Every atom of Leia's body screamed and thrashed and struggled to rise, to fight-at least to turn her head. And every atom of the sweetblossom in her system laughed at her and held her still.

The dragging stopped. Get up, get up, get up.

Dzym came around the head of the divan. He stood gazing down at Leia with his large, utterly colorless eyes-(They were brown on the ship.

I know they were brown on the ship.)-and Leia saw that the skin of his throat, where it was revealed by the open neck of his loose gray robe, was purplish brown, shiny, and ever so slightly articulated.

Chitenous, not like human skin at all. When he sat on the divan beside her and took her hands in his, she saw between the cuffs of his gloves and those of his robe that his wrists were the same.

He saw she was looking at him and smiled, running a very long, very pointed tongue over sharp brown teeth. While his eyes held hers he turned his shoulder to her, so that she could not see his hands, and drew off his gloves. She felt him lay them over her arm. Then he took her left hand between both of his.

The terrible sinking, the slow ache in her chest were as they had been in her stateroom on the Borealis. A growing, spreading coldness.

The seeping away of her breath.

I'm dying, thought Leia, as she had then. She saw the secretary's thin, dark lips part in what might have been a smile or only a satiated sigh.

Ecstatic, as he had been on the ship.

He stood and walked around behind her. Lifting aside her hair, he put his hands to the sides of her neck. Something sliced her that wasn't pain and wasn't cold, more terrifying than either.

She thought, Please, no more. She thought, Han..

She thought, You'd better finish me off you squalid parasite, because if you don't, by my father's hand I swear I'll break your stinking neck.

She sank into drowning darkness.

Voices cried out through the Force.

Hundreds of them-Luke felt their terror and despair. Dying, he thought.... He thought also, in that first cold lance of panic, that Leia's was one of them, terrified and alone. But in the clamor he couldn't be sure.

His hand flashed to the comm panel, calling up the far-off images of the Borealis and its escort. Readouts showed them on their way to the Coruscant jump point; a long-distance visual confirmed. Luke debated for a moment trying to contact them-he had a scrambler in the B-wing's comm systems, but the possibility of being overheard by Getelles's agents, or by those other, nameless threats, held his hand.

Instead he cut into the pickup channel, and heard Leia's voice dimly making her report to Rieekan and Ackbar: "... successful conclusion to our enterprise. We're on our way home."

Trouble elsewhere? he wondered. On Pedducis Chorios, perhaps? Or some other world in the vicinity? Sometimes it was difficult to tell, with the Force. It picked up and magnified some alterations in the life-tides of the universe, distorted others. Even now, the tugging grief, the cold panic, he felt had faded; he wasn't even sure exactly where it had come from.

He turned his eyes toward the growing violet star that was Chorios II, Nam Chorios's primary. That speck of piercing white beside it should be the planet itself.

A singing surge of the Force washed over him, filled him, sieved the tiny craft like gamma rays. Like coming in to Dagobah that first time, looking at the seething life readings of that strange world, he felt now in the presence of a vastness he could not understand.

No wonder Callista was drawn to this place.

He touched the levers, accelerated into high orbit.

Now the planet was clearly visible. Wastes of slate, smooth and hard as rollerball floors, stretched kilometer after kilometer. Zones of broken rock surrounded them, wall after brittle wall of toothed mountains uneroded by rain or the roots of growing plants. In other places the dry sea floors were covered for thousands of miles in faceted, quartzine gravel that glared as if the world were one great cut-gla.s.s gem.

Crystal mountains flashed a bleached and broken reflection in the wan light of the tiny, faded whitish sun, chains of them petering out into lines of solitary crystal-rock chimneys, like widely s.p.a.ced sentinels, far into the shimmering, twilight wastes.

Light and gla.s.s, dizzying alien cloudless heights, and among it all, tiny zones of green.

Luke's hands played fast through the orbital checks, then returned to the subs.p.a.ce, signaling back to the Adamantine, the Borealis.

Nothing. They'd gone into hypers.p.a.ce by this time, heading back to Coruscant.

Death, his memory whispered. He had felt death, ma.s.sive death, he thought. His recollection of it was dim and dreamlike, and he could not be sure where, or when, or from what direction the sensation had come.

But Leia was alive. Somewhere, wherever she was, she was alive.

He flipped his scanners to their widest range, but saw only the yellow speck that would be Seti Ashgad's pieced-together planet-hopper, blinking along at max sublight, heading for home.

His single B-wing should be too small to register on its scanners at this distance, he thought. But it would be best to disappear into the planet's magnetic field before Ashgad got any closer.

Do not meet with Ashgad.

Do not go to the Meridian sector.

Luke studied the scan again. This close to Antemeridian, it paid to be cautious, though by all accounts Moff Getdies didn't have the firepower to b.u.mp heads with the fleet at Durren, or the guts to try. And indeed, no sign of any deep-s.p.a.ce vessels disturbed the provincial calm of this portion of the Meridian. Just the occasional orange flicker of planet-hoppers, small traders, light cargo haulers going about their petty businesses between the stars.

What did Callista know about Seti AshgadS.

He edged the B-wing into a lower temporary orbit and brought up the coordinates for the town of Hweg Shul.

He would find her, he thought. He would see her again.

The long-range laser cannon took out his rear deflector shield and nicked the stabilizer before he was even out of sight of blackness and stars.

It was only luck it didn't destroy the craft entirely, luck and probably the difficulty in homing on a vessel at the bottom end of its target ma.s.s. Luke flipped at once into evasive action, twisting, zagging, plunging toward that vast glittering eternity of dimness and crystal through a flaming hovl of atmosphere. A second bolt clipped the B-Wing's airfoil; and as he fought to pull out of the crazy spin, Luke saw' the white lances of light slash upward from the ragged line of slate-gray foothills.

So much for Seti Ashgad's information about the minimum ma.s.s needed to activate the gun stations, thought Luke grimly. Was that what Callista had meant about not trusting the man?

But Ashgad hadn't known Luke would even be on Leia's mission, let alone that he'd be going to Hweg Shul. n.o.body but Han and Chewie had known that. He twisted the controls, trying to avoid sliding straight into one of those white lances of killing light. The ground rushed upward, radiant, burning with wan, reflected sun.

Blast, thought Luke, as the joystick lurched under his hands, don't quit on me now.

There was enough play in the remaining stabilizer to land without killing himself-just. The antigray cradles were still okay. But when he leveled off he'd be a better target. He zagged right, left, dropped instinctively as a beam slicked over his head. Those were live gunners, they had to be.

No autostation had that kind of response flexibility. Live gunners who knew what they were doing.

Huge cliffs; mountains; towering terrifying, bare monuments of basalt and crystals yawned fathomless below him. He plunged the big fighter down among them, veered through narrowing chasms as a laser bolt splintered a black column of rock a thousand feet high to his left and rained the craft with fragments. The steady, howling winds of the higher atmosphere turned to random hurricanes that smote him from every canyon and crevice.

With its long ventral airfoil the B-wing was almost impossible to control. Luke pulled into a level slide, barely avoid ing another bolt and a toothed crag of what looked like gray striated quartz, the glare of the sunlight from a million million mirrors nearly blinding.

He was out of range of the gun stations, hidden in the mountains, plunging down a long, scintillated canyon toward the wasteland beyond.

The stabilizer went, and Luke forced the controls over, reached out with his mind to touch the Force, nudge the crazily plunging craft away from the rock walls, past the jutting towers and razor-ridged hogbacks of stone, heading for the blue notch of the canyon mouth.

Too low. No alt.i.tude. He'd never...

He put out all his will, all the strength of the Force, to lift the B-wing over the last ridge of rose-gold shining gla.s.s, edge it down, down...

Wind slapped him like a monster hand. The B-wing veered wildly, then the airfoil sc.r.a.ped and tore on the pebbled wilderness beyond the canyon.

Rocks and dust and fragments of crystal enveloped him in a whirlwind of heat. Shaken nearly out of his bones, Luke held the controls steady, fighting to see, hoping there was nothing ahead of him but more level gravel.

There was. A transparent boulder the size of a speeder caught what was left of the airfoil. The whole craft slewed sideways, rolled, the delicate S- foils buckling and snapping. Luke feared for one heart-tearing second that his seat restraint would give way, and he'd break his neck on the console. The belts held-there was an explosion of sealant and crash foam-the B-wing rolled twice more, like a barrel, and came to a stop up against something that sent up another splintering cloud of fragments and dust.

Then stillness, the moaning of the wind, and the dying pitter of pebbles raining down on the laser-cracked hull.

"Here, Your Excellency."

Strong hands helped Leia sit up, put a cup into hers, held it steady while she drank. "How are you feeling?"

She blinked. The divan had been moved out onto the terrace. Weak, strangely colored sunlight lay in mosaics of gla.s.sy brightness across the cinder-colored permacrete walls of the house that loomed over them, glinted on the treeless lunacy of the heaped stone ridges, columns, pinnacles, and b.u.t.tresses that dwarfed the house on three sides and framed, on the fourth, eternities of flashing gravel, as if the sea had sunk away long ago and left its foam solidified into salt and gla.s.s.

It must be the crystals that pick up and reflect the sunlight, thought Leia, looking around at the huge outcrops of them embedded everywhere in the rocks of the mountains. The small sun gave only thready light in cobalt oceans of sky. Dim stars shone even in the presence of its glow.

Because of the light thrown back by the rocks, there seemed to be no shadows anywhere, or a confusing multiplicity of watered ones. The dry air tightened her face, as it had not in the moister mini-climate of the house.

She turned from those bizarre distances to meet the anxious dark eyes of the man who sat on the divan at her side.

It was Seti Ashgad's pilot.

A nice man, she thought at once. He reminded her a little of the pilot Greglik for some reason, though the physical appearance could not have been more dissimilar. Of medium height and slender build, this man had a sort of saturnine darkness to him in utter contrast with the Rebel pilot's flamboyant good looks. Maybe it was the nose-an elegant aquiline-or the battered, deeply woven wrinkles around the eyes that spoke of a life lived very hard.

More probably, she thought, it was somethin in the expression of the eyes. Odd again, to think of the daredevil Greglik. This man's eyes were the eyes of one who wouldn't harm so much as an insect or stand up to someone who was taking shameless advantage of him for fear of hurt feelings. An escaper, she thought. Not escape into drugs-he hadn't Greglik's unhealthy complexion-but escape by simply not being there if he could manage to get away.

But nice.

"I'm fine. I think I'm fine." Had Dzym been a dream? The slicing pain in the sides of her neck, the hands that drew life from her, exactly as the sickness had on the ship. The horrible impression she had had of some other being under his clothing, some vile movement, tucked away where it didn't show. "Where am I? What happened?" Her thoughts felt as if she'd dropped them, and they'd rolled to the far ends of the room, and exhaustion prevented her from gathering them up again.

"I'm afraid i can't tell you where you are, Your Excellency." He sounded genuinely sorry about it. "You understand, it's better if you don't know.

My name is Liegeus Sarpaetius Vorn."

"Vorn..." With the greatest of difficulty, as if she were laboriously constructing a house of cards by means of waldoes, Leia put things together in her mind. "Liegeus Vorn-You were Seti Ashgad's pilot, weren't you. And Dzym... Dzym was here. Is this Nam Chorios?"

"Dzym was here?" He held the vessel away from her reaching hands, his dark brows knotting. "I think you've had enough of this, Your Excellency.

I'll get you some water."

He emptied the cup-which Leia thought had contained water-over the low wall at the edge of the terrace. She sat up, watching it fall, the droplets flashing and dwindling as they tumbled in slow motion past the walls of the house, past the rocks of the bluff on which it stood, down to the broken tumble of slate and scree and adamant two hundred meters below.

"Stay here in the sunshine," he urged gently. His voice was very soft, almost inaudible, but deep and one of the most beautiful she had ever heard. "I won't be a moment."

Leia remained where she was, not because he had told her to, but because the warmth was pleasant on her face, like the slow return of health after a terrible coldness.

The Borealis, she thought. What happened on board the Borealis?

She'd been ill. The memory of cold returned, the slow dimming down of every system in her body. Or had that been later, when Dzym had come into the room there?

Ashgad had apparently taken her off the ship, brought her to this place.

She recalled nothing about it. Had Captain Ioa thought she was dead But in that case, they'd have brought her body to Coruscant, not here.

Han, she thought. Han will be worried sick. The children...

Other things were leaking back into her consciousness.

The blinking message light on the comm that no one had been there to ansivet.

Yeoman Marcopius darting away down the corridor.

Admiral Ackbar saying, It looks as if there was an information leak at Council level, and Representative Q-Varx tapping the malachite tabletop in her private conference chamber with a stubby brown finger and saying, All arrangements have been made for the secret meeting with Ashgad, Your Excellency. Though he has no official position on the planet, this conference could be the key to the entire policy of beneficial usage of untapped planetary resources.

Do not meet with AshGad.

Do not Go to the Meridian sector.

What had happened to the Noghri.

The thought wended its way leisurely across her mind. She wondered, if she were to go into the room behind her and try the door, whether it would open. But, of course, she thought, locked or unlocked makes little difference. The house itself seemed to be situated in an utterly deserted wasteland of sawtoothed mountains and glaring, jeweled plain.

Voices rose to her from somewhere below. She recognized Seti Ashgad's: "We'll just have to go over Larm's head and talk to Dymurra.

Larm's an idiot anyway. He still has no concept of what we need to complete the Reliant. Has any word come in on the subs.p.a.ce?"

The beautiful baritone carried strongly in the thin, dry air. Larm, thought Leia. Moff Getelles had an admiral named Larm. She'd met him at the diplomatic reception on Coruscant to celebrate Getelles's elevation to the position, one of the last she'd attended at the Palace.

Larm was of the flat-backed, by-the-book, spit-and-polish, boot-kissing school of soldiering, toadying Getelles and every other Moff and Governor without ever relaxing his tough-warrior manner. He'd come up through the fleet as Getelles's stringer, a dark-visaged and sternly efficient foil to the new Moff's hail-fellow-well-met fairness and had been duly promoted over the heads of several better-qualified candidates when Getelles had been made Moff of Antemeridian.

Who Dymurra was she had no idea, though the name was familiar to her.

She couldn't make out the words murmured in reply, but the purring voice pierced her, an arrow of cold under her solar plexus.

Dzym. She looked down at her hand again.

Soreness lingered on the sides of her neck, over the main arteries, but she lacked the strength to put her hands up to feel. The cold of death lingered in her mind, and something else, the aftertaste of nightmare.

That was why she felt so weak.

No, she thought. I feel weak because there was sweetblossom in the water.

"I suppose you're right." Ashgad's voice was quieter, but just as penetrant. "Three synthdroids! When I think about how much even one of those things costs..."

Dzym's voice was a little louder now. Knowing Ashgad's habit of pacing, Leia a.s.sumed he was farther from his secretary than he had been a few'

moments before. "It could not be helped, my lord. Synthdroids were the only way we could bring the Death Seed on board the vessels undetected."