Balance Point (5 page)

“Thank you.” Aj Koenes, the Talz, opened one large eye to glare at meteorologist Kolb.

Leia emerged from the research building, which was an elegant prefab shipped in by SELCORE. Her own office, due south in the cylindrical admin complex, would take a good stiff walk to reach. She wanted to move and think. Basbakhan followed at a distance, happiest when she ignored him. That way, he could keep his mind on his sworn obligation to protect her. She strode down
Main Street, as they’d taken to calling it, swinging both arms.

Gateway had been erected on the ruins of Tayana, an ancient Duros mining city. Under the new refugee huts, two upturned rock layers came together, one relatively soft and one exceptionally dense. Leia hoped to convert the old hard-rock mines into shelters, in case of breaches in the dome or other emergencies. SELCORE had sent two mammoth stone-chewing machines, and she’d been promised a state-of-the-art mining laser.

If she paused and stood still, she could hear the big chewers underfoot.

Chewers.

Chewie.

Leia’s chest ached every time she thought of the beloved Wookiee. She strode on, frowning. She couldn’t flinch every time something reminded her of his name. Naturally, it’d taken a falling moon to kill the big Wook. Duro had no moon, only twenty orbital cities.

On her left, an open-sided barn housed her major construction machinery, used for outside projects and new housing.

Housing! She’d been warned to expect an influx of Falleen and Rodians.

Not at Gateway, she hoped. That combination would be explosive. Refugee settlements were springing up all around the planet’s equator. They nestled like baby Vors under the protective orbital cities, sheltered by their planetary shields.

A new neighborhood lay beyond the construction barn, a few duracrete-block buildings made from her engineers’ experimental concoctions—local cement, mixed with marsh grass that’d been steeped in an antitoxin
brew and then heat-dried. Beyond that, a hydroponics complex gave off the unsubtle odor of organic fertilizer.

She entered the admin complex by its north door, then plodded up a flight of stairs that circled an interior light-well. A U2C1 housekeeping droid hummed softly, its hoselike arms sweeping back and forth, rattling with the pebbles that constantly fell out of local duracrete. Two stories tall, plus a basement, this building had been constructed on-site by SELCORE before the big ships left.

Was that only nine weeks ago? Leia opened the door of the sparsely furnished room that served her as office and quarters. Near the north-facing window—which overlooked the research building, construction shed, and a patchwork of refugee families’ straggly garden plots—she’d placed the massive SELCORE desk. A stranger had offered a pair of heirloom wall sconces. “I don’t want to burn down our tent,” she’d explained, so Leia agreed to keep them until that family took permanent housing in the new apartments Leia hoped to build, the projected Bail Organa complex.

Along the left wall were her cot and a cooking unit. The refresher was down the hall.

Something smelled odd. C-3PO stood beside the focus cooker.

His head swiveled. “Good evening, Mistress Leia. I am sorry, this would have been more savory an hour ago—”

“Not your problem, Threepio.” She sank down at the table. “I’ll eat now, before it gets any worse.”

Whatever it was—probably soypro cutlets, beside a pile of local greens that had been overcooked to a slimy gel—probably had been tasty once. She made appreciative noises for C-3PO’s sake. His culinary programming wasn’t at fault. Her meeting had gone long.

He took up his usual position at the routing board, assigning
incoming supplies and checking duty lists. He would spend the night working there.

“May I wonder, Mistress Leia …”

She chewed a rubbery bite. “Go ahead, Threepio.”

“If you would permit me to make a personal inquiry …” He trailed off again. Leia thought she knew what was coming.

“Is it possible,” he said, “that Captain Solo will be permanently absent from our … operation? I had rather thought he might appear, or at least communicate, by this time.”

The soypro stuck in her throat. “The last time he called in, he didn’t know exactly where he was going.”

She eyed the protocol droid’s gleaming finish. Was that a touch of corrosion on his left shoulder? She’d sent him outside the dome several times, grateful for an assistant who didn’t need to breathe. Duro-stink wasn’t toxic to most species, but the atmosphere had gotten significantly worse over the last few decades, and now working outside without rebreathers was nearly impossible. Masking up had become habit for most of them.

“Why do you ask? Han hasn’t exactly been respectful to you, over the years.”

C-3PO let his arms hang at his sides. “Recently, I was given a reason to take some pride in our ongoing relationship. I was surprised to learn that on Ruan, he was greeted as something of a hero by my cyborg counterparts.”

“Say that again, Threepio?” She rocked forward. Han, a droid hero? “Where did you hear that?”

“After we returned to Coruscant.” C-3PO reached out expansively with one arm. “There was a HoloNet story you might have missed, since you were somewhat preoccupied. On Ruan, several thousand droids held a
peaceful demonstration against the Salliche Ag establishment, which had meant to deactivate them—”

“I remember that,” she broke in. “Vaguely.” Something about droids being warehoused, so that if the Yuuzhan Vong arrived, they might be presented as a peace offering. Obviously, Ruan didn’t intend to resist the invaders.

“In the subtext,” he said, “I found additional references to someone that the droids had called a ‘long-awaited one,’ the ‘only flesh and blood’ who would be able to help them. As it turned out, Captain Solo did save them from imminent destruction. In our recent flurry of activity, I neglected to mention—”

“Good heavens,” Leia said softly. “Whatever was he thinking?” She’d love to rub his nose in
that
little tale.

Actually, she’d love to rub his nose against hers. It’d been so long.

Did his long silence mean that an enemy had found him? But he had Droma’s help, now. He’d made it plain that he didn’t want hers.

If he was dead, and their last words had been scornful taunts, she would regret it for the rest of her life. She was almost tempted to stretch out with the Force, looking for him.

No. He could be on the other side of the Mid Rim by now. If she reached out and felt nothing, she would fear the worst. She finished her meal in silence, then assembled her dishes for C-3PO to recycle.

“Whatever happens, I’ll take care of you,” she promised. “I need you.”

Then she frowned at the datapad beside her elbow. Before she could turn in tonight, she had to check on the secondary rock-chewer crew. She needed to make sure Abbela sent off her weekly burst to the main Duros
orbital city, Bburru, and then renewed their request for better satellite data. Then there was Gateway’s still-nonfunctional bakery. Its staff had requested a shipment of salt and sucrose, anticipating a cereal crop. Ruan had sent this year’s surplus burrmillet seeds as a goodwill gesture—and then slammed the door on accepting any more refugees.

Also, SELCORE still hadn’t delivered that mining laser.

No wonder she hadn’t had time to go looking for Han. She would’ve given everything to see him, the way he’d been before tragedy tore them apart. He’d matured so much from the scoundrel she’d come to love, although he’d never lost the glimmer in his eyes, or the quirk to his lips—till he lost Chewie. Suddenly, he was Han with the itchy trigger finger again. Han with the low-life friends.
Scoundrel
she could tolerate, even enjoy. All right, she admitted to herself:
Scoundrel
she’d adored. Over the years, he’d learned to drop the defenses that first turned him into a scoundrel. He’d learned to let her glimpse his real idealism. He needed warmth in return.

Over the years, slowly, she’d learned to give it. She loved both sides of him, the knight-errant and the scoundrel—but this time, she must wait until he came to her. She couldn’t baby a full-grown man.

At least he’d been involved in the Ryn rescue episode. Unlike Han, she tried to stay current on HoloNet news. His ongoing involvement with the Ryn seemed like a sign of recovery.

Four hours later, she let down her long coil of hair and tumbled onto her cot.
What am I doing here?
flitted through her mind. Living with only a protocol droid for company—Basbakhan and Olmahk slept in the stairwell—made her feel as if she’d forgotten something
critically important, day after day. It really was fortunate she was too tired to worry … much too tired … to worry too much, anyway … about him … or the children …

Her last thought was,
I really should reach out through the Force for them. How many days has it been? …

The war vessel
Sunulok
, under way for decades, showed its age in a thousand small ways.

Luminescent colonies of lichen and bacteria grew at intervals near its passengers’ head level. Many of those colonies flickered, and some had dulled or dimmed. Communication nodes, where tiny nondedicated villips stood on protrusions of fiery red-orange phong coral, had turned as gray as ash.

Striding down one of its coral-lined arteries, Tsavong Lah ignored those marks of age and death. A living cape clung to his shoulders by its needle-clawed gripping fingers. Rust-colored scales hung like armor plates from his breastbone and shoulder blades. Each larval armor scale had been seeded against bone while a priestly choir sang atonal incantations on his behalf, renewing his pledges of devotion to Yun-Yammka, god of war. Over half a year, the plates had grown slowly, stretching his tendons, tugging his joints to new angles. Then the priests had declared Tsavong Lah’s painful transformation to warmaster complete.

Tsavong Lah embraced pain. Suffering honored his gods, who had created the universe by sacrificing parts of themselves.

Two sentries stood ahead. Their claw joints were immature and deadly sharp, their tattooed insignia far
from complete. Outside his communication center, they snapped their fists to opposite shoulders. Tsavong raised one hand, receiving their homage and signaling his door. The organic door valve thickened at its edges, then dilated.

A striking young attendant, black honor bars burned across her pale cheeks, sat at her station. Seef sprang up and saluted. As she did, her seat extended pseudopodia and propelled itself sideways.

“Warmaster,” she said reverently. “I roused the master villip in your privacy chamber, and I commanded the executor to present himself.”

She strode to the far bulkhead. This part of
Sunulok
had grown an array of geometrically staggered coral blastulas where dozens of smaller villips lay quiescent.

Tsavong Lah strode past them, into the largest blastula of all. He waited until the cubicle’s sphincter closed, then frowned at the leathery ball isolated on a display stand. Budded like yeast from master villips and nurtured in onboard nurseries, or raised in berrylike galls that parasitized certain swamp plants, the mollusklike genus enabled instantaneous, long-distance communication.

The villip mirrored the disgraced executor’s face, sparely fleshed, with the crooked nose of multiple breaks showing great devotion—and maybe more vanity than was appropriate. In place of his left eye, he’d inserted a venom-spitting plaeryin bol.

Few of Nom Anor’s contacts had ever suspected his true identity, not even his succession of duped human servants. His long-term mission included finding and neutralizing their people’s most dangerous enemies. Ironically, after his major assignment at Rhommamool, a few residents of the New Republic honored him as a fallen hero—slain, they thought, in a war he had actually incited.

Yun-Harla, the Trickster goddess, seemed to smile on Nom Anor.

“Warmaster.” The villip gave a good imitation of Nom Anor’s voice. Its bass undertones suggested deference and submission.

“How many have they added to your herd?” Tsavong asked.

“Six thousand four hundred since we spoke. Many came from Fondor. Another dome is under construction.”

“Abominable, but temporary. Be careful not to tip your hand.” Tsavong’s fringed lips, slit many times in devotion to Yun-Yammka, curled in a smile. Fondor had resisted one of his supreme commanders, Nas Choka, less than a klekket ago—two months by the infidels’ calendar. In the process of destroying its ghastly mechanized shipyards, Choka had taken only a few hundred captives.

Then a torrent of starfire wiped out half of Choka’s flotilla and three-fourths of the enemy’s own ships. Tsavong’s tacticians still were trying to decide whether that had been a deliberate sacrifice on the enemy’s part. The infidels’ usual urge to preserve life had been their greatest weakness, their most heinous spiritual perfidy. Were they learning? Had they discovered that sacrifice was the key to victory?

According to spies, the torrent originated in the system the infidels called Corellia, at a monstrous mechanical installation they named Centerpoint. Until Tsavong Lah’s strategists could explain the weapon’s hideous power, they advised him to find a Coreward staging point that lay behind multiple gravity wells from Centerpoint’s direct line of fire.

By happy coincidence, the disgraced executor had been sent to just such a world.

“Watch for worthy ones,” Tsavong reminded him.
“With better sacrifices, we might be cleansing the inner worlds now.”

Nom Anor ducked his head. “And Jedi,” he promised, pronouncing the difficult word well. He’d lived among these people for years. “Difficult to catch, but some seem worthy.”

Tsavong Lah nodded and touched the ridge crest of Nom Anor’s villip. The face faded and smoothed out. The villip retracted, sucking itself back through its mouth hole.

On his distant world, Nom Anor would be putting his new masquer back on—not an ooglith, but a newly bred type that imitated a nonhuman species. Anor’s human contact, on the enemy’s capital world, had agreed to deliver shiploads of captives to his current system.