Star Wars_ Shadows Of The Empire Part 35

Moonglow was found only on a single satellite world, in a small section of one forest; it grew naturally nowhere else in the galaxy; in fact, it could not be grown anywhere else. Many had tried to transplant the funguslike tree, and all had failed. About the size of a man's fist, the fruit contained in its natural state one of the most potent biological poisons known. A single unaltered slice divided into a thousand tiny pieces would be enough, if consumed, to kill a thousand people and to do it in less than a minute. There was no known antidote, but there was a way to neutralize the poison before eating the fruit. Such preparation of moonglow legally required a chef who had studied the technique for a minimum of two years under a certified Master Moonglow Chef, and the process itself consisted of some ninety-seven steps. Should any of the steps be omitted or performed incorrectly, the resulting dish might cause anything from a mild stomach upset to a painful, thras.h.i.+ng, hallucinatory coma, followed by death. If a would-be diner went into a restaurant that had the proper licenses to offer the dish, the price of a single serving of moonglow would be somewhere around a thousand credits. Xizor generally ate it three or four times a month and had the most respected moonglow chef in the galaxy on his payroll. Even so, a small thrill always arose when he consumed the fruit. Always the possibility, however slight, of an error.

It added a wondrous flavor to the taste.

Eating moonglow was somewhat like Xizor's contest with Darth Vader, when he thought about it. There was no thrill in contending with those you knew you would defeat beyond any shadow of a doubt. But with an opponent such as Vader, lapdog to the Emperor that he was, you had to remember that those teeth were sharp and always ready to bite. He did not think Vader would win, but there certainly was a slight possibility.

It added a wondrous flavor to the contest.

Was it Vader who tripped those warning jitters?

Or was it someone else?

He pushed the moonglow aside, no longer interested in it. He would have Guri run a full security check on his operations, onplanet and off-. And while she was here, he would have her remove the remaining moonglow, too.

If his chef saw anything left on the plate, he would probably quit in high dudgeon. Or worse, he might be upset enough to miss a step next time he prepared the dish. Xizor did not want that. Artists were so temperamental.

He stared at the half-empty plate, whose cost would furnish food for a small family for several months. There was nothing else to be done about the edgy feeling. It probably meant nothing anyway. Jitters, nothing more.

He wished he could believe that.

They sat at a small table in the Underground hotel's restaurant, waiting for their meal to be served.

Dash began, "This is the center of the Empire-"

"It is?" Lando cut in, heavy on the irony. "Uh-oh. We shouldn't be here.

Why, it could be... danger-ous."

"What's your point, Dash?" Luke asked, ignoring Lando's sarcasm.

"The Empire is corrupt. It runs less on loyalty and honor than it does on bribes and graft. Credits lube the gears, and nowhere more than here."

"So? You think we're going to be able to bribe a guard? I don't think Black Sun is likely to put that kind of person on the door," Lando offered.

"Not a guard, an engineer."

"What am I missing here?" Luke asked.

Dash continued: "In a bureaucracy, everything has to be filed and copied and logged in quadruplicate. You can't build anything without permits, licenses, inspections, plans. All we need to do is find the right engineer, one who maybe gambles too much or has more taste than he's got money."

They still looked blank.

"All right," Dash said. "Here's the idea. We know that the really big buildings on this planet extend as far under the surface as they do above it. One thing I know is, no matter how much graywater recycling and reclamation you do, some of it is always going to be lost. Waste products, sewage, they have to be pumped away where bigger and more efficient systems can work on them."

"Basic stuff, don't foul your own nest," Luke said. "So?"

"A building as big as this one"-here he tapped a holographic postcard showing several huge structures that included among them the Emperor's castle-"generates a lot of waste. There has to be a way to get rid of it.

I haven't seen any garbage vans or drain wagons on the streets or in the skies of Coruscant, so they have to break the solid waste down and pump it away, probably as a slurry. Therefore we are talking about pipes."

Luke got it. He looked around the table. Said, "Big pipes."

He saw the others get it.

Chewie said something.

Lando nodded and said, "Chewie is right. Those conduits, if they are big enough to admit people, will certainly be guarded."

Chewie said something else.

"Yeah," Dash said. "Chewie also points out such drains would be hard to locate, given that every building will have similar systems. It's probably a monster maze under the ground."

"Right. But there will probably be fewer guards posted on a big sewage drain than the doors aboveground. They wouldn't really expect any kind of a.s.sault that way; you couldn't move a lot of troops in without making noise their sensors would pick up. But a few men would be lost in the background gurgle, if they were careful."

Lando looked at Luke and Chewie, then back at Dash. "a.s.suming we could find a guide, you are saying you want us to wade through kilometers of sewage to get into this place?" He looked at Dash as if he had just turned into a big spider.

Dash smiled. "Exactly what the guards would think. Who would be that stupid?"

Lando shook his head. "Us. Who else?"

"And finding a guide is no problem. I know somebody."

"I've heard that before," Luke said.

Vader took a deep breath, blew it out, then took another. The energies of the dark side filled him, and he could once again breathe as a normal man did. He focused his anger. It was not right that he be crippled, that he couldn't do this all the time. It was... not... right!

The healing energies held.

As long as he could maintain his indignation, his lungs and breathing pa.s.sages stayed open and clear. He fed the fires of his rage with the unfairness of a galaxy that would not let him be whole.

Still the healing energies held. He fought the sense of relief he felt.

Fought it and kept his anger pure.

And still they held. Almost two minutes now. A new record.

He would grow stronger. He would add Luke's power to his own, and he would eventually be able to shed the armor, to walk around as normal men walked.

Luke...

He tried to stop the smile. Failed.

Sank back into the protection of his breathing chamber, unable to maintain the energies any longer. But even so, he'd managed two minutes.

Eventually it would be ten minutes, then an hour, then as long as he wished.

Eventually.

Leia was not the most patient woman in the galaxy, she knew. Being cooped up in a room, no matter how well appointed that room might be, was not her idea of fun.

She tried meditating, but her mind buzzed too much. She worked on escape plans, but given how little information she had, that was also fairly limited in scope.

Finally she took to exercising. She knew some basic gymnastics, easy enough to do as long as you had a little floor s.p.a.ce. The carpet was almost as thick as a tumbling mat, and while the roof wasn't high enough to allow flips-even if she could still do one-there was nothing stopping her from doing handstands and a.s.sorted presses. She stretched, twisted, did splits, pitted her muscles against gravity in a variety of ways until she worked up a healthy sweat.

When she was done and fairly exhausted, she felt a lot better. She padded into the refresher and cranked up the shower. Turned off the lights and undressed, showered, and got dressed again in the dark. Tricky business, but since she was fairly sure Xizor had a hidden holocam or three in her room, she was not going to give him a show.

Feeling a little sore but better, Leia once again considered ways to escape. Or, more likely, ways to help Luke with whatever plan he had. She was worried about him, but on another level, pleased that he would come for her.

It was nice to know somebody cared that much.

34.

Dash's contact, one Benedict Vidkun, was more than willing to scan the systems, make maps, lead them himself or whatever else they might want-as long as they had plenty of credits.

They didn't really have a whole lot of money among them. Lando had a little stashed here and there, plus what he'd managed to get from the Galactic Bank before his accounts on Bespin were shut down by the Empire.

But under a pseudonym, Leia had a line of credit from the Alliance for use in emergencies, and Luke knew the account's access code. He figured this was as good a time as any to use it. Vidkun was willing to sell himself cheaply, too. The engineer's integrity was apparently worth about three months' salary-and that was not very much.

He was a short, thin man, fish-belly pale, with bulging brown eyes, a wispy beard and mustache, and more than his share of nose. He tended to clear his throat a lot. According to him, he worked nights, slept days, and seldom saw the sun, save when he went to and returned from his duties under the Imperial Complex. His wife, a somewhat younger woman, apparently had very expensive tastes.

"-see this conduit? This is the subsewer for the entire sector. You could drive a landspeeder through it; it's huge. The branch we want is here."

He pointed to the holograph floating over the table. "That one drains Xizor's castle. There's a locked grate to keep out rats and snake eyes and other vermin, but maintenance has the key codes. After that, it's a clear shot to the building pipes, here. About a half kilometer is all."

He touched a control on the projector and the picture changed, enlarged as the viewpoint zoomed in closer on the ma.s.s of noodlelike tunnels.

"How big are those?" Lando said.

"You can see, they're to scale. Big enough for a couple of men to walk side by side, if they ain't too tall." He glanced at Chewie. "The Wook here'll have to hunch down some."

Chewie growled at the little man.

"Those go into the building itself?"

The engineer cleared his throat, a phlegmy rasp. "Yuh. There'll be another rat-grate where they enter the structure. We're not supposed to have the lock codes for those, but, well, it so happens my brother-inlaw Daiv works for the firm that got the construction of Xizor's castle and I can give you those. For a consideration." He grinned, revealing yellow teeth that looked sharper than they should.

Luke and Lando exchanged glances.

"How much of a consideration?" Dash asked.

"Two hundred and fifty credits?"

"A hundred and twenty-five," Lando said before Dash could speak.

"Save us a lot of trouble, we got those codes."

"Blaster energy is cheaper," Lando said. "We can blow the locks. One-fifty."

"Make a lot of noise, you don't want that. Oneseventy-five."

Lando nodded. "Okay, deal."

The engineer smiled nervously and continued. "Now, we got to watch out for the varmint zapper, here." He waved his finger through the diaphanous image. "Walk into that field and bzzzt! it'll cook you faster'n a high-amp microwave blast. As it happens, my other brother-in-law, Lair, he installs these things, and I have the bypa.s.s codes."

"For a consideration," Luke said. His voice was dry.

"Same price as the other?"

Lando cut his gaze to the ceiling.

Dash said, "All right."

"After that, all you got to worry about is getting out of the gather chamber and past whatever guards are down there. I can't help you there; Xizor uses his own people and I don't know any of 'em."

"We'll manage," Dash said.

Vidkun nodded. He stood.

"Where do you think you're going?" Lando said.

"Huh? Home."

"I don't think so," Dash said. "I think maybe you'll stay here with us."

"But you said you ain't ready to go until tomorrow."

"We changed our minds," Dash said. "We want to go now. And since we don't want to find a squad of stormtroopers or Black Sun guards waiting for us when we start wading through the sewers, we'd rather you didn't make any calls."

"Hey, I wouldn't turn you in!"

"Not unless you thought you could get more for us from Black Sun or the Empire," Lando said. "But since you're going to be leading us, anybody starts shooting, guess who gets it first?"

Vidkun looked nervous. He cleared his throat, swallowed, said, "How about if I call my wife and tell her? She'll be really mad at me if I don't."

"So buy her a nice present when you get back," Dash suggested. "You'll have a pocketful of credits, you can make it up to her."

The engineer rubbed at his face, flashed his orpimental smile again.

"Yuh. Well. I guess so, since I don't have much of a choice."

"That's right," Dash said.

The planet-glow was so bright, the incoming and outgoing s.h.i.+ps so plentiful that it never truly got dark here on Xizor's private balcony.