Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 07_ Conviction - Aaron Allston [62]
Luke killed the repulsors, allowing the shuttle to settle down on the stony surface of the slope. The shuttle began to rock, pushed by the winds.
“Fun flight, Dad.”
“Quiet, you.”
Minutes later, wrapped against the cold and flying grit, they began their walk to the facility.
At a distance of twenty meters, the clouds of gray and crystal dust being driven past were thin enough that the three of them could see their destination. Situated in a cleft between two sloping ravine walls, it was a circular building of rough stones joined by permacrete mortar; it looked like the guard tower of an ancient city wall rather than a mineral processing plant.
And it was, as far as they could see, as dry and dead as most of this world. Its viewports, horizontal slits, were dark. There were no vehicles outside. But its main door, a slab of metal rare on a building this old on this world, was open, drawn halfway into the left wall section.
Vestara put her hand on her lightsaber hilt as if to reassure herself that it was still there. Her voice was muffled by her cold-weather veil. “Not a good sign.”
Luke shrugged. “Look at it pragmatically. At least we don’t have to climb a wall to get in.”
The main door led to a broad channel between permacrete walls. This had been a lane for bringing in ore, Luke decided; its foundation, natural stone ground flat in some long-ago time, showed ruts where wagons had passed by the hundreds, perhaps across centuries. The channel was open to the air above, but at its end it entered an enclosed area that was dark, kept in shadow by the roof.
Once they were past the durasteel door they could see, just protruding from the shadows, a pair of leather, fur-lined boots. They were not decayed, crumbled wrecks, and they had not sagged flat.
Ben sighed. “Also not good.”
They moved to the boots. Close up, they could see that this was a body, an unmoving figure lying mostly in shadow, facedown.
Luke opened himself up to the Force, seeking the distinctive, loathsome flavor of massed drochs, but he detected none. All he could feel were the looming presences of the tsils, watchful and intimidating.
He reached down to roll the body over. Vestara ignited a glow rod.
Once on his back, the victim proved to be stone dead, his body frozen. There was brown all over his chest, blood—practically freeze-dried by the surrounding air. His eyes were closed. His face was ruddy, not that of an Oldtimer, and his hair was graying black, tied back in a ponytail.
Luke knew his face. He’d seen it earlier today, many times, in holos.
Ben apparently had, too. “It’s Dr. Wei.”
They could not perform a full search of the old processing plant in just a few minutes, but a preliminary exploration did reveal that the place was plausibly unoccupied. There was no electronic equipment remaining, no food. There were a couple of muscle-powered machines still functioning, a wheel-shaped crank usable to open and close the outer door, and a hand pump that brought water up to a stone trough in the roofed area connected to the loading channel.
Their personal comlinks elicited no response from Hweg Shul, Koval Station, or any homestead.
Luke shook his head. “We may be too far from any receiver, or perhaps we’re surrounded by mountain peaks. Or perhaps it’s just the atmospheric conditions. We’ll try again when the winds die down at night.”
Seated on the water trough, Vestara looked at the body of Dr. Wei. They hadn’t found any cloth or flexiplast to wrap him up and give him a little dignified concealment from prying eyes. “So I take it he wasn’t working for Abeloth.”
Ben made a disgusted face, though Luke