Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [5]
“Legassi?” Oran bent over the Mon Calamari’s shivering body. “Legassi, what …?” She staggered a little, almost as if she had been struck, and put a hand to her chest. Groping, as if trying to massage away some numbness or pain.
“Commander Zoalin,” stated the calm voice of Two-Onebee, the head of the infirmary section, on the channel that he had left open, “I regret to report that bacta tank therapy appears to accelerate rather than retard dissolution of subjects, by a factor of nearly thirty-five percent, as far as can be analyzed.”
With the measured tones sounding in his earclip, Zoalin flicked the central console screen from image to image, keying through to corridors where the search teams in quest of the signal block device turned toward the infirmary as first one, then another of their number would stop, lean against the wall, knead and rub at the chest or head or side. The view cut to sick bay, where the calm and tireless droids operated mechanical lifts to remove Sergeant Wover’s lifeless, dripping body from the bacta tank; to the shuttle bay control room where the last yeoman on duty lay dying alone in a corner by the door.
Fifteen minutes, thought Zoalin blankly. Fifteen minutes since Wover signaled from the deck-nine break room.
He hadn’t even severed the connection when the other calls had started pouring in. Midshipman Gasto down. Engineering Chief Cho P’qun down. Sir, we can’t get any signal from maintenance …
“Foursi.” He clicked through a channel to the Central Computer’s Operating Signal Division—Division 4C. “Emergency reprogramming request. All maintenance droids of the …” His head was aching—his chest, too. He found it difficult to breathe. Stress, he told himself. And no wonder. He had to find the signal block, had to get in touch with the Chief of State’s flagship. Had to get a signal out to the Sector Medical Facility on Nim Drovis.
“All maintenance droids of the See-Three category. Search for nonstandard equipment in …” What color would the lines be, that a signal blocker would be cut into? “Nonstandard equipment in the green lines.” He hoped that was right. His head was throbbing. “Implement immediately.”
Not that it would do much good, he thought. Droids were systematic. Their method of hunting for nonstandard equipment would be to start at the Adamantine’s nose and work to the stern, investigating every hatch and relay, rather than checking the most obvious places first, the places where some member of Seti Ashgad’s small good-faith party might have made a few moments for himself alone.
Not that it had to be Ashgad. A signal blocker could have been set with a timer. The thing could have been planted in the Adamantine before their inconspicuous departure from Hesperidium.
Zoalin found that without thinking about it, he had slumped back into his chair. His hands and feet felt cold. He cut into the image of the flagship Borealis, distant against the blackness of the stars. So close, but kilometers away in the palely shimmering green glow of the planet beneath.
Had this, whatever it was, broken out there, too? Was Captain Ioa trying to reach him?
He leaned his head back. Twenty minutes, he thought. Twenty minutes. He felt as if he were in a turbolift, plunging into long darkness.
“I realize there’s been a great deal of ill said about the Rationalist Party over the past few years.” Seti Ashgad had risen from his chair as if the sheer importance of his cause drove him to his feet, and paced restlessly back and forth behind it. “But I assure you, Your Excellency, that we’re not the—the strip-mining capitalists we’ve been portrayed. The Newcomers went to Nam Chorios in the hopes of opening new frontiers. Individual entrepreneurs can’t get a foothold in Pedducis Chorios. Places like Nim Drovis and Budpock and Ampliquen have their own civilizations, settled