Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [108]
Ice spattered on the triple plex of the crawler’s bubble, wind rocking the low-slung vehicle like the paw of a huge pittin batting at a slow-moving sludbug crawling across some hellishly vast kitchen floor. Leia, though her attention was focused on every shudder of the control bar, every fluctuation of the gauges—on the bobbing pattern of yellow lights that marked the ice walker’s gawky, arachnoid limbs, far out ahead of her in the wind-torn desolation of the ice—was in the deeper part of her mind scarcely aware of it.
Her consciousness was back on the Death Star, on Moff Tarkin’s colorless eyes.
“You, Princess, are responsible …”
… you are responsible …
Had she been?
She knew Tarkin. She knew he despised Bail Organa and she knew he was aware of the opposition centered on Alderaan. She knew that under his self-satisfied efficiency he had a spiteful streak the width of the Spiral Arm and loved to tell people that his—or the Emperor’s—most frightful retaliations were actually the fault of the victims.
Of the Atravis Sector massacres, he’d said, “They have only themselves to blame.”
She knew, too, that as a military man he’d been dying to try his new weapon, to see it in action … to describe its performance to the Emperor and hear that pale cold voice whisper like dead leaves on stone, “It is well.”
In her heart, she knew he’d intended Alderaan as his target all along.
But in her dreams she was responsible, just as he said.
The lights were far out ahead of her on the ice, reeling and dodging among themselves with the motion of the walker’s legs, like a pack of drunken firebugs. Away from the hot thermals that rose off the Plawal dome and cleared the dense roil of clouds, storm winds and blowing sleet covered the glacier, cutting visibility and darkening the already feeble daylight to a whirling, cindery gloom. Black bones and spines of rock, scoured bald by the winds, thrust like dead islands through narrow rivers of ice; drifts of snow packed high in places like wind-sculpted desert dunes, and in others the violence of storms had carved the ice underfoot into toothed, ridgy masses, like the waves of an ocean flash-frozen in the midst of storm.
Twice crevasses loomed before them, ghostly sapphire depths falling farther than her eye could easily judge in the shadowless twilight. The walker’s longer legs had taken them in stride, and Leia cursed as she trundled the crawler along the rim for hundreds of meters, looking for a place where the chasms narrowed sufficiently to make the heart-stopping jolt over the emptiness. Rumbling back along the rim to pick up the choppy trail again, she prayed the windblown ice hadn’t eradicated the walker’s marks.
Ohran Keldor was aboard that walker. Ohran Keldor, who had helped design the Death Star.
Ohran Keldor had been aboard it, watching when Alderaan was destroyed.
Leia had more or less forgiven Qwi Xux, the Death Star’s primary designer, when they had finally met, seeing the woman’s stricken horror at what her abilities had wrought. It was a little hard to appreciate how anyone could be naive enough to believe Moff Tarkin’s assurances that the Death Star was a mining implement, but she understood that the Omwat woman had been raised in a carefully constructed maze of ignorance, coercion, and lies.
And when she had seen the truth, she had had the courage to follow where it led her—not something everyone did.
But Ohran Keldor—and Bevel Lemelisk, and others whose names the Alderaan Alliance of survivors had collected—had known precisely what they were doing. After the destruction of Alderaan, they’d all been dropped at Carida, when the Death Star started its final voyage to destroy the Yavin base. But all of them had wanted to see the first test of their theories.
And Keldor was here.
And so was Drost Elegin, she thought, and in all probability the heads of those other old Houses, those