Part 5 (1/2)

The Death Seed! Leia's breath left her, as if with physical shock.

Seven hundred years ago that plague had wiped out millions.

Whole sectors had relapsed into primitive subsistence, as those who understood machinery and s.p.a.ceflight had perished wholesale...

It was the casualness of Dzym's tone that galvanized Leia into action.

She rose from the divan, pulled the cloaklike folds of her robe more closely around her-the sunlight held no heat-and made her way shakily to the far end of the terrace. Perhaps twenty-five meters below her, just above where the walls of the great, rambling house merged into the harsh basalt of the bluff itself, another terrace ran the length of that side of the building and curved around the face of the cliff.

Heavy hedges of brachniel and 1oak grew from planters of imported soil as windbreaks around two sides, brilliant and alien green against the gray permacrete. A sort of gazebo stood at one end of the terrace, the shade densely black within. A complex system of mist jets and pipes mitigated somewhat the dryness of the air. By the way Ashgad turned, Leia guessed that Dzym sat within the gazebo's shade.

There was a third being on the terrace, stretched out on a black-and-orange air-duvet under a veritable rainshower of air misters, and Leia flinched with revulsion at the sight of it, and the sound of its gluey, tuba ba.s.s.

”Dzym's right.” It rolled over, flexed its gelid length-at roughly twelve meters, it was the longest Hutt Leia had ever seen. It was ma.s.sive, without Jabba's obesity; like a young Hutt in its agility and speed but grown to the size of an old one. ”You couldn't have gotten past the medical scans without them. And only droids would have taken the vessels into hypers.p.a.ce without a second jump coordinate.”

Hypers.p.a.ce!

Marcopius. Ezrakh. Captain Ioa. Those poor children of her honor guard...

Threepio and Artoo.

Sickness and horror swept her, replaced a moment later by a burning rage.

”Yes, but at a hundred thousand credits apiece!”

”Cheap at the price.” The Hutt shrugged. ”Dymurra thought it was worth the expenditure. I agree with him. It wasn't enough to have Liegeus put through that 'Mission accomplished, we're leaving for Co-ruscant'

message, or even the faked transmissions from the jump point.

We couldn't bring those vessels here. We couldn't destroy them without the risk of telltale debris. And what do you care, anyway?” Dymurra paid for the synthdroids, not you.”

”And that makes it all right?” Ashgad turned impatiently from the railing to face the huge, reclining shape. ”With an att.i.tude like that, it's no wonder you're no longer ruling this territory, Beldorion.”

”Anyway,” rumbled Beldorion cryptically, ”the price is about to come down on them, isn't it? And what's three hundred thousand credits, if you can get rid of all evidence of where Her Excellency is and what became of her?” Once Rieekan goes into a coma, the Council's going to be chasing its tail for days, each member trying to keep the next from being named successor.”

He swelled up a little and produced a burp of cosmic proportions, leaking green drool from his mouth and releasing a vast breath of gases that Leia could smell from the terrace above. He rolled a little and delved with one tiny, muscular hand into a washtub-size porcelain bowl of some kind of pink-and-orange snack food that rested on the duvet at his side. Even Ashgad turned his face aside in disgust.

”And don't speak to me about not ruling this Force-benighted planet anymore,” the Hutt added, around a mouthful of small, squirming things.

”No one forced me-me, Beldorion the Splendid, geldorion of the Ruby Eyes-to retire. I ruled this world longer than your petty Empire existed, and I ruled it well.”

He shoved another handful of whatever it was into his enormous mouth.

Some of it escaped and made it nearly to the edge of his duvet before he tongued it up. ”So don't tell me I was too wasteful or too lazy to know what I'm talking about.” He extended one hand, and Leia felt it.

The Force.

A silver cup, probably kept in some kind of cooling bowl under the gazebo's black shade, floated into sight and drifted across toward the stubby, outstretched yellow fingers with their golden rings.

And all around her, Leia felt the air change, as if the iridescent sunlight had thickened or changed its composition: Itchy, swirling, angry.

Beldorion the Hutt had been trained as a Jedi.

And against his use of the Force, there was a stirring, a reaction, a movement in the Force itself that Leia, though only marginally adept with her Jedi powers, felt like sandpaper on the inside of her skull.

Leia's knees felt weak, and she retreated to the divan again, catching the head of it for balance, s.h.i.+vering within the garnet weight of the state robe.

The Borealis, sent into hypers.p.a.ce blind and unprogrammed, never to emerge.... But if what Dzym said was true, if the Death Seed plague had been on board, that was just as well.

She had had the Death Seed. She shook her head. It was impossible, according to the records no one recovered.

And Minister Rieekan, her second-in-command in the Council .. When Rieekan goes into his coma...

I have to warn him. I have to warn someone...

She dropped onto the divan, shaking in every limb with weakness and shock. Panic and rage struggled against the thickness of the sweetblossom that clogged her brain, a fury to escape, to outwit them.

And the drug whispered its reply, Of course you should. But not just now.

Something in the pocket of her robe pressed into her thigh, hard and uncomfortable. Leia frowned, trying to recall what she'd carried with her in the garment's bulky folds to the meeting with Ashgad. The answer was, of course, Nothing. The velvet garment of state was sufficiently heavy without adding weight to it.

But in that case, who could have put something there, and when She fished and fumbled around until she found the pocket in the lining, originally designed to carry a recording device or, depending on who the wearer planned to meet, a hold-out blaster.

Clumsy with the effects of the sweetblossom, her fingers closed on metal.

It was her lightsaber.

She brought it out, stared at it in a kind of shock. Touched the switch, the quivering laser blade humming faintly, pale blue and nearly invisible in the odd, morning light.

Luke's voice came to her, Keep up with your lightsaber practice. You need it. And like an echo, the voice of the Anakin she had never heard, We have the Power...

She pushed the ugly dream from her mind. But she couldn't push from her the knowledge of what they were: The grandchildren of Darth Vader, with only the teaching of Law and Justice between the New Republic and that terrible dream. She remembered all the efforts that had been made to kidnap them, to use them, to twist them into tools for greed or obsession. And all the while people a.s.sumed that she would teach them better, teach them not to use their powers for selfishness or impulse, while she watched the jackals of the broken Empire and the members of her own Council squabble and s.n.a.t.c.h and waste time and lives.

And Luke kept urging her to take up that personal, frightening power: the power of Palpatine. The power to have it all her own way.

She touched the switch again. The s.h.i.+ning blade was gone.

Artoo. Dimly she remembered Threepio's despairing wails into the comm, and as she slid toward cold darkness, the soft clickety-whirr of the astromech's servos near her. Artoo knew I was in danger. He helped me the only way he could.

She closed her eyes, fighting tears.

I will kill them, she thought, the cold fury breaking through the sluggishness of the drug. Ashgad, and Dzym, and that foul Hutt, and Liegeus with his drugged drinks and phony concern. Whatever they're up to, I'll destroy them.

Before Liegeus came back, she thought, she'd better check out her room for whatever escape she could find.

The air was softer indoors, subtly modified to escape the piercing dryness. That meant magnetic s.h.i.+elds on the doors and windows-not cheap-and some kind of mist generators in the ceilings. Away from the jewellike refractions of the sunlight the shadows were thick, and the ma.s.sive walls sheltered a sour muskiness that no air-conditioning could disperse.

Anyplace a Hutt occupied smelled of Hutt, of course. n.o.body ever liked that heavy, rotted odor. On Tatooine, Leia had learned to hate it, though her experience of living in Jabba's palace had served her well during her negotiations with Durga the Hutt on Nal Hutta. She was one of the few diplomats who could deal with highly odorous species like Hutts and Vordums unjudgmentally and relatively unflinchingly. One couldn't, she knew, discredit their intelligence just because their digestive enzymes were set up to deal with everything from tree roots to petroleum by-products.

There were bugs, too. She saw them, tiny and purplish brown, skittering along the densest shadows at the base of the wall and under the small, roughly constructed chest of drawers that was the room's single other piece of furniture. Most storage was in wall niches, natural in a world where only intensive agriculture on the part of its unwilling inhabitants centuries ago had been able to eventually produce woody plants large enough to make furniture out of. The niche doors and the old-fas.h.i.+oned manual outer door of the room were high-impact plastic.