Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [99]
Grand Moff Tarkin was probably good to his wife and children, too, if he’d had any, she thought, disgusted with her own naïveté. The man who pulled the lever on the Death Star that destroyed Alderaan would undoubtedly have been kind to someone he cared for. Her hand closed tight on itself for a moment, her breath shaky with rage.
Then, face cold and still, she began looking through the plast sheets again, searching for something …
There. Invoices for the building of the Reliant. A charging mechanism for antigrav lifters and speeder buoyancy tanks, to make prospecting for crystals easier once the gun stations had been destroyed and the big trader vessel was free to take off. She studied the schematics for the vessel. A curious amount of shielding, she thought. Double and triple hulls with internal baffles—What kind of radiation did they think they were going to encounter?
Leia sat back, staring out the windows at the gaudy sunset sky.
She felt she’d slept longer, though by the light she’d only been out for a few hours. There was fresh water in the pitcher and signs that someone—probably Liegeus—had been in the room. She’d waked with a blanket over her, and was gladder than ever that she’d forced herself to conceal the flimsiplast and the lightsaber before finally passing out. When she had lain down she felt like she was dying.
In fact, the sensations had been curiously similar to her brush with the Death Seed.
But Dzym hadn’t been around. If Dzym had known where she was, and what she was doing, she certainly wouldn’t have waked up here.
She pushed up her sleeve. Her flesh was reddened in a few places and she had picked up a couple more droch bites, but there was no sign of violence. No sign of the broken capillaries, the bruising that the secretary’s fingers had left.
The purplish twilight of day was dimming into deeper night, windless and still with sunset. Leia thought about waiting until dawn, then shook the thought away. It wasn’t as if any natural predators walked Nam Chorios’s nights. Delay would only bring Ashgad’s return eight hours closer. If she acted now, there was a good chance they wouldn’t miss her until morning.
Leia got to her feet, unsteady at the knees. The water pitcher was of the vacuum type. A turn of the cap sealed it shut. It was heavy, hung over her shoulder by a makeshift strap of torn bedsheet. She rolled together two blankets and put on the two spare shirts Liegeus had given her. At the touch of them, her anger at him faded. He could not have known what he was getting into, and once in, it would have been too late.
The doorpad combination had been changed while she slept, and she activated her lightsaber and drove it into the innards of the lock. It was now or never. She could afford no delay.
Ashgad’s study first. There were two more things she needed to find out.
The study faced north, like her room. Its inner wall was curtained in shadow, but the faded sunset reflected from the cliffs and faceted towers of crystal of the mountains beyond the plateau, and the ghostly crazy quilt of light lay across the white tiled floor with a strange radiance that was somehow comforting. Leia called up the main files, ran a scan-and-print on everything concerning the Death Seed. It was fifty or sixty sheets, double sided, closely spaced, and she shoved those into her bedroll with the rest of the printouts she’d gotten earlier.
Then she paged through the directories until she found what she needed: maps of the area, elevations, travel guides. There was a village twenty kilometers away, on the other side of the mountain spur on which the fortress stood. Ashgad would look there, she thought. Odds were good they wouldn’t have equipment strong enough to send a signal offplanet, anyway. Sixteen kilometers in the other direction was one of the gun stations, on a shoulder of the mountains called Bleak Point. She thought she could reach it, keeping to the hem of the foothills for cover.