Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [82]
“I know about Ohran Keldor,” said Leia softly. Even after all these years her body went hot at the thought of his name, as if a thousand needles were rising up through her skin. “He was a student of Magrody’s, one of the designers of the Death Star. One of the teachers at the Omwat orbital platform that produced the rest of that design.” Her hands trembled involuntarily and she tightened them hard; felt Han’s swift, worried glance.
“That’s him,” said Mara. She regarded Leia for a time, her own thoughts hidden behind the cool mask of her face, but if she understood the hatred of one who has had her world destroyed, she made no comment, and Leia herself said nothing. Could say nothing.
“Same guy?” asked Han, a little too quickly, seeking to cover. “I mean, that was, what? Twenty years before they put the Death-Star together …”
“Twenty years isn’t that long,” said Mara. “And Keldor was a boy genius back then, Magrody’s best. Looking at the kind of thing he designed later—military and industrial both—I’d say the Emperor paid him to design a supership of some kind. That was back when they needed a vessel the size of a city to carry the blasting power they wanted. Whatever was on Belsavis, it looks like the Emperor didn’t want anything breathing when the dust settled. Logically, it has to have been an installation, because of the firepower and because of the trade that started up later in xylen chips and gold wire, salvage goods; far too much to be just the gleanings of a battlefield. But I always wondered what kind of installation was so important that they’d go to that much trouble.”
Han crossed his legs and pulled the dark-patterned native sarong he wore up to cover his knees. “But somebody dropped the ball.”
Mara shrugged. “That part had been pulled out of the file, but it sounds like it, yes. The supership—or whatever it was that those automated relays were designed to summon—never arrived. Most of the relays were destroyed or lost, so somebody must have guessed what they were. The interceptors got mauled by a small planetary force, pretty badly by the sound of it. The file said ‘subjects departed.’ The officers in charge said they strafed everything in sight and did maximum damage with the weaponry available, but most of them were cashiered when they came home. A couple of high-ranking designers of artificial intelligence constructs and automated weapons systems were reassigned to places like Kessel and Neelgaimon and Dathomir …”
“Real vacation spots,” murmured Han, who’d visited all three.
Mara’s red mouth quirked in a small, chilly smile. “There are worse places. Ohran Keldor dropped out of sight for a while.”
Chewbacca growled.
“Yeah,” agreed Han, “I would have, too. But it looks like somebody reinstated him.”
“That was probably Moff Tarkin,” said Mara. “He was a man who never lost track of so much as a paper clip. He was in charge of the Omwat orbital and that’s where Keldor showed up again, trying to work himself back onto the Emperor’s good side.”
She shook her head again, a look on her face that was half speculation, half wonderment. “So it was the Jedi and their families. No wonder he wanted the whole planet done.”
She was silent for a time, and looking at her, Leia wondered suddenly if that was what had drawn Mara to the Emperor in the first place: that Palpatine, Force-strong as he was, had been the only one who could teach Mara, the only one like herself that she knew.
Having grown up herself with the knowledge that she was somehow just slightly different, without knowing how, Leia could understand that need. The need to have someone who understood.
“Nothing in the records about where those ‘subjects’ went?” she asked. The bitter heat in her chest had chilled, but her own voice still sounded like a recording in her ears. “Nothing about the group itself? How big it was? How many ships they had? What direction they took off in?”
The smuggler shook her head. “The file didn’t even mention who and what they were. Just that they ‘departed.’ ”
“So you went to Belsavis to see who they’d been?”
“Not exactly.