The sergeant regarded the thin cable with extreme doubt-Drovi-ans averaged twice the weight of moderately sized adult humansbut Han said, "It's tested at a thousand."

"What about my pals?" Hral Piksoar nodded back to the two downed troopers.

"Are you kidding, Sarge." said the larger of the two, struggling to sit up. "Between the slime-festering Gopso'o and them molds, believe me, I'll try it. I got one good tentacle still."

At their weight, Drovians are not good acrobats, but by scrambling up a makeshift heap of boards, broken doors, and furniture looted from the ground floor of one of the buildings opening into the alleyway, they could get enough height to make the swing to a low balcony, and thence clamber down and across the plank bridge. There was no problem of them throwing back the weighted end of the cable to the next swinger-Drovian tentacles are like mechanical pistons and with that many different sensory devices on their bodies, their aim is exceptional.

Han and Dr. Oolos went last, maintaining cover fire against the Gopso'o who maneuvered, crouching, everywhere on the street outside and on the balconies of the various tenements above street level. It would only be a matter of time, Han knew, before they made their way through the mazes of alleys and tenements to surround the retreating party; only a matter of time, he reflected dourly, before the ma.s.ses of advancing molds grew too thick and too insistent to be driven back.

Since their first run-in with the Gopso'o, every summons Hral Piksoar had sent out for reinforcements had been met with, "We'll be there when we can." A polite euphemism, Han knew, for "You're on your own, pal."

Laser fire skinned the wall above him, tearing his face with burning chips of rock. He aimed for the muzzle flash but didn't know whether he scored. No body fell from the balcony where it had originated, but no return fire came, either. Behind him, Dr. Oolos yelled, "Solo!"

The last Drovian had swung to safety. The molds were thick over the street now, churning sluggishly, the whole enclosed seam of the alley rank with oozing digestive acids and with the smoke of charring where the Drovians were forcing them to keep their distance. "Can you make it?"

yelled Solo. After the physician had volunteered to escort him back to the docking bay-Solo suspected out of a very real fear that the Drovian troops would abandon him in the event of an attack-he'd hate to see the Ho'Din miss his grip and have the flesh burned off his bones by carnivorous fungi.

Dr. Oolos fired off a last shot at the molds that were now,, only fractions of a meter from his and Solo's boots. He caught the end of the cable the waiting Drovians had flung to him, clambered up the pile of broken furnishings. "I can but try."

"This way!" insisted Threepio, pausing in the mouth of one of the warren of noisome, unpaved alleyways between the end of the bridge where they had parted from Yarbolk, and the spot where they had last seen Solo and his party duck around a corner. "I can hear the shooting!"

Artoo made no reply. He could have remarked that there was shooting all over the district now-the shrill, zapping whine of hand blasters, the unmistakable crunch of Caspel cannister shot, the vibrant roar of ion cannons and blaster rifles-but did not. He only set off determinedly across a small, muddy square.

"Artoo, don't be foolish!" cried the protocol droid, deeply distressed.

"Oh, dear, I'm afraid those circuits we couldn't get out of you on the Pure Sabacc have disrupted your directional system! That alley won't take you anywhere near where we last saw'' Captain Solo!"

Nevertheless, he toddled in pursuit of the determined astromech, well aware that on his own he did not possess the information necessary to facilitate Her Excellency's rescue. It was his responsibility to deliver Artoo safe and sound to Captain Solo whether Artoo cooperated or not.

And to his great surprise, the next corner they rounded showed them Solo, the tall Ho'Din, and the Drovian troops, just pelting across a plank bridge while a much larger force of Gopso'o fired at them futilely from the other side of an alleyway choked with s...o...b..ring, aggressive orange and yellow fungi, like a knee-deep river of mucus between the confining alley walls.

Unfortunately, Artoo had led them out of the maze several meters too far up the alley, so that the Gopso'o, the molds, and the width of the ca.n.a.l lay between the two droids and the fleeing Drovians. Amid a welter of blaster fire Threepio called out, "Captain Solo! Captain Solo!" but such were the vocal volume modulations necessary for a protocol droid, his words did not carry over the razor-wire shriek of the blasters.

Even as Threepio was trying to ascertain how to get through the Gopso'o and the molds-which though they could not digest the two droids they would certainly gum up their means of locomotion-Solo, who was in the rear, made it across the plank bridge and turned the cutting ray of his blaster on the jerry-built catwalk, exploding it in a dazzle of flame and dropping it into the ca.n.a.l.

Solo, the Ho'Din, and the Drovians disappeared at a run down the narrow street beyond.

What ensued reminded Threepio of nothing so much as an obstacle course of the sort invented by military computers to test the reflexes of humans and droids-such droids as were specially fitted for military usage, he reflected bitterly. Artoo, who seemed to know where he was going or to think he did, led the way' around corners, across tiny squares where recent sh.e.l.l holes from grenades or cannister shot were rapidly filling with muddy rainwater, down narrow walkways above ca.n.a.ls oozing with purulent, creeping life. And everywhere there was shooting, small bands of topknotted or nontopknotted natives of Nim Drovis firing at one another from doorways and balconies, groups of them looting burning stores and houses with the oily smoke thick in the air.

Bodies lay in the street, soaked with rain and half-covered, some of them, with slowly feeding molds. In places the narrow streets were so torn up by blaster shot and grenades that the underlying dirt, soaked with the pouring gray' rain, made an impa.s.sable soup of muck. In others, barricades had been erected of furniture, broken paving stones, and timbers, sometimes occupied by combatants of one side or the other locked in deadly blaster duels, sometimes festooned only with the dead.

"We have to find Captain Solo," nattered Threepio, catching his balance on the wall of a narrow through-pa.s.sage where the flooded goo came up to his precisely articulated knees. "He will be here in search of Her Excellency, of course. The Council must know by this time that something has befallen her. Even without free communication, he'll be searching the sector."

Artoo, brown as if painted with a slurry of mud, tweeted in response.

"The docking bays!" cried Threepio. "Artoo! You're a genius! Of course that's where they'll be going!"

They reached the docking bays only moments after the advancing Gopso'o closed in around the s.p.a.ceport facilities. Blaster fire splattered hot and vicious among the wide, sheltered permacrete pads. In places the Drovian troops had set up ion cannons, driving the Gopso'o back or holding them to the few pads they'd managed to take over. Artoo stolidly led the way along walls scorched by waves of smoking plasma, through baggage tunnels, and under temporary plastic shelters burning in clouds of stinking smoke.

Threepio cried, "There!" as they emerged into the sheltered cargo porch fronting the wide permacrete s.p.a.ce of a bay, where the familiar shape of the Millennium Falcon crouched, entry ramp down, like a great gray-and-rust heap of junk in the streaming rain.

A spattering of blaster fire tore up the pavement before them. Two troops of natives-one the uniformed Drovian troopers, the other a band of Gopso'o-held the two entrances to the bay. Those under the same porch as Artoo and Threepio were, unfortunately, the Gopso'o, a ragged a.s.semblage of ill-clad guerrilla fighters armed to the teeth with the finest of weaponry. The Drovians under the other porch, which lay at ninety degrees, were fewer in number, but Threepio could distinguish the redand-violet headstalks of the Ho'Din who'd been with Solo, and, crouched behind a barricade, Captain Han Solo himself.

"Captain Solo!" cried Threepio. "It's us! Don't leave us!"

More laser fire drowned his well-modulated voice. Solo broke cover, dashed across the open pavement in a lightstorm of covering fire.

The Gopso'o in the porch fell back-Threepio could not but observe that most of them were far inferior shots when compared with the Drovians-he said to Artoo, "Now!" and called out to the sergeant of the Drovians, "Let us through! We're friends!"

He called out-for better understanding-in Drovian, a language used chiefly by Gopso'o; the ruling Drovians tended to speak Basic, even to one another.

A storm of shot drove them back.

Han Solo made a long rolling dive and plunged up the boarding ramp.

Someone within the ship was surely watching, for the ramp started to lift the moment the captain's body touched its end. It almost literally gulped him up, like a steel monster slurping up a treat.

Threepio made a despairing try at stepping out into the bay and retreated hastily with a scorch mark across his stained and muddy chest perilously close to his power-supply jacks.

"Don't leave us!"

White fire poured from the Millennium Falcon's vents.

Artoo let out a despairing wail.

The souped-up freighter tore a hole in the rain-black clouds and was gone.

Luke was still sufficiently furious the following evening to consider telling Gerney Caslo to pick up his own smuggler drop and take it to perdition in his pocket, but something Arvid said to him changed his mind. It was only a chance remark, when Luke met the young farmer the following day, to the effect that Caslo was Ashgad's business agent in Hweg Shul, but it caused Luke to think. Ashgad had clearly been doing everything he could to rouse the local Rationalists to fury. It didn't take many data to figure out that it was to Ashgad's benefit to have a private army ready to drive the Therans out of the gun stations and open the planet to trade. As the wealthiest man Luke had so far encountered, heir to the crime boss Beldorion, Ashgad would be in a position to act as middleman for the community once trade started coming in.

Only for a few years, true, thought Luke. Did he think he could control the place longer than that, once the gun stations weren't there to limit imports? Or did Ashgad just want to seize the gun stations for himself and keep the status quo for his own profit?

The planet itself was dirt poor. Its only export seemed to be the rather friable Spooks, and having lived for several days on topatoes, smoot, and blerd exudum, Luke couldn't imagine anyone paying the shipping costs to acquire any of those delicacies. But having been raised there, Ashgad might very well desire only the power that he knew.

Was that logical? he wondered that evening, as he waited in the darkness of the Blue Blerd's yard. Ashgad had been raised on the planet, true, but he had been raised by a father who had dreamed of taking over control of the Senate himself. Had Palpatine not become Emperor, Seti Ashgad might very well have done so. Hardly the man to raise a son who sought only to rule what was almost literally a barren ball of rock.

Only minutes after the easing of the evening's torrential winds, he saw the line of speeders make the corner between the buildings in ghostly silence. Six of them, shadows only, running without lights above the machinery-cracked permacrete of the roadbed into the hangar yard. He recognized Arvid's lopsided Aratech with the crude bal-ance-leg beneath it, and Umolly Darm's skip. Gerney Caslo was riding up beside the prospector, a small, black, vicious-looking blaster rifle c.o.c.ked up against his thigh. A couple of volunteer guards rode cu-pas behind them, blaster rifles slung in the ready position, faces blacked and eyes glittering in the watery flicker of the stars.

"Fourth in line," whispered Gerney, and tossed Luke a small, flat can of the dark camouflage paint that hunters used to take the glint off their weapons. "Rendezvous at Ashgad's if we get split up. Overload the charges on anything you pick up, if it looks like the Therans are going to be able to take it away from you." Luke blacked his face, and touched up the crude pair of infrared goggles he'd been lent by Aunt Gin with the camo paint. A dozen or more riders met them among the topato towers, the rounded, chubby bipeds moving with surprising quiet.

Luke noted that these guards, too, were extremely well armed.

Ashgad was putting out a lot of money to get himself in the position of leader of the ruling faction of the planet, he thought as they left the towers and slowly rising antigrav b.a.l.l.s of newer cultivation, glided between the scrubby fields of brope and the algal meadows where bierds grazed like wrinkled lapis mountains. The smell of growing plants faded in his nostrils as the sterile p.r.i.c.kle of the wastelands crept over his skin.

There was something he didn't know. Some piece of information he didn't have that would make sense of this.

The wastelands stretched out around them like a blanket of salt.

The terrible velvet weight of the Force grew heavier on his mind.

Few on the planet seemed to be aware of the Force's presence here, thought Luke. No one at all seemed to realize that there was some kind of invisible life, some unseen civilization here, silent among the dazzling, wind-scoured canyons. Was Ashgad. Was that what he sought to control here?.

Or like Taselda's enemy, did he seek to control the Force itself?.

Ahead of them Luke saw the red-orange spark of laser cannon illuminate the spine of the hills. As if in answer another glinted, sixty degrees around the horizon. Before them, the loose ring of the crystalline Cousins pointed mutely at the stars.

Tiny, tiny in the hard black vault overhead a pinlight exploded, faded.

Someone in one of the other speeders cursed the Therans, called them fools and fogeys, and worse things yet for their refusal to welcome outside influences to their world. Raised as he had been, Luke understood.

n.o.body he'd known as a boy and a teenager had ever considered the rights of the Jawa or the Sand people to the territory occupied by the human colonists of Tatooine, and every one of his adult acquaintances in those days would have been outraged had either indigenous species a.s.serted its undoubted majority rights to determine policy for the planet as a whole.

Stop the import of farming equipment, metal, chips, just because nine-tenths of the population of the planet thought it was vrong for trade to come down out of the skies?. Ridiculous! Why don't you just forbid us to use tools at all and be done with it?.

He scratched at a droch bite, slowed his newly repaired speeder as a flicker far up in the sky signaled a red-hot meteorite in entry, a minute capsule of smuggled goods. The mounted guards scattered, minuscule yellow lights from their sensors and heat detectors briefly outlining their camouflaged faces, cu-pas silent, muzzled and booted in the dark.

Caslo marked where the capsule came down, every driver triangulating on the ten icy pinnacles, and they raced for them over the vast flat, glittering dish of the plain.

Equipped with primitive retros, the capsule hadn't even buried itself in the twinkling gravel. A percussion rifle crackled somewhere far off, and Luke sensed the distant presence of more riders. He wondered, as Caslo scrambled down the side of the smoking impact crater a hundred meters from the nearest tsil, how' Ashgad managed to pay for weapons for his followers. Had Palpatine left revenues in the hands of his rival? When rocks dance. But the weapons Ashgad was buying were all new or near new, the most modern, the most expensive that bore the Loronar double-moon logo. "All the finest-all the first." The man had money from somewhere.

Had Callista entered his house? Learned from Taselda, perhaps, where the money came from and where it was being sent? Was that why she'd fled Hweg Shul?

Men were handing crates up out of the pit, pa.s.sing them to the drivers.

A flurry of shots in the flat distance told Luke of approaching Therans, held off by the ragged perimeter of guards. Someone gave Luke a bale of blaster rifles, which he stowed in the back of his Theran speeder; a crudely tied together bunch of spare energy cores.

So they were getting at least some secondhand, thought Luke, turning the sleek black-and-red cylinders over in his hand before stashing them in a corner. Even at smuggler's prices, those would be cheaper than new, and Ashgad was clearly out to arm every man and woman of the Rationalist Party. They were pa.s.sing rifles up singly now. He caught one thrown to him, held it briefly in the dim glow of the speeder's console lights to see the make. His mind went back to the gun station, to the embattled, dirty Therans ducking through the shadows of the crazy superstructure, the gawky, dancerlike figure in red swinging down on the cable to throw the grenade.

The gun was a white-and-silver BlasTech, this year's model, small, solid, and familiar in Luke's hands. He knew it well. They were the type of guns with which the entire Honor Guard of the New Republic had been newly outfitted only last month. He'd practiced with them, to while away time, on board the Borealis.

Luke turned it over, and his blood went cold in his veins.

On the b.u.t.t was the silver coding plate of the Honor Guards, marking the weapon as the property of the New Republic, a.s.signed to the flagship itself.

The gun had come off the Borealis.

"Yo, Lars!" somebody called from the ground. "Asleep at the switch?"

Luke stashed the weapon quickly, caught another handed up to him. He didn't need to hold this one to the console lights, his fingers found the coding plate by themselves. When he carried the next several guns to the back of his speeder he flicked on the glowrod to check the others.

There were a couple from the Adamantine, but most of these had come off Leia's flagship.

There was one-a Flash-4 with a custom grip and a lanyard ring-that he recognized as the one Han had given Leia herself.

I have to escape.

From the corner of her balcony that overlooked the dawn-colored crystal flatlands far below, Leia watched the luxurious black landspeeder that bore Seti Ashgad and his two bodyguards dwindle and perish with the distance. He had avoided her since the kidnapping-probably, she thought, because he knew' himself unable to sustain the masquerade of being his own son before someone who had studied holos of him as she hadbut she had always been conscious of his presence and protection.

His plan, whatever it was, was clear in his mind, and at least for the moment he had to keep her alive.

But Dzym and Beldorion had plans of their own.

Three days. If she lasted that long.

For the first time in days, she had awakened with her mind clear.

The water Liegeus had brought her last night had been clean. Whether that had been an oversight or some kind of gift to her, she knew she had to take advantage of it without delay.

On the threshold of her room she paused, blanket wrapped around her over the thin white nightshirt she wore, long chestnut hair hanging in a braid down her back. Around her-around the high cinder-gray walls of Ashgad's fortress, the spiky, crystalline rocks of the plateau-the greater mountains towered, huge chunks and teeth and ma.s.ses of crystal, like enormous jewels flashing in the eternal twilight, reminding her of just how steep a drop it was, to the glittering plain below.

Her heart twisted inside her with a sick terror, an awful almost-wish that they'd kept her under the soporific peace of the blossom.

Closing her eyes, she reached out with her mind and heart, formed the image of Luke. He'd come for her once before, when she was trapped in the Termination Block of the Death Star; when she was weak and sick after torture, numb with a grief that it was years before she'd actually feel.

I'm here to rescue you, he'd said.

She would have smiled at the memory, had the fear in her not been so great.

In her mind she cried his name: Luke! sending it echoing, blazing out across the emptiness of air and crystal and early light. Luke!

He had to hear. He had to.

But in the still cold, the deep, heavy movement of the Force seemed to surround her, filling her with the alien sense of its presence.

It was like the sound of the sea, drowning all other voices in its great voice.

Luke wouldn't hear. She was trapped there alone.

She shook the fear away almost at once, and with it the horrible recollection of the man Dzym's hands on her face, the dreadful, sinking coldness of death.

Luke wouldn't hear. He wouldn't come. She had to figure out what to do and what was going on.

They had released the Death Seed.

She returned to the shadowy bedchamber, sat on the end of the bed where the sunlight fell on it, and drew her feet up under the blanket.

She felt a droch bite her and scratched furiously, the insect dropping from the bedding into the dazzling carpet of mottled light. It curled itself into a tight brown-black pellet no bigger than a pinhead and died.

Blossom made you accept almost anything, she thought, revolted.

Even lying down in bedding that you knew was alive with parasites. She was bitten all over from sitting in the dim chamber at tea with Beldorion the Splendid, too.

They had released the Death Seed. If they could control it, or thought they could control it, through Dzym, it was an easy guess what their negotiations with Moff Getelles and Admiral Larm were. Curse them, she thought. Curse them!

Dzym was somehow a key. He could lay it on them somehov-transmitted by the synthdroids-and call it off, as he had called it off of her.

She remembered the ecstasy on his face, and at other times, his air of paying attention to something else, listening to something else, like a man counting down time.

And yet, what was the point?