• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

She dropped onto the divan, shaking in every limb with weakness and shock. Panic and rage struggled against the thickness of the sweetblossom that clogged her brain, a fury to escape, to outwit them.

And the drug whispered its reply, Of course you should. But not just now.

Something in the pocket of her robe pressed into her thigh, hard and uncomfortable. Leia frowned, trying to recall what she’d carried with her in the garment’s bulky folds to the meeting with Ashgad. The answer was, of course, Nothing. The velvet garment of state was sufficiently heavy without adding weight to it.

But in that case, who could have put something there, and when?

She fished and fumbled around until she found the pocket in the lining, originally designed to carry a recording device or, depending on who the wearer planned to meet, a hold-out blaster.

Clumsy with the effects of the sweetblossom, her fingers closed on metal.

It was her lightsaber.

4

She brought it out, stared at it in a kind of shock. Touched the switch, the quivering laser blade humming faintly, pale blue and nearly invisible in the odd, moiréd light.

Luke’s voice came to her, Keep up with your lightsaber practice. You need it.

And like an echo, the voice of the Anakin she had never heard, We have the Power …

She pushed the ugly dream from her mind. But she couldn’t push from her the knowledge of what they were: The grandchildren of Darth Vader, with only the teaching of Law and Justice between the New Republic and that terrible dream. She remembered all the efforts that had been made to kidnap them, to use them, to twist them into tools for greed or obsession. And all the while people assumed that she would teach them better, teach them not to use their powers for selfishness or impulse, while she watched the jackals of the broken Empire and the members of her own Council squabble and snatch and waste time and lives.

And Luke kept urging her to take up that personal, frightening power: the power of Palpatine. The power to have it all her own way.

She touched the switch again. The shining blade was gone.

Artoo. Dimly she remembered Threepio’s despairing wails into the comm, and as she slid toward cold darkness, the soft clickety-whirr of the astromech’s servos near her. Artoo knew I was in danger. He helped me the only way he could.

She closed her eyes, fighting tears.

I will kill them, she thought, the cold fury breaking through the sluggishness of the drug. Ashgad, and Dzym, and that foul Hutt, and Liegeus with his drugged drinks and phony concern. Whatever they’re up to, I’ll destroy them.

Before Liegeus came back, she thought, she’d better check out her room for whatever escape she could find.

The air was softer indoors, subtly modified to escape the piercing dryness. That meant magnetic shields on the doors and windows—not cheap—and some kind of mist generators in the ceilings. Away from the jewellike refractions of the sunlight the shadows were thick, and the massive walls sheltered a sour muskiness that no air-conditioning could disperse.

Anyplace a Hutt occupied smelled of Hutt, of course. Nobody ever liked that heavy, rotted odor. On Tatooine, Leia had learned to hate it, though her experience of living in Jabba’s palace had served her well during her negotiations with Durga the Hutt on Nal Hutta. She was one of the few diplomats who could deal with highly odorous species like Hutts and Vordums unjudgmentally and relatively unflinchingly. One couldn’t, she knew, discredit their intelligence just because their digestive enzymes were set up to deal with everything from tree roots to petroleum by-products.

There were bugs, too. She saw them, tiny and purplish brown, skittering along the densest shadows at the base of the wall and under the small, roughly constructed chest of drawers that was the room’s single other piece of furniture. Most storage was in wall niches, natural in a world where only intensive agriculture on the part of its unwilling inhabitants centuries ago had been able to eventually produce woody plants large enough