Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [109]
Unless programmed to give alternate information, droids are devastatingly truthful, even those whose business is protocol and diplomacy. “Yarbolk Yemm,” provided Threepio unhesitatingly. “I understand that he’s a journalist for TriNebulon.”
There was momentary silence. Then the captain said, “That’s him,” and signaled to another guard as she started across the room toward the Chadra-Fan.
Yarbolk saw them coming and sprang to his feet. Everyone in the waiting hall had been relieved of whatever weaponry he or she’d possessed, and in any case the guards were heavily armed. He bolted toward the doors, but they did not open. Turning at bay, he raised his hands in protest or surrender as the Gotal captain pulled her blaster from her side and fired a stun beam into his chest from a distance of less than a meter. The shock of it threw the little journalist back against the door, where he slumped slowly to the floor in a tangle of golden fur and pink-and-blue silk.
The Gotal captain glanced around her. Under the watchful eyes of the guards, none of the others in the room had moved. Perhaps, deduced Threepio, they had their own reasons for wishing to remain inconspicuous. The captain spoke to the guards nearest her, in a voice so low that only a droid’s acute audio receptors could pick up what she said.
She said, “Airlock three.”
Stretched in the crevice of a glittering cliff face, Leia shaded her eyes against the rising sun glare. Wind made her face feel as if it had been chemically processed. From her high ledge she could see back along the maze of canyons, harsh edged and broken as old tectonic upheavals had left them, every surface a mirror magnifying the heatless light.
If they were looking for her, she couldn’t tell it.
Certainly she saw nothing. Ashgad could easily program simple tracker droids to her physical parameters: movement, mass, and body temperature. For this reason she had sacrificed the antigrav unit and one of the heaters, sending it drifting away down the canyon as a decoy. Beldorion’s decayed powers might sense the difference, but Leia was willing to bet that even had the Force not lain like a crackling magnetic field over the entire planet, the effort was beyond the one-time Knight.
She closed her eyes for a moment, weary to exhaustion. She still didn’t know why she hadn’t been dashed to jelly at the foot of the mesa—there must have been more juice in the coil than she’d thought. She felt like she’d dodged, and run, and scrambled a hundred kilometers since then.
Opening her eyes again, she unfolded the map. Years on the run with the Rebel forces had taught her to read elevation maps. She identified the canyon she’d climbed up, and the two peaks between which she had to clamber to come down on the deserted gun station at Bleak Point. There was no water marked anywhere on the map, so she didn’t know whether there would be a pump of any kind at her destination. Only about a quarter of the water in the pitcher remained, and she didn’t know how long it would take her to get a message out …
… If the gun station still contained working equipment capable of subspace range.
Stiffly, achingly, she bent to examine the wreckage of her gold-stamped ceremonial boots, and with bleeding fingers ripped another length of silver space tape to add to the existing crisscross of repairs.
If Ashgad didn’t have some means of picking up and tracking such a signal.
If there were anyone alive to hear.
She tried not to think about the Death Seed and about how much her feet hurt.
The Death Seed.
The echo of it returned again and again to her mind.
Idiot, idiot, idiot. She slung the sealed pitcher over her back once more and started the long, cautious, terrible process of following the ledge back along the cliff toward the high-up cluster of amethyst peaks that were her next landmark.
She’d