Read Online Star Wars - Planet Of Twilight by Barbara Hambly - Free Book Online Page B

undetected.”
    The Death Seed! Leia's breath left her, as if with physical shock.
    Seven hundred years ago that plague had wiped out millions.
    Whole sectors had relapsed into primitive subsistence, as those who understood machinery and spaceflight had perished wholesale . . .
    It was the casualness of Dzym's tone that galvanized Leia into action.
    She rose from the divan, pulled the cloaklike folds of her robe more closely around her--the sunlight held no heat--and made her way shakily to the far end of the terrace. Perhaps twenty-five meters below her, just above where the walls of the great, rambling house merged into the harsh basalt of the bluff itself, another terrace ran the length of that side of the building and curved around the face of the cliff.
    Heavy hedges of brachniel and 1oak grew from planters of imported soil as windbreaks around two sides, brilliant and alien green against the gray permacrete. A sort of gazebo stood at one end of the terrace, the shade densely black within. A complex system of mist jets and pipes mitigated somewhat the dryness of the air. By the way Ashgad turned, Leia guessed that Dzym sat within the gazebo's shade.
    There was a third being on the terrace, stretched out on a black-and-orange air-duvet under a veritable rainshower of air misters, and Leia flinched with revulsion at the sight of it, and the sound of its gluey, tuba bass.
    “Dzym's right.” It rolled over, flexed its gelid length--at roughly twelve meters, it was the longest Hutt Leia had ever seen. It was massive, without Jabba's obesity; like a young Hutt in its agility and speed but grown to the size of an old one. “You couldn't have gotten past the medical scans without them. And only droids would have taken the vessels into hyperspace without a second jump coordinate.”
    Hyperspace!
    Marcopius. Ezrakh. Captain Ioa. Those poor children of her honor guard . . . Threepio and Artoo.
    Sickness and horror swept her, replaced a moment later by a burning rage.
    “Yes, but at a hundred thousand credits apiece!”
    “Cheap at the price.” The Hutt shrugged. "Dymurra thought it was worth the expenditure. I agree with him. It wasn't enough to have Liegeus put through that 'Mission accomplished, we're leaving for Co-ruscant' message, or even the faked transmissions from the jump point.
    We couldn't bring those vessels here. We couldn't destroy them without the risk of telltale debris. And what do you care, anyway?“ Dymurra paid for the synthdroids, not you.”
    “And that makes it all right?” Ashgad turned impatiently from the railing to face the huge, reclining shape. “With an attitude like that, it's no wonder you're no longer ruling this territory, Beldorion.”
    “Anyway,” rumbled Beldorion cryptically, “the price is about to come down on them, isn't it? And what's three hundred thousand credits, if you can get rid of all evidence of where Her Excellency is and what became of her?” Once Rieekan goes into a coma, the Council's going to be chasing its tail for days, each member trying to keep the next from being named successor."
    He swelled up a little and produced a burp of cosmic proportions, leaking green drool from his mouth and releasing a vast breath of gases that Leia could smell from the terrace above. He rolled a little and delved with one tiny, muscular hand into a washtub-size porcelain bowl of some kind of pink-and-orange snack food that rested on the duvet at his side. Even Ashgad turned his face aside in disgust.
    “And don't speak to me about not ruling this Force-benighted planet anymore,” the Hutt added, around a mouthful of small, squirming things.
    “No one forced me--me, Beldorion the Splendid, geldorion of the Ruby Eyes--to retire. I ruled this world longer than your petty Empire existed, and I ruled it well.”
    He shoved another handful of whatever it was into his enormous mouth.
    Some of it escaped and made it nearly to the edge of his duvet before he tongued it up. “So don't