Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [83]
“Look familiar?” Solo fished the gleaming chip from his pocket. “The Slyte was making a good living off these, but the supply pinching out wasn’t why he quit. You know what happened to him?”
Mara leaned forward a little to study the chip through the Holonet’s shimmering transceiver field, then sat back with a long flash of white leg. “That’s the stuff. You ever do the Belsavis Run, Han? There’s a spot in the southern hemisphere that’s far enough from any rift or vent to be atmospherically stable about the same time every twenty-four hours. The Corridor, it’s called. Because of the storms and the ionization in the upper atmosphere they can’t track anyone who’s not coming down a charted beam. You come in high, drop fast, and run along close to the ice to one of the pads.”
“I heard about the pads out on the ice,” said Han.
Chewie rumbled a comment.
“Yeah,” agreed Han. “Not something I’d want to do, either. I guess there’s still one or two in operation.”
“There were twelve or thirteen back then,” said Mara. “Most were within a few kilometers of the rifts, about half of those near Pletwell … Plawal, they call the place now. I could look up the coordinates for you if it would help. Nubblyk started thermoblasting the pads right after the Clone Wars, when Brathflen and Galactic first came to the planet. He’d sound out geothermal fissures below the ice, tunnel down to them, then t-blast the pads within half a kilometer of the tunnel heads. That kept the people running the goods in and out through the Corridor dependent on Nubblyk, because only Nubblyk knew where the tunnel heads were. The Jedi.” She shook her head again. “I’d never have guessed that.”
Chewbacca stopped brushing his fur long enough to offer a nominal sum against odds that Bran Kemple had been one of the tunnel guides, and Mara said, “Not on your life.”
Leia rested her hands on Han’s damp, towel-wrapped shoulders. “And Drub McKumb was one of the guys who ran the Corridor.”
“Drub McKumb?” Mara’s usually cold expression relaxed into a grin at the memory of the man. “Is he still around? Yes, he was one of the Corridor runners. How’s he …?”
She saw the stillness in Han’s face, and her eyes went cold and flat.
“What happened?”
Han told her, and went on to outline his and Chewie’s adventures underground. “They were smugglers, Mara,” he said after a long—and somewhat expensive—silence on both ends of the Holonet transmission. “Whiphids, a Twi’lek, a Carosite, a couple of Rodians … local Mluki. Humans. They looked like they’d been down there years. Like Drub.”
Mara swore: briefly, comprehensively, and filthily. Then for a time she sat in silence again, staring into the darkness beyond memory and time.
“Does it sound like anything you know about?” asked Leia. She came around and Han made room for her on his chair. “They didn’t find any drugs in him.”
“No,” said Mara distantly. “They didn’t use drugs.”
“Who didn’t?”
Mara didn’t answer. Leia said, still more quietly, “Vader?” Again her skin grew hot, around a core of bitter ice. Her father. Luke’s father.
No, she thought. Bail Organa had been her father.
The smuggler nodded, once. “Vader and Palpatine.” She brought the words out, crisp and cold and without qualification, as if she knew nothing could make it easier. “They mostly did it with semisentients: Ranats, Avogui, Zelosian Aga, cidwen. They’d use them for enclosure guards in places where they needed stormtroopers for other work. Drug them with a hallucinogen like brain-jagger or Black Hole, something that worked on the fear/rage centers of the brain. They’d use the dark