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.She leaned against the doorjamb, listening deeply, focusing her mind through the hazybrightness of the Force.Relaxed.watching a smashball game--illegally--on the subspace net.The Dreadnaughts were getting pasted again.Reassured, she surveyed the annex room behind her.It was filled with packing crates.Stacks of them, piled around the lift doors, dark anonymous greenplastene bare of destination but emblazoned with corporation logos and serial numbers.Mekuun-made DEMP guns and heavy laser carbines.Seinar ion cannons.Scale-50 power cells, sizedfor the smaller, older TIE'S and Blastboats; smaller cells, C's and B's and Scale-20's by the dozen.Blaster size.We've lost contact with Bot-Un again, she heard Jevax say.That's where they're bringing in the men.The realization came to her, complete and logical.Bring themdown the Corridor, come in high, drop fast, run along above the ice.Communications between the rifts failed so frequently that it might be a week before anyone took anice walker out across the glaciers to check.Or more."You getting all this, Artoo?" She pulled her helmet back on, braced herself as they slipped out to thefrozen nightmare outside.She had to cling to the droid for support as they struggled back to the crawler,picked up the trail of the walker's huge grippers across the ice.The astromech tweeped assent.Ohran Keldor, last of the Emperor's fleet designers.Designing something new? She shook her head.Only with an effort now could she see the almostobliterated tracks.Too expensive, beyond even the capacity of a coalition of the Senex lords, and thecorporations they dealt with would be wary of backing them on major construction.Keldor had moreprobably been called in as a consultant on some older apparatus, maybe the very Jedi equipmentNubblyk and Drub had been looting and smuggling out all those years ago.But her instincts whispered, No.Something bigger.Something else.Something they'd assassinated Stinna Draesinge Sha over, lest she hear something that would ringfamiliar from her own studies and notify the Republic of their danger.The black rock outcroppings of the main ridge formed a wind trap east of the hangar itself.No one,thought Leia, grimly hanging on to the crawler's control bar, would have been able to track the site of thetunnel from the air.The pale sun's light barely penetrated the scudding clouds and only faint scuffsremained of the walker's tracks.She only saw the cave where they left the craft, and the permacretepillbox that covered the shaft head itself, because of the puckery masses of dimples fast fading in theblowing snow.New military structures at the landing pad but no improvements on the shaft head, thought Leia,maneuvering the crawler behind the last spur of rock out of sight of the walker in its cave.And bringingElegin in the long, cold way around.Don't trust the Senex lords, do we?Snow squeaked under Leia's boots as she crossed to the pillbox, and the hot air rushing out around heras the shaft head doors opened to Artoo's breaker program made her gasp.She stepped inside quickly,the droid at her heels, and the door slid shut once more.More crates filled the shaft head, bearing all thelogos and labels she'd seen before: Mekuun, Seinar, Kuat Drive Yards, Pravaat--the massive consortiumin the Celanon System that manufactured and sold uniforms to whoever cared to pay for them.The palestrings of battery-run glowpanels threaded around the room showed the floor scratched with fresh dragmarks and spotted with oil leaked from secondhand droids.Han.I've got to let Han know.Kill you all, Drub McKumb had said.They're gathering.They're there.Five sets of tracks marked the powdered snow that lay all over the cement floor, ending at the doors ofthe lift.Four humans and the broad, short, slightly rounded prints of what might have been a Sullustan ora Rodian.Leia recalled that many of the executive board of Seinar were of the rotund, flat-nosedSullustan race.She recalled other things as well."Artoo," she said softly, "I want to see how this tunnel links up with the smuggler tunnels under Plawalitself.But if we get into any trouble, your default command is to head back to the crawler and get Han."While she spoke she broke the seals on three of the crates, helped herself to a flamethrower, a semiautoblaster carbine, and a forcepike, which she assembled swiftly, deftly, as the boys in the Hoth dugout hadtaught her when it looked as if they weren't going to get out before the Imperials came in."Give him coordinates, information, everything.Don't stay to defend me.All right?"The droid beeped and trailed her onto the lift.The smuggler tunnel would surface somewhere in Plawal, she knew.But from Han's description of thelava caves and the well in its circle of standing stones--from the fact that Roganda Ismaren had spent apart of her childhood here--she guessed they connected with the crypts under Plett's House as well.What she was concealing there, and how she had managed to thwart sensor probes after people starteddisappearing, Leia couldn't imagine, but it was clear to her now what had become of Drub McKumb andNubbyk the Slyte.and who knew how many more besides?Vader.and Palpatine, Mara had said.And, evidently, Palpatine's concubine.though the woman hadn't struck Leia as particularly strong inthe Force.Certainly not imbued with that aura of eerie strength, that silence that even as a cocky teenageSenator she had felt emanating from the Emperor.What, then?Leia slung her weaponry straps over her shoulders, and stepped out warily into the dark.For a long distance the smuggler tunnel was simply raw stone, chewed out of the bedrock of the planetunder five thousand years' worth of glacier, which ran occasionally through the widened beds of what hadonce been underground streams.The floor had been smoothed to permit the passage of cargo droids:ramps built, roofs heightened, crevasses bridged.It was easy to follow; all she had to do was move assilently as she could.Later, when the way branched, or cross-tunnels were cut in the rock, or when they passed throughcaves stifling with fumes and smotheringly hot from sullen craters of steaming mud, she listened, stretchingout her senses, feeling in the Force for the touch, the essence of the five people who led her on [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.She leaned against the doorjamb, listening deeply, focusing her mind through the hazybrightness of the Force.Relaxed.watching a smashball game--illegally--on the subspace net.The Dreadnaughts were getting pasted again.Reassured, she surveyed the annex room behind her.It was filled with packing crates.Stacks of them, piled around the lift doors, dark anonymous greenplastene bare of destination but emblazoned with corporation logos and serial numbers.Mekuun-made DEMP guns and heavy laser carbines.Seinar ion cannons.Scale-50 power cells, sizedfor the smaller, older TIE'S and Blastboats; smaller cells, C's and B's and Scale-20's by the dozen.Blaster size.We've lost contact with Bot-Un again, she heard Jevax say.That's where they're bringing in the men.The realization came to her, complete and logical.Bring themdown the Corridor, come in high, drop fast, run along above the ice.Communications between the rifts failed so frequently that it might be a week before anyone took anice walker out across the glaciers to check.Or more."You getting all this, Artoo?" She pulled her helmet back on, braced herself as they slipped out to thefrozen nightmare outside.She had to cling to the droid for support as they struggled back to the crawler,picked up the trail of the walker's huge grippers across the ice.The astromech tweeped assent.Ohran Keldor, last of the Emperor's fleet designers.Designing something new? She shook her head.Only with an effort now could she see the almostobliterated tracks.Too expensive, beyond even the capacity of a coalition of the Senex lords, and thecorporations they dealt with would be wary of backing them on major construction.Keldor had moreprobably been called in as a consultant on some older apparatus, maybe the very Jedi equipmentNubblyk and Drub had been looting and smuggling out all those years ago.But her instincts whispered, No.Something bigger.Something else.Something they'd assassinated Stinna Draesinge Sha over, lest she hear something that would ringfamiliar from her own studies and notify the Republic of their danger.The black rock outcroppings of the main ridge formed a wind trap east of the hangar itself.No one,thought Leia, grimly hanging on to the crawler's control bar, would have been able to track the site of thetunnel from the air.The pale sun's light barely penetrated the scudding clouds and only faint scuffsremained of the walker's tracks.She only saw the cave where they left the craft, and the permacretepillbox that covered the shaft head itself, because of the puckery masses of dimples fast fading in theblowing snow.New military structures at the landing pad but no improvements on the shaft head, thought Leia,maneuvering the crawler behind the last spur of rock out of sight of the walker in its cave.And bringingElegin in the long, cold way around.Don't trust the Senex lords, do we?Snow squeaked under Leia's boots as she crossed to the pillbox, and the hot air rushing out around heras the shaft head doors opened to Artoo's breaker program made her gasp.She stepped inside quickly,the droid at her heels, and the door slid shut once more.More crates filled the shaft head, bearing all thelogos and labels she'd seen before: Mekuun, Seinar, Kuat Drive Yards, Pravaat--the massive consortiumin the Celanon System that manufactured and sold uniforms to whoever cared to pay for them.The palestrings of battery-run glowpanels threaded around the room showed the floor scratched with fresh dragmarks and spotted with oil leaked from secondhand droids.Han.I've got to let Han know.Kill you all, Drub McKumb had said.They're gathering.They're there.Five sets of tracks marked the powdered snow that lay all over the cement floor, ending at the doors ofthe lift.Four humans and the broad, short, slightly rounded prints of what might have been a Sullustan ora Rodian.Leia recalled that many of the executive board of Seinar were of the rotund, flat-nosedSullustan race.She recalled other things as well."Artoo," she said softly, "I want to see how this tunnel links up with the smuggler tunnels under Plawalitself.But if we get into any trouble, your default command is to head back to the crawler and get Han."While she spoke she broke the seals on three of the crates, helped herself to a flamethrower, a semiautoblaster carbine, and a forcepike, which she assembled swiftly, deftly, as the boys in the Hoth dugout hadtaught her when it looked as if they weren't going to get out before the Imperials came in."Give him coordinates, information, everything.Don't stay to defend me.All right?"The droid beeped and trailed her onto the lift.The smuggler tunnel would surface somewhere in Plawal, she knew.But from Han's description of thelava caves and the well in its circle of standing stones--from the fact that Roganda Ismaren had spent apart of her childhood here--she guessed they connected with the crypts under Plett's House as well.What she was concealing there, and how she had managed to thwart sensor probes after people starteddisappearing, Leia couldn't imagine, but it was clear to her now what had become of Drub McKumb andNubbyk the Slyte.and who knew how many more besides?Vader.and Palpatine, Mara had said.And, evidently, Palpatine's concubine.though the woman hadn't struck Leia as particularly strong inthe Force.Certainly not imbued with that aura of eerie strength, that silence that even as a cocky teenageSenator she had felt emanating from the Emperor.What, then?Leia slung her weaponry straps over her shoulders, and stepped out warily into the dark.For a long distance the smuggler tunnel was simply raw stone, chewed out of the bedrock of the planetunder five thousand years' worth of glacier, which ran occasionally through the widened beds of what hadonce been underground streams.The floor had been smoothed to permit the passage of cargo droids:ramps built, roofs heightened, crevasses bridged.It was easy to follow; all she had to do was move assilently as she could.Later, when the way branched, or cross-tunnels were cut in the rock, or when they passed throughcaves stifling with fumes and smotheringly hot from sullen craters of steaming mud, she listened, stretchingout her senses, feeling in the Force for the touch, the essence of the five people who led her on [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]