Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [24]
There was a third being on the terrace, stretched out on a black-and-orange air-duvet under a veritable rain-shower of air misters, and Leia flinched with revulsion at the sight of it, and the sound of its gluey, tuba bass.
“Dzym’s right.” It rolled over, flexed its gelid length—at roughly twelve meters, it was the longest Hutt Leia had ever seen. It was massive, without Jabba’s obesity; like a young Hutt in its agility and speed but grown to the size of an old one. “You couldn’t have gotten past the medical scans without them. And only droids would have taken the vessels into hyperspace without a second jump coordinate.”
Hyperspace!
Marcopius. Ezrakh. Captain Ioa. Those poor children of her honor guard … Threepio and Artoo.
Sickness and horror swept her, replaced a moment later by a burning rage.
“Yes, but at a hundred thousand credits apiece!”
“Cheap at the price.” The Hutt shrugged. “Dymurra thought it was worth the expenditure. I agree with him. It wasn’t enough to have Liegeus put through that ‘Mission accomplished, we’re leaving for Coruscant’ message, or even the faked transmissions from the jump point. We couldn’t bring those vessels here. We couldn’t destroy them without the risk of telltale debris. And what do you care, anyway? Dymurra paid for the synthdroids, not you.”
“And that makes it all right?” Ashgad turned impatiently from the railing to face the huge, reclining shape. “With an attitude like that, it’s no wonder you’re no longer ruling this territory, Beldorion.”
“Anyway,” rumbled Beldorion cryptically, “the price is about to come down on them, isn’t it? And what’s three hundred thousand credits, if you can get rid of all evidence of where Her Excellency is and what became of her? Once Rieekan goes into a coma, the Council’s going to be chasing its tail for days, each member trying to keep the next from being named successor.”
He swelled up a little and produced a burp of cosmic proportions, leaking green drool from his mouth and releasing a vast breath of gases that Leia could smell from the terrace above. He rolled a little and delved with one tiny, muscular hand into a washtub-size porcelain bowl of some kind of pink-and-orange snack food that rested on the duvet at his side. Even Ashgad turned his face aside in disgust.
“And don’t speak to me about not ruling this Force-benighted planet anymore,” the Hutt added, around a mouthful of small, squirming things. “No one forced me—me, Beldorion the Splendid, Beldorion of the Ruby Eyes—to retire. I ruled this world longer than your petty Empire existed, and I ruled it well.”
He shoved another handful of whatever it was into his enormous mouth. Some of it escaped and made it nearly to the edge of his duvet before he tongued it up. “So don’t tell me I was too wasteful or too lazy to know what I’m talking about.” He extended one hand, and Leia felt it.
The Force.
A silver cup, probably kept in some kind of cooling bowl under the gazebo’s black shade, floated into sight and drifted across toward the stubby, outstretched yellow fingers with their golden rings.
And all around her, Leia felt the air change, as if the iridescent sunlight had thickened or changed its composition: Itchy, swirling, angry.
Beldorion the Hutt had been trained as a Jedi.
And against his use of the Force, there was a stirring, a reaction, a movement in the Force itself that Leia, though only marginally adept with her Jedi powers, felt like sandpaper on the inside of her skull.
Leia’s knees felt weak, and she retreated to the divan again, catching the head of it for balance, shivering within the garnet weight of the state robe.
The Borealis, sent into hyperspace blind and unprogrammed, never to emerge … But if what Dzym said was true, if the Death Seed plague had been on board, that was just as well.
She had had the Death Seed. She shook her head. It was impossible, according to the records no one recovered.
And Minister Rieekan, her second-in-command in the Council …When Rieekan goes into his coma …
I have to warn him. I have to