Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [2]
“All of them.” Ashgad strode back to her, standing too close, trying to dominate her with his height and the fact that he was standing and she remained in her chair. But she looked up at him with an expression in her brown eyes that told him she knew exactly what he was doing, or trying to do, and he stepped back. “All of us,” he corrected himself. “Newcomers and Therans alike.”
Leia folded her hands on her knee, the wide velvet sleeves and voluminous skirt of her crimson ceremonial robe picking up the soft sheen of the hidden lamps overhead and of the distant stars hanging in darkness beyond the curved bubble of the port. Even five years ago she would have remarked tartly on the fact that he was omitting mention of the largest segment of the planet’s population, those who were neither the technological post–Imperial Newcomers nor the ragged Theran cultists who haunted the cold and waterless wastes, but ordinary farmers. Now she gave him silence, waiting to see what else he would say.
“I should explain,” Ashgad went on, in the rich baritone that so closely resembled the recordings she had heard of his father’s, “that Nam Chorios is a barren and hostile world. Without massive technology it is literally not possible to make a living there.”
“The prisoners sent to Nam Chorios by the Grissmath Dynasty seem to have managed for the past seven hundred years.”
The man looked momentarily nonplussed. Then he smiled, big and wide and white. “Ah, I see Your Excellency has studied the history of the sector.” He tried to sound pleased about it.
“Enough to know the background of the situation,” replied Leia pleasantly. “I know that the Grissmaths shipped their political prisoners there, in the hopes that they’d starve to death, and set automated gun stations all over the planet to keep them from being rescued. I know that the prisoners not only didn’t oblige them by dying but that their descendants—and the descendants of the guards—are still farming the water seams while the Grissmath homeworld of Meridian itself is just a ball of charred radioactive waste.”
There was, in fact, very little else in the Registry concerning Nam Chorios. The place had been an absolute backwater for centuries. The only reason Leia had ever heard of it at all before the current crisis was that her father had once observed that the old Emperor Palpatine seemed to be using Nam Chorios for its original purpose: as a prison world. Forty years ago it had been rumoured that the elder Seti Ashgad had been kidnapped and stranded on that isolated and unapproachable planet by agents of his political foe, the then-Senator Palpatine. Those rumors had remained unproven until this second Ashgad, like a black haired duplicate of the graying old power broker who had disappeared, had made contact with the Council in the wake of the squabbling on the planet and asked to be heard.
Though there was no reason, Leia thought, to make this man aware of how little she or anyone knew about the planet or the situation.
Do not meet with Ashgad, the message had said, that had reached her, literally as she was preparing to board the shuttle to take her to her flagship. Do not trust him or accede to any demand that he makes. Above all, do not go to the Meridian sector.
“Very good!” He passed the compliment like a kidney stone, though he managed a droll and completely automatic little chuckle as a chaser. “But the situation isn’t as simple as that, of course.”
From a corner of the lounge, where a dark-leaved dyanthis vine shadowed the area near the observation port, a soft voice whispered, “They never are, are they?”
“Well, I was given to understand that the only inhabitants of the planet before