But did Moff Getelles really think that he was strong enough to take over the Meridian sector, once quarantine and containment procedures got under way? To hold it in the face of a concerted Republic effort to drive him out?

And for what purpose? Pedducis Chorios, that nest of smugglers and Warlords, would be impossible to control effectively. Durren's planetary coalition was solidly behind the Republic. Budpock had been one of the Kebellion's most loyal supporters. Nam Chorios was a waterless, lifeless, poverty-stricken rock.

To complete the Reliant, Ashgad had said.

But she'd seen the Reliant. It was not a planet-killing Dreadnought, but a midsize freighter. Boxes... of both kinds. What kind of payload could a midsize ship carry that would make this all worthwhile, even were the gun stations to be eliminated?

Leia shivered, and rubbed her wrists, where the memory of Dzym's cold hands remained.

The door chime sounded politely. Leia swung around, startled, drawing the comforter close around her and sliding her hand toward the lightsaber concealed among the pillows.

But it was only Liegeus, bowing shyly in the doorway, a porcelain pitcher of water in his hands. "I'm pleased you're feeling better, my dear." His eyes went-as Leia's had, automatically-to the empty pitcher beside the bed. She had drunk all the water the minute she'd realized it wasn't drugged.

By his gentle smile she saw that he knew.

mate." He held out to her the gla.s.s goblet. "Ashgad's never noticed any difference. I've brought you some holovids, too; imprisonment without them is only bearable if one is drugged."

Leia studied the man's face warily across the rim. "And what now?" she asked softly. "What happens to me while he's gone? Or was that why he left, so that it wouldn't be his fault?"

"No," said Liegeus quickly, "no, of course not. He isn't a bad man, my dear."

"He is the worst kind of man." Leia turned her face aside. The words, Death Seed, lay close to the tip of her tongue and she knew she must not say them, must not let even Liegeus know how much she knew. He might stand up to Beldorion for her sake, but she knew-she had seen-that he was unable to stand up to Dzym. And who could blame him for that'.

He was like Greglik, she thought. She was fond of him, she pitied him, but she knew she could not trust him.

"No," insisted the holo faker. "Ashgad..." He hesitated. "I understand what's making him... do all of this. And it... I can't explain."

Her long dark braid whipped as she turned back to him, to meet the utter wretchedness of his gaze.

"I can't," he said. "But please, trust me." Sitting beside her on the divan, he fumbled in the pocket of his lab smock, brought out a black cylinder half again the length of his palm and perhaps twice the thickness of his thumb. "This is for you," he said. "i'll have to have it back just before he returns, you understand."

Leia turned it over in her hands. A comlink. Dedicated circuitry, at a guess-there wasn't a keypad. Probably made of standard components, though. And old, like everything else on this planet. The new ones were half that size and you needed micron tools to work on them.

"I've changed the combination on the door pad," Liegeus went on.

He didn't quite glance back over his shoulder, but almost. "He shouldn't be able to get in here." He didn't say of whom they spoke-he didn't need to. "He has no computer skills, he can't... do that kind of thinking.

Whatever he tells you, don't let him in. If he tries to come in, or if he does manage to, somehow, use the comlink.

I'll only be moments away, in the..." He stopped himself-at a guess, from saying something that would reveal to her that there was a ship under construction on the premises. Why the secrecy about that?

What part did it play in their plan. "In the other part of the house."

He made a move to turn away, and Leia caught his sleeve. "Who is he?" she asked. "What is he" The dark eyes looked quickly away, and she saw the too-sensitive mouth flinch. "He is... what he is. He's a native of this world..."

"There are no natives of this world." Leia felt his hand cold under the grip of her fingers. "Before the Grissmaths started shipping political prisoners here there was nothing but stones. What is it he wants to do with me? What is it he tried to do, that night?" You said Beldorion sold him someone he had enslaved. For what purpose And what became of him?"

"Nothing," said Liegeus quickly. She looked down and saw' his hands were trembling. "I can't explain. It's... it's something few people would understand."

The fear in his eyes was terrible to see, and her heart went out to him in pity. She put her hand over the cold, slender fingers. "Try me," she urged.

Liegeus got quickly to his feet, and backed to the door. "I..."

Then he shook his head. "Beldorion may invite you to tea or to supper again," he said. "Don't go, or make sure that I go with you. Just remember to spend as much time as you can on the balcony, in the sunlight, and you'll be all right."

The door opened, and he stepped through. In the instant before it closed Leia met his eyes again, and saw in them longing, and grief, and a terror that had swallowed nearly everything within the man's soul.

She said quietly, "Thank you," and the metal panel swished between them.

A moment later the outer locks clicked.

After he had gone, Leia sat for a moment, gathering her breath and her courage. Then she got up, crossed to the dresser where she kept her gown, the pins and jewels that had been in her hair, the folded-up ma.s.s of the red velvet robe. Two of the flat-backed cabochon jewels from the robe's chest piece, picked loose, gave her enough purchase to bend the end of one of the hairpins into a makeshift manual screwdriver. It took her five minutes to open up the comlink, and recalibrate the beam.

Picking a simple keypad lock by means of a micron beam was an excruciatingly tedious process, but she had all day, and nothing else to do. Judging by the number of holovids he'd brought, Liegeus didn't expect to be free of his duties on the Reliant until evening.

Lock picking was one of those skills she'd acquired in her years with the Rebellion, one of the minor guerrilla survival skills pilots had taught one another, just in case, like making explosives out of certain brands of game tokens, or tinkering water filters from sand and flight-suit liners. Something simple that might just save your life.

Winter-who'd taught her this particular trick, which she in turn had learned from an outlaw slicer on Coruscant-had said, "Be sure to write down every combination as you try it. Sure as little hawk-bat eggs, the minute you get bored and quit writing them down, you'll score, and then you won't remember what the combination was."

Leia wrote them down, laboriously, with another hairpin scratching in the soft b.u.t.tonwood back of one of the drawers pulled from the chest.

An hour and a half after noon, as far as she could judge from the angle of the sunlight, the lock opened.

With the sensation of having been unexpectedly knocked breathless she stepped back, closed the doors, let the lock click over again. She had to be sure it would open at need-that it hadn't been a fluke. If they caught her outside and she couldn't get back in, she would be incarcerated indeed.

It opened a second time. Leia slipped the converted comlink into her pocket, not without a qualm. But the likelihood of encountering Dzym was marginally less than the likelihood that she'd have to get back into this room on less notice than the ten minutes it would take to switch the beam over from comm to micron. She reached back to feel the comforting hardness of the lightsaber tied around her body beneath her shirt and stepped out into the hall.

Luke had said to her, over and over on those occasions on which she'd put aside the pressing demands of state to train with her brother's pupils, The eyes are the most dangerous of the senses, because you'll believe them first. Pausing at the foot of the stair, Leia shut her eyes, slowed her breath, and listened deeply to the house around her.

Reached out with her mind, as Luke had taught her. Felt for the flow and movement of the Force.

It was everywhere, a singing vast as light. The ocean of light, Beldorion had said, utterly unlike anything she had experienced on Yavin, on Coruscant... anywhere that she had ever tried this.

Strong and frightening, as if something huge stood just behind her shoulder, watching her with sad wisdom.

Is there a reason to fear this? she thought, holding her fear in check. A minute pa.s.sed, two. Beneath that deep, humming strength, she was able to sort out true sound in the rooms around her.

Beldorion's thick voice came from his quarters close-by: "Beautiful, beautiful! All that, from just those unprepossessing little glet-mites!"

And the harsh, nasally whine of a Kubaz's inflection: "It's all in finding the correct solution, you see, Master." That would be the chef, she thought. The unworthy heir of the great and lamented Zubindi Ebsuk.

"tinder ordinary circ.u.mstances, of course, glet-mites would never have contact with a solution of hall d'main excretions-their worlds aren't even in the same Sector! But it so happens that the hormones contained within halles d'main are the exact physiological complement of the glet-mite teleological systems..."

And under it a cheepin& tiny voices protesting. Leia shivered.

Of Dzym she could hear nothing. Did he make sound, when he tooveda.

Pressed to the harsh plaster of the wall, she ignored the sudden jab of a droch bite on her ankle, probed deeper with her mind. There was a kind of heavy vibration somewhere in the house, the steady whine, as of machinery. The house generator, of course. Liegeus had said Dzym wasn't capable of "that kind of thinking," to cut into the household computer and make it tell what the security keypad numbers were.

Leia wondered how good their security was.

Whether it was the smell of Hutt or revulsion over the drochs or just overwrought nerves, she was feeling light-headed by the time she found her way out of the dim, curtained quarters of the Hutt to a door into what was clearly Set? Ashgad's portion of the house, the long, sun-flooded chamber that looked out onto the terrace below her own balcony.

Here the ceilings were higher, the heavy, heat-trapping curtains drawn back from the line of transparisteel panels that gave onto the terrace.

There was an airy functionality about the place, with its immobile wood-and-leather chairs, its desk put together from planks of but-tonwood, its simple sideboard. The monitor screen in the niche above the desk was new, Leia saw, a high-definition Sorosuub X-80-they'd had to cut the niche bigger for it, and so recently that the chipped-out plaster hadn't yet had time to discolor. Leia paused in the doorway to listen again-If Dzym's mind doesn't work in terms of computers, how did he get a job as secretary? - - then crossed to the desk and brought out the board, keying in quickly a request for systems sh.e.l.l. Once she knew the type of system she pulled up data on the house itself.

Wiring diagrams showed her the shaft that led down through the heart of the mesa, to the garage from which she'd seen Ashgad's hench men take that elegant-and nearly new-black speeder at dawn. After a little puzzling she identified where she was and where the head of the shaft lay on the other side of the house near the docking bay and its compound of workshops and labs.

She ran a print, then called up another instruction and asked for further data. The docking compound beyond those blast doors she'd seen was enormous. For a world where equipment of any sort was scarce, there seemed to be no shortage of it there.

A complete complement of the extremely expensive equipment that charged the antigrav coils of speeder buoyancy tanks. A major computer system hooked to an independent generator and dedicated to hypers.p.a.ce engineering. Liegeus's holo faking works: Good grief! Millions of separate data clips, far beyond hobby or art. That, too, had to have been part of their plan, and might explain why in five days there'd been no attempt at rescue.

Another system centered in this very room-probably, thought Leia, behind the slatted cupboard doors to her right. She got up, still reading down at the backup systems screen: high-security locks with backup wiring on various doors, including, she saw with a certain annoyance, that of the lift from this level down to the garage.

She ran a zoom check on the schematic. No such backup existed on the lift shaft's repair stairway. Her calf muscles would ache, but she could do it. She keyed a further command to open the combinations on file. Yes, she'd gotten that of her chamber door correct-silly, but it gratified her to have her skill officially confirmed. It was listed as having been changed shortly after dawn that morning, probably the moment Set? Ashgad disappeared into the morning glow. She ran a print, folded the sheets of plast together, stuffed them into the pocket of her trousers, and went to investigate what was behind the slatted doors that rated a separate power backup.

It was a CCIR board. The central control unit for synthdroids-How many of the things did he have. Leia counted wiring for two dozen.

Two dozen?

She tried to remember what she'd learned about synthdroids from her one tour of the Loronar Corporation facility on Carosi's larger moon. That had been during the Daysong uproar about the relative rights of synthflesh. Synthflesh, Leia recalled, was supposed to retain automatic immunities to virus and antibodies, but obviously they'd gotten around that one. She did remember the officials of Loronar telling her that CCIR technology operated on near-instantaneous transmission between a special variety of programmable-matrix crystals.

Was that an intrinsic part of the plan, she wondered, or just a convenience?

Leia returned to the computer. Every second she remained in this room increased the likelihood of encountering Dzym, or Liegeus, or Beldorion, but this might be the only chance she had. It was hard to know what else she might need. She ran a compressed print of a Corevide scan on the names she had overheard: Dymurra. Getelles.

Reliant. When it was over she copied the information to a wafer, shoved both the wafer and the formidable sheaf of flimsiplast into the thigh pockets of her trousers, and replaced the plast in the printer with fresh so that it would not be obvious that some two hundred sheets had been printed out. Heart beating hard enough to sicken her, she closed her eyes again, probing at the stillness of the house.

She heard nothing, but she wasn't sure if she was doing this right or not. If she'd had more training-if she'd concentrated more on it-could she have reached through this strange, heavy miasma of the Force to summon Luke.

That way lay despair, and she shook the thought away.

She studied her first printout of the wiring schematic again, identifying the lift shaft, the stairway that wound down its side. By overlaying the schematic of the backup systems, she could easily identify the room that contained both the CCIR terminal, and the main computer station: The room where she now stood.

Through that door. Down another flight of steps to a round reception area that contained nothing more important than an enormous light sculpture and a couple of artificial waterfalls. The lift doors opened there, as did the access hatch for the maintenance stairs.

She glanced over her shoulder at the wide transparisteel panels leading onto the terrace, aware of how secure the light made her feel, how safe.

As she headed toward the reception area, the doors to the lift and the access stairs, she found herself hoping that the room would have transparisteel.

It didn't. It was dark, save for the flamboyant rainbows of the light sculpture, whose colored patterns twinkled and flashed in the murmuring waterfalls, half-seen in the gloom. It stank of drochs and Hutt, and Leia dared not touch what she thought were the glow panels, for fear of activating something that would reveal to others where she was.

Picking her way between the pale mushroom shapes of cushioned furniture years unused, by the dim reflections of the light sculpture, she thought, The stairs will be unlit.

She pulled her shirt out of the waistband of her trousers, fumbled underneath to untie the lightsaber from around her body. The cold laser blade didn't give much light, but at least, she thought, it was better than groping downward in utter dark.

"True Jedi can see in the dark, bartim," Beldorion had rumbled to her once a day or two ago, when he'd asked her to join him for lunch and a bask on the terrace-she no longer even remembered how the subject of Jedi powers had arisen. "They see not with their eyes-they see with their noses, with their ears, with the hairs of their head, and with their skins. You have neglected your training, little princess." He'd shaken a tiny bejeweled finger at her. "They used to have us run races in the Caves of Masposhani, miles below the ground. Used to drop us on the dark sun worlds of Af'El and Y'nybeth, where there is no spectrum of visible light. But the great Jedi, the Masters-Yoda and Thon and Nomi Sunrider-they could summon light, could make metal glow so that their puny little friends wouldn't stumble either. They'd hold a pin-so.. ." He'd reached one slimy hand to pluck a hairpin from her head, Leia flinching but too dazed with the drug to pull back.

The Hutt had held the pin between thumb and forefinger, vast ruby eyes looking past it into hers. And she saw', like a dream she'd dreamed and forgotten, a fragment of his memory, a man's thin face, bone-thin and horribly scarred within a great gray tousle of hair, holding a hairpin as the Hutt was holding hers, the metal curve of its upper end incandescent and shedding light enough to see the pillars and frescoes of the room in which he stood.

Leia had shivered, as the memory vision died: Shivered to think of all that ancient learning, all the techniques and knowledge that Luke had been so painstakingly trying to jigsaw together for years, sunk in the mucky well of the Hutt's indolent mind. All that unlimited power, put, not to evil use, as Vader and Palpatine had put it, but to the service of utter pettiness, even as he could think of enslaving her for no better purpose than to regain his rule over defenseless farmers or to beat an old rival who had no more actual power than he.

The lightsaber weighed heavy in her hand. You must learn to use your powers, Luke had said. We need champions of the Force. There aren't so many of us that we can afford to choose.

But every time she thumbed the toggle, every time the cold, clear sky-hued blade hummed to life, Leia saw only shadows: the shadow of Vader.

The shadow' of Palpatine. The shadows of her own anger, her own impatience, and the righteous certainties she had come to distrust.

And now, the moldy shadows of Beldorion and the pettiness of greed.

The shadows of the future she feared, when Anakin, Jacen, Jaina-those three incalculable fragments of her body and her life came to the age when they would choose either the light or the dark.

Still, at the moment she had no other option. She activated the blade, and pushed open the discreet access hatch that led into the service stairs.

Something she couldn't see clearly whipped out of sight down the first curve of the flight. The smell of drochs was choking. The dim glow of the lightsaber's blade showed her only the faintest of outlines a meter around her, the steep little wedge-shaped stairs-cut into the rock of the mesa itselfthe descending curve of the ceiling close over her head.

Right hand clutching the weapon's haft, left hand touching the centerpost of the stairs, she moved downward, the scald of adrenaline cold fever in her veins. She didn't know what she'd do if she reached the garage to find one of the synthdroid servants on guard there or if there were no landspeeders to steal. From the high balcony outside her room she had looked west and north as far as she could and had seen nothing but the wastelands of crystal mountains and endless, glittering plains.

There might, of course, be a resort casino and greenputt playing field a hundred meters south of this place. She could almost hear her friend Callista's wry, soft comment, and her heart ached with the hope that Luke would somehow find her, here on this world. But I wouldn't bet the tent on it. just the memory of the kind of thing Callista would say made her smile, the ironic image giving her courage in the darkness.

She stopped.

There was something sitting on the step ahead of her, just beyond the range of the cold blade's light.

It was about the size of a pittin, sitting upright twenty or thirty centimeters high-glistening, crablike, c.o.c.king its long eyestalks at her with malign awareness. Sitting upright. Waiting for her.

Leia took another step, and extended the blade.

The thing swayed back. In the dense shadows it was extremely difficult to make out what it looked like, but glancing up, Leia saw that there were other things, things like long-legged spiders splayed out on the ceiling and walls, things like short-legged slugs that scooted along the walls, catching and eating the huge drochs that rustled in the shadows. As she watched, the upright thing on the step bent and turned, extruding what looked like a single spiky limb from itself to pounce on a particularly gross droch, catching it in a pincer that seemed to alter in shape and transform into a gulping mouth. For a moment she heard it purr, a soft little thrum of deep pleasure. Then it swung back, eyestalks swiveling to face her again. Sickened, overwhelmed with the sensation that this was an evil that could not be fought, Leia extended the lightsaber so that the glowing tip advanced on the crab thing.

Movement flickered in the corner of her eye and she swung around as something dropped from the ceiling, landing on her shoulder with a wet plop. Pain stabbed through her, like a droch bite but far worse. The soft-bodied thing that had fallen on her morphed out grabbing legs, hooks that sank into her flesh as she cried out and tried to pull it loose.

Weakness. Pain in her chest. Cold and dreamy sleep.

Something else fastened on her leg. The crab thing on the steps purred louder, a sound of dreamy pleasure. She felt as if she were dropping down in a lift bound for the center of the world.

She whipped the lightsaber around in her hand, shrinking in terror from the glowing blade that she knew could take her own arm off' as she touched it to the parasite on her shoulder. It frizzled horribly and the pain it felt went through her like a knife, and in her dreamy, sickened weakness she felt it die. It was like a part of her own flesh dying. She turned the blade, fried the thing on her leg, taking the pain, taking the sense of black slipping death, and moved another step down.

The crab thing scuttered ahead of her, vanishing into the dark, save for the orange sparks of its eyes. Around the curve of the stair she could see the walls moving with them, all shapes, shifting one into the other, feeding on one another but all turning as one toward her with the awareness of the light. Leia backed up, catching her heel on the stair in her weakness and almost falling. Another one, whatever they were, dropped from the ceiling onto her neck, smaller, so that both the sinking weakness of dying, and the pain of its death, were less; but they were coming after her.

Two more bites. She felt like she would faint from lack of air. The crab thing's soft throb of delight made her long to find it, cut it to shreds, wherever it was. Her hand fumbled with the lightsaber's hilt, pain of a different sort lancing through her arm as the tiniest edge of the blade brushed her flesh in killing another parasite. If she fell, she thought, if she lost consciousness, she would die.

Clinging to the walls, sobbing, trying to breathe, fighting not to sink into that cool welcoming sleep, she stumbled upward, fifteen steps, twenty. The crab thing was following in the darkness behind, as if relishing, reveling in her exhaustion and pain. They'll find me, she thought. I won't be able to make it back to my room and they'll find me.

Seti Ashgad was away, Seti Ashgad who had warned, Skywalker will know, if she dies. She had tried, again and again, to call out to Luke, to send him signals with her mind, but wasn't sure that he had heard. The humming, singing power of the Force in this world might have drowned out everything else. Only Dzym was there, silent in this silent house.