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Threepio said nothing, but in the portion of his central processing unit that formed opinions as protocol paradigms for communications facilitation, he reflected that he was heartily sick of plans.

They were undoubtedly doomed.

From the dense shadow at the base of the plateau, Luke looked up the striated cliff-face at the matte black jumble of Seti Ashgad’s compound, and wondered how many of those glowing rectangles of yellow and white denoted occupation. Was one of them Leia’s prison? Or were they holding her somewhere in the heart of the house, within the rock of the plateau itself?

Shivering in the dense cold, he reached out with his mind, seeking to touch hers—Leia …—but did not know if she could hear. In the darkness, the whisper of the Force around him was very strong, pressing on his mind, tugging at all his thoughts, so that he was hard put to keep it at bay. Even as there were ways of using the Force to keep from being seen, so it was possible to keep from making an image on certain types of sensors. Luke hoped that such minor use wasn’t sufficient to trigger a reaction elsewhere on the planet.

What was happening elsewhere in the galaxy as a result of Leia’s kidnapping—what other events that kidnapping would have been coordinated with—he didn’t like to think.

He’d brought a toolkit from Croig’s shop—leaving most of his slender finances to pay for it—and it didn’t take long to rewire the alarm and spring the door-catches. His small glowrod showed him a permacrete parking bay containing a sleek black Mobquet Chariot, and by the stains on the floor there were two other speeders usually in residence, one of them with a faulty rear coil. Turbolift doors gleamed dully in the light. Luke ran the beam along the wall, seeking a stairway door, and drochs the size of his thumb waddled and skittered out of his way.

The stairway, he thought, was going to be bad.

The Force was life, Yoda had said. Connecting all living things. What he felt, standing in the doorway to the stair and reaching up with whatever senses he could muster, Luke had never felt before and never wanted to feel again.

Life, thick and cloying. Life huge and all-encompassing—there couldn’t possibly be that many creatures in the stairwell! Billions, billions.… The sense of life there was overwhelming, and yet there was something hideously wrong with it. Something ugly, evil, rotted. A dirty miasma, a sense of fermentation, swollen like cancerous tissue, rotted and foul. Luke had no idea how to interpret this, no concept of what this meant, or even if his perception were accurate. He couldn’t even tell if it was billions of lives he felt, or only one, huge and vile and waiting.

But Leia had to be up there.

The lightsaber hummed to life in his hand. He maneuvered the little clip-on glowrod from the toolkit onto the front flap-pocket of his coverall, flicked it on.

Permacrete steps ascended to a landing, then turned out of his view. Darkness, and something moving along the walls. With the choking inner sense of evil it was impossible to determine anything else about what might be up there, shape or size or sound or smell.

Cautiously, Luke began to climb.

He passed one landing, two, then three. Each break in the stair was twenty steps up. The plateau looked well over three hundred meters high, but there was no telling how deep the foundations of the house extended. As far as Luke could tell, there were no holocams or viewers in the stairwell: only a close-crowding monotony of permacrete walls, grimy with the brown tracks of drochs. The join of the walls and floor was almost sepia with the noisome exudations of their bodies.

Pain stabbed him in the calf and he looked down to see half a dozen huge drochs—the length of his thumb—wriggling and climbing up his boots. Several had bitten through his pants leg and into the flesh already. Disgusted, he pulled a hypo-driver from his belt and used the shaft of it to dislodge those that hadn’t bitten yet, but more were crawling purposefully