Star Wars_ Splinter of the Mind's Eye - Alan Dean Foster [20]
“Okay. Since you know we’re strangers, you know what we need. We have to get off this planet.” The Princess gave him a warning look, but he shook it off.
“No, relax. She does have the Force about her.” He turned back to face the oldster. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Just old Halla,” the woman declared blankly. “And you just want to get off Mimban. You didn’t pick me a simple one, did you.” She frowned slyly. “Say, how did you two get here, anyways? You can’t convince me you came on the regular supply ship.”
“Regular supply ship?” Leia exclaimed. “You mean Circarpous knows about this installation?”
“Now, woman, did I say where the transport was from?” Halla snorted derisively. “The Circarpousians … those provincials! This place is right in their backyard and they don’t know about it. No, the Imperial government operates the mine and the towns direct.”
“We suspected as much,” Luke admitted.
“They monitor space out for many planetary diameters,” Halla went on. “The Circarpousians have a pretty good colony going on Ten. If a ship passes anywhere close by, they shut down everything. The mine, the landing beacon, everything.”
“I think I see why they didn’t detect us,” Luke ventured. Leia put out a restraining hand, looked at him warningly. He shook her off. “Either we trust Halla or we don’t. She already suspects enough to turn us over to the local enforcers anytime she wants to.”
He looked openly at the old woman. “We were traveling from Circarpous X to Four on business.”
“You were coming from the Rebel base on Fourteen, you mean,” Halla corrected him smugly. “So much for trust.” When Luke choked on his reply, she waved it away. “Never mind, boy. The only government I recognize is my own. If I wanted to sell out the Rebels, do you think that base’d still be there?”
Luke forced himself to relax, smiled at her. “We were traveling in a pair of single-seat fighters. If the instrumentation here is standard, it’s not calibrated to recognize anything that small. That must be why there’s been no alarm raised. We got down undetected.”
“Where are your two ships?” Halla asked with concern. “If they’re nearby, they might be found soon.”
Luke made an indifferent gesture in a generally northeast direction. “Out there, somewhere, several days’ walking. That’s if the muck that passes for ground here hasn’t swallowed them up by now.”
Halla gave a gratified snort. “Good! People don’t stray very far from the towns. Not likely they’ll be discovered. How did you manage to land without the field and beacon?”
“Land!” the Princess snapped. “That’s funny. We ran into some kind of field-distortion effect, produced by the energy mining, I’ll bet. It wiped out our on-board instrumentation. I’d expect a ship needs special shielding to pass through an atmosphere affected by that kind of waste energy. It’s a damn good thing we did, though, or we would have set down right on the Imperials’ field,” she finished.
“You see, Halla,” Luke explained. “You have to help us arrange off-world passage.”
“Next to impossible, boy. Think of something else. You’re here illegal, without proper identification. The moment anyone asks you to produce it and you can’t, they’ll dump you in the local lock-tight for questioning. The local head is a mind-ugly-ug named Grammel.” She looked at each of them in turn, solemn. “A good man to avoid.”
“All right,” Luke agreed easily, “then if we can’t leave through normal channels, you’ll have to help us steal a ship.”
For the first time since she’d joined them, Halla sat speechless. “Anything else you’d like, boy?” she finally wondered. “Grammel’s cloak of office, or maybe the Emperor’s Dualities? Steal a ship? You’ve got to be out of your mind, boy.”
“We’re in sound company, then,” the Princess observed with satisfaction.
Halla turned on her. “I’ve had just about enough