Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [56]
He caught her arm, grinning; she tried to duck away to open the door but he pinned her, a hand on either side of her shoulders, their eyes laughing into one another’s, his body warm against hers. “You want to see how innocent I can be?”
She reached to touch the scar on his chin. “I know how innocent you are,” she said, meaning it, and their lips met, isolated in the still cloak of the mist.
Only the padding footfalls on the ramp broke them apart, and the soft whirring of servos. They stepped back from each other in time to see Chewbacca’s tall form materialize out of the pearlescent shimmer of the air, trailed a moment later by Artoo. The glittering colors of the mist were darkening as the dome-magnified sunlight waned. Between the gray trees of the orchards that stretched downhill from the back of the house, the twilight was growing thick.
“Find anything?”
As they passed through the front door Chewbacca shrugged eloquently and groaned. He’d pursued his own investigation of the local scene in places that left the smell of strange smokes in his fur, and had learned, he said, very little. Very little was going on. One of the smuggler pads out on the glacier was still in operation sometimes, though there were fewer and fewer pilots looking to make the difficult run in through the Corridor. A couple of ships were buying vine-silk on the cheap—mostly grade-two skimmings from the factories. A couple of dealers running in yarrock, ryll, and various sorts of frontal-lobe candy for the old buzz-brains living in the grubby shacks and lean-tos behind Spaceport Row. Bran Kemple was evidently the only person selling it on a regular basis. Everybody said Not like the old days. You could make more money packing brandifert if you didn’t mind purple fingers.
“I’m going to take Artoo with me to the MuniCenter, if you don’t mind.” Inside the house Leia hunted out a dark green-and-violet tunic slightly more respectable than the garment she’d worn to go touring the bars of the Row—she owned underwear more respectable than that particular outfit, for that matter—and more comfortable shoes. “You find anything from public access while we were up at Plett’s House, Artoo?”
The astromech trundled obediently over to the small monitor-printer setup in the corner and extruded a comm plug, and the printer began to chatter. Han crossed the room to see. “Export figures for all seven main packing plants for the past week,” he reported with a grave nod. “Mmmm … oh, now we’ve got employee health figures … fuel intake of all vessels for the past week … Better and better. Wow, here’s a hot item! Repair costs for malfunctions of mechanical fruit pickers amortized over the past ten years. Leia, I don’t know if my heart can take this …”
She rapped him on the arm with the back of her knuckles. “Don’t tease Artoo … That’s very thorough of you, Artoo, you did a good job. You always do.”
The droid beeped. Past the bedroom’s line of floor-length windows and the narrow stone terrace beyond, darkness had settled, the lights that dotted the orchards below the house making raveled blurs of brightness in the mist. The house was one of the few in Plawal to consist mostly of the original stone—only the kitchen and half the living room were prefab—but had been remodeled in the past few years, the old keyhole windows replaced by modern crystalplex with sliding metal shutters to cut out the orchard lights. It was environment-controlled, too, after a fashion—better than the Smoking Jets, anyway. An ironic refinement, thought Leia, for a planet whose surface temperature averaged in the minus fifties.
Like most houses in the old town it was built over a small warm-spring site, and though the spring had been diverted to warm the orchard, the basement floor still produced errant wisps of steam. Leia wondered with a sudden qualm of disgust if kretch lurked there.
“You’ll be okay here?” She paused on her way to the door.
“I’ll have a go at calling Mara Jade. She may know where those