Star Wars_ Planet Of Twilight Part 15

She shook her head, clearly puzzled. "You okay, Owen? What happened?"

Luke hesitated. It was impossible to explain matters of the Force to those unaware of its existence and, given Taselda's attempt to control him-and Officer Snaplaunce's account of her attempt to kidnap Cal-lista-in the town he was very careful to whom he spoke. "It's nothing."

He took the crystal from Darm's hand, and held it to the nearest window once more. The threadlike gray striations in the Spook's heart had changed their orientation, forming two starlike blotches where the terminals had touched.

"if that Spook had had the proper cc lot, said the prospector with rueful amus.e.m.e.nt, "I'd just have done myself out of a hundred credits.

They can program them, realign the structure to act as a receiver."

She flipped the pale arrowhead of quartz in her hand, then tossed it to Luke.

His hand jerked back, and the crystal fell to the floor and shattered into glittering slivers. "Sorry, he said. sorry She kicked the fragments casually out of sight under the recharger.

"Not to worry. Like I said, it wasn't anything they'd take, but even the tiny ones can be reoriented like that with an ion zap." She frowned at him again, studying his face, which still, Luke feared, showed too much of the sickened shakiness he felt inside. "You sure you're okay?" She probably meant, thought Luke, that it wasn't like him to drop things and after years of a Jedi's hair-trigger physical training it certainly wasn't.

Whatever their other properties, the Spook crystals somehow seemed to be loci or triggers for the Force.

"Yeah," said Luke, and rubbed his temples, trying to gather his wits.

"Yeah, I'm fine." No wonder the planet reverberated with the Force.

Could they be used to...

"There's a meeting tonight," went on Darm, her voice breaking into the half-formed train of thought. "Seti Ashgad's back. Turns out he met with some bigwig in the Republic, how do you like that We're all going to his place tonight. You know it. That big old joint that used to belong to some Hutt who ran things around here way long ago. Pretty fancy, but it must get fairly exciting during ground lightning. if you wanted to go I could get you in, introduce you around. People will be there from as far away as Outer Distance. If your friend's still in settled territory at all, someone will have seen her."

"Thanks," said Luke, his sense of confusion, of despair, returning at the mention of her presence on this world. He'd walked past Taselda's house two or three times in the past twenty-four hours, carefully, had walked past Ashgad's, too. At least this would be a way in without rousing the suspicions of the too-intelligent Officer Grupp. "I'd like that."

Darm waved his thanks away, with the easy friendliness of communities where humans, or at least humans of a certain persuasion, feel that they have to stick together. "We'll find her for you," she said.

"Sooner or later, somebody'll know. Tonight at twenty hours, then.

I'll come by here at quarter of. Arvid and Gin'll probably be there as well."

Luke nodded. After Ilmolly Darm had left he knelt and touched the broken fragments of crystal with his fingertips, trying to recap-ture-trying to understand-what it was exactly that he'd felt.

But they were only bits of silicon, like the rubbish heaped in all the corners beneath the repair shop's stilts.

So, Taselda's enemy-whose house had been taken over by Seti Ashgad-had been a Hutt.

An evil Jedi? wondered Luke. Or was that just another of her lies? A "crime boss," Grupp had called him, but that could be only a layman's description of something he did not understand.

Could Hutts be born, imbued with the Force?

There was a time when someone would have asked that about the Khomm people as well, until Luke's pupil Dorsk 81 had made his appearance on Yavin Four.

Had Taselda tried to get Callista to break in and search for her lightsaber?

Ashgad's palace itself, though typical of Hutt dwellings in its burrowlike arrangement of rooms leading out of rooms, round doors, and feeding niches in every available wall, had been in human ownership long enough to have had windows put into it and been cleansed many times. As Luke, Arvid, and Aunt Gin struggled against the millrace of the evening wind, Luke fingered Taselda's sketch map in his pocket.

"You know anything about the meeting, Grupp?" asked Arvid, as the paunchy cop fell into step beside them. Grupp shook his head.

"Far as I can tell n.o.body did. I did sort of wonder where he's been these past few months." Howling out of the fast-falling darkness, the wind thrust them this way and that, making it almost impossible to speak.

"Snaplaunce and I have been keeping an eye out here and most times there's been n.o.body."

Luke didn't think it likely that a prisoner-especially one who'd already attracted the man's notice-could be kept here undetected.

Nevertheless, when they entered the house, he took the occasion to slip away from the others and make his way to the old kitchen courtyard.

Though sheltered by its high walls from the wind, the place gave him the w.i.l.l.i.e.s for reasons he couldn't quite define. On one side, wide transparisteel showed him a long room embellished with what he vaguely recognized as state-of-the-art culinary esoterica: Four types of electronic stoves; freeze and slow dryers; dehydrators and rehydrators; bowls and measures and work surfaces of every conceivable size and material; bottles, boxes, and sacks on shelves that reached to the ceiling.

A glutton's heaven, but little more.

Across the court the corresponding chamber was shuttered close.

Opening its door, Luke had a dim vision of gla.s.s-enclosed vats of every size, tanks of oxygen and methane, feeder-tubes, shunts, and apparatus to which Luke could put no name. He couldn't imagine the purpose of such a display, but the whole long room resonated with ugliness and evil.

But there was no sign of Callista, no sign of any prisoner. The doorway to the treasure vaults that Taselda had described stood shut behind an iron grille, grille and door both covered with a thick blanket of podhoy of clearly many years' growth. He reached out with his mind, calling Callista's name, searching for some trace of her in this place. But whether because of her loss of ability to use the Force or because of the strange, thick presence of the Force in the ether of the planet or simply because she was not and had never been there, he felt nothing.

A tall, androgynous individual whom Luke recognized as one of Ashgad's synthdroids-either a member of the party who'd escorted him aboard the Borealis or an identical creation-appeared behind him and inquired politely, "May I help you?"

Luke meekly allowed himself to be herded back to the others in what had clearly been the house's banqueting chamber in earlier times, the biggest room in any Hutt's dwelling. It was now filled with men and women, some of whom Luke recognized from the abortive attack on the gun station.

Others he knew by sight from his brief tenure at Croig's Fix-It Barn.

Their clothing marked them all as Newcomers, following standard cut and fashion in the Core worlds even if they could no longer acquire the usual materials, and there was more diversity in complexion than he'd seen in the limited Oldtimers gene pool.

Croig was there, grayish, orange-eyed, and glum, keeping close to his brother (or sister-the Durosian word was the same) and the two or three other aliens of Hweg Shul: the Arcona who operated one of the majie-processing plants and a couple of Sull.u.s.tans who owned the biggest branswed towers in the district. Luke noticed that all were vaguely ostracized by most of the Newcomer humans. He'd encountered this a number of times at the shop, this unspoken prejudice against the non-human species of the Core worlds. Stupid, when you thought of their technologies. But then the prejudices of the Empire had been stupid and had, in fact, brought about its downfall.

More synthdroids guarded the door. He doubted that most of the people in the room realized that the guards weren't alive or human.

They were realistic to the smallest degree, though the hair was a give-away-perfect, human, but with the oddly dead look that replants frequently had-and the smell. Everyone in the room smelled: of sweat, of beer, of coffbine; of the salt of work and life. Synthflesh, until it grows into organic matter as a patch, requires no nourishment and excretes no by-products. Luke recalled an article he'd read about Loronar Corporation's efforts to make synthdroids that would be acceptable to scentcued species like the Chadra-Fans and Wookiees.

There were even humans who reacted badly to the deeply buried anomaly of something that looked like a human and smelled like nothing.

The conclusion of the article, as he recalled, was that the project was low on the Loronar priorities list. Chadra-Fans and Wookiees had little purchasing power and were considered an insufficient market to take the trouble over, even at a hundred thousand credits a throw'.

"Arvid." Gerney Caslo jostled over to them through the crowd as people began to settle themselves on the edges of the low daises that were scattered around the room and on the compressed chairs set between.

The whole place had been carpeted in a kind of dense industrial weave, which lent it an odd hybrid look. What had been food niches were now filled with the sort of cheap knock-off artwork available to the wealthy on thinly settled worlds: bad holos of famous sculp ture, sometimes edited to subst.i.tute the faces of the new owner and his or her family, or cheap little sixteen-color-lights displays that ran through their cycles in a minute and a half. Luke had seen some beautiful sand-glazed Oldtimer pottery, and wondered that neither Seti Ash-gad nor his father, after all those years on the planet, had thought to include it in the house.

Had the elder Ashgad so much resented this world that he'd have none of its works? But surely the son, who had been born there, or at least raised there he didn't look more than forty-wouldn't share the prejudice to the same degree? Or was Ashgad's other house, his dwelling in the Mountains of Lightning, more his than his father's?

"We're looking for a couple of boys for a job," Caslo went on, speaking from the corner of his mouth like a bad guy in a holovid.

"There's a drop coming in tomorrow night."

"Where?"

"Ten Cousins."

Luke had heard Croig speak of the place. The Cousins in question were tsils, the crystal chimneys standing in a ring instead of a line, markers of some unknown geological process. A smuggler's dream, a formation easily identified on a scan but small enough to search in a night.

"Can you use Owen here, too?" Arvid nodded to Luke. "He's working for Croig. He could use the cash."

Booldrum Caslo, a thickset, smooth-faced little man with heavy sight-amplification equipment bolted into his head, grinned, "Anyone who works for Croig could use cash."

Caslo studied Luke for a moment, then nodded. "We can use as many as we can. I hear it's a good-size cargo. You got that speeder of yours running yet? "

Luke nodded, though running was a matter of interpretation.

"You'll work pickup, then," said Caslo. Arvid sniffed as the older man walked away.

"Doesn't trust you as a perimeter guard."

"Hunh."

"To keep the Therans away," explained Gin, coming over and perching on the edge of the dais where they sat. "Oh, the Listeners sometimes get word of drops and try to stop them, but mostly I think it's just keeping tabs on whatever's going on. Mostly they seem to concentrate on..."

The lights dimmed, save for a single one on the main dais, set un.o.btrusively in what had been an olympian feeding niche. A curtain at the back of the room parted, and Seti Ashgad stepped through.

Do not trust him, Callista had said. Do not meet with him, or accede to any demand he makes.

Why?.

It was the first time Luke had seen the man face-to-face, though on the Borealis he'd glimpsed him and his escort in pa.s.sing. He had not been born when Ashgad's father had been exiled by the Emperor Palpatine, but his teenage interest in the Rebellion had made him familiar with the older politician's easygoing charm and chameleon promises from holos.

The old man must be in his eighties now, thought Luke, watching the son mount the dais and exchange jokes and pleasantries with those in the audience who knew him best.

He hadn't heard Croig or anyone at the Blue Blerd of Happiness speak of the older man at all. Yet he'd defeated the (possibly Jedi) Hutt, taken over his power and his house. So he must have been a remarkable man. Was he dead, or just retired to the house in the Mountains of Lightning?

"Now, now', we can't have any of that," Ashgad was saying, to a raucous suggestion that Republic troops would soon be on hand to "settle for" the Therans. Good-natured sarcasm dripped from his deep voice.

"They're the majority, after all, you know. It's their planet."

"It's our planet, too!" yelled Gerney Caslo, springing to his feet.

"We bust our backs putting plants on this motherless rock. Don't that count?"

"Does it?" Ashgad swept the crowd with a green eye suddenly cold and angry. "I thought so. I was optimistic enough to a.s.sure you I could do something about that. It appears that I was wrong."

Silence fell, but Luke felt anger pa.s.s like ground lightning through the crowd.

"As you know," said the politician, now suddenly the focus of the entire quiet room, "I had high hopes. Through connections I was able to obtain a meeting, not with some politician, not with some bureaucrat, not with some committee member, but with Leia Organa Solo herself-not," he added bitterly, "that she was at all enthusiastic about coming, as she made clear to me from the outset."

They'd called the senior Ashgad the Golden Tempter. Luke knew, listening to his son, what he must have sounded like. Ashgad used his voice like a master artist used a light organ, evoking nuance, shade, twilight, and brilliance with the slightest shifts of tone and volume.

"I apologize," went on Ashgad, "for my enthusiasm and for my folly. I owe you all that apology, for raising hopes not destined to be fulfilled." He gestured, and another man-at this distance Luke couldn't tell whether it was a synthdroid or not, though there was something suspiciously smooth about the way he moved-slipped through the curtain and set up a holo player in the niche.

"Perhaps I should let Her Excellency tell you in her own words."

The light in the chamber dimmed still further. The holo of Leia was of crystal-clear quality, appearing almost solid in the near darkness, as if she were bathed in radiance from an unseen source. The scale was perfect-life-size, so that she truly seemed to be in the room, hands folded on her knees, the heavy folds of her robe of state spread around her. The Noghri bodyguards squatted on their bunkers, nearly a dozen strong, like shadows behind her. Her chin was up, and she spoke with a cold precision Luke had only heard her use when she was truly angry.

"I'm afraid that any help from the Republic is out of the question, Master Ashgad," she said. "The Republic cannot afford to be seen to support a minority-any minority by prospective planetary councils still undecided about joining. Too much trade depends on our maintenance of the status quo and too many people see the efforts of the Rationalists on your planet as disruptive, unruly, and criminal."

A buzz stirred the crowd. Beside Luke, Gerney Caslo mutttered, "Criminal-I'll show you criminal, honey!"

"Criminal to make an honest living pumping water..."

"What's disruptive about wanting medicine for my son...."

Leia's image went on, "I understand your problems, Master Ashgad.

But the Republic must look at the larger picture. And, quite frankly, the discontent of a handful of settlers on a world that isn't even a member of the Republic is not worth the two billion credits it would cost-not to mention the damage done to the Republic's image-should we intervene in your quarrel."

Her last words were drowned in a rising roar. Someone yelled, "Festering hag witch, what in blazes does she know?" and Luke was on his feet, his whole body aflame with rage, not at the man who had shouted insults at his sister but at the man who stood on the dais, just visible beside the glimmering holo, his head bowed in pious resignation and regret.

Luke yelled, "Liar!" but his voice was drowned in other outcries, and before he could draw breath for another shout he realized that to protest that the holo was faked would only reveal his own ident.i.ty and make it impossible for him to locate Callista. The holo was as much a fake as the cheap sculptures in the niches, holographically altered to resemble family members. For one thing, even before Leia had eliminated the bodyguards, she had never appeared in public with the Noghri.

When "Leia" rose from her chair Luke was sure of it: the chair itself was nothing like those in the Borealis's conference room or indeed anywhere on the executive flagship at all. The crimson robe was one she'd worn on a dozen state occasions over the past few years, easily copied. Luke had never seen it done this effectively, but presumably a really good slicer could get a holo of Leia's face and alter the movement of the lips to mesh with any voder-modified script.

But all this, he realized, was something he'd learned over the course of years with the Rebellion, years of dealing with the sophisticated technologies and scientific neepery available on Coruscant and its inner worlds. As a kid on Tatooine-and had he grown to adulthood there, as Uncle Owen and Uncle Owen's friends had-he'd had no more suspicion that truth could be skillfully edited than he'd had the ability to fly.

They believed what they saw.

They believed Seti Ashgad.

And they were furious.

Ashgad was up on the dais artfully giving the impression that he was mollifying the crowd without in any way lessening their outrage.

Luke slipped past the synthdroids by the door, crossed through the smaller chamber beyond, his boots making no sound in the carpet, too angry to remain. He was aware of the synthdroids watching him-their Central Control tinit, wherever it was, was undoubtedly programmed with the faces of every Rationalist on the planet. But no one stopped him.

He stepped through a pair of long windows to the outside, breathing hard with fury, and made his way through the thickets of blueleaf and aromatic shrubs to the street. The wind had died to a dull hammering with the coming of full darkness. The voices in the dining hall still echoed in his ears, yelling vituperation at his sister.

Beyond the edges of the settlements, the tsils glistened like spikes of ice in the cold-eyed starlight of the wastes. The ground was l.u.s.trous with frost, and the cold was like iron. He felt the Force all around him, breathing-waiting.

There were people out there in the waste, not far away. Though they bore no lights he sensed them dimly: eddies, stirrings in the Force.

Therans?

Probably. Watching Seti Ashgad's house.

Release your anger, his father had said. Release your anger.

He had meant it then as a lure, a come-on-use your anger in combat-a fool's trick.

But now Luke truly released his anger, let go of it: let it rise like steam, to be absorbed and defused by the stars. There was entirely too much anger afoot that night anyway, deliberately being stirred up, raised like a magician raising power back in that house. Rid of it, Luke was able to think clearly again, to ask questions. And the chief question was: What does Seti Ashgad stand to gain?