"Another Palpatine?" asked Callista. "Another Vader? You aren't.
You're not even another Bail Organa. You're Leia."
Leia was silent, regarding the soft-shining blue light of the blade, the
paler glow of Callista's just beyond. Those two heatless beacons illuminated
the darkness around them, isolated the two women in the heart of an ember
fire, statesman and warrior, thinker and feeling heart.
"Haven't you seen that yet?" asked Callista, her voice more quiet still.
"Luke has."
Leia's panting breath steadied. The weapon felt more stable in her hands,
more a part of herself. For the first time ever when she had held the
lightsaber, she smiled. And smiling, signed to the younger woman and stepped
into the fray again.
It was Callista who gestured to stop. Leia lowered her weapon.
Callista turned her head, listening, her dark, level brows drawn together.
A moment later B came into the circle of torchlight, his scarred, thin face
intent in the braided frame of his long hair.
"They're moving on the gun station," he said. "From Ruby Gulch, dozens of
them. On other gun stations as well."
"How did he know that?" Leia asked, as she and Callista followed the others
to the caves where the cu-pas and speeders were hidden She climbed onto the
back of a repulsor-lift sled with three other cultists; Callista swung into
the saddle of a pale golden cu-pa, wrapped the gray veiling close around her
face, and settled her rifle and grenades over her shoulder "Voices tell
them, they say. Voices that speak in their minds if they sleep in certain
places, far back in the hills, or drink preparations of certain herbs--as
far as I can tell, that suppress left-brain linear activity. Be is a Healer,
strong in the Force. Many of the other Listeners are, tOO."
She tossed Leia a rifle and a bow. There were arrows in the back of the
sled, being passed among those who clustered there, men and women alike, as
the vehicles and animals began their swift trek through the icy darkness of
predawn, flowing like water down the silent canyons.
"The Force is so strong here," she said softly, her gloved hand steady, easy
on the cu-pa's rein "I'd heard the rumor of it from Djinn, my Master. There
was a story about two young Jedi who came here centuries ago seeking gifts
and strength in the Force that they themselves lacked Nothing further was
known of them, but one of them supposedly was a Hutt. I know Hutts live a
long time" She shook her head, wonderingly, as if regarding that desperate
young woman of nearly a year ago, fleeing the ruin of Admiral Daala's
demolished fleet and seeking a place to go, a clue to lead her through the
labyrinth of her quest for her own lost gifts.
"What I found, you know. Pettiness, old feuds, slavery to the base. . . And
I thought, never again. Never again am I going to be anyone's pawn, because
of the powers I was born with, the powers I don't even possess anymore But
while I was a prisoner I saw the Reliant. I had seen Dzym and guessed what
he was planning. I take it you didn't get my message?"
"I got it." Leia grimly shifted the rifle on her shoulder, clung to the
struts of one of the sled's makeshift gun turrets. "It's just that by that
time things had progressed too far to be called off. It reached me the day I
left."
"You should have said you were sick."
"It took Q-Varx and the Rationalists months to set up the meeting.
They were operating in good faith--pawns, not spies. I read their
correspondence.
I wasn't willing to risk the political repercussions of refusal."
Callista shook her head, and Leia said, "You have to make these decisions."
She hesitated, and then, because she herself despised surprises, added,
"Luke came, too. He was on Hesperidium to see me off.
He took a fighter to the planet's surface, to look for you."
Callista's head turned sharply.
"I don't know where he is."
She looked away. What could be seen of her face was still as ivory, but
above the edge of the veil, the wide gray eyes filled with tears.
They rode for a time in silence, winding down the trails that were barely
familiar, scattered with broken rock and shards of crystal, with dunes of
gravel hurled up wholesale from the flats below. Dawn winds had started as
Squinting against it in the silky gray light, Leia could make out the taller
masses of the cliffs around the gun station, the fretwork of the shattered
upper works, black against the peadescent air.
"I found nothing here that would help me," said Callista quietly.
"The Force is here, but not in a form that I can touch or understand.
Whatever is alive here--if anything--is invisible, intangible. Believe me,
I've tried to reach it, to touch it. The Listeners say it's the ghosts of
the old holy men and women that speak to them, but I think they're wrong.
The voices only use the shapes that the Listeners have already in their
minds."
She shook her head, her eyes narrowing against the shadowless twilight of
distances and wind. "There's a woman in Hweg Shul who has interests in
shipping. When this is over I'm going to contact her, see if I can get
myself off-planet in one of the little cargo lifters and work my passage
elsewhere. Are you going to tell Luke you've seen me?"
"Whatever you wish," said Leia. "I'd like to, yes, but I won't if you'd
rather I didn't."
Callista started to say something, then thought about it and asked, "What do
you think would be best?"
"I think it would be best if I did."
"Then do so," said Callista. "Make him understand, if you can. Tell him that
I will love him to the ending of my life, but that mine is a life of which
he cannot be a part."
Across the crystal ridges, sudden snakes of white lightning flickered, cold
and pale in the dawning light. Leia grabbed the railing of the speeder as it
rocked and swayed, jolted by what felt like a groundquake, though the ground
beneath the antigrav lifters was steady.
An obsidian boulder several tons in mass wrenched and twisted in the rock
side of the mountain before them, and the glittering talus of crystals at
the foot of the cliffk around them leapt upward into funnels, like toothed
whirlwinds.
The Therans in the speeders cried out, looking around them with weapons at
the ready, and Callista and Be fought their cu-pas to a standstill moments
before the beasts could bolt in panic.
"Another," said Callista softly. "Worse than before, I think."
"There's one with them who moves this storm." B6's lizard-black eyes were
shut, listening deeply. "He brings this storm at his will, summons and
directs it."
"That will be Beldorion."
"What do we do?" asked a man on Leia's repulsor sled, looking nervously
around at the cold cliffs sparkling in the new light, the world paused, it
seemed, on the brink of chaos.
B shook back his tangled braids. "We can do no other than we are
instructed," said the Listener. "We meet them, and die."
If the horrors of watching the
dying corpses of Cybloc XII being looted had
been bad--the squabbles between looters, the remote-operated droids
patrolling like whirring insects, the sight of those few expiring survivors
being relieved of jewelry and credit cylinders by thieves--the darkness that
followed was infinitely worse. The dome lights were gone. The dim auxiliary
circuits were going. In the medical offices where, with a droid's infinite
patience, See-Threepio was broad casting his distress call in alternating
bands of Basic and various of his six million language repertoire, the light
had gone utterly, and only a few' buildings were lit in the next square,
leaking stray glims to show him the street below the windows, where nothing
at all now moved.
The body of the dead looter lay where it had been left, naked of its e-suit,
which others had taken along with the computer equipment that he'd been
dragging. It was little more than a black shape to Threepio's visual
receptors, though it registered on his infrared for some time. The smells of
alien bacteria and decay organisms choked the air.
"It isn't any use," he said in time. Artoo-Detoo, sitting inert as a heating
unit in the corner, illuminated a single red light, inquiring.
"The entire base computer core has been gutted. Even should someone attempt
Artoo wibbled a reply.
"Oh, very well. But it will do us no good. I expect we'll sit here until our
power cells run down, and chaos and destruction will encompass the
Republic." At another time Threepio would have spoken out of a personal
conviction of impending doom. Now he realized he was saying no more than the
truth.
"We did our best."
The astromech tweeped and settled back to his resting position. It was
inconceivable that either of them would do other than his best.
Threepio returned to the jury-rigged microphone. "Distress on Cybloc XII.
Distress on Cybloc XII. Please send an evacuation team.
Please send an evacuation team.
"Ee-tsuti Cybloc XIt. Ee-tsuti Cybloc XII. N'geesw'a eltipic'uti
ava'acuationma-teem5 negpo, insky.
"Dzgor groom Cybloc XII. Dzgor groom Cybloc Xli. Hch'ca shmim'ch
vr/Srkshkipfuth gna gna kabro n'grabiaschkth moah." He dug down into the
bottommost registers of his voder circuits. The Yeb language had few
technical terms, and it was necessary to patch together a linguistic
equivalent from "Several conglomerates are urged strongly but respectfully
to coordinate activities to prevent the drowning of another conglomerate
that is not a threat to any of them, nor will be in the immediate or distant
future to them or to their children." He did the best he could.
Bith was easier. "Six-five. Twelve-seven-eight. Two-nine-seven." In many
ways, Threepio was very fond of the Bith.
"Distress on Cybloc XII. Dis--Artoo, look! It's an incoming vessel!"
He pointed to the dark transparisteel, through which the transpariflex
panels of the dome could be seen. Against the livid gloom of the sky the red
track of descending retros had appeared. "Can you get any sort of reading on
the computer?"
Artoo, who had tried already a dozen times, simply twitted a negative.
Threepio was already toddling toward the turbolift. "They'll be coming into
the port bays. By the time we reach there they should be just about landed.
Oh, thank goodness."
Artoo simply lowered himself down onto his third wheel, and rolled after his
golden counterpart, without comment. If he had reservations about the nature
of the rescuers, as deduced from the make and serial numbers of their
vessels, he kept them to himself.
It wasn't that Threepio hadn't considered the possibility of smugglers,
looters, or space pirates. But the events that had transpired since the two
droids and the unfortunate Yeoman Marcopius's escape from the doomed
Borealis had given the protocol droid a little more confidence in his
ability to negotiate possible transport. in any case his power core was
dangerously close to reserve, and even another pas de deux with space
pirates seemed preferable to going cold on the dead world, leaving Her
Excellency to her own devices with no one who knew where she was. All the
way through the dark, utterly silent streets of the plague-stricken dome, he
composed scenarios and arguments to talk his way into passage to Coruscant
without informing potentially hostile--or simply verbally incontinent hosts
what his message and mission might be.
And they all fell silent within him as he and Artoo stepped through the
doorway of the largest of the docking bays, and he saw before him in the
actinic glare of its landing lights the black ship that stood there, an
Imperial Fleet Seinar IPV System Patrol Craft, like a sleek-shelled crab,
lowering its boarding ramp.
Threepio said, "Oh, dear."
On the face of it, there seemed very little chance that any amount of money
would persuade the inhabitants to drop him and Artoo off at Coruscant.
It was too late to turn tail, however. Figures in dark e-suits were coming
down the ramp--both men and women, judging from the way they walked, which
was unusual for the Imperial Service--followed by two black, spider-armed
floating remotes that scanned the base with hard beams of white light while
the troopers crossed the stained floor of the bay to where the two droids
stood. One of them, a dusky Twi'lek woman with an enormously extended
helmet, touched the comm button in her suit and said, "Two of them," and
again Threepio wondered.
The Imperial Service would ordinarily no more employ nonhumans than it would
employ nonmales. On closer study he identified the e-suits of Imperial
design--CoMar 980s--but without emblems, though the sleeves and chest bore
marks where emblems had been removed.
"No other signs of life on the base?" inquired a very small, very tinny
voice from the comm.
"No, Admiral. Looks well and truly looted to me."
"There was, in fact, extensive looting during the final throes of the
epidemic," provided Threepio helpfully. "My counterpart and I counted five
separate parties of looters, and the Computer Core of the base system was so
extensively dilapidated that we could not even use it 'to signal out."
"Put them through cleansing procedures," said the tinny voice.
"Bring them to me. I want to find out once. and for all what's taking place
in this sector."
"You know, Artoo," surmised Threepio, when after a very thorough passage
through two radiation chambers and a chemical bath the two droids were
conducted, still by the Twi'lek Sergeant, to a small lift marked "Private,"
"I think this isn't an Imperial mission at all. The ship, though of Imperial
design and manufacture, does not bear the markings of any of the various
satrapies of the former Empire. Neither do the uniforms of such crew members
as we have seen. We might be dealing with a case of extensive theft of
Imperial matdriel by a completely neutral third party."
The doors of the lift closed soundlessly. There was a shivering vibration as
it ascen
ded. Artoo tweeped.
"Clandestine operation? What kind of clandestine operation would be
undertaken by any of the remaining Imperial governors? I'm sure it can't be
that."
The doors slid open. Imperial Captains and Admirals always tended to favor a
black sleekness in their offices, in part in the interests of spare
unclutteredness, in part, quite frankly, in the interests of intimidation.
The chamber into which the two droids stepped now was no exception.
Threepio was quite well aware that computer screens and consoles lurked
behind those obsidian-mirrored panels, that a touch on an access hatch would
summon chairs, if necessary; more lamps; dictation equipment, if required;
implements of torture; articles of restraint; a mirror and shaving
equipment; or wine, caffeine, and beignets for that matter . .
.
But all of that was secondary to the digitalized tallying of recogni-tive
factors concerning the woman who sat in the room's single chair tall, tough,
and athletic in her stripped-down version of the Imperial officer's uniform,
red hair hanging like a comet's tail down her back and eyes cold as ball
bearings in a pale, expressionless face.
Threepio had never seen her in person, but as a specialist in protocol he
was programmed with all sorts of files about people who were or had been in
positions of authority, and he identified her at once.
"Good heavens, Artoo," he exclaimed, "I seem to have been given inaccurate
data. According to my most recent information, Imperial Admiral Daala should
be dead."
Daala said softly, "I am."
Han Solo wondered whether there was any insanity in his family.
He folded his arms, considering the vista afforded him by the hard
transparisteel of the viewport two CEC gunships, the Courane and the
Fireater, half a dozen smaller cruisers, and maybe twice that many escorts,
X-wings and E-wings. They hung pale silvery against the darkness of
realspace, sleek white fish among the stars. The newest Republic equipment,
true--unlike the clunky, crotchety horrors of the Rebel fleet--but all of
them, he knew', understaffed with men and women pushed to the brink of
exhaustion. None of them a match for what he knew lay ahead.
But not a bad turnout for a faked video and a lot of bluster and fast talk.
He turned from the Falcon's viewport to the main screen, where Lando, who'd