"Everyone on board both ships appears to be dead or incapacitated."

He glanced over at Dzym, whose eyes had gone dreamy again.

Dzym smiled and murmured, "Yes. Oh, yes."

The man Liegeus looked away from him, pain and loathing in his eyes.

"The synthdroids have taken one of the shuttles over to the escort ship.

They should have no trouble boarding."

"Very good." Ashgad glanced at the wall chronometer. "It should take about thirty minutes for us to return to the Light of Reason and take her far enough from these ships for safety."

The door opened as they turned to enter the anteroom. Through it, Threepio could glimpse the Noghri Ezrakh, sprawled on the floor across the threshold, still moving feebly but his face livid with the pallor of approaching death. Ashgad, with Leia in his arms, stepped over him, and over the others, human and Noghri, lying on the floor beyond, the crimson velvet dragging over their faces. Dzym knelt for a moment at Ezrakh's side, pa.s.sed his gloved hands lightly across the dying bodyguard's face and throat, his face suffused with pleasure; Liegeus averted his eyes and avoided touching him as he pa.s.sed.

The closing door cut off the sight of them, and whatever Ashgad said next.

"Oh, do something!" cried Threepio, and tried to get to his feet.

Artoo rolled over to him and extended his welder as a sort of lever arm to help him up. "Why didn't you do something, you ignorant little adding machine! We have to stop them! Guards! Guards! They're kidnapping the Chief of State!"

The anteroom door swooshed wide at Threepio's touch. The protocol droid hesitated over the body of Ezrakh, dead now, eyes staring in horror, then turned helplessly away. With the opening of the door into the corridor he stopped in alarm. Two other Noghri lay on the floor, one still breathing with slow, harsh, stertorous gasps, the other utterly still. They bore no marks of violence or struggle.

"Shuttle bay!" cried Threepio, punching the code on the wall comm.

"Shuttle bay! They have to be stopped!"

There was no answer but the whine of a signal blocker somewhere in the system.

He hastened after Artoo, who hadn't even paused, trundling down the corridor and making a little detour around the dead guards. "What can have caused it? Symptomatic a.n.a.lysis indicates..."

Artoo stopped, with such suddenness that Threepio nearly can-nonaded into him, over the body of a third Academy guard. He extended his gripper arm to prod the young man's shoulder, and Threepio saw that this one, the bodyguard Marcopius, bore on the side of his head the mark of a heavy blow.

"Yeoman Marcopius, Master Ashgad has kidnapped Her Excellency!" cried Threepio, at the first sign of reviving consciousness.

Sitting up, the youth said a word that Threepio knew in close to a million languages but was programmed never to utter in any of them.

"The vhole ship's been poisoned!" He rolled to his feet with a nimbleness that caused the droid a momentary flash of envy.

"I beg your pardon, sir, but the symptoms are less those of poison than of disease," reported Threepio worriedly. "Specifically, my data-banks show a ninety percent correlation with the Death Seed plague of seven centuries ago. But how such a thing came to pa.s.s..."

"Whatever it is, they're panicking down in the infirmary." The boy scooped up his ceremonial weapon and strode so quickly along the corridor as he spoke that the two droids could barely keep pace. "The engine crew sealed themselves off. I caught that pilot of Ashgad's-if he is a pilot-doing something with the transmission records..."

"They're going to do something to both vessels, something to destroy them!" said Threepio. "They said they had to get their own ship out of range. We're doomed!"

"Not if we can get to one of the scout boats, we're not."

Beyond the vast portal of the magnetic hatch, the stars were already moving when Yeoman Marcopius and the two droids reached the shuttle bay floor. The shuttle brig was already gone, a dwindling gray flake in the blackness. The three bay guards lay dead on the floor, unmarked and peaceful. Far off the Light of Reason was a tiny berry, a cl.u.s.ter of minute bronze, black, and silver minihulls, and farther still the silver arrowhead of the Adamantine could be seen moving out).

"Where are they going>." cried Threepio, stopping dead in his tracks to watch. He thought he saw something move in the shadows, something tiny scuttling along the wall, and turned his head in an attempt at visual tracking. "There isn't anyone alive on that ship, I heard them say so...

Marcopius grabbed his arm and dragged him up the small scout craft's ramp. "They're taking it out of the vicinity of the Chorios systems,"

said the boy, slamming shut the scout boat's hatch behind them and dropping into the chair behind the bridge controls. "If Ashgad kidnapped Lady Solo-if he found some way to poison the crews on both ships, or whatever he did-he's not going to want record of either ship disappearing too soon after the rendezvous." He was jerking over levers, checking readouts, activating the emergency relays to open the magnetic portal once again, while beyond the portal the stars glided quicker and quicker as the tiny dots of the Charlos systems fell behind.

"He's going to want to say, Oh, they were all fine when they pulled out of here. Look at this." He cut into the coded deep-s.p.a.ce Net channel.

Its screen flashed an image of the two Republic cruisers making their serene way toward the standard Coruscant jump point on the far side of the Chorios systems. Immediately afterward the image of Leia's face appeared, reporting the conference successfully concluded.

Bra.s.sy lights flared over Marcopius's dark frown, and the cool, neutral voice of an emergency recording began to announce monotonously, "This vessel is in stage two of hypers.p.a.ce sequence. Taking a scout craft out at this time is extremely dangerous. Contact the main bridge and review'

your instructions. This vessel is in stage two of hypers.p.a.ce sequence...

"Hypers.p.a.ce!" wailed Threepio. "Who could be taking it into.."

"One of the synthdroids. No one else is alive." Marcopius delicately lifted the scout boat from its moorings and swung its nose weightlessly toward the black rectangle of the portal. "Can't you shut that thing off?"

'I'm terribly sorry, Yeoman Marcopius, but my program forbids me to tamper with safety equipment of any kind."

The young man made a final sequence of adjustments, lip between his teeth, sweat glistening on his forehead, while the warning voice repeated over and over that it was extremely dangerous to take out a scout craft of any kind. Ahead of them, through the portal, they saw the Adamantine flash bright as it turned, accelerating, then vanished in a spangle of hyperblue light.

"Where can they be going>." nattered Threepio. "That's nowhere near the hypers.p.a.ce jump point for Coruscant. If we can somehow extrapolate from the jump point to learn where they're going..."

"They're not going anywhere." Marcopius was breathing hard now, setting the controls. On the decoder screen before them the digitalized images of the flagship and its escort continued to float among the empty, lifeless worlds that comprised most of the sector.

"They're just taking the ships into hypers.p.a.ce, period. Don't you see>.

The whole point has to be that Her Excellency vanishes, without a trace, after she's seen to leave the rendezvous safely. They must have one turbo-powered holo faker working for them." He put his hand to his chest, as if to ma.s.sage away some deep, troubling ache. "Hang on."

He eased forward on the levers, sweat sparkling in the cropped suede of his hair in the doubled glare of amber and scarlet warning lights. The small, boxlike craft slid through the magnetic portal and flipped immediately down, around, avoiding the Borealis's stabilizers, picking up speed while interacting with a far larger vessel, which was ripping along at thousands of kilometers per second.

Threepio clutched at the back of the empty navigator's station, circuits momentarily jammed with alarm. Artoo let out a long, trilling wail as the scout boat whipped by inches from the bigger ship's secondary tanks. The wake of the flagship's magnetic field tossed and dragged the little craft like a chip in a riptide. Marcopius's dark hands flickered and danced from levers to joystick to toggles as huge sheets of metal and rivets rocketed past the observation ports, alternating with slabs of interstellar blackness already shimmering with the light-shift effects of hypers.p.a.ce sequence. Then the scout boat plunged away, spinning dizzily, stars and ships and planets reeling in a disorienting tumble past the ports. There was a blinding flash, far too near for comfort, as the Borealis plunged into the glimmering void of quasi-reality that was called "hypers.p.a.ce" for lack of any better term.

Far to starboard, as Marcopius stabilized the spinning scout boat, the Light of Reason had left orbit as well, streaking toward the Nam Chorios primary like an incandescent teardrop.

"Shall we go after them?"

"And do what?" The young yeoman's hands were trembling where they lay on the console. "Throw spitb.a.l.l.s at them? This is a scout boat, not an Ewing. Besides, we're too big to make it past those gun stations they were talking about."

He nodded toward the viewport, where the Light of Reason was diminishing into the stars. "Just looking at that ship I'd guess it comes apart and goes down to the planet in self-powered sections, leaving the main reactor in orbit. It's the only way they could get enough bulk or even limited hypers.p.a.ce capability."

He guided the scout boat in a long loop, began setting coordinates, an expression of grim sorrow aging his face. "What do you know about Pedducis Chorios? That's the nearest civilization."

"Well, it can't really be called civilized," said Threepio judiciously.

"The local Warlords have taken on so-called advisers-ex-smugglers, Imperial renegades, Corporate sector mercenaries, fugitives from both Imperial and Republican justice. I shudder to think what would happen to us if we went there, or to Her Excellency if anyone there discovered the predicament she was in."

Marcopius nodded, and made another adjustment. "It has to be the fleet orbital base at Durren, then." He paused, trying to draw breath, his face gray around the lips. "Are either of you programmed to handle one of these once we get out of hypers.p.a.ce?"

Artoo, who had released himself from his takeoff cradle, let out an optimistic trill, and Threepio said firmly, "Oh, no, sir. Upon the single occasion that we tried any sort of piloting at all, the results were most unsatisfactory. Certainly the more modern craft are entirely beyond our programming capacity. I'm a protocol droid, as you know, and though Artoo is quite a competent astromech, I'm afraid he has his limitations in other areas. "

The young man nodded again, leaning his forehead on his fist, his breath going out in a long sigh. Threepio could see he was still shivering: With shock or exertion, the droid supposed sympathetically.

Some humans were simply not as resilient as others.

Encouragingly, Threepio ventured, "It isn't that far to Durren, sir.

The ship should run well enough until we have to make orbit. If you wish to lie down and rest, I can certainly wake you when you're required to pilot the ship into base."

For a long time Yeoman Marcopius didn't answer. Then he murmured, "Yeah.

I guess that's how it'll have to be."

He got to his feet, staggering and catching himself on Artoo's stubby bulk. The astromech rolled beside him, to help him to the narrow bunk in an alcove just beyond the control room door. The young man groped blindly for the blanket-Artoo extended his gripper arm and pulled it up over him, and emitted a gentle trill of comfort and farewell as he rolled from the room.

Thirty minutes later, when Threepio returned to ask the youth how long it would be before they could subs.p.a.ce the Durren base, he found Marcopius dead.

The Force was everywhere, palpable, warming her like sunlight.

Lying-on a divan? On the toothed, fist-size crystals that carpeted the old sea floor plains as far as vision could descry. - - Leia Organa Solo basked in the warmth of the Force. So much warmer than the heatless fingernail of the sun, she absorbed it through her skin, as if her body had been rendered transparent like the amoebic Plasmars of dark Y'nybeth.

Someone was saying something to her, but she was deeply asleep and could not make out the words.

She dreamed.

She was in her father's palace in Aldera. His study was a garden room, looking through a double line of smooth, snow-white pillars to a small lawn beyond whose curved railing the blue waters of the lake could be seen, the endless plains of wind-combed gra.s.s beyond. The intoxicating smell of the gra.s.s blew through on the warm winds, and she could hear the muted whisper of the wind chimes among the pillars and the soft cooing and twittering of the cairokas, the sounds of her childhood.

Her father was there. She was presenting her children to him, Jacen and Jaina and Anakin grown to teenagers, wearing the faces she knew they would one day wear.

"You've done well, daughter." Bail Organa extended a hand to touch Jaina's heavy chestnut hair. The gold ring on his finger gleamed like a fragment of the world's final sunset. "What have you taught them, these young Jedi of the House of Organa?"

"I've taught them to love justice, as you loved justice, Father."

Leia's own voice sounded deep and quiet in the chamber's gentle twilight.

"I've taught them to respect the rights of all living things. I've taught them that the Law is above any single being's will."

"But we know better." Anakin spoke in the breaking treble of an adolescent, and there was an unfamiliar, ugly grin on his face as he stepped forward, and a light in his crystal-blue eyes that Leia had never seen in waking life. "We're Jedi Knights. We have the Power."

His light-saber licked out crimson from the shadow and slashed her father in half.

Leia sprang back from the toppling pieces of the corpse, scream-ing-Why couldn't she scream through the clogging weight of sleep.

Her father's body lay in pieces in the shadow, cauterized where the blade had severed thorax from pelvis, only a trickle of brownish fluid worming across the marble floor toward her feet. She cried something, she didn't know what. Anakin, Jacen, and Jaina all turned to gaze at her.

All three had drawn lightsabers. Three blades gleamed, red and shining columns of power, the light making six red flames in three pairs of demon eyes.

"We're Jedi, Mother," Jaina said. "There's no Law for us. We can do whatever we want."

Anakin said, "That's your gift to us. We're Jedi because you're Jedi, too. We are what you are." He turned to look back at the pieces of Bail Organa's body, the eyes open and staring in shock, the outstretched hand with its golden ring. "And anyway he wasn't really your father."

Leia screamed "No! No!"

The images blurred to darkness and she heard Luke's voice. "Learn to use the Force, Leia. You have to."

"Never!"

You have to.

She couldn't swear then that it was Luke's voice. The warmth of the Force touched her, comforting, but it seemed that she could see it only through a viewport or a doorway. She lay in shadow, and the shadow was cold.

She heard movement behind her head, and opened her eyes.

For a time there'd been a man named Greglik who'd piloted a reconditioned ore hauler for the Rebel forces, back when they'd been moving from planet to planet ahead of Admiral Piett's fleet. Greglik had been a good pilot but an addict, whose addictions had deepened until he'd gotten himself and seventeen Rebel fighters killed in a stupid collision with an asteroid.

She remembered him now'. One night in a temporary HQ on Kid-ron, when they were watching for an attack, he'd told her about being an addict, about mixing drugs to achieve the exact rainbow of mental damage to match any mood he sought to erase.

"Glitterstim's all right if you're blue," he had said, his brown eyes dreamy, like a man recalling the great love of his life. "Everything takes on a rise, a buzz, a life, as if your whole body had been made new and your whole future with it. And for those nights when you've got an itchy anger in your soul against all the people who've robbed you or jeered at you, there's pyrepenol. Two shots of pyrep and you'll spit on the Fates that spin your life thread. When you're hurting for the girl who could have saved you if-only, Santherian tenho-root extract's your poison: gentle, gentle, like the sun breaking clouds at the end of day."

He'd smiled, and Leia's contempt for the man had trans.m.u.ted to pity, as she comprehended for the first time all that he had done himself out of for the sake of those easy illusions. He had been a handsome man, bronzed and fair like a charming G.o.d, but s.e.xless, as most addicts quickly became, and without the courage to face a relationship or hold an opinion of his own.

"But sometimes there's nothing that'll do it but sweetblossom. It's a good thing the blossom's not addictive," he'd added with a grin. "It could grind galactic civilization to a halt in a week flat."

"It's that deadly?" Leia had asked.

Greglik had laughed. "My darling child, few drugs are that deadly.

It's what they get you to do to yourself that destroys you. Blossom is exactly like sleep. A little of it-two drops, maybe-and it's like you've just woken up, before your mind is in gear to do anything: You just sit around in your pajamas saying, I'll take care of business when I'm feelin a bit more the thing. But, of course, you never do. Five drops is good for endless sitting, curled up, comfortable, thinking nothing, watching addercops spin webs or dust motes make patterns.

Your mind is perfectly clear, you understand, but the starter won't engage. Seven or eight drops and you're paralyzed. Awake, but unmoving, unable to move, like those mornings when you open your eyes but your entire body's still asleep. A good way to get through-oh-days when things are happening to you that you'd rather not feel."

Leia had thought at the time, Like seeing your world destroyed, and the deaths of everyone you know? She'd dealt with that one by helping Luke and Han escape with the Death Star plans, by setting in motion the events that had blasted Grand Moff Tarkin and the Emperor's cherished superweapon into stellar dust.

She'd changed the subject, and a few weeks later, Greglik had been killed. She hadn't thought of him, or that conversation, in years.

But his words came back to her as she heard the soft snick of the door lock unbolting and the rustle of clothing just beyond the line of her sight. She tried in panic to turn her head and couldn't.

She couldn't move at all. Blossom, she thought.

Panic flooded her.

Someone was definitely approaching the divan on which she lay.

The heavy velvet robe of state she'd worn to her meeting with Ashgad still wrapped her like a shroud of molded lead. There was a doorway or a long transparisteel panel in the wall opposite her feet, and the end of the trapezoid of blanched sunlight that fell through it touched her knees, heating them uncomfortably under the velvet's folds. The wall around the doorway was poured permacrete, lead colored and unplastered; beyond she could see a paved terrace and a low permacrete wall and a hugeness of air imbued with hard-edged, sugary light.

Clothing rustled again. She felt the vibration of someone grasping the carved headboard of the divan.

Its legs sc.r.a.ped softly on the permacrete floor as the divan was drawn backward, away from the rectangle of sunlight, into the deeper shadows of the room.