Shadows of the Empire (33 page)

“Any halfwit pilot who knows the freighter trick can manage it. Our own smugglers do it all the time.”

Xizor rejected the outfit. Tossed it onto the floor and picked another suit of a darker hue and more conservative cut.

“All right. Check it out. If it is Skywalker’s ship, have it watched. When he shows up, have our people kill him. Circumspectly, of course.”

She nodded. Turned and left.

Xizor considered his image in the mirror after he dressed. Very impressive. He also considered what Guri had just told him. He didn’t really expect Skywalker to
arrive here so soon, but it was possible. If it was him, so much the better.

Vader would be made to look a fool by having Skywalker killed under his very nose.

And there was Leia, a problem he would eventually unknot to his satisfaction. He had plenty of time to play with her.

Things could hardly be moving along any smoother, could they?

Business had to go on, however, and Xizor could delegate only so much of it. Certain matters required his attention. He finished his inspection and headed for his receiving sanctum.

Once there, Xizor said, “All right. Who is my first appointment?”

“General Sendo, Prince Xizor.”

Well. The device had been repaired enough to get his name right.

“Send him in.”

General Sendo entered, bowed low.

“Do sit down, General,” Xizor said.

“Your highness.” The man obeyed.

There was the obligatory chitchat. Then Xizor gave him a plastex envelope containing ten thousand in worn, used credit notes, his monthly stipend for keeping Black Sun abreast of things Black Sun might wish to know about. Sendo was a do-nothing officer in the Imperial Intelligence’s Destab Branch who had never seen battle but who could access all kinds of information from where he worked keeping a chair warm.

Xizor put the envelope into the man’s hand and waved him away. There was no chance of any betrayal here—every supplicant who arrived was scanned and body-searched for recorders or holocams, and any who happened to have such things upon his or her person was summarily executed once he stepped inside. The rules were simple, and everybody who entered Xizor’s castle had those rules made known to them each visit.
And if the courier decided to try to tell what he saw without proof, he would be wasting his time. Not to mention that the high-ranking officers of the local police, the local Army garrison, and Imperial Navy Intelligence were also on retainer to Black Sun, and any such reports concerning Xizor would find their way to his desk within moments of being given. Such reporters would simply … disappear, courtesy of Black Sun’s secret employees in the appropriate agency.

Mayli Weng arrived with a petition from the Exotic Entertainers’ Union asking for general pay increases and better working conditions for the twenty thousand workers who were members. Xizor was disposed to grant her request: Happy entertainers made for happier customers. Black Sun’s percentage of the profits—donated by the owners of the businesses in which the entertainers were employed—would thus increase. Weng always asked and never demanded. He’d never even had to use his pheromones on her, she was so polite. Of course, he could not actually make the change himself; that would still be up to the Owners’ League; but they had yet to refuse a recommendation from Black Sun, and he thought it unlikely they would do so now.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Xizor said.

Weng nodded, bowed, thanked him profusely for his generosity, and left.

Bentu Pall Tarlen, the head of the Imperial Center Construction Contracts Division, arrived to hand-deliver the latest bids on major building projects on-planet. With these numbers, Xizor could have his favored companies bid at lower prices and win the jobs. Once construction was started there would, of course, be cost overruns and delays to bring the monies involved up to profitable levels. Black Sun’s percentage of such deals was not inconsiderable.

Through a dummy consortium that hired “consultants,” Xizor arranged a transfer into Tarlen’s account.

The man left, pleased.

Wendell Wright-Sims dropped by to deliver ten kilos of the highest-grade spice. Xizor didn’t indulge in such things himself, but sometimes he had guests who might wish to do so, and he wished to be hospitable as a host. He thanked Wright-Sims and sent him on his way. There was no question of payment; the man did it to maintain favor. It was cheap insurance for him, even though that much spice was probably worth a couple of million credits on the streets.

The head of Black Sun could have had these transactions handled by others, but he preferred to see his most valuable tools face-to-face now and then. It was part of the job, necessary to remind those in the know just who ran the system—and who would come looking for them if they ran afoul of Black Sun.

The work might have been called tedious by some, but Xizor had not been bored in years. There were too many things to think about, too many angles to consider in even the most humdrum situation. Boredom was for those who lacked imagination. Xizor could sit alone in a room for days staring at a wall and be as busy mentally as most men working a complex and demanding job.

The representative from the Jewelers’ Guild arrived …

T
he place Dash led them to was a pit, dirty, smelly, and more of a cave than anything, bounded by raw sewage and rat-eaten power cables. At least that was what it looked like on the outside.

Once they moved past a guard and a gate as thick as Chewie, the inside was a considerable improvement. It might have been a second-rate hotel in any one of a dozen ports Luke had visited. Except that the prices for staying here would have bought them new houses on Tatooine. Each.

Or so Dash told them.

“Now, if we can come up with an idea of how to proceed, I can reach out to my contacts,” Dash said. “Do we have any ideas?”

“Yes,” Luke said. “I have one.”

L
uke took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and sought to clear his mind. Now that they had the time and space, he wanted to try again to reach Leia.

He had removed the stolen uniform and discarded the blaster, and now he sat in the kneeling posture Master Yoda had taught him for meditation. The new clothes Dash had gotten for him felt appropriate: a coarsely woven, dark gray hooded cape and cowl, a plain shirt and a simple vest, pants and jacket, knee boots, all in black, without any insignia. Maybe it was not quite the uniform of a Jedi Knight, but it was close enough.

Relax. Let go …

He concentrated, focused, said the name aloud: “Leia …”

Waited a moment. Then, “Leia, I’m here. I’m coming for you.”

S
he was using the computer, trying to find a floor plan for Xizor’s castle. He wasn’t so foolish as to leave one where she could access it; too bad—

Leia …

It was not telepathy so much as empathy, and since it had happened before, on Bespin, she recognized the sensation quickly.

Luke.

She took a deep breath and let part of it out, held her silence. She was being watched; she must give no sign of the connection with Luke. She pretended to look at whatever the computer image was, but she was seeing through it, into the distance beyond it, beyond the walls.

Leia, I’m here. I’m coming for you
.

That’s what Luke was saying, if she could have put it into words. But it wasn’t expressed in words; it was a feeling, and she felt the truth of it.

Luke was here, on Coruscant, not far away. He was coming for her.

There was a calmness about Luke she hadn’t felt before. He had grown stronger; his control of the Force was better. She was afraid for him and at the same time heartened at the connection. The sense of his confidence was very powerful. Before when she’d felt him touch her this way, it had been when he’d been injured, when Vader was on the brink of destroying him, but now, now he felt strong, in control, potent. Maybe he could rescue her. Maybe they would survive all this somehow.

Leia …

She smiled.
Luke, I’m here …

L
uke Skywalker, Jedi Knight, smiled.

I
n his chamber, Darth Vader felt the ripple in the Force. It was elusive, but he recognized it this time.

Luke.

He was
here
. On Imperial Center.

The knowledge sent a chill through his body.

Vader reached out, tried to touch his son:
Luke …

He frowned. The way was … blocked. It was not only as if Luke’s power had increased; it seemed also to be in two separate places.

Impossible. He was interpreting the energies wrong. There could be no other as strong as Luke in the Force; the Jedi were all dead. The Emperor was gone, light-years away.

What could be causing that echo effect? Surely that was all it was, an echo, some reverberation in the Force.

Of a moment the ripple passed and Vader was alone again.

He waved his hand, raised the lid of his chamber. Stood and moved for his armor. Luke was here, and he was going to find the boy. Find him—

—and bring him to the dark side.

X
izor sat alone in his private dining room deep in his castle and lunched on thin slices of moonglow, a delicate, rare—and expensive—pearlike fruit from more than a hundred light-years away. As he ate, he frowned. It wasn’t the fruit, which was crisp and delicious; no, that was outstanding, was exquisite as always.

But something was wrong.

What it was he could not say, but he had not gotten to the top of an organization where you were either quick and clever or you were dead and gone by ignoring any input, be it logical or intuitive. In the complexity that was Black Sun there were
always
problems—but there were no indications of any more problems than usual. No reports of treachery, no upstart rivals trespassing on forbidden territory, no idealistic and overzealous police officers snooping where they’d been paid to leave off. The machine seemed to be running fine.

But there was an edgy, pit-of-the-stomach, nervous feeling he had learned to pay attention to over the years. It was a
feeling,
yes, but it was not as if he had no emotions, merely that he controlled them.

He chewed thoughtfully on the fruit. Nothing had changed about it, but it seemed to be … not quite as good as it had been a few moments before.

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, thrashing, 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.

T
hey 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 … 
dangerous.
”

“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.”