Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [109]
They are gathering …
Gathering around Roganda Ismaren, former concubine of the Emperor and child of the Jedi, and who knew what besides?
Out in the sooty maelstrom another light glowed briefly blue. It blinked away almost instantly, but Leia saw the moving tangle of the walker’s leg markers turn in that direction. “Got that, Artoo?” she yelled into the com, and barely heard the reassuring affirmative chirp. Course bearings flashed green on her readouts, and the wind slapped hard as she steered the crawler out from behind a twisted cliff of ice, like some impossible marble monolith thrown up by the restlessness of the volcanic line far beneath.
Her hands were shaking, and she was weirdly conscious of the heat of the blood in her veins.
In a way, it surprised Leia that nobody had mapped the location of the smuggler pads. Because of the intensive ion storms, high-altitude scans were out of the question, but a ground-level geothermic trace would have been possible. Possible, but not easy, she reflected, fighting the control bar as the crawler heaved up over a talus slope of rotting ice under the feet of another, older cliff. And probably not worth anybody’s while.
The wind nearly took her off her feet when she climbed out of the crawler in the lee of the scoured black rocks that sheltered the pad. The t-suit was certified below the freezing point of alcohol, and still she felt the cold creep through it as she fought her way up the knife-edge crest of drift and rock to get her first clear look at her goal.
It wasn’t a pad anymore.
Where a sort of bunker had been—precast permacrete and designed for little more than an inconspicuous staging point beside a clear space thermoblasted into the rock-hard glacier—Leia saw through the screaming sleet the low black walls of what the military referred to as a permanent temporary hangar, snow frizzing wildly away from a magnetic field that was clearly both new and extremely powerful. The old permacrete bunker had been added to by others, mostly perm-temps, low-built structures whose black walls blended with the rock of the ridge against which they backed. Were it not for the magnetics they would have been buried by drifts in hours.
Leia muttered a word she’d picked up from the boys in the old Rogue squadron and edged her way down to the walls, slipping in the heavy pack snow, with Artoo’s treads squeaking sharply in her wake.
The ice walker was gone. That didn’t mean the hangar was deserted—Leia could see by the melt patterns that something had landed on the ice and been taken into the hangar less than three hours ago, and at a guess they’d have left crew. Above the battering howl of the wind it was difficult to extend her senses into the main shed, but the door to the smaller buildings adjacent to it was on the lee side, and those smaller buildings were empty, anyway. It was a matter of moments, even with gloved fingers in the deepening cold, to have Artoo hotwire the locks. The stillness when the door slid shut behind them was almost painful.
She pulled off her helmet, shook out her hair. The small annex’s heating system was a relief, but she could still see her breath in the dim gleam that fell through the connecting passage to the main hangar itself.
The ship in the hangar was a Mekuun Tikiar model, sleek and dark and curiously reminiscent of the avian hunter for whom the model was named. Tikiars were a favorite, she knew, among the aristocratic Houses both in the Senex Sector and elsewhere.
Two crew. She leaned against the doorjamb, listening deeply, focusing her mind through the hazy brightness of the Force. Relaxed … watching a smashball game—illegally—on the subspace net.
The Dreadnaughts were getting pasted again.
Reassured, she surveyed