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“And it’s a sure thing,” he added, almost to himself, “that Q-Varx didn’t know about Dzym.”

The hangar doors were locked. So were the doors that led from the hangar to the stairway, up to Ashgad’s house. Luke was of the opinion that half-power on the ion blaster should be sufficient for the second pair of doors, for the first had nearly disintegrated when Leia had fired at them full-force. But the first blast only dented the inner ones, so Leia turned up the blaster to full and let them have it again. The noise in the enclosed space of the hangar was quite astonishing, and brother and sister waded to the resultant, gaping hole through a calf-deep rubble field and a choking cloud of dust.

“I told you three-quarters would do it.”

“We can’t waste time.”

Leia might have learned diplomacy and patience with ambassadors, reflected her twin wryly, slinging one of the two flamethrowers into place over his shoulder, but it was quite clear that she still dearly loved the destructive force of small artillery fire.

“What did you do to the synthdroids?” Luke still couldn’t get over the fact that there were virtually no human guards.

“Gutted the central controller.” Leia swept the whole steps before them, floor, walls, and ceiling, as far as the landing, with a blast of fire. They both wore goggles picked up in the hangar, but Luke still had to blink hard to get his bearings back. The curled little black crusts that had been drochs crunched under their boots as they ascended to the landing. Leia fired again.

“We’ll have to remember that if Loronar gets the Needles going. But any commander worth his ammo allowance is going to have the central controller locked up in the heart of the biggest battlemoon in the galaxy.”

“Yeah, well, you were locked up in the heart of the biggest battlemoon in the galaxy, too.” Luke grinned across at her as they dashed up another installment of stairs.

“And unless we’ve got somebody on the inside willing to let us go again with a homing device stuck on our tails,” retorted Leia, pushing her goggles onto her forehead, “we’d better not count on that kind of luck again.” The jewels on her gold-headed hairpins glittered incongruously through the soot and filth. “There has to be a weakness to them. One that doesn’t involve access to the central controller.”

The two halted in the doorway of the chamber, where Luke had met Dzym and had rescued Liegeus from the life drinker. The floor was a creeping sea of drochs. Brother and sister opened fire with the flamethrowers, swept the whole room in a licking, roaring sheet of yellow heat. It was like sprinting through an oven afterward, sweat rolling down their dust-streaked faces, the burned matter left after searing the soles of their boots.

The gateway that led through to the construction compound was locked, and Luke laid a hand on Leia’s shoulder as she brought up the ion blaster again. “It’s shielded.” The green column of his lightsaber hummed into existence at the touch of a switch.

Leia glanced back over her shoulder, toward the blown-out door of the stairway. Luke knew what it was, who it was, that she felt behind them.

He was there, Luke thought. He could almost see him, ascending each step with a heavy, coiling loop of his great wormlike body, eyes malevolent rubies in the dark. The dark hurricane of the Force swirled around him, uncontrolled, while in his mind the voice of Dzym whispered, telling him that these humans, these pale little maggots, these defiant little play-Jedi, needed to be stopped at all costs.

Luke ran the lightsaber into the lock’s works, tested the door switch. It vibrated, but held. “There’s another lock,” he said. “A hidden one, behind a wall-hatch …”

“Here.” She had her own blade out. Luke wondered how she had managed to keep that with her, when Seti Ashgad had taken her from the ship.

There was no time to ask, for the floor shivered suddenly with the force of liftoff, the amber lights all across the lintel of the door turning red. Luke gritted, “They’re off!” and far above, over the top of the wall, they