Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [93]
Of Dzym she could hear nothing. Did he make sound, when he moved? Pressed to the harsh plaster of the wall, she ignored the sudden jab of a droch bite on her ankle, probed deeper with her mind. There was a kind of heavy vibration somewhere in the house, the steady whine, as of machinery. The house generator, of course. Liegeus had said Dzym wasn’t capable of “that kind of thinking,” to cut into the household computer and make it tell what the security keypad numbers were.
Leia wondered how good their security was.
Whether it was the smell of Hutt or revulsion over the drochs or just overwrought nerves, she was feeling light-headed by the time she found her way out of the dim, curtained quarters of the Hutt to a door into what was clearly Seti Ashgad’s portion of the house, the long, sun-flooded chamber that looked out onto the terrace below her own balcony. Here the ceilings were higher, the heavy, heat-trapping curtains drawn back from the line of transparisteel panels that gave onto the terrace. There was an airy functionality about the place, with its immobile wood-and-leather chairs, its desk put together from planks of buttonwood, its simple sideboard. The monitor screen in the niche above the desk was new, Leia saw, a high-definition Sorosuub X-80—they’d had to cut the niche bigger for it, and so recently that the chipped-out plaster hadn’t yet had time to discolor. Leia paused in the doorway to listen again—If Dzym’s mind doesn’t work in terms of computers, how did he get a job as secretary?—then crossed to the desk and brought out the board, keying in quickly a request for systems shell. Once she knew the type of system she pulled up data on the house itself.
Wiring diagrams showed her the shaft that led down through the heart of the mesa, to the garage from which she’d seen Ashgad’s henchmen take that elegant—and nearly new—black speeder at dawn. After a little puzzling she identified where she was and where the head of the shaft lay on the other side of the house near the docking bay and its compound of workshops and labs.
She ran a print, then called up another instruction and asked for further data. The docking compound beyond those blast doors she’d seen was enormous. For a world where equipment of any sort was scarce, there seemed to be no shortage of it there.
A complete complement of the extremely expensive equipment that charged the antigrav coils of speeder buoyancy tanks. A major computer system hooked to an independent generator and dedicated to hyperspace engineering. Liegeus’s holo faking works: Good grief! Millions of separate data clips, far beyond hobby or art. That, too, had to have been part of their plan, and might explain why in five days there’d been no attempt at rescue.
Another system centered in this very room—probably, thought Leia, behind the slatted cupboard doors to her right. She got up, still reading down at the backup systems screen: high-security locks with backup wiring on various doors, including, she saw with a certain annoyance, that of the lift from this level down to the garage.
She ran a zoom check on the schematic. No such backup existed on the lift shaft’s repair stairway. Her calf muscles would ache, but she could do it. She keyed a further command to open the combinations on file. Yes, she’d gotten that of her chamber door correct—silly, but it gratified her to have her skill officially confirmed. It was listed as having been changed shortly after dawn that morning, probably the moment Seti Ashgad disappeared into the morning glow. She ran a print, folded the sheets of plast together, stuffed them into the pocket of her trousers, and went to investigate what was behind the slatted doors that rated a separate power backup.
It was a CCIR board. The central control unit for synthdroids—How many of the things did he have? Leia counted wiring for two dozen. Two dozen?
She tried to remember what she’d learned about synthdroids from her one tour of the Loronar Corporation facility on Carosi’s larger moon. That had been during the Daysong uproar about the relative rights