Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [34]
“We’ll stay awhile, thanks,” said Han doubtfully.
“One more thing.” Leia held up a finger; the Chief Person turned politely back. “Have you ever seen this man before?”
The holo cube of McKumb, taken while he was asleep, showed a slack, shut-eyed, skeletally thin face not much like the ruddy pot roast of a man Han had known, but it would have to do. Drub McKumb, like Han himself, had been in a business that discouraged accurate portraiture.
Jevax tilted his head, the white bar of brow curving in the middle with his frown. “I don’t think so,” he said. “You can try it in Port Records this evening, though if the man were a smuggler there would be no record of him. During the last decade or so of the Empire we had quite a problem with smugglers—the Imperial Governor kept only a small staff of tariff police. Lately even that’s slacked off.”
“I’ll check Port Records.” Leia returned the cube to her pocket. “Thank you, Jevax. Thank you for all your help.”
“Thank you, Your Excellency, General Solo.” The Mluki’s ugly face brightened into another grin. “You’ve spared me an entire afternoon at the Computer-Time Reapportionment Board—a gift more valued than glitterstim.” And he strolled off through the somber green grass, wreathed in bright insects, all his earrings twinkling in the pallid light.
Chewie growled softly.
“You’re right,” said Han quietly. “I think he was lying.”
“Or someone lied to him.”
Han nodded toward the curving bites taken out of the inner wall. “If Imperials had meant business there wouldn’t be a wall standing,” he said. “This looks like two or three carriers and a bunch of TIEs, tops. All the way out here with no assault wing? No destroyers? If they knew the Jedi were here, there’d be nothing but a hole in the ground. All right, all right,” he added at Chewbacca’s gruff rumble, “so this place is a hole in the ground. You know what I mean. If they didn’t mean business, why attack at all?”
Leia shook her head, still looking around her at the broken walls, the small kitchen wing, the few rooms that could have been workshops. Still haunted by that sense of vanished happiness, that deep, silent aura of rest.
“I’ve never dealt with an implanted belief,” she said after a time. “Luke has. He says they can go pretty deep. For all we know, the Jedi implanted their own children—Nichos, and Cray’s mother—with beliefs after they left, to keep them from being traced. The damage looks bad enough that these people would have needed some outside help right after it was over. Turning it over to an Ithorian corporation at least kept it from being exploited by some relative of the Emperor’s, once everyone knew it was here. But even if they did that—even if they implanted everybody in the village with the belief that there never were crypts—the Jedi were gone by the time the corporations arrived. Maybe the Ithorians who run Brathflen treat the inhabitants of their commercial worlds decently, but I can’t see them—and I certainly can’t see the Twi’leks who run Galactic—passing up rumors of secret crypts. You notice how Jevax sort of skipped over the part about rumors ‘persisting.’ ‘Every few months’ doesn’t sound like something that gets put out of the way by a sensor check. There’s got to be something else going on.”
As they spoke they worked their way back into the triangle of the ruins, where the tower poked domeward under the massive, graceful spring of the girders and beetling outcrops of the cliff leaned inward, garlanded with hanging tapestries of flowers. Beds of vine-coffee hung above the remains of Plett’s House, like obese and gaudy hoverbirds, the trailing ends of the vines only a dozen meters above the highest peak of the tower itself. Beyond them Leia could see the dome through the fragments of mists, and was surprised at how dark the sky appeared overhead.
In an inner room, one of a line cut into the cliff itself, a pipe tapped into a warm spring deep in the rock. Up at this end of the valley the water emerged from the earth little warmer than a truly hot bath, and without the sulfurous stink of the scalding