Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [97]
I can’t let them find me, she thought. I can’t.
It took everything she had left to climb the stairs again, holding to the walls, exhausted and sick with the pain of the lightsaber burn. She collapsed again on the floor after letting herself in the room, and lay there for a long time, curled in a fetal position in the fading bars of sunlight, wanting only to sleep until the universe was made new.
In time she got up and hid the lightsaber, the wafer she had copied, and all the printouts under the duvet and pillows of her bed. She called out again, reaching out with her mind, but it was little more than a despairing whisper: Luke … then she did pass out, into dreams like the colorless wells of death.
“Igpek Droon,” boomed the deep voice of the masked and hooded passenger, and what looked like a bad prosthetic hand in a cheap black glove—so bad it might almost have been a droid’s jointed metal fingers under there—held out fifty-seven credits worth of various bars and tokens to the captain of the freighter Zicreex. “I’m in the employ of the Antemeridian Freight Lines. It’s necessary that my droid and I reach Cybloc XII as soon as possible.”
The captain counted the money, looked at the glowing yellow lenses that were visible through the full-face breathing mask that covered most of her prospective passenger’s head. Long, pale hair flowed out around it, giving it the eerie look of a decorated skull.
With the driving back of the Gopso’o rioters by government troops, every docking bay still operable in the port was jammed: with business people, stranded travelers, aliens of all sorts and descriptions fleeing the fire-ravaged city. Most were paying lots more than fifty-seven credits, but then, most were trying to get on to better vessels than the Zicreex, which would have been termed unprepossessing even by the charitable.
Captain Ugmush didn’t care. She had a human for an engineer who kept the thing running, and her several husbands, when they weren’t fighting one another, made a fair team for trading goods to the rougher worlds of the sector, which was about as good as Gamorreans could do in competition with more sophisticated species. Ugmush herself, her long hair dyed pink and her heavily muscled arms and breasts sporting fifteen parasitic morrts to demonstrate her strength and endurance, was aware that few aliens could stand to travel on Gamorrean ships. She knew it wasn’t likely she’d be besieged with offers as long as there was one other vessel in port.
“You got a deal.”
The black-robed alien who called himself Igpek Droon, clanking just faintly as he walked, made his way up the ramp and into the ship, trailed by his little R2 unit droid. Ugmush wondered if this person Droon might be talked into selling his droid when they got to Cybloc XII.
14
It was all there, in black on the pale green plast.
Seti Ashgad’s communication with Moff Getelles of Antemeridian, making arrangements to destroy the gun stations in return for weaponry and first cut of the profits when Loronar Corporation moved in on Nam Chorios to strip-mine it for its crystals.
Memos from Dymurra—who turned out to be CEO of Loronar for the Core systems—detailing which minorities, disaffected factions, and splinter groups would rise in revolt, suitably armed at Loronar Corporation’s expense, in order to split the Republic peace-keeping fleet and allow Getelles’s Admiral Larm to move in.
A comparison chart by Seti Ashgad, showing the trade-offs in cost between the expenses of weaponry, bribes, agitators, and planted atrocity stories against the first year’s profits on programmable CCIR crystals.
Details of the meeting, including a payoff to Councillor Q-Varg, coordinating Leia’s disappearance with the poisoning—not to death,