Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [110]
It was filled with packing crates. Stacks of them, piled around the lift doors, dark anonymous green plastene bare of destination but emblazoned with corporation logos and serial numbers.
Mekuun-made DEMP guns and heavy laser carbines. Seinar ion cannons. Scale-50 power cells, sized for the smaller, older TIEs and Blastboats; smaller cells, Cs and Bs and Scale-20s by the dozen. Blaster size.
We’ve lost contact with Bot-Un again, she heard Jevax say.
That’s where they’re bringing in the men. The realization came to her, complete and logical. Bring them down the Corridor, come in high, drop fast, run along above the ice …
Communications between the rifts failed so frequently that it might be a week before anyone took an ice walker out across the glaciers to check. Or more.
“You getting all this, Artoo?” She pulled her helmet back on, braced herself as they slipped out to the frozen nightmare outside. She had to cling to the droid for support as they struggled back to the crawler, picked up the trail of the walker’s huge grippers across the ice.
The astromech tweeped assent.
Ohran Keldor, last of the Emperor’s fleet designers …
Designing something new? She shook her head. Only with an effort now could she see the almost obliterated tracks. Too expensive, beyond even the capacity of a coalition of the Senex lords, and the corporations they dealt with would be wary of backing them on major construction. Keldor had more probably been called in as a consultant on some older apparatus, maybe the very Jedi equipment Nubblyk and Drub had been looting and smuggling out all those years ago.
But her instincts whispered, No. Something bigger.
Something else.
Something they’d assassinated Stinna Draesinge Sha over, lest she hear something that would ring familiar from her own studies and notify the Republic of their danger.
The black rock outcroppings of the main ridge formed a wind trap east of the hangar itself. No one, thought Leia, grimly hanging on to the crawler’s control bar, would have been able to track the site of the tunnel from the air. The pale sun’s light barely penetrated the scudding clouds and only faint scuffs remained of the walker’s tracks. She only saw the cave where they left the craft, and the permacrete pillbox that covered the shaft head itself, because of the puckery masses of dimples fast fading in the blowing snow.
New military structures at the landing pad but no improvements on the shaft head, thought Leia, maneuvering the crawler behind the last spur of rock out of sight of the walker in its cave. And bringing Elegin in the long, cold way around. Don’t trust the Senex lords, do we?
Snow squeaked under Leia’s boots as she crossed to the pillbox, and the hot air rushing out around her as the shaft head doors opened to Artoo’s breaker program made her gasp. She stepped inside quickly, the droid at her heels, and the door slid shut once more. More crates filled the shaft head, bearing all the logos and labels she’d seen before: Mekuun, Seinar, Kuat Drive Yards, Pravaat—the massive consortium in the Celanon System that manufactured and sold uniforms to whoever cared to pay for them. The pale strings of battery-run glowpanels threaded around the room showed the floor scratched with fresh drag marks and spotted with oil leaked from secondhand droids.
Han. I’ve got to let Han know.
Kill you all, Drub McKumb had said. They’re gathering. They’re there.
Five sets of tracks marked the powdered snow that lay all over the cement floor, ending at the doors of the lift. Four humans and the broad, short, slightly rounded prints of what might have been a Sullustan or a Rodian. Leia recalled that many of the executive board of Seinar were of the rotund, flat-nosed Sullustan race.
She recalled other things as well.
“Artoo,” she said softly, “I want to see how this tunnel links up with the smuggler tunnels under Plawal itself. But if we get into any trouble, your default command is to head back to the crawler and get Han.” While she spoke she broke the seals on three of the crates,