Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [106]
Leia looked aside at once, as if studying the small stand of sweetberry that someone had planted in the waste space between two buildings. But as Luke had taught her—had tried to teach her, in her hectic intervals between trying to be a mother, trying to be a diplomat, trying to keep the New Republic from falling to pieces and her children from dismantling poor See-Threepio—she extended her senses, identifying footfalls, breathing, voices … the sense and essence of what people were …
Ohran Keldor and Drost Elegin.
Here.
They vanished into the fog almost at once. She crossed the narrow street, Artoo trundling behind, followed the sound of the feet, the sense of their presence, cutting ahead through an alley and watching as they passed across its mouth.
There was no chance of mistake.
Drost Elegin’s hair had grayed a little from the days when he’d been one of the most notorious playboys of the Emperor’s Court, in and out of the Court Gazette for scandals about gambling, dueling, amorous affairs—he’d mockingly called her Madame Senator and Little Miss Inalienable Rights. Only his brother’s position in the Imperial navy had saved him from severe reprisals after the last of his major scandals—that, and the power his family wielded. The flesh of that hawk face had begun to sag, but the tall, gawky-graceful form and beaky features were unmistakable to anyone who’d ever seen them.
Ohran Keldor …
She felt as if her skin had been stuffed with red-hot pins.
She’d studied his holos until she could see his face in her dreams. His face, lit from below by the glow of the Death Star’s activation consoles.
Ohran Keldor. Nasdra Magrody. Bevel Lemelisk. Qwi Xux, though Qwi Xux had been only their dupe …
So there was more here—far more—than just a woman hiding out.
Fog cloaked the two men as they took the paths that led through the orchards, where the rushing of water and the faint click and whirr of the tree feeders covered Artoo’s soft, steady rumble. Now and then one of those huge, arachniform mechanicals would loom from the mists, picking its way across the path in front of her, intent on its tedious ministrations, and Leia wondered with a sort of chill viciousness if the droids belonging to the primary designer of the Death Star’s autosystems ever malfunctioned.
Somehow she didn’t think so.
The ground began to rise in a long, steady ramp. The mists thickened, darkened before them, solidifying into the dripping, vine-festooned monolith of the valley wall. Leia fell back, stepping into the lipana thickets at the bottom of the ramp, Artoo following gingerly onto the spongy ground. From here they were definitely committed: They were going to the lift shaft that led to the hangars, from which vehicles could be taken out onto the ice. She heard their voices fading away as they climbed …
“It seems a long, cold way to go around,” she heard Drost Elegin say, in that bronze-and-velvet voice that every girl and woman at Court had seemed to believe when it said the words, I love only you … “If the tunnels connect with this smuggler pad …”
“The fewer people who know the way in from here the better. Even you, my lord.” There was a world of implied offense on Keldor’s part in the hasty addition of that last sentence. “And at this point, with Organa showing up as she has, we don’t know who may be watching.”
Whhish-kunk. Distantly the vapors stirred around the closing of the door.
Leia and Artoo stepped back on the path, climbed the ramp to the small curved bunker of quick-set permacrete molded into the cliff itself, the plain green sturdiplast door. Sturdiplast was a material designed only to keep minor fauna out of the bunker and the air-conditioning in. She listened through it with only minimal concentration until she heard the characteristic ping of the lift’s arrival, and, tiny behind the thickness of the door, Elegin’s voice asking, “Is it far out?” The last words were cut off, presumably by the lift doors.
Leia still