Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [23]
Yeoman Marcopius darting away down the corridor.
Admiral Ackbar saying, It looks as if there was an information leak at Council level, and Representative Q-Varx tapping the malachite tabletop in her private conference chamber with a stubby brown finger and saying, All arrangements have been made for the secret meeting with Ashgad, Your Excellency. Though he has no official position on the planet, this conference could be the key to the entire policy of beneficial usage of untapped planetary resources.
Do not meet with Ashgad.
Do not go to the Meridian sector.
What had happened to the Noghri?
The thought wended its way leisurely across her mind. She wondered, if she were to go into the room behind her and try the door, whether it would open. But, of course, she thought, locked or unlocked makes little difference. The house itself seemed to be situated in an utterly deserted wasteland of sawtoothed mountains and glaring, jeweled plain.
Voices rose to her from somewhere below. She recognized Seti Ashgad’s: “We’ll just have to go over Larm’s head and talk to Dymurra. Larm’s an idiot anyway. He still has no concept of what we need to complete the Reliant. Has any word come in on the subspace?”
The beautiful baritone carried strongly in the thin, dry air. Larm, thought Leia. Moff Getelles had an admiral named Larm. She’d met him at the diplomatic reception on Coruscant to celebrate Getelles’s elevation to the position, one of the last she’d attended at the Palace. Larm was of the flat-backed, by-the-book, spit-and-polish, boot-kissing school of soldiering, toadying Getelles and every other Moff and Governor without ever relaxing his tough-warrior manner. He’d come up through the fleet as Getelles’s stringer, a dark-visaged and sternly efficient foil to the new Moff’s hail-fellow-well-met fairness and had been duly promoted over the heads of several better-qualified candidates when Getelles had been made Moff of Antemeridian.
Who Dymurra was she had no idea, though the name was familiar to her.
She couldn’t make out the words murmured in reply, but the purring voice pierced her, an arrow of cold under her solar plexus. Dzym. She looked down at her hand again.
Soreness lingered on the sides of her neck, over the main arteries, but she lacked the strength to put her hands up to feel. The cold of death lingered in her mind, and something else, the aftertaste of nightmare.
That was why she felt so weak.
No, she thought. I feel weak because there was sweetblossom in the water.
“I suppose you’re right.” Ashgad’s voice was quieter, but just as penetrant. “Three synthdroids! When I think about how much even one of those things costs …”
Dzym’s voice was a little louder now. Knowing Ashgad’s habit of pacing, Leia assumed he was farther from his secretary than he had been a few moments before. “It could not be helped, my lord. Synthdroids were the only way we could bring the Death Seed on board the vessels undetected.”
The Death Seed! Leia’s breath left her, as if with physical shock.
Seven hundred years ago that plague had wiped out millions. Whole sectors had relapsed into primitive subsistence, as those who understood machinery and spaceflight had perished wholesale …
It was the casualness of Dzym’s tone that galvanized Leia into action. She rose from the divan, pulled the cloaklike folds of her robe more closely around her—the sunlight held no heat—and made her way shakily to the far end of the terrace. Perhaps twenty-five meters below her, just above where the walls of the great, rambling house merged into the harsh basalt of the bluff itself, another terrace ran the length of that side of the building and curved around the face of the cliff. Heavy hedges of brachniel and loak grew from planters of imported soil as windbreaks around two sides, brilliant and alien green against the gray permacrete. A sort of gazebo stood at one end of the terrace, the shade densely black within. A complex system of mist jets and pipes mitigated somewhat the dryness of the air. By the way Ashgad turned, Leia guessed that