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By Root 542 0

him for what it really looked like. From above it looked fairly normal—a compound surrounding a number of buildings including a tall tower. From the ground what became apparent was that, aside from the entryway and the tower itself, the buildings he’d seen were all constructed below the planet’s surface. Gavin slid the landspeeder to a stop near the entryway beside several other land-speeders and then led Mirax and Corran down through the stairs to the compound’s main courtyard. The stark white color of everything aided the suns in producing glare, but Corran realized that white absorbed far less solar energy—too much of which already made Tatooine unbearable as far as he was concerned.

A slender, gray-haired woman emerged through one of the arched doorways and immediately smiled. “Gavin Darklighter, how you have grown!” Boiling out around from behind her came a number of small children, ranging from toddlers to curious preadolescents.

“Aunt Lanal!” Gavin trapped the woman in a hug, then freed her and performed introductions that included her and the half-dozen cousins. Corran shook hands all around, but immediately lost track of names.

Lanal explained that she was Huff Darklighter’s third wife and all of the children were hers. “Biggs’s death shook Huff. He decided he wanted more heirs. His second wife decided she wasn’t interested in having any more than the one she’d already borne. She left, and Huff married me.”

“Biggs’s mother died before I was born. Aunt Lanal is actually my mother’s sister, so she’s my aunt on both sides.” Gavin gave her a kiss on the forehead. “Is Uncle Huff available?”

Lanal nodded. “He asked me to put you in the library. He’s meeting with someone else right now, but he should be free shortly.”

“Great.”

The Darklighter estate struck Corran as an expensive compromise between the practicalities demanded by Tatooine and the essence of elegance as defined in other places within the galaxy. Fountains and pools would have been a foolish waste, but Huff succeeded in providing water features by encasing them entirely in transparisteel. Whereas a simple decorative column in any other home might have been painted brightly, Huff filled it with water and bubbled air up through it. Tiles on the thick walls were decorated and colored in such a way that they created optical illusions meant to diminish the blockiness of the house’s design. Liberal use of transparisteel gave the dwelling an openness that it would not have otherwise had, yet elsewhere in the house more traditional design and decoration made Corran feel as if he’d never left Coruscant.

The library into which Lanal guided them was just one such room. Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined all the walls except where the doorways split them in two places. They entered through the south wall, and a closed double doorway bifurcated the east wall. The shelves and the doors were probably of duraplast, but Corran couldn’t rule out actual wood having been used. If that’s true, it had to be imported from many light-years away and probably cost as much as a squadron of X-wings.

Corran felt a chill run through him as he entered the library. Box after box of datacards filled the shelves, though trinkets and other odds and ends spaced them out a bit. What made Corran feel odd about the room was that it reminded him very much of the library in the Lusankya annex facility through which he had escaped from Isard. Though no trace of it was found after the Lusankya blasted its way free of Coruscant, the setup had been almost identical to the Imperial library in the private floor of Imperial Palace. At least it seemed so to Corran when he viewed a broadcast hologram about the palace.

I suppose a businessman like Huff Darklighter would want a decor that made Imperial officials feel at home. The briefing files Winter had given Corran about Huff Darklighter left no doubt that Huff had worked out an accommodation with the local Imperial officials that had given him free rein to operate on Tatooine. Those same arrangements also got his son Biggs his appointment to the Imperial