"TriNebulon'll pay me a fortune for that," said the Chadra-Fan. "More so than ever, now." He hadn't been groomed in days-most of the grooming parlors in Bagsho had been boarded tight-and his silky golden fur was a ma.s.s of dirt and knots. "Did you get a look at that wreckage?" The hulls of the attacking vessels, the weapon vessels?"

"I didn't examine them closely, no." Threepio turned his head to look at the pieces of wreckage that [lgmush had taken on board the Zicreex before the QEC had put in its appearance. They were stacked in a corner of the enormous waiting room, labeled and under a very tired-and crabby-looking Sull.u.s.tan guard.

Yarbolk lowered his voice still further. "They're modified Seifax shielded transport sh.e.l.ls," he whispered. "Thousands of them were shipped to Seifax's new plant on Antemeridias a few months ago-and Seifax is a dummy corporation for Loronar."

"You can't really be serious." Threepio modulated his voice down, shocked. Though he was not physically uncomfortable in the all-enfolding black robe and leather mask with its breathing tubes and filters, Threepio found the disguise ma.s.sively inconvenient because the fabric bunched in his joints, interfered with the delicate operation of his hydraulic retractors, and-since like many droids his balance was less acute than humans'-threatened to trip him at every other step.

"Loronar Corporation is a subscriber to the Republic Registry of Corporations. Their board of directors is made up of individuals of the highest probity and credentials. They were responsible for a good deal of the armament that made the Rebellion possible!"

"And they turned a five hundred percent profit in the ten years of active Rebellion that preceded the fall of the New Order. Now the Rebellion had its own financial sources, but not that kind of money.

Loronar was selling to both sides, probably through dummy corporations like Seifax. And the Seifax plant on Antemeridias has been buying miniaturized hypers.p.a.ce drives from the Bith. I have a connection in the processing office. Hey," he added, s.n.a.t.c.hing back another of the datacubes from Artoo, who, apparently still under the impression that look at these was an order, had been systematically picking up the cubes on the table with his gripper and taking them into his data-retrieval port. "You give those back."

The droid promptly spat them out in a line onto the table. Yarbolk s.n.a.t.c.hed them up, counted them, and glanced quickly over his shoulder again at the other occupants of the quarantine hold. They were a motley bunch: a scrofutous-looking gray Wookiee and a couple of Aqualish who held together and kept looking from the guards to the doors, the crew of a Squib prospector vessel who protested vehemently and often that they hadn't heard about any plague, and a rather extravagantly hued Ergesh who occupied three seats and smelled like the garbage pressers of a candy factory.

"There have been three attempts on my life, since I started on this story," whispered the Chadra-Fan, and his four wide nostrils quivered in the velvet of his snout. "Loronar Corporation can't afford for this to be made public. Half their contracts come from the Republic."

"Surely Loronar Corporation wouldn't frank an a.s.sa.s.sin?

Yarbolk sniffed and jabbed one short finger at the protocol droid for emphasis. "Loronar might not do it themselves, but they'd get Getelles to do it. Who do you think put those Gopso'o on me, back on Drovis?.

My sources at Getelles's court tell me Loronar is pretty much backing Getelles's whole household. The local CEO, Dymurra, lives there like a king: s.e.x droids, vibrobaths, plug-ins, glitterstim, four different chefs, self-conforming slippers, independently controlled environments in every room of his mansion, you name it. Some stuff that isn't legal anywhere. He couldn't get it without Getelles's okay. That all adds up to..."

"Igpek Droon?" called a voice from the inner doorway.

"That's you!" hissed Yarbolk, when Threepio didn't respond.

"Oh-oh, yes." Threepio rose quickly, stepping on the hem of his robe as he did so; Yarbolk inconspicuously caught him by the elbow to keep him from going over. The Lycomins's Captain and Chief Medical Officer both stood in the doorway: female Gotals, their flat gray faces already turning toward him with suspicion as he hastened in their direction, their hornlike sensory organs picking up the synergistic energy fields that betrayed him as a droid.

"Thank goodness we've finally contacted someone in authority!" cried Threepio gratefully, unhooking the straps of his mask and pulling free the blond wig. "You have no idea..."

He found himself looking down the barrels of two blasters and a disruptor.

"Don't come any closer, droid," snapped the captain. "Tuuve, get a restraining bolt for this one."

"But you don't understand!" protested Threepio. "You must communicate with the New Republic Council immediately! Her Excellency, Chief of State Leia Organa Solo, has been kidnapped! You must..."

"Not another one," muttered the Chief Medical Officer to her captain.

"What was the last one? A wrecked shipload of Carosi pups with two hours'

oxygen left? And how' much tenho-root extract did that one have stashed in its casing?"

"I beg your pardon!" Threepio drew himself up to his full height, though he had been carefully engineered to be nonthreatening to a wide spectrum of sentient species, Gotals among them. "I am a certified protocol droid belonging to Her Excellency herself! The very idea that I would be programmed to smuggle illicit drugs..."

"Whoever programmed this one picked a doozy of a cover story," remarked the captain. She nodded to the Sull.u.s.tan engineer who had come up behind Threepio with a couple of restraining bolts. "Get His Excellency down to the impound hold and go over him good. And take down the serial numbers."

She rubbed her eyes. Her thin, fleshless lips were gray with fatigue and the soft tissue around her eyes was swollen. When he considered it, Threepio supposed that operating a quarantine enforcement vessel along the perimeter of a sector involved in half a dozen separate revolts-without any centralized authority to back up her decisions-must be an extremely wearing task.

"We'll put Enforcement on whoever he really belongs to after this is all over, but for now, tag anything you find hidden in the casings and send the microprocessors down to the lab. We need them bad. They need wiring in Maintenance, too."

"I protest!" cried Threepio, as the Sull.u.s.tan troopers laid hold of his arms. "Her Excellency has been kidnapped and..."

"Her Excellency, for your information, my friend," said the Gotal, with a weary, gritting edge to her voice, "just transmitted authorization for our mission in this sector, under her personal seal. I've just spoken to her."

"She left authorized holograms of herself for contingency purposes before she left on the secret mission!" cried Threepio. "That's standard procedure. Of course they would need her authorization to establish a quarantine zone, but she isn't really there! My counterpart and I are the only ones who know' her true whereabouts!"

The two Gotals-members of a species notoriously distrustful of droids, an understandable prejudice given the sensitivity of their sensory organs-exchanged an eloquent glance.

"But I tell you I was there! Two battle cruisers disappeared! The Borealis and the Adamantine..."

The surgeon frowned. "Your cousin's on the Adamantine, isn't he, Captain?

The captain nodded. "And the Adamantine left for Celanon at the beginning of the week."

"That was only a cover story!" wailed Threepio, as the guards pulled him in the direction of the doors. "Her mission in this sector was top secret! The Adamantine was destroyed..."

The captain's eyes hardened to steel. "Get him out of here," she said softly to the guards. "Get that R2 as well, would you? You tell them in Impound to flush those microprocessors good."

The guard saluted, and asked, "What about the Chadra-Fan they came on board with?

The Gotal captain fished in her pocket for a slip of pink flimsiplast.

Threepio thought it was a message slip of some kind, but there was no official heading, only a private scramble code across the top. Her eyes narrowed furtively as she looked over at Yarbolk, who was still sitting next to Artoo and trying to look inconspicuous. Then she turned to Threepio. "What's your friend's name?"

Unless programmed to give alternate information, droids are devastatingly truthful, even those whose business is protocol and diplomacy.

"Yarbolk Yemm," provided Threepio unhesitatingly. "I understand that he's a journalist for TriNebulon."

There was momentary silence. Then the captain said, "That's him," and signaled to another guard as she started across the room toward the Chadra-Fan.

Yarbolk saw them coming and sprang to his feet. Everyone in the waiting hall had been relieved of whatever weaponry he or she'd possessed, and in any case the guards were heavily armed. He bolted toward the doors, but they did not open. Turning at bay, he raised his hands in protest or surrender as the Gotal captain pulled her blaster from her side and fired a stun beam into his chest from a distance of less than a meter. The shock of it threw the little journalist back against the door, where he slumped slowly to the floor in a tangle of golden fur and pink-and-blue silk.

The Gotal captain glanced around her. Under the watchful eyes of the guards, none of the others in the room had moved. Perhaps, deduced Threepio, they had their own reasons for wishing to remain inconspicuous.

The captain spoke to the guards nearest her, in a voice so low that only a droid's acute audio receptors could pick up what she said.

She said, "Airlock three."

Stretched in the crevice of a glittering cliff face, Leia shaded her eyes against the rising sun glare. Wind made her face feel as if it had been chemically processed. From her high ledge she could see back along the maze of canyons, harsh edged and broken as old tectonic upheavals had left them, every surface a mirror magnifying the heatless light.

If they were looking for her, she couldn't tell it.

Certainly she saw nothing. Ashgad could easily program simple tracker droids to her physical parameters: movement, ma.s.s, and body temperature.

For this reason she had sacrificed the antigrav unit and one of the heaters, sending it drifting away down the canyon as a decoy.

Beldorion's decayed powers might sense the difference, but Leia was willing to bet that even had the Force not lain like a crackling magnetic field over the entire planet, the effort was beyond the one-time Knight.

She closed her eyes for a moment, weary to exhaustion. She still didn't know why she hadn't been dashed to jelly at the foot of the mesa-there must have been more juice in the coil than she'd thought.

She felt like she'd dodged, and run, and scrambled a hundred kilometers since then.

Opening her eyes again, she unfolded the map. Years on the run with the Rebel forces had taught her to read elevation maps. She identified the canyon she'd climbed up, and the two peaks between which she had to clamber to come down on the deserted gun station at Bleak Point. There was no water marked anywhere on the map, so she didn't know whether there would be a pump of any kind at her destination.

Only about a quarter of the water in the pitcher remained, and she didn't know how' long it would take her to get a message out...... If the gun station still contained working equipment capable of subs.p.a.ce range.

Stiffly, achingly, she bent to examine the wreckage of her gold-stamped ceremonial boots, and with bleeding fingers ripped another length of silver s.p.a.ce tape to add to the existing crisscross of repairs.

If Ashgad didn't have some means of picking up and tracking such a signal.

If there were anyone alive to hear.

She tried not to think about the Death Seed and about how much her feet hurt.

The Death Seed.

The echo of it returned again and again to her mind.

Idiot, idiot, idiot. She slung the sealed pitcher over her back once more and started the long, cautious, terrible process of following the ledge back along the cliff toward the high-up cl.u.s.ter of amethyst peaks that were her next landmark.

She'd seen records of other governments, other armies, other men who had attempted to use plague as a weapon. Hathfox III came to mind. It had been twelve centuries, according to the records unearthed there, and the place was still on the Registry as a Standing Hazard. The team that had retrieved the records had all died, as had the crew of their rescue ship and the entire staff of the quarantine facility to which they'd been taken. According to the records-tapped into by remote at a distance-the terrorist organization that had developed that particular quasivirus had had a "fool-proof" antivirus.

Are you familiar with the term mutate, boys and girls? Leia's mouth twisted in cynical despair. Have you ever heard the words human error?

Minor equipment failure? How about that little phrase 'Oh, we didn't think of THAT!

Death Seed.

Don't you dare. Don't you DARE.

But they already had dared. If Ashgad's memos were correct, the Death Seed was already spreading through the fleet, crippling it as revolt after revolt broke out across the sector and Admiral Larm's ships moved in. Apparently Dzym could control the timing of its starts if he were in the area or cared about doing so-otherwise it spread on its Own.

Would Beldorion hear her, if she tried to call out to Luke again.

Her hand touched the lightsaber at her belt. She should have listened to Luke, she thought. Spent more time in training. Luke wouldn't have this trouble.

Neither would Vader, of course.

Panting, hands bleeding, knees torn from the bitter mangling of uneroded stone, Leia gained the crest of the ridge between the two peaks and looked down on the gun station below.

It looked tiny, hundreds of meters below. A blunt black cylinder, doorless and without so much as a centimeter of transparisteel, set close beside the heavy shoulder of rock that gave the place its name.

The original black stone had been added to with rude defensive works, reminiscent of a woman in a formal senatorial robe wearing a shade-drinks-and-stereo picnic hat. She could get in, thought Leia, through those bristling wood-and-metal upper works, were she willing to sacrifice her blanket by cutting it into strips to lengthen the cable.

She managed, but only just. Throwing the hook from a precarious balance point at the top of the rock spur, with the help of the pouring wind she was able to lodge it among the bristling beams. Releasing the cable to hang free along the wall, she climbed to the ground again, and stumbled to the place where the cable, added to by blanket strips, reached to within a meter of the gravel.

It had been years since Leia had shinnied up a wall. Once, twenty meters up, pummeled by the wind, arms burning and breath short and hard in her lungs, she felt a wave of dizziness rise over her and thought, I'm going to faint.

She wrapped the cable around her arms, pressed her forehead to the black stone, wind crushing her like a torrent of ice, willed the giddiness to pa.s.s. Her body trembled with hunger and fatigue. I'll never make it.

But she did. She pulled the cable up after her when she reached the top, and crept like an exhausted old woman to the cl.u.s.ter of shielded coils, reflectors, and modulators that rose through the pavement among the jury-rigged defensive works: The great laser cannons pointed at the sky.

Night brought the dim white daytime stars to unwinking brilliance among the tangle of beams and razor wire and lessened the pounding brutality of the wind. Leia cut through the locks on the doors that led down to the station below, afterward barricading the doors as well as she could behind her. The gun station, being without transparisteel, might well be haunted with the same groping, mutating vermin that had attacked her in the stairway of Ashgad's house. If that were the case, she would be forced to sleep on the roof, and would probably freeze.

She saw none of those things, but there were hundreds of fingernail-size drochs in the stairway. Some turned toward her in the muted beam of her downward-pointing glowrod, and began to crawl purposefully in her direction up the steps. Leia activated her lightsaber and flicked them with its tip. Those she touched sizzled and curled into b.a.l.l.s of charred death. The others crawled after her, as she descended the stair.

The equipment in the station was old, but serviceable. Most of the gun coils themselves were sealed, but the controls were open, a simple switching mechanism transferring targeting from the sealed computers to manual. They have to have teachin of some kind. She flicked the test switches experimentally, studied the readouts. The targeting equipment was elementary, but n.o.body who hadn't been trained could have used it.

Something] the Listeners pa.s.s along with the doctrines they hear from the voices in the wastelands?

Why would they want to destroy ships coming] in and ships going out?

Just because they want to keep the world primitive?

Or was there something else.

Sharp pain stabbed the calf of her leg. Looking down, she saw three or four huge drochs burrowing through the strips of s.p.a.ce tape wrapped around her legs. Exhaustion and a slight breathlessness dragged at her, as it had after the attack by the creatures in the stairwell.

They must be related to drochs, she thought, backing away from the targeting consoles and shining the glowrod all around her. The floor was dotted with the round, flat shapes of the insects. Keep moving, she thought. Don't let your feet stay too long in any one place.

The gun chamber was enormous, round, obviously occupying all of one level of the squat tower. Nothing in it even suggested communication equipment to her. Lamp fixtures hung dead from the smoke-black vaults.

A steel ladder in the center of the floor communicated with the lower level, and there was equipment there, too, sealed behind soot-stained and filthy black metal. Wornout blankets, heaps of arrows and spears, boxes of metal bullets, explosive ceramic pellets, and paper-wrapped gravel shot strewed the floor. Leia leaned against the ladder, fighting a wave of dizziness, her body trembling and suddenly cold. Drochs, she thought.

Sunlight will make me feel better. But she realized it could just as easily have been exhaustion, hunger, and the fatigue of unaccustomed hardship.

Far above her, she heard the sudden slither and crash of falling beams and furniture.

The barricade! Her heart froze. Boots clumped with m.u.f.fled tread on the floor above, and the hard white beam of a sodium light veered and flickered down the opening in the floor. Voices murmured. A quick glance around showed her there was no further ladder down. The rest of the tower must be taken up with the power supply of the guns themselves. Though she knew the dark s.p.a.ces between the equipment were crawling with drochs, Leia wedged herself between two anonymous black boxes, bruised hand gripping the lightsaber. The light from above grew stronger, moving with the movement of being carried, turned, scanned along the floor. Someone said, "Look," and was shushed.

The dead drochs, thought Leia. And then, i must have left tracks in the dust of the floor as well.

Her whole body ached with the thought of having to fight. Luke, she thought, if I get out of this alive I'm going to start training with you, at least to get into condition.

Her cold hands slid over the switch on the lightsaber.

Light poured from above, and a shadow came down two steps of the ladder, then dropped lightly to the floor and stepped at once into shadows, a trained warrior seeking cover. Other shadows cl.u.s.tered above, blocking most of the light, but a stray beam of it caught a sand-scoured red coat, a whirlwind of smoke-colored veils, the metal plates and buckles of heavy boots. There was movement, and with a flint hum the sun-yellow blade of a lightsaber stabbed into existence.

A woman's voice said, "Come out." L eia lowered her weapon, suddenly dizzy. "Callista?" she said.

The blade lowered, and the red figure before her put up a black-gloved hand to push away the veils that wrapped her face. "Leia?"

"We are the weapons of the Force." Callista's strong fingers pulled the roll of silver s.p.a.ce tape taut, while she fished one-handed in the pocket of her crimson coat for a knife. Above her, the iron beams of the gun station's defensive works lost themselves in the darkness, like a deadly sieve of razor wire set to trap the cold diamond stars. "We always have been, since the beginning of the Order; since people first began to understand the existence of the Force."

Leia said softly, "That's what scares me."