In driving her lightsaber into the Central Controller, she had ma.s.s-deactivated them, destroyed them...

They're not living, she told herself. No more living than a droid that might have been deactivated or its memory flushed. But the guilt remained, as if she'd wiped Artoo's programming or Threepio's.

They'll search, she thought. Ashgad and Dzym and Liegeus. They'll get Beldorion to use his Jedi perceptions, to touch the Force. To feel for the vibrations of her mind, if the sluglike ma.s.s of indolence still had the capability of doing so-if the weird, overwhelming vibration of the Force that filled this world would permit it.

The storeroom containing the antigrav units was exactly where the schematic said it was.

But only one unit was active. The rest-nearly a dozen-lay in boxes of styrene and goatgra.s.s along the wall, dead, useless as so many rocks would have been.

Leia felt as if she'd had a bucket of cold water hurled in her face.

Her hands shook uncontrollably as she pulled the single unit whose lights were green from its shelf. It was a 100-GU unit-a speeder usually took four-and about half charged. She clicked it to neutral buoyancy and pulled it after her like a balloon on a string to the lab outside, where a synthdroid lay on the floor, eyes staring, near the half-a.s.sembled parts of a new buoyancy charger. The old one, on a table nearby, was an outmoded model held together by Y-bands and silver s.p.a.ce tape. A scattering of antiquated, blown-out, and depleted tanks lay around it.

Next time they vote to have trade come in, I'm all for it, thought Leia grimly, as she dug through drawers. There was a belt reel of cable and a hook there, standard in mountainous terrain; also a small glowrod, and two rolls of silver s.p.a.ce tape, which she threaded onto the makeshift bedroll strap. This business of never having the right equipment is ridiculous! She pocketed a couple of emergency mini-heaters, crossed the room at a run to the big double doors that the schematic had told her would lead to the docking bay.

As the schematic promised, the great permacrete pad that formed the southeastern quarter of Ashgad's compound overlooked open s.p.a.ce on two sides. The Reliant sat on five short legs close by the workroom door through which she emerged. In smaller hangars to the side she made out the needlelike nosecone of an elderly Headhunter, and the blunt silhouette of a gutted Skipray Blastboat.

Synthdroids, fallen with equipment or tanks of Puffo-Shield in hand, lay about the Reliant in starlight like wet black heaps of laundry.

There was no light, for the Central Control [Init knew where every step and cable and piece of machinery lay, no matter which droid set it down, but it seemed to Leia that the great gulfs of air beyond the permacrete ap.r.o.n were filled with the softest echo of brightness, the glow of the merciless stars amplified by the wasteland of faceted ridge and scree.

Leia looked down from the edge of the ap.r.o.n and her heart froze. I can't.

It was easily three hundred meters to the base of that first, sheer drop.

From there the slope tapered steeply, a shamble of diamonds, bled of color in the etiolated light. An antigrav unit's lifting capability was directly proportional to the distance from the surface of the ground.

The first drop might be so fast that when the lift finally kicked in, it might not do so soon enough or hard enough.

The cable wasn't even a quarter long enough, and with no way of detaching the hook, she might as well set off flares to announce in which direction she'd gone.

Behind her, in the dark bulk of the house, she saw a light go up, then another.

The image returned to her mind, of Ashgad bending his head down to the mouths and tentacles and groping, wormy nodules of Dzym's chitinous chest; of Dzym's ungloved, unseen hands on her face, her wrists. Of the cold sickness that pulled her down toward death.

Here in this high place, unshielded by any walls, she had the curious sensation of the Force being all around her, as if she stood not on a boat in the sea, but on the living ocean bed itself. Strong, strange, it called to her, she thought. Spoke in words she could not understand.

She checked the antigrav unit in her hands.

It wasn't enough. it is. The thought was warm wind breathing in her mind.

It is.

You've got to be kidding!

Leia looked over the edge again. Darkness and starlight and scintil-lant wastes dropped away like a vast subconscious thought. She knew that the slight difference in weight wasn't going to have any effect on the immutable law of twenty-six point six meters per second per second, but nevertheless she dropped her bedroll first. The sealed pitcher would shatter and couldn't be risked.

What am I thinking about? she reflected cynically, as she ripped a double strip of s.p.a.ce tape and fashioned a makeshift handle. I'm the one who's goin to smash to a million pieces.

The night around her, the subtly flashing darkness, whispered, You won't.

We're here. Trust.

More lights sprang up like startled glowbugs on a summer evening, and she heard Ashgad's oratorial baritone call, "Liegeus! Here, at once!"

They'd found the synthdroids.

Leia slipped her arm through the handle, clicked over the antigrav unit to its highest output, and stepped off the edge of the platform.

Leia was calling him.

Luke jolted out of sleep, shocked breathless in the chilly dawn.

Encircled by the towering crystal shapes of mountains like molten gla.s.s, the image of her was etched on his mind, alone in a world of gla.s.s and sky. She was on a stone terrace, wrapped in a white blanket, cinnamon hair lying in a long disheveled braid down her shoulder.

There was something about the image that told him that this had happened some time ago, that it had been caught up in the distortions of the Force, but he knew it was real. She looked thin and fragile and badly scared. Ashgad.

He hadn't just destroyed her ship, looted it for its weapons. He'd taken her off. Ransom? Negotiation?

An illusion, the result of last night's discovery on the smuggler drop?

No. As surely as he knew the bones of his body, he knew she was there or had been there. Alive.

The foot of the Mountains of Lightning, Taselda had said. Arvid or Aunt Gin would know the spot. For a moment he considered taking Taselda, only to reject the thought in the next heartbeat.

He rose from his bed, walked to the rear transparisteel, looked down on the peacefully prosaic yard of dust and belcrabbian, water pumps and broken speeder parts, the dark-leaved antigrav b.a.l.l.s beyond the walls floating still as cutouts in the clear, early light. It was difficult to remember that this was all manufactured, laboriously carved from a world that admitted no life.

From here, the great, lawless presence of the Force could only be felt a little, dim and far away.

Luke reached out with his mind. Leia. Don't despair. i'm on my way.

He didn't know if his thought even reached her, tangled in the distorting effects of the Force on this world. Didn't know if she could hear, even when it did.

But Callista had told him once that hope, too, can sometimes affect the Force.

"What's that?

m.u.f.fled in the folds of the black hooded robe and c.u.mbersome breath mask and wig, See-Threepio considered Captain Ugmush's question to be purely rhetorical. Even one unused to the noises of war, riot, and rebellion should have been able to accurately identify the sound of heavy artillery sh.e.l.ling, the crash of crumbling walls, and the harsh clashing of human voices and blasters.

The Gamorrean captain's three husbands, however, seemed to take their lady's exclamation as a straightforward request for information, and went barreling to the round portal that led onto the boarding ramp to see. All three reached the entryway at the same moment and immediately undertook a slugging match for precedence. Captain Ugmush, who had taken on another commission to transport cargo offplanet and was waiting impatiently for delivery, heaved herself from the bridge workstation, where she'd been checking through projections of launch windows and hypers.p.a.ce jump points, and proceeded to break up the fight with slaps, squeals, and head bashing, following which the entire family group piled out the door and down the ramp. Engineer Jos, chained to his console, didn't even raise his eyes.

A further explosion that made the ship rock on its landing gear brought Threepio nervously to his feet. "Captain Ugmush..." He realized his vocal modulators had gone into default register and quickly reset them to the deeper tone that, though it took up far more memory in mimicry of organic resonators, exhibited less of the characteristic droid "metallic"

quality. "Captain Ugmush, do you really think you should leave the ship at this moment?" He toddled toward the door as another flurry of shots and outcry came echoing from somewhere uncomfortably close by. "In the event of an emergency takeoff... Oh, dear, Artoo..." His voice dropped back to default again. "Do you have any idea how to get this model of vessel lifted off?"

The astromech, trundling toward the doorway in his wake, denied any expertise in the piloting of the lumpy Gamorrean cubeship.

Threepio muttered, "Oh dear, oh dear," as he followed Artoo out the door and down the ramp, hoping against hope that the situation outside wasn't going to get any worse.

The moment he emerged at the foot of the ramp it became evident that it was unlikely that it would-or could-get worse. The next bay over was in flames, black oil smoke and thirty-foot columns of fire pouring skyward and Gopso'o troops and Drovian government forces searing one another with blaster fire and cannister grenades across the wreckage.

For a moment the docking bay in which the Zicreex lay was quiet.

None of the Gamorreans was to be seen. Then under the arcade a door opened and a muddy, shabby little figure darted through. The fugitive slammed the keypad to close the door behind him, pulled a crowbar from the nearest heap of sc.r.a.p under the arcade, and smashed the lock.

The effort was to little avail. It was clear that whoever was on the other side of the door also had crowbars, battering rams, and grenades.

The fugitive dashed madly across the open permacrete, and Threepio said in surprise, "Why, it's Master Yarbolk from the Chug 'n' Chuck!

Master Yarbolk! Over here, Master Yarbolk!"

The Chadra-Fan needed no further encouragement. He bolted past them and up the entry ramp, instants before the doors gave way and an exceedingly mixed congregation of Drovians-some wearing the Gopso'o scalplock and others, though presumably sympathizers, not so decorated, accompanied by a couple of Durosian and Devaronian lay-about s.p.a.ceport types-came smashing through. Someone yelled something about a stinking traitor sellout swine, and Threepio, correctly interpreting the remark to reflect on the fugitive Master Yarbolk, pointed toward the doorway that led to the unburning bays beyond.

"That way!" he boomed in his alternate alien voice. "Unclean hairy undersize journalist!" He hoped the invective was as acceptable to them as it was informative.

Hollering imprecations, the mob smashed its way through the farther doors at the same moment a twenty-centimeter sh.e.l.l struck the arcade between the burning bay and the one currently occupied by the Zicreex.

Threepio let out a squeak of panic and retreated up the ramp as the Drovian government forces scattered, regrouped, and fired on the Gopso'o who were attempting to advance over the wreckage. At the same moment Ugmush and her husbands appeared at a run. They must have pa.s.sed the mob just within the other doorway, and they added their mite to the battle, firing on the Gopso'o as they lumbered across the permacrete and up the boarding ramp, an a.s.sortment of parcels and packing boxes hung over their shoulders and backs.

Dirty pink curls flying and morrts clinging to her for their very lives, Ugmush burst onto the bridge, screaming, "Get yourselves strapped in, you stupid garbage eaters! What in sithfestering blazes do you think this is, a luxury liner?" She flung herself down behind the console, jabbing keys and flipping levers with far more speed than seemed possible in hands so huge. "Close that festering boarding ramp, you muck-sodden flapdragon, do I have to do everything on this maw-sapping ship? Jos, get us out of here! Fruck, open fire on those festering Gopso'o-hang on, the lot of you! Bunch of crab-sucking morrtless soap-using cheesebrains!"

She rammed the activation levers over, the engineer cut in the power overrides, and in a roar of ground fire, ion cannons, and retro lasers, the Zicreex was airborne and heading out of the ragged billows of smoke, flak and wreckage like a spinning overweight glet-fruit shot from a catapult at the sky.

Threepio, who hadn't had time to buckle himself down or even take a seat, picked himself gingerly up and readjusted his breath mask, hoping that either his robe hadn't come disarranged enough to exhibit his undeniably droidlike legs, or that Ugmush had been too occupied with her velocity computations to notice. Yarbolk, who like him had been hurled to the far corner of the bridge, limped over to a.s.sist him in righting Artoo-Detoo, who had rolled a considerable distance and whose distress lights were blinking in several systems, including one of the bolted-on components they hadn't been able to get rid of after disconnecting him from the Pure Sabacc. Most of the distress lights went out. Artoo tweeped a wan thanks, and without a word, los removed the elastic tie from his long hair and offered it to Yarbolk to tie up some of Artoo's stray cables.

"Thank you-er-Igpek," said the Chadra-Fan. "I owe you one."

Ugmush turned in her seat, and glared at the furry little journalist out of orange pinhead eyes. "And what the festering muck is that troublemaker doing on my ship?" she demanded. "Don't you sapheads know there's a reward out for him on seven systems?"

They were there.

Luke froze, lying under the pitted steel belly of the speeder.

Listening.

No sound.

But they were there, watching him. He knew' it. Even through the silent trumpets of the Force in the deep stillness of the wastelands, he could sense their presence. He'd sensed awareness of him again and again since leaving Hweg Shul.

The invisible watchers.

The planet's unseen original inhabitants.

Effortlessly following his speeder, keeping him in sight.

Where he lay under the speeder he could see nothing. When the starboard antigrav unit had started to go he'd prudently set the vehicle down with one edge on a sort of bench of basalt, the other side on a lump of frost-green quartz the size of a ha.s.sock, so his only view from underneath, as he rejiggered the generator wiring to recharge the defective a-g coil, was straight ahead or straight behind, identical vistas of harsh reflective gravel broken by bigger fragments and hunks of crystal, and, farther off5 crystal chimneys piercing the sky.

He sensed that should he emerge from beneath the speeder and look around him, he would still see no one.

He lowered his eyelids, trying to call the shape of them within the Force. But such was the interference of the Force on this world, the sheer magnitude of its presence in alien guise, that he could get no clear picture of those invisible ones. Maybe, he thought, that was the point of the interference to begin with.

Nor could he tell exactly when they had begun to dog him, or feel whether their interest was beneficent, malicious, or merely inquiring.

They were only there.

"Who are you?" he called out, aware of his vulnerability, lying on his back under the speeder. "I mean you no harm. You don't need to be afraid to show yourself to me. Can you show yourselves to me?"

Their presence drew closer-or something drew closer, a distinct awareness of their awareness of him. He wondered how he knew' it was they and not he, she, or it.

Carefully, he crawled from beneath the speeder, and stood up.

Pale shadows lay about him; pale daytime stars pierced the dark blue of the sky. Pale sunlight fragmented from the glittering gravel that stretched in all directions, empty to the farthest sh.o.r.e of the long-forgotten sea.

"It's the Loronar Corporation." The Chadra-Fan journalist Yarbolk lowered his husky alto voice, brought out from the pocket of his singed and stained silk vest a handful of green datacubes, held them out as if their mere presence on his hairless, pink palm were proof of what he said. "On every one of these planets, every place in the Meridian sector where there's been an armed revolt or religious rioting or uprisings from minority tribes or groups or whatever it's been... the dissident forces are always armed with Loronar weapons. Not bottom-cut sell-outs, mind you, like the gunrunners are always peddling to aborigines if they think they can get away with it. Top-of-the-line blasters and grenades and ion cannons. Look at these."

He rattled the datacubes like dice in his hand. Artoo-Detoo, taking him at his word, promptly extruded a gripper arm, picked up a cube, and withdrew the arm into his own vitals. "Hey, give that back!" protested Yarbolk, loudly enough that two of Ugmush's husbands, an armed guard, two very nervous Aqualish smugglers, and the dozen or so others who shared the waiting chamber of the Quarantine Enforcement Cruiser Lycominturned to glare at them, as if blaming them for their present situation.

The Zicreex had not even made it to the hypers.p.a.ce jump point when it ran into trouble. Just outside the outlying asteroid fields of the Drovian system they had encountered the Republic cruiser Empyrean, firing furiously with all guns in all directions without any target immediately apparent-not until the flash of one of the cruiser's shield generators blowing up had illuminated what at first appeared to be a cloud of s.p.a.ce debris surrounding the vessel like flies. Within moments, however, it was obvious that the tiny slips of matte black metal were vessels of some kind, pouring concentrated fire on the huge ship and slipping and scattering from return fire like a cloud of b.u.t.terbats.

Since the battle lay between the Zicreex and the outer reaches of the system, where it would be safe to jump to hypers.p.a.ce, the small trader was trapped where it was. Ugmush, the droids, and Yarbolk cl.u.s.tered by the viewport and watched as the Empyrean tried first to battle, then to flee the swarming attackers.

"Fascinating," Threepio said, looking over Ugmush's shoulder as the captain tried to scan up a reading on the nearby area in the hopes of not running afoul of whatever larger vessel was controlling the swarm.

"They seem to be nothing more than ambulant weapons. Don't be silly," he added, to Artoo, who had surrept.i.tiously hooked into the console behind Ugmush's broad back. "There has to be a princ.i.p.al ship.

Whatever it is, it must have amazing range."

Yarbolk, crowding at Ugmush's elbow and peering back and forth between Attoo's readouts and those on the console, whispered, "No princ.i.p.al ship.

Just weapons. It's got to be CCIR of some kind."

Light flared over their faces as a bolt from one of the tiny ships achieved target. The fire cloud from the exploding cruiser enveloped the daggerlike little weapons; a hundred white stars flared in the dissipating ball of heat and gases as they, too, were destroyed. The score or so which survived simply pivoted, like a school of glimmerfish in the darkness, and moved away. Black painted as they were, they were swiftly lost to sight.

Yarbolk whispered, "By the Big Green Fish..." And then, "What are you doing?" as Ugmush moved the levers, and the Zicreex swung around.

"Salvage," the Gamorrean said. She jerked one meaty hand at the viewport, where the two or three huge chunks of what was left of the cruiser hung glowing in blackness, surrounded by whirling fields of half-melted shielding, metal shards, spears of gla.s.s, and vacuum-bloated corpses.

"Lots of stuff."

Ugmush and her husbands, resplendent in deep-s.p.a.ce environmental gear customized to their species for use by mercenaries, were looting the wreck when the Quarantine Enforcement Cruiser Lycoming made its appearance. Its captain, a much-harried Gotal female in charge of a small troop of fighters and a squad of medics from the Coruscant Inst.i.tute, had picked up the Empyrean's distress call, and was not amused by the presence of the Gamorrean free traders at the wreck site.

Threepio supposed it was a credit to his disguise that he'd been put under arrest with the others. Artoo-Detoo had simply been impounded.

Now the little blue access hatch in Artoo's side slid open again and his gripper arm deposited the cube on the table in front of Yarbolk.

Yarbolk s.n.a.t.c.hed it up possessively and bestowed it in his breast pocket.