the wastelands, he could
sense their presence. He'd sensed awareness of him again and again since
leaving Hweg Shul.
The invisible watchers.
The planet's unseen original inhabitants.
Effortlessly following his speeder, keeping him in sight.
Where he lay under the speeder he could see nothing. When the starboard
antigrav unit had started to go he'd prudently set the vehicle down with one
edge on a sort of bench of basalt, the other side on a lump of frost-green
quartz the size of a hassock, so his only view from underneath, as he
rejiggered the generator wiring to recharge the defective a-g coil, was
straight ahead or straight behind, identical vistas of harsh reflective
gravel broken by bigger fragments and hunks of crystal, and, farther off5
crystal chimneys piercing the sky.
He sensed that should he emerge from beneath the speeder and look around
him, he would still see no one.
He lowered his eyelids, trying to call the shape of them within the Force.
But such was the interference of the Force on this world, the sheer
magnitude of its presence in alien guise, that he could get no clear picture
of those invisible ones. Maybe, he thought, that was the point of the
interference to begin with.
Nor could he tell exactly when they had begun to dog him, or feel whether
They were only there.
"Who are you?" he called out, aware of his vulnerability, lying on his back
under the speeder. "I mean you no harm. You don't need to be afraid to show
yourself to me. Can you show yourselves to me?"
Their presence drew closer--or something drew closer, a distinct awareness
of their awareness of him. He wondered how he knew' it was they and not he,
she, or it.
Carefully, he crawled from beneath the speeder, and stood up.
Pale shadows lay about him; pale daytime stars pierced the dark blue of the
sky. Pale sunlight fragmented from the glittering gravel that stretched in
all directions, empty to the farthest shore of the long-forgotten sea.
"It's the Loronar Corporation." The Chadra-Fan journalist Yarbolk lowered
his husky alto voice, brought out from the pocket of his singed and stained
silk vest a handful of green datacubes, held them out as if their mere
presence on his hairless, pink palm were proof of what he said. "On every
one of these planets, every place in the Meridian sector where there's been
an armed revolt or religious rioting or uprisings from minority tribes or
groups or whatever it's been . . .
the dissident forces are always armed with Loronar weapons. Not bottom-cut
sell-outs, mind you, like the gunrunners are always peddling to aborigines
if they think they can get away with it. Top-of-the-line blasters and
grenades and ion cannons. Look at these."
He rattled the datacubes like dice in his hand. Artoo-Detoo, taking him at
his word, promptly extruded a gripper arm, picked up a cube, and withdrew
the arm into his own vitals. "Hey, give that back!"
protested Yarbolk, loudly enough that two of Ugmush's husbands, an armed
guard, two very nervous Aqualish smugglers, and the dozen or so others who
shared the waiting chamber of the Quarantine Enforcement Cruiser
Lycominturned to glare at them, as if blaming them for their present
situation.
The Zicreex had not even made it to the hyperspace jump point when it ran
into trouble. Just outside the outlying asteroid fields of the Drovian
system they had encountered the Republic cruiser Empyrean, firing furiously
with all guns in all directions without any target immediately apparent--not
until the flash of one of the cruiser's shield generators blowing up had
illuminated what at first appeared to be a cloud of space debris surrounding
the vessel like flies. Within moments, however, it was obvious that the tiny
slips of matte black metal were vessels of some kind, pouring concentrated
fire on the huge ship and slipping and scattering from return fire like a
cloud of butterbats.
Since the battle lay between the Zicreex and the outer reaches of the
system, where it would be safe to jump to hyperspace, the small trader was
trapped where it was. Ugmush, the droids, and Yarbolk clustered by the
viewport and watched as the Empyrean tried first to battle, then to flee the
swarming attackers.
"Fascinating," Threepio said, looking over Ugmush's shoulder as the captain
tried to scan up a reading on the nearby area in the hopes of not running
afoul of whatever larger vessel was controlling the swarm.
"They seem to be nothing more than ambulant weapons. Don't be silly," he
added, to Artoo, who had surreptitiously hooked into the console behind
Ugmush's broad back. "There has to be a principal ship.
Whatever it is, it must have amazing range."
Yarbolk, crowding at Ugmush's elbow and peering back and forth between
Attoo's readouts and those on the console, whispered, "No principal ship.
Just weapons. It's got to be CCIR of some kind."
Light flared over their faces as a bolt from one of the tiny ships achieved
target. The fire cloud from the exploding cruiser enveloped the daggerlike
little weapons; a hundred white stars flared in the dissipating ball of heat
and gases as they, too, were destroyed. The score or so which survived
simply pivoted, like a school of glimmerfish in the darkness, and moved
away. Black painted as they were, they were swiftly lost to sight.
Yarbolk whispered, "By the Big Green Fish . . ." And then, "What are you
doing?" as Ugmush moved the levers, and the Zicreex swung around.
"Salvage," the Gamorrean said. She jerked one meaty hand at the viewport,
where the two or three huge chunks of what was left of the cruiser hung
glowing in blackness, surrounded by whirling fields of half-melted
shielding, metal shards, spears of glass, and vacuum-bloated corpses. "Lots
of stuff."
Ugmush and her husbands, resplendent in deep-space environmental gear
customized to their species for use by mercenaries, were looting the wreck
when the Quarantine Enforcement Cruiser Lycoming made its appearance. Its
captain, a much-harried Gotal female in charge of a small troop of fighters
and a squad of medics from the Coruscant Institute, had picked up the
Empyrean's distress call, and was not amused by the presence of the
Gamorrean free traders at the wreck site.
Threepio supposed it was a credit to his disguise that he'd been put under
arrest with the others. Artoo-Detoo had simply been impounded.
Now the little blue access hatch in Artoo's side slid open again and his
gripper arm deposited the cube on the table in front of Yarbolk.
Yarbolk snatched it up possessively and bestowed it in his breast pocket.
"TriNebulon'll pay me a fortune for that," said the Chadra-Fan. "More so
than ever, now." He hadn't been groomed in days--most of the grooming
parlors in Bagsho had been boarded tight--and his silky golden fur was a
mass of dirt and knots. "Did you get a look at that wreckage?" The hulls of
the attacking vessels, the weapon vessels?"
"I didn't examine them closely, no." Threepio turned his head to look at the
pieces of wreckage that [lgmush had taken on board the Zicreex before the
QEC had put in
its appearance. They were stacked in a corner of the enormous
waiting room, labeled and under a very tired-and crabby-looking Sullustan
guard.
Yarbolk lowered his voice still further. "They're modified Seifax shielded
transport shells," he whispered. "Thousands of them were shipped to Seifax's
new plant on Antemeridias a few months ago--and Seifax is a dummy
corporation for Loronar."
"You can't really be serious." Threepio modulated his voice down, shocked.
Though he was not physically uncomfortable in the all-enfolding black robe
and leather mask with its breathing tubes and filters, Threepio found the
disguise massively inconvenient because the fabric bunched in his joints,
interfered with the delicate operation of his hydraulic retractors,
and--since like many droids his balance was less acute than
humans'--threatened to trip him at every other step.
"Loronar Corporation is a subscriber to the Republic Registry of
Corporations. Their board of directors is made up of individuals of the
highest probity and credentials. They were responsible for a good deal of
the armament that made the Rebellion possible!"
"And they turned a five hundred percent profit in the ten years of active
Rebellion that preceded the fall of the New Order. Now the Rebellion had its
own financial sources, but not that kind of money.
Loronar was selling to both sides, probably through dummy corporations like
Seifax. And the Seifax plant on Antemeridias has been buying miniaturized
hyperspace drives from the Bith. I have a connection in the processing
office. Hey," he added, snatching back another of the datacubes from Artoo,
who, apparently still under the impression that look at these was an order,
had been systematically picking up the cubes on the table with his gripper
and taking them into his data-retrieval port. "You give those back."
The droid promptly spat them out in a line onto the table. Yarbolk snatched
them up, counted them, and glanced quickly over his shoulder again at the
other occupants of the quarantine hold. They were a motley bunch a
scrofutous-looking gray Wookiee and a couple of Aqualish who held together
and kept looking from the guards to the doors, the crew of a Squib
prospector vessel who protested vehemently and often that they hadn't heard
about any plague, and a rather extravagantly hued Ergesh who occupied three