Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [100]
She checked the household plan again. Through that door, right up the hall where she had turned left before; a flight of stairs and a locked door whose combination, according to the computer, was 339-054-001-6. The antigrav tanks were stored behind the second door. The light in the sunset sky was dimming, and she felt an obscure pang of fear. Though she knew Dzym was active in daylight as well as at night, by day she felt safer from him. Whoever and whatever he was, she wanted to be out of the house before full dark.
A thought crossed her mind. Turning back, she opened the slatted doors into the small chamber where the CCIR Central Control Unit stood, amber power lights glowing like eyes in the dark.
This would have to be fast, she thought. Liegeus would be working with the synthdroids in the docking compound. Beldorion would certainly have one or two about his quarters and maybe one in the kitchen with his grubby little Kubaz cook. The synthdroids’ wholesale collapse would get them on her trail, but the only ones on her trail would be Liegeus and Dzym, not twenty-something centrally controlled and extremely mobile synthetic humans.
Her hand was on the toggle of her lightsaber when the swish of the outer doors froze her where she stood. The next second voices sounded in the room, and she barely had time to pull shut the slatted doors that concealed the Control Unit in its vestibule.
Three days! she wanted to scream. He said he’d be gone three days!
The voice was the voice of Seti Ashgad.
“I told you not to go near her!” he was saying, and Leia was shocked to hear how broken and shrill was his voice. An old man’s voice. “Skywalker’s her brother, and a Jedi Knight. He’ll know if she dies, and it’s too soon to have them know they can choose a successor! Our whole plan will come adrift if …”
“You’ve told me that before.” Dzym’s voice hissed in the twilight. “Don’t treat me like an imbecile, Ashgad. Are you telling me that you believe this puling little wreck over me? Are you?”
Leia turned one of the slats of the door, put her eye to it. No light had come up in the long study, and the fading daylight outside did not reach to its inner wall. She could make out faces, and the sharp white V of Ashgad’s shirtfront … she thought he was wearing a gray or white cap of some sort, blurring into the blur of his face. Of Dzym she could distinguish almost nothing, save a slumped dark suggestion of evil, a gleam of eyes that reminded her unpleasantly of something else. Other eyes, recently seen …
Liegeus stammered when he spoke. “I—I merely said—I thought when I found her yesterday afternoon … she hasn’t wakened, my lord. She’s lying up there cold and barely breathing. I’ve checked on her all through today …”
“And you thought,” whispered Dzym, and the shadow of him shifted with the slow ophidian turning of his head, “you jumped to the conclusion that I had disobeyed my lord’s request—that I would only wait until his back was turned …”
Leia thought he reached out one hand toward Liegeus’s face. Though it was difficult to make out what was happening she thought the holo faker fell back a pace, his back to the wall. Thought she heard him whisper, “Please …” with utter terror in his voice.
“Did you check the room?” asked Ashgad, rather quickly. “Could it have happened another way? Could another …?”
“Of course not!” Dzym swung around on him, Liegeus stepping quickly out of his reach. “What other besides me has the strength? What other besides me is old enough, developed enough? I have told you. Told you that and not to treat me as if I haven’t a brain! Let us go to her and see if this whiner is even telling the truth.”
Liegeus turned hastily, and Leia heard the swoosh of the door in the darkness; Ashgad said hoarsely, “Wait.”
It was hard to see, and the murmuring voices were barely audible, but Leia thought Liegeus had gone ahead, leaving