Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [92]
Picking a simple keypad lock by means of a micron beam was an excruciatingly tedious process, but she had all day, and nothing else to do. Judging by the number of holovids he’d brought, Liegeus didn’t expect to be free of his duties on the Reliant until evening.
Lock picking was one of those skills she’d acquired in her years with the Rebellion, one of the minor guerrilla survival skills pilots had taught one another, just in case, like making explosives out of certain brands of game tokens, or tinkering water filters from sand and flightsuit liners. Something simple that might just save your life. Winter—who’d taught her this particular trick, which she in turn had learned from an outlaw slicer on Coruscant—had said, “Be sure to write down every combination as you try it. Sure as little hawk-bat eggs, the minute you get bored and quit writing them down, you’ll score, and then you won’t remember what the combination was.”
Leia wrote them down, laboriously, with another hairpin scratching in the soft buttonwood back of one of the drawers pulled from the chest. An hour and a half after noon, as far as she could judge from the angle of the sunlight, the lock opened.
With the sensation of having been unexpectedly knocked breathless she stepped back, closed the doors, let the lock click over again. She had to be sure it would open at need—that it hadn’t been a fluke. If they caught her outside and she couldn’t get back in, she would be incarcerated indeed.
It opened a second time. Leia slipped the converted comlink into her pocket, not without a qualm. But the likelihood of encountering Dzym was marginally less than the likelihood that she’d have to get back into this room on less notice than the ten minutes it would take to switch the beam over from comm to micron. She reached back to feel the comforting hardness of the lightsaber tied around her body beneath her shirt and stepped out into the hall.
13
Luke had said to her, over and over on those occasions on which she’d put aside the pressing demands of state to train with her brother’s pupils, The eyes are the most dangerous of the senses, because you’ll believe them first. Pausing at the foot of the stair, Leia shut her eyes, slowed her breath, and listened deeply to the house around her. Reached out with her mind, as Luke had taught her. Felt for the flow and movement of the Force.
It was everywhere, a singing vast as light. The ocean of light, Beldorion had said, utterly unlike anything she had experienced on Yavin, on Coruscant … anywhere that she had ever tried this. Strong and frightening, as if something huge stood just behind her shoulder, watching her with sad wisdom.
Is there a reason to fear this? she thought, holding her fear in check. A minute passed, two. Beneath that deep, humming strength, she was able to sort out true sound in the rooms around her.
Beldorion’s thick voice came from his quarters close-by: “Beautiful, beautiful! All that, from just those unprepossessing little glet-mites!”
And the harsh, nasally whine of a Kubaz’s inflection: “It’s all in finding the correct solution, you see, Master.” That would be the chef, she thought. The unworthy heir of the great and lamented Zubindi Ebsuk. “Under ordinary circumstances, of course, glet-mites would never have contact with a solution of hall d’main excretions—their worlds aren’t even in the same Sector! But it so happens that the hormones contained within halles d’main are the exact physiological complement of the glet-mite teleological systems …”
And under it a cheeping, tiny voices protesting. Leia shivered.