She looked up quickly--she found she had been staring reflectively at the
blinking comm light--and said, "Oh, okay. Fine. Thank you."
She punched through an alternate comm number, and again, got only tone.
It happened, of course. Usually it meant that the comm watch was in the
break room. As a girl she'd had the annoying habit of coding and recoding
comm numbers every few seconds until she got results. It had taken her years
to break herself of it, to relax for a few moments, do something else, then
try again like a normal person.
But the situation wasn't normal. Though the Meridian sector included a
number of Republic planets and two major fleet strongholds at the Durren
orbital base and on Cybloc XII, Moff Getelles's satrapy in the Antemeridian
sector wasn't all that far away. And whereas she doubted he or his admirals
would try anything in the face of the combined firepower of the Borealis and
the Adamantine, the fact remained that her mission to the Chorios systems
wasn't widely known. If there was trouble, response time would be slow.
The bright-faced boys and girls of the Academy guard leapt to their feet as
she re-entered the anteroom. bringing their weapons to the present. Leia
returned the salute with a grave lifting of her hand.
"Marcopius, would you do me a favor? I know this sounds really paranoid, but
I've got a message light and I can't raise anyone in Comm.
Could I get you to go down there and see if it's anything urgent?"
"Of course, Your Excellency." He slung his weapon, bowed, and departed like
an advertisement for the Academy before she could get her thanks out of her
mouth. As Leia returned to her private parlor she smiled a little in
reflection. Several members of the Council--notably Q-Varx, who like most
Rationalists was enchanted by gadgetry--had moved to purchase an executive
honor guard of the new synthdroids, arguing that, in addition to eliminating
any further need to use the Noghri, it would be cheaper to maintain in the
long run and provide more uniform security with less chance of betrayal or
individual error.
Her desk--neatly arranged by See-Threepio, who had taken it on himself
periodically to pass through her stateroom like a golden hurricane of
tidiness--contained a very nicely produced ad-cube from the Loronar
Corporation's synthdroid division concerning the aesthetic quality, utter
reliability, high performance standards, and low cost (Hah!
thought Leia) of the new droids. "Hardly droids at all," the pleasant voice
of the obviously synthdroid announcer had lauded before Leia muted the
sound. She had to hand it to Loronar ("All the finest, all the first") The
cube had been in her stateroom since the start of this mission and as far as
she could tell hadn't repeated itself yet.
Centrally Controlled Independent Replicant technology could allegedly
reproduce the watchfulness and defensive capabilities of the Noghri, though
she didn't believe it and wasn't sure she wanted something like that on the
open market. She had to admit, seeing Ashgad's three, that they were nice
looking, undoubtedly efficient, less aesthetically intrusive than droids,
and certainly less unsettling than Noghri.
Freed of standard droid memory system requirements, for all intents and
purposes they looked like human beings, if human beings were what you
wanted.
She shook her head and sat down at the comm station again, suddenly
overwhelmed with fatigue. Members of Daysong, a splinter group of the Rights
of Sentience Party, claimed that an honor guard was
a form of servile humiliation and should be replaced by droids (Hadn't these
people ever heard of magnetic flux disruptors? But Leia didn't consider
either Ezrakh or Yeoman Shreel, for instance, either humiliated or servile.
In his off-duty moments--not that a Noghri was ever completely off duty--the
little hunter-killer would tell Leia tales of his childhood on Honoghr, of
his wife and children there, the same way Yeoman Shreel or Yeoman Marcoplus
would show her holos of their brothers and sisters and pets at home.
The Daysong folks objected violently to the synthdroids too, of course, on
the grounds that synthflesh was living and had rights as well.
The Theran Listeners, wandering around the desert holding conversations with
rocks, couldn't possibly be crazier.
Leia leaned her head against the back of the chair, tired beyond words.
Tired, she thought suddenly, as her hands and feet grew cold, beyond what
she should be. It didn't exactly hurt her to breathe, but every breath was
an effort. The hand she raised, or tried to raise, to rub the ache behind
her sternum felt as if she'd been manacled with lead.
This is ridiculous, she thought. Every member of Seti Ashgad's party and
yesterday's good-faith inspection of the vessel had been scanned.
Of course they'd been scanned. No virus, no microbe, no poison . . .
nothing had been detected.
Dizziness swamped her. She reached across the table for the comm button, but
collapsed halfway and slid to the floor in a great sigh of velvet robe.
"Your Excellency?" The door swished open. "Your Excellency, I have been
attempting to monitor fleet communications, and . . . Your Excellency!"
Threepio toddled into the stateroom, golden hands flying up in a singularly
human gesture of alarm. "Your Excellency, whatever is the matter?"
Artoo-Detoo, close on the protocol droid's shining metal heels, rolled up to
Leia's side and directed a scanner beam over her. He tweeped informatively.
"I know she's not well, you stupid bucket of bolts! And don't you go quoting
heart-rate readings to me." He was already at the wall comm unit.
"Infirmary? Infirmar? There's no answer!" He turned dramatically to his
counterpart. "Something terrible is going on! I attempted to get in touch
with the Adamantine just now to check on our departure for the rendezvous
point and there was no answer! We must .
. ."
The stateroom door slid open, framing in its tall rectangle the slumped,
small form of Dzym.
"Oh, Master Dzym!" cried Threepio. "Something terrible has happened!
You must inform the emergency services . . ."
The man only stepped clear of the opener beam of the doorway and walked to
Leia's side. He seemed a trifle unsteady on his feet, as if drunk or
drugged. His colorless eyes half-shut, he wore on his face an expression
Threepio--never truly good at interpretation of human facial expression
despite the most advanced of pattern-recognition software--could not define
or even guess at ecstasy, concentration, dreamy pain.
He stood beside Leia for a time, looking down at her. Then he half-knelt and
began to pull off his violet leather gloves.
The door swished open behind him. "Dzym!" cried Ashgad, striding through as
his secretary slewed around.
Dzym got quickly to his feet, pulling his glove on once again.
Ashgad dropped to one knee at Leia's side.
"Oh, Master Ashgad . . ." began Threepio, starting forward.
Ashgad said briefly, "Push him aside," and one of the fair-haired,
androgynous synthdro
ids stepped through the door after him, and shoved
Threepio hard across the room. The synthdroid had the startling strength of
cable and hydraulic joints, and Threepio, for all his excellent
construction, was only middling well balanced. He went crashing down in the
corner, flailing and struggling to get up.
"Stop it," said Ashgad, looking up at Dzym, holding his gaze Meaning,
obscure to any onlooker, passed between them that they both understood.
"Release her."
"My lord, she may revive before . . ."
"Release her! Now!"
Dzym's mouth turned pettishly down for a moment. He shut his eyes in
momentary concentration. Then he drew a little breath, and said, "Very well.
The action is stopped."
Ashgad turned back to Leia. Artoo-Detoo, standing over her with
his single little clamper-arm extended downward as if to try to rouse her,
swung back to his upright mode and backed hastily.
"Wait!" cried Threepio. "No!" For the first time, he had an almost human
intuition that this man had not the smallest intention of taking the Chief
of State to the infirmary. "Artoo, stop them!"
But Ashgad was human, and Artoo, though he had a certain defensive
capability with his electronic welder, could no more have attacked him than
he could have danced on a tightrope. It was something that normally
programmed droids simply could not do.
Ashgad got to his feet, with Leia limp in his arms, the red velvet of her
robes hanging nearly to the floor. To the synthdroid, Ashgad began to say,
"You're to wait until the brig is . . . Yes, Liegeus?"
The thin, tired-looking man whom Threepio recognized as the brig's pilot
stepped in as the door swished open once more. "It's finished," the pilot
said. "I've launched the slave relay with the time-delayed projections of
final reports for both vessels. I used scrap from the active files of both
onboard computers. The messages should be indistinguishable from real
transmissions."
His face was white in the dark, graying tousle of his hair, and there was a
tautness to his mouth, as if he had just finished being sick.
"Everyone on board both ships appears to be dead or incapacitated."
He glanced over at Dzym, whose eyes had gone dreamy again.
Dzym smiled and murmured, "Yes. Oh, yes."
The man Liegeus looked away from him, pain and loathing in his eyes.
"The synthdroids have taken one of the shuttles over to the escort ship.
They should have no trouble boarding."
"Very good." Ashgad glanced at the wall chronometer. "It should take about
thirty minutes for us to return to the Light of Reason and take her far
enough from these ships for safety."
The door opened as they turned to enter the anteroom. Through it, Threepio
could glimpse the Noghri Ezrakh, sprawled on the floor across the threshold,
still moving feebly but his face livid with the pallor of approaching death.
Ashgad, with Leia in his arms, stepped over him, and over the others, human
and Noghri, lying on the floor beyond, the crimson velvet dragging over
their faces. Dzym knelt for a moment at
Ezrakh's side, passed his gloved hands lightly across the dying bodyguard's
face and throat, his face suffused with pleasure; Liegeus averted his eyes
and avoided touching him as he passed.
The closing door cut off the sight of them, and whatever Ashgad said next.
"Oh, do something!" cried Threepio, and tried to get to his feet.
Artoo rolled over to him and extended his welder as a sort of lever arm to
help him up. "Why didn't you do something, you ignorant little adding
machine! We have to stop them! Guards! Guards! They're kidnapping the Chief
of State!"
The anteroom door swooshed wide at Threepio's touch. The protocol droid
hesitated over the body of Ezrakh, dead now, eyes staring in horror, then
turned helplessly away. With the opening of the door into the corridor he
stopped in alarm. Two other Noghri lay on the floor, one still breathing
with slow, harsh, stertorous gasps, the other utterly still. They bore no
marks of violence or struggle.
"Shuttle bay!" cried Threepio, punching the code on the wall comm.
"Shuttle bay! They have to be stopped!"
There was no answer but the whine of a signal blocker somewhere in the
system.
He hastened after Artoo, who hadn't even paused, trundling down the corridor
and making a little detour around the dead guards. "What can have caused it?
Symptomatic analysis indicates . . ."
Artoo stopped, with such suddenness that Threepio nearly can-nonaded into
him, over the body of a third Academy guard. He extended his gripper arm to
prod the young man's shoulder, and Threepio saw that this one, the bodyguard
Marcopius, bore on the side of his head the mark of a heavy blow.
"Yeoman Marcopius, Master Ashgad has kidnapped Her Excellency!"
cried Threepio, at the first sign of reviving consciousness.
Sitting up, the youth said a word that Threepio knew in close to a million
languages but was programmed never to utter in any of them.
"The vhole ship's been poisoned!" He rolled to his feet with a nimbleness
that caused the droid a momentary flash of envy.
"I beg your pardon, sir, but the symptoms are less those of poison
show a ninety percent correlation with the Death Seed plague of seven
centuries ago. But how such a thing came to pass . . ."
"Whatever it is, they're panicking down in the infirmary." The boy scooped
up his ceremonial weapon and strode so quickly along the corridor as he
spoke that the two droids could barely keep pace. "The engine crew sealed
themselves off. I caught that pilot of Ashgad's--if he is a pilot--doing
something with the transmission records . . ."
"They're going to do something to both vessels, something to destroy them!"
said Threepio. "They said they had to get their own ship out of range. We're
doomed!"
"Not if we can get to one of the scout boats, we're not."
Beyond the vast portal of the magnetic hatch, the stars were already moving
when Yeoman Marcopius and the two droids reached the shuttle bay floor. The
shuttle brig was already gone, a dwindling gray flake in the blackness. The
three bay guards lay dead on the floor, unmarked and peaceful. Far off the
Light of Reason was a tiny berry, a cluster of minute bronze, black, and
silver minihulls, and farther still the silver arrowhead of the Adamantine
could be seen moving out).
"Where are they goinggt;." cried Threepio, stopping dead in his tracks to
watch. He thought he saw something move in the shadows, something tiny
scuttling along the wall, and turned his head in an attempt at visual
tracking. "There isn't anyone alive on that ship, I heard them say so . . .
Marcopius grabbed his arm and dragged him up the small scout craft's ramp.
"They're taking it out of the vicinity of the Chorios systems," said the
boy, slamming shut the scout boat's hatch behind them and dropping into the
chair behind the bridge controls. "If Ashgad kidnapped Lady Solo--if he
found some wa
y to poison the crews on both ships, or whatever he did--he's
not going to want record of either ship disappearing too soon after the
rendezvous." He was jerking over levers, checking readouts, activating the
emergency relays to open the magnetic portal once again, while beyond the
portal the stars glided quicker and quicker as the tiny dots of the Charlos
systems fell behind.
"He's going to want to say, Oh, they were all fine when they pulled out of
here. Look at this." He cut into the coded deep-space Net channel.
Its screen flashed an image of the two Republic cruisers making their serene
way toward the standard Coruscant jump point on the far side of the Chorios
systems. Immediately afterward the image of Leia's face appeared, reporting
the conference successfully concluded.
Brassy lights flared over Marcopius's dark frown, and the cool, neutral
voice of an emergency recording began to announce monotonously, "This vessel
is in stage two of hyperspace sequence. Taking a scout craft out at this
time is extremely dangerous. Contact the main bridge and review' your
instructions. This vessel is in stage two of hyperspace sequence . . .
"Hyperspace!" wailed Threepio. "Who could be taking it into . ."
"One of the synthdroids. No one else is alive." Marcopius delicately lifted
the scout boat from its moorings and swung its nose weightlessly toward the
black rectangle of the portal. "Can't you shut that thing off?"
'I'm terribly sorry, Yeoman Marcopius, but my program forbids me to tamper
with safety equipment of any kind."
The young man made a final sequence of adjustments, lip between his teeth,
sweat glistening on his forehead, while the warning voice repeated over and
over that it was extremely dangerous to take out a scout craft of any kind.
Ahead of them, through the portal, they saw the Adamantine flash bright as
it turned, accelerating, then vanished in a spangle of hyperblue light.
"Where can they be goinggt;." nattered Threepio. "That's nowhere near the
hyperspace jump point for Coruscant. If we can somehow extrapolate from the
jump point to learn where they're going . . ."
"They're not going anywhere." Marcopius was breathing hard now, setting the
controls. On the decoder screen before them the digitalized images of the
flagship and its escort continued to float among the empty, lifeless worlds