Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 04_ Exile - Aaron Allston [32]
Lando dithered for a few seconds. “I say Number Three. And we can resort to Number One if it starts to go bad on us.”
Leia smiled. “You always did like to have a skifter in reserve.”
chapter seven
STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL
Today it was to be makeup—good old-fashioned powders and pigments and pseudo-skin appliances. Lumiya sat before a brightly lit mirror and got to work.
It was painful, of course. Not long ago, Luke Skywalker had shot her five times with a blaster. Two of those shots had hit prosthetic limbs, with simulated pain that could be switched off instantly and damage that could be repaired within minutes. But three of those shots had found meat, and despite the fact that she healed at an unnaturally high rate—both from Force-based healing trances and from the alterations made to her body decades earlier by the science of Emperor Palpatine—she was far from recovered. She hurt.
And that was why it was to be makeup today. When trying merely to hide her scarred features, she normally wore an identity-concealing scarf wrapped around her lower face; she could bring up the Force illusion of normal features if obliged to reveal herself. But distracted as she now was by injuries, her control might slip, allowing viewers a glimpse of the real features beneath.
Properly applied pseudo-skin didn’t slip.
Paint-on pseudo-skin eliminated the web of age lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Little pads affixed to the insides of her cheeks gave her face a rounder appearance. A dot of fluid that caused flesh to contract or even wither convincingly provided her with dimples. Pseudo-skin appliances covered her scars and gave her jaw a softer, less angular line. An application of foundation smoothed out all discrepancies of texture or tone…and on top of that she added blush, a striking red lip color, eyeliner. She donned the wig at the end, covering her graying red hair with a tumbling mass of long golden curls.
When she was done, she appeared to be a woman of thirty, roughly half her true age, and to possess the beauty and many of the racial stock characteristics of a woman of the Hapes Consortium.
She drew on the Force to dull her pain while she rose and dressed in a green gown and matching neck scarf, both overlaid with a webwork of gold thread, and altogether too much sapphire jewelry, all appropriate to a wealthy Hapan woman.
It was important to dull the pain. If she hurt too much, she’d perspire, and her makeup would be undone.
Dressed, she looked at herself in the mirror again, ensuring that the makeup had endured. “The decorator is through with my Battle Dragon,” she said. A mnemonic, the phrase allowed her to recapture the Hapan accent quickly. “The decorator is through with my Battle Dragon.”
Ready and confident, she gave herself a nod and then marched into the next room.
It was a hemispherical holocomm chamber. The central area, essentially a studio-quality stage, was surrounded by a ring of holocams that together would sample a three-dimensional image. Carefully programmed and adjusted for depth of field, they would only record images from that central area; they could not read objects farther away. That meant there was a safe zone around the central area, a ring where observers could stand and not be captured by the holocams. The walls were covered to a height of three meters by the broadcasting equipment, which transmitted via hyperspace, allowing instantaneous communications with targets half a galaxy away.
Lumiya’s servant-droids had set up the central area with a chair that plausibly looked like a marble throne—Lumiya knew it to be foamplas covered in a beautiful mottled green-and-white veneer—and a matching side table. On the table was a bowl of peeled oversized grapes.
She sat carefully on the throne and sampled one of the grapes. It was gummy, nasty—not a true grape at all, but a candy-like material produced by an ancient food fabricator that had been new when this station was built.