Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [161]
Inferiors, of course—and those whom circumstance had placed in the power of a Lord—were jolly well on their own.
She turned to face Roganda, her eyes cold. “What guarantees can you give me that I’ll be returned to Coruscant safe and sound?”
“You dare ask for guarantees!” yelled Irek, slamming his fist on the table, and Roganda held up her hand.
“I can guarantee you that unless you tell us what you did to your droid that enabled it to escape my son’s influence,” she said, with quiet viciousness, “you’re going to be blasted out of existence in very short order, along with every living thing in Plawal. Because the Eye of Palpatine is not responding to my son’s commands.”
“Not responding?” said Leia, startled. “I thought your son commanded it to come here.”
“I did,” said Irek sullenly.
“Not … exactly,” corrected Keldor. The little man looked harried, his bald head shining with sweat in the glow of the console lights. “We knew that part of the original activation signal relay to trigger the Eye of Palpatine had been destroyed somewhere in the vicinity of Belsavis. By tapping into the strength of the Force, Lord Irek was able to reactivate the relay and bring the battlemoon here, where it will be close enough for him to control its on-board programming directly.”
He cleared his throat uneasily, and avoided both Roganda’s eyes and Leia’s. “The thing is, Princess, the Eye of Palpatine—a fully automated ship, one of the few designed with a completely automatic mission control in order to obviate security leaks—was originally programmed to destroy all life on the planet Belsavis. Shell out of existence anything that resembled a settlement.”
“Because the Jedi were here,” said Leia steadily.
Keldor’s eyes avoided hers. “The Emperor took whatever steps he felt necessary to reduce the risk of civil war. Whatever else can be said about them, the Jedi were potential insurgents who he felt could not be trusted with power.”
“And he could be, I suppose?” Leia looked across at Roganda. “You were one of the children here, weren’t you?” she asked. “It was your family they were attacking.”
“We change with the times, Princess.” Roganda folded her delicate hands, the topaz of her ring a sulfurous star in the candle’s light. Away from her chief of staff, and the Senex Lords whom she sought to impress, all semblance of that shy defenselessness was gone. In its place was a cool vituperative scorn, the power-loving contempt that Leia guessed sprang from envy of those who had looked down on her, and desire to get her own back.
“If I’d followed the strictest traditions of my family I’d have been destroyed, as they and my older brother Lagan were destroyed. As it was, I adapted those traditions.”
“You followed the dark side, you mean.”
That stung her. The winglike brows lifted. “What is the ‘dark side,’ Princess?” There was a good deal of Irek in her chilly voice. Here was another one, thought Leia, who could not conceive of the possibility of being wrong. “Some of us think that fanatic adherence to every jot and quibble of an antiquated code is, if not dark precisely, at least stupid. And from all I’ve heard, the ‘dark side’ seems to be anything that disagrees with the hidebound, divisive, every-tree-and-bush-is-sacred teachings that shackled the Jedi gifts—and shackled every political body that had anything to do with the Jedi, whether they agreed with them or not—like an iron chain.”
She gestured, with the small hand that had never done any work in the woman’s life, as if summoning the spirit of the clammy old man in the black robe whose pale eyes still sometimes stared at Leia in her dreams.
“Palpatine was a pragmatist. As am I.”
“And you don’t think that pragmatism—as you call that form of selfishness—isn’t exactly what the dark side is?”
“Madame,” said Keldor—leaving it unstated whom he was addressing—“to be strictly pragmatic … we have very little time. The Eye of Palpatine will be in range of this rift, its principal target, in a matter of forty minutes.” His cold colorless