seats and smelled like the garbage pressers of a candy factory.
"There have been three attempts on my life, since I started on this story,"
whispered the Chadra-Fan, and his four wide nostrils quivered in the velvet
of his snout. "Loronar Corporation can't afford for this to be made public.
Half their contracts come from the Republic."
"Surely Loronar Corporation wouldn't frank an assassin?
Yarbolk sniffed and jabbed one short finger at the protocol droid for
emphasis. "Loronar might not do it themselves, but they'd get Getelles to do
it. Who do you think put those Gopso'o on me, back on Drovis?.
My sources at Getelles's court tell me Loronar is pretty much backing
Getelles's whole household. The local CEO, Dymurra, lives there like a king
sex droids, vibrobaths, plug-ins, glitterstim, four different chefs,
self-conforming slippers, independently controlled environments in every
room of his mansion, you name it. Some stuff that isn't legal anywhere. He
couldn't get it without Getelles's okay. That all adds up tO . . ."
"Igpek Droon?" called a voice from the inner doorway.
"That's you!" hissed Yarbolk, when Threepio didn't respond.
"Oh--oh, yes." Threepio rose quickly, stepping on the hem of his robe as he
did so; Yarbolk inconspicuously caught him by the elbow to keep him from
going over. The Lycomins's Captain and Chief Medical Officer both stood in
the doorway female Gotals, their flat gray faces already turning toward him
with suspicion as he hastened in their direction, their hornlike sensory
organs picking up the synergistic energy fields that betrayed him as a
droid.
"Thank goodness we've finally contacted someone in authority!"
cried Threepio gratefully, unhooking the straps of his mask and pulling free
the blond wig. "You have no idea . . ."
He found himself looking down the barrels of two blasters and a disruptor.
"Don't come any closer, droid," snapped the captain. "Tuuve, get a
restraining bolt for this one."
"But you don't understand!" protested Threepio. "You must communicate with
the New Republic Council immediately! Her Excellency, Chief of State Leia
Organa Solo, has been kidnapped! You must . . ."
"Not another one," muttered the Chief Medical Officer to her captain.
"What was the last one? A wrecked shipload of Carosi pups with two hours'
oxygen left? And how' much tenho-root extract did that one have stashed in
its casing?"
"I beg your pardon!" Threepio drew himself up to his full height, though he
had been carefully engineered to be nonthreatening to a
wide spectrum of sentient species, Gotals among them. "I am a certified
protocol droid belonging to Her Excellency herself! The very idea that I
would be programmed to smuggle illicit drugs . . ."
"Whoever programmed this one picked a doozy of a cover story," remarked the
captain. She nodded to the Sullustan engineer who had come up behind
Threepio with a couple of restraining bolts. "Get His Excellency down to the
impound hold and go over him good. And take down the serial numbers."
She rubbed her eyes. Her thin, fleshless lips were gray with fatigue and the
soft tissue around her eyes was swollen. When he considered it, Threepio
supposed that operating a quarantine enforcement vessel along the perimeter
of a sector involved in half a dozen separate revolts--without any
centralized authority to back up her decisions--must be an extremely wearing
task.
"We'll put Enforcement on whoever he really belongs to after this is all
over, but for now, tag anything you find hidden in the casings and send the
microprocessors down to the lab. We need them bad. They need wiring in
Maintenance, too."
"I protest!" cried Threepio, as the Sullustan troopers laid hold of his
arms. "Her Excellency has been kidnapped and . . ."
"Her Excellency, for your information, my friend," said the Gotal, with a
weary, gritting edge to her voice, "just transmitted authorization for our
mission in this sector, under her personal seal. I've just spoken to her."
"She left authorized holograms of herself for contingency purposes before
she left on the secret mission!" cried Threepio. "That's standard procedure.
Of course they would need her authorization to establish a quarantine zone,
but she isn't really there! My counterpart and I are the only ones who know'
her true whereabouts!"
The two Gotals--members of a species notoriously distrustful of droids, an
understandable prejudice given the sensitivity of their sensory
organs--exchanged an eloquent glance.
"But I tell you I was there! Two battle cruisers disappeared! The Borealis
and the Adamantine . . ."
The surgeon frowned. "Your cousin's on the Adamantine, isn't he, Captain?"
The captain nodded. "And the Adamantine left for Celanon at the beginning of
the week."
"That was only a cover story!" wailed Threepio, as the guards pulled him in
the direction of the doors. "Her mission in this sector was top secret! The
Adamantine was destroyed . . ."
The captain's eyes hardened to steel. "Get him out of here," she said softly
to the guards. "Get that R2 as well, would you? You tell them in Impound to
flush those microprocessors good."
The guard saluted, and asked, "What about the Chadra-Fan they came on board
with?
The Gotal captain fished in her pocket for a slip of pink flimsiplast.
Threepio thought it was a message slip of some kind, but there was no
official heading, only a private scramble code across the top. Her eyes
narrowed furtively as she looked over at Yarbolk, who was still sitting next
to Artoo and trying to look inconspicuous. Then she turned to Threepio.
"What's your friend's name?"
Unless programmed to give alternate information, droids are devastatingly
truthful, even those whose business is protocol and diplomacy.
"Yarbolk Yemm," provided Threepio unhesitatingly. "I understand that he's a
journalist for TriNebulon."
There was momentary silence. Then the captain said, "That's him," and
signaled to another guard as she started across the room toward the
Chadra-Fan.
Yarbolk saw them coming and sprang to his feet. Everyone in the waiting hall
had been relieved of whatever weaponry he or she'd possessed, and in any
case the guards were heavily armed. He bolted toward the doors, but they did
not open. Turning at bay, he raised his hands in protest or surrender as the
Gotal captain pulled her blaster from her side and fired a stun beam into
his chest from a distance of less than a meter. The shock of it threw the
little journalist back against the door, where he slumped slowly to the
floor in a tangle of golden fur and pink-and-blue silk.
The Gotal captain glanced around her. Under the watchful eyes of the guards,
none of the others in the room had moved. Perhaps, deduced Threepio, they
had their own reasons for wishing to remain inconspicuous. The captain spoke
to the guards nearest her, in a voice
so low that only a droid's acute audio receptors could pick up what she
said.
She said, "Ai
rlock three."
Stretched in the crevice of a glittering cliff face, Leia shaded her eyes
against the rising sun glare. Wind made her face feel as if it had been
chemically processed. From her high ledge she could see back along the maze
of canyons, harsh edged and broken as old tectonic upheavals had left them,
every surface a mirror magnifying the heatless light.
If they were looking for her, she couldn't tell it.
Certainly she saw nothing. Ashgad could easily program simple tracker droids
to her physical parameters movement, mass, and body temperature. For this
reason she had sacrificed the antigrav unit and one of the heaters, sending
it drifting away down the canyon as a decoy.
Beldorion's decayed powers might sense the difference, but Leia was willing
to bet that even had the Force not lain like a crackling magnetic field over
the entire planet, the effort was beyond the one-time Knight.
She closed her eyes for a moment, weary to exhaustion. She still didn't know
why she hadn't been dashed to jelly at the foot of the mesa--there must have
been more juice in the coil than she'd thought.
She felt like she'd dodged, and run, and scrambled a hundred kilometers
since then.
Opening her eyes again, she unfolded the map. Years on the run with the
Rebel forces had taught her to read elevation maps. She identified the
canyon she'd climbed up, and the two peaks between which she had to clamber
to come down on the deserted gun station at Bleak Point. There was no water
marked anywhere on the map, so she didn't know whether there would be a pump
of any kind at her destination.
Only about a quarter of the water in the pitcher remained, and she didn't
know how' long it would take her to get a message out . . .
. . . If the gun station still contained working equipment capable of
subspace range.
Stiffly, achingly, she bent to examine the wreckage of her gold-stamped
ceremonial boots, and with bleeding fingers ripped another length of silver
space tape to add to the existing crisscross of repairs.
If Ashgad didn't have some means of picking up and tracking such a signal.
If there were anyone alive to hear.
She tried not to think about the Death Seed and about how much her feet
hurt.
The Death Seed.
The echo of it returned again and again to her mind.
Idiot, idiot, idiot. She slung the sealed pitcher over her back once more
and started the long, cautious, terrible process of following the ledge back
along the cliff toward the high-up cluster of amethyst peaks that were her
next landmark.
She'd seen records of other governments, other armies, other men who had
attempted to use plague as a weapon. Hathfox III came to mind. It had been
twelve centuries, according to the records unearthed there, and the place
was still on the Registry as a Standing Hazard. The team that had retrieved
the records had all died, as had the crew of their rescue ship and the
entire staff of the quarantine facility to which they'd been taken.
According to the records--tapped into by remote at a distance--the terrorist
organization that had developed that particular quasivirus had had a
"fool-proof" antivirus.
Are you familiar with the term mutate, boys and girls? Leia's mouth twisted
in cynical despair. Have you ever heard the words human error?
Minor equipment failure? How about that little phrase 'Oh, we didn't think
of THAT!
Death Seed.
Don't you dare. Don't you DARE.
But they already had dared. If Ashgad's memos were correct, the Death Seed
was already spreading through the fleet, crippling it as revolt after revolt
broke out across the sector and Admiral Larm's ships moved in. Apparently
Dzym could control the timing of its starts if he were in the area or cared
about doing so--otherwise it spread on its
Own.
Would Beldorion hear her, if she tried to call out to Luke again.
Her hand touched the lightsaber at her belt. She should have listened to
Luke, she thought. Spent more time in training. Luke wouldn't have this
trouble.
Neither would Vader, of course.
Panting, hands bleeding, knees torn from the bitter mangling of uneroded
stone, Leia gained the crest of the ridge between the two peaks and looked
down on the gun station below.
It looked tiny, hundreds of meters below. A blunt black cylinder, doorless
and without so much as a centimeter of transparisteel, set close beside the
heavy shoulder of rock that gave the place its name.
The original black stone had been added to with rude defensive works,
reminiscent of a woman in a formal senatorial robe wearing a
shade-drinks-and-stereo picnic hat. She could get in, thought Leia, through
those bristling wood-and-metal upper works, were she willing to sacrifice
her blanket by cutting it into strips to lengthen the cable.
She managed, but only just. Throwing the hook from a precarious balance
point at the top of the rock spur, with the help of the pouring wind she was
able to lodge it among the bristling beams. Releasing the cable to hang free
along the wall, she climbed to the ground again, and stumbled to the place
where the cable, added to by blanket strips, reached to within a meter of
It had been years since Leia had shinnied up a wall. Once, twenty meters up,
pummeled by the wind, arms burning and breath short and hard in her lungs,
she felt a wave of dizziness rise over her and thought, I'm going to faint.
She wrapped the cable around her arms, pressed her forehead to the black
stone, wind crushing her like a torrent of ice, willed the giddiness to
pass. Her body trembled with hunger and fatigue. I'll never make it.
But she did. She pulled the cable up after her when she reached the top, and
crept like an exhausted old woman to the cluster of shielded coils,
reflectors, and modulators that rose through the pavement among the
jury-rigged defensive works The great laser cannons pointed at the sky.
Night brought the dim white daytime stars to unwinking brilliance among the
tangle of beams and razor wire and lessened the pounding brutality of the
wind. Leia cut through the locks on the doors that led down to the station
below, afterward barricading the doors as well as she could behind her. The
gun station, being without transparisteel, might well be haunted with the
same groping, mutating vermin that had attacked her in the stairway of
Ashgad's house. If that were the case, she would be forced to sleep on the
roof, and would probably freeze.
She saw none of those things, but there were hundreds of fingernail-size
drochs in the stairway. Some turned toward her in the muted beam of her
downward-pointing glowrod, and began to crawl purposefully in her direction
up the steps. Leia activated her lightsaber and flicked them with its tip.
Those she touched sizzled and curled into balls of charred death. The others
crawled after her, as she descended the stair.
The equipment in the station was old, but serviceable. Most of the gun coils
themselves were sealed, b
ut the controls were open, a simple switching
mechanism transferring targeting from the sealed computers to manual. They
have to have teachin of some kind. She flicked the test switches
experimentally, studied the readouts. The targeting equipment was
elementary, but nobody who hadn't been trained could have used it.
Something] the Listeners pass along with the doctrines they hear from the
voices in the wastelands?
Why would they want to destroy ships coming] in and ships going out?
just because they want to keep the world primitive?
Or was there something else.
Sharp pain stabbed the calf of her leg. Looking down, she saw three or four
huge drochs burrowing through the strips of space tape wrapped around her
legs. Exhaustion and a slight breathlessness dragged at her, as it had after
the attack by the creatures in the stairwell.
They must be related to drochs, she thought, backing away from the targeting
consoles and shining the glowrod all around her. The floor was dotted with
the round, flat shapes of the insects. Keep moving, she thought. Don't let
your feet stay too long in any one place.
The gun chamber was enormous, round, obviously occupying all of one level of
the squat tower. Nothing in it even suggested communication equipment to
her. Lamp fixtures hung dead from the smoke-black vaults.
A steel ladder in the center of the floor communicated with the lower level,
and there was equipment there, too, sealed behind soot-stained and filthy
black metal. Wornout blankets, heaps of arrows and
spears, boxes of metal bullets, explosive ceramic pellets, and paper-wrapped
gravel shot strewed the floor. Leia leaned against the ladder, fighting a
wave of dizziness, her body trembling and suddenly cold. Drochs, she
thought. Sunlight will make me feel better. But she realized it could just
as easily have been exhaustion, hunger, and the fatigue of unaccustomed
hardship.
Far above her, she heard the sudden slither and crash of falling beams and
furniture.
The barricade! Her heart froze. Boots clumped with muffled tread on the
floor above, and the hard white beam of a sodium light veered and flickered
down the opening in the floor. Voices murmured. A quick glance around showed
her there was no further ladder down. The rest of the tower must be taken up
with the power supply of the guns themselves. Though she knew the dark