Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [90]
Her heart twisted inside her with a sick terror, an awful almost-wish that they’d kept her under the soporific peace of the blossom.
Closing her eyes, she reached out with her mind and heart, formed the image of Luke. He’d come for her once before, when she was trapped in the Termination Block of the Death Star; when she was weak and sick after torture, numb with a grief that it was years before she’d actually feel. I’m here to rescue you, he’d said.
She would have smiled at the memory, had the fear in her not been so great.
In her mind she cried his name: Luke!!! sending it echoing, blazing out across the emptiness of air and crystal and early light. Luke!!!
He had to hear. He had to.
But in the still cold, the deep, heavy movement of the Force seemed to surround her, filling her with the alien sense of its presence. It was like the sound of the sea, drowning all other voices in its great voice.
Luke wouldn’t hear. She was trapped there alone.
She shook the fear away almost at once, and with it the horrible recollection of the man Dzym’s hands on her face, the dreadful, sinking coldness of death.
Luke wouldn’t hear. He wouldn’t come. She had to figure out what to do and what was going on.
They had released the Death Seed.
She returned to the shadowy bedchamber, sat on the end of the bed where the sunlight fell on it, and drew her feet up under the blanket. She felt a droch bite her and scratched furiously, the insect dropping from the bedding into the dazzling carpet of mottled light. It curled itself into a tight brown-black pellet no bigger than a pinhead and died.
Blossom made you accept almost anything, she thought, revolted. Even lying down in bedding that you knew was alive with parasites. She was bitten all over from sitting in the dim chamber at tea with Beldorion the Splendid, too.
They had released the Death Seed. If they could control it, or thought they could control it, through Dzym, it was an easy guess what their negotiations with Moff Getelles and Admiral Larm were. Curse them, she thought. Curse them!
Dzym was somehow a key. He could lay it on them somehow—transmitted by the synthdroids?—and call it off, as he had called it off of her. She remembered the ecstasy on his face, and at other times, his air of paying attention to something else, listening to something else, like a man counting down time.
And yet, what was the point?
But did Moff Getelles really think that he was strong enough to take over the Meridian sector, once quarantine and containment procedures got under way? To hold it in the face of a concerted Republic effort to drive him out?
And for what purpose? Pedducis Chorios, that nest of smugglers and Warlords, would be impossible to control effectively. Durren’s planetary coalition was solidly behind the Republic. Budpock had been one of the Rebellion’s most loyal supporters. Nam Chorios was a waterless, lifeless, poverty-stricken rock.
To complete the Reliant, Ashgad had said.
But she’d seen the Reliant. It was not a planet-killing Dreadnought, but a midsize freighter. Boxes … of both kinds. What kind of payload could a midsize ship carry that would make this all worthwhile, even were the gun stations to be eliminated?
Leia shivered, and rubbed her wrists, where the memory of Dzym’s cold hands remained.
The door chime sounded politely. Leia swung around, startled, drawing the comforter close around her and sliding her hand toward the lightsaber concealed among the pillows.
But it was only Liegeus, bowing shyly in the doorway, a porcelain pitcher of water in his hands. “I’m pleased you’re feeling better, my dear.” His eyes went—as Leia’s had, automatically—to the empty pitcher beside the bed. She had drunk