“Your face went all puckered just then,” Driller said. “Is there a problem?”
“No,” Arihnda said. She hadn’t realized she’d reacted. “Sorry. I was just thinking about the Empire taking over our family’s mine three years ago.”
“Sorry, I’d forgotten about that,” Driller apologized. “If it’s too uncomfortable for you to do this…?”
“No, no, I’m fine,” Arihnda assured him.
“Okay,” he said. “And don’t feel like you have to finish tonight. I’ve got a late appointment—you okay with closing up alone?”
“Sure,” Arihnda said. The apartment she shared with Juahir was two hundred levels down and not in the best part of the district, but the rowdies usually didn’t come out into the walkways and platforms until the sunlight had faded from the bits of clear sky above. At this time of year, that was a good two hours away. “Enjoy.”
“Right,” he said drily. “A meeting with a Senate doorkeeper. It’s going to be so much fun.”
He headed out, locking the door behind him, and Arihnda settled in to read.
She had assumed Driller was imagining things, seeing patterns and conspiracies that turned out to be figments of his overblown imagination. He had a tendency to do that.
But in this case, he was right on the mark.
There were twenty-eight mines on the list: twenty-eight Imperial takeovers dating back to a year before Renking had ripped Pryce Mining out of Arihnda’s hands. The majority of them, though—twenty-one, to be precise—had occurred during the past year. She dug through the list, scanning the basic elements, occasionally digging into or at least skimming the accompanying subfiles, looking for common threads. She reached the entry on the most recent event, an attack on an Imperial task force off Umbara—
She paused, frowning, as one of the names in the report caught her eye.
Captain Thrawn.
“No,” she murmured under her breath. Surely it couldn’t be the same blue-skinned nonhuman she’d met at the Alisandre Hotel a year ago. That Thrawn had been a lieutenant, and this one was a captain, and she’d heard somewhere that it typically took ten to fifteen years in the navy to ladder that far up the ranks.
But it was him, all right. There was a subfile attached giving the details of the battle, and the accompanying images left no doubt. The lowly lieutenant that Colonel Yularen had been trying to rescue had leapt to command rank in less than two years.
Mentally, she shook her head. Either he was amazingly competent, or he had impressively powerful friends.
Interesting, but not her concern. Putting him out of her mind, she got back to work.
Focused on her analysis, she didn’t notice the time slipping away, and it was a shock when she looked at the chrono and realized the sun had been down for over half an hour. The rowdies would be starting to gather, but the trip back to her apartment should still be safe if she hurried. She closed down the computer system and headed out, locking the door behind her.
The faint daylight from overhead had long since vanished, but the increased intensity from the streetlamps and brassy advertising signs more than made up for it. Still, the lack of sun somehow created a psychological illusion of darkness.
Up here, where the police were vigilant, things were all right. But in the lower parts of the district, the rowdies would be gathering to drink, spice up, and make noise.
Some of them, eventually, would also start making trouble.
The turbolift car, when it arrived, was packed. The next car might be more comfortable, but Arihnda wasn’t in the mood to wait. Fortunately, the passengers began filing out almost immediately as the car stopped at the more elite residence levels just below the government offices. Twenty levels above hers, her last companion got out, leaving her alone.
Not an ideal situation, certainly not at this hour and this deep. But she should be all right.
And as long as she had the car to herself, she might as well take advantage of the unexpected privacy. Pulling out her comm, she keyed for Juahir.
“Hey,” Juahir answered cheerfully. “What’s up? You got dinner going?”
“Not exactly,” Arihnda said. “I got tied up at the office and I’m just heading home now.”
“Ooh,” Juahir said, her voice going serious. “You okay? Where are you?”
“In the turbolift heading down,” Arihnda said, watching the indicator. “I’m almost—”
She broke off, her breath catching in her throat. The car had reached her level; but instead of stopping, it continued moving down.
“Juahir, it didn’t stop,” Arihnda said, fighting to keep her voice even. Belatedly, she lunged for the control board and punched the next button down.
Too late. The car had already passed that level. She tried again, picking a button ten levels farther down this time. Again, the car reached the landing and continued on without stopping.
“Arihnda? Arihnda!”
“It’s not stopping,” Arihnda ground out. This time she ran her finger down the whole column of buttons. The car ignored all of them.
And it was picking up speed.
“Juahir, I can’t stop it,” she said. “It’s heading down and I can’t stop it.”
“Okay, don’t panic,” Juahir said firmly. “There’s an emergency stop button. You see it?”
“Yes,” Arihnda said. It was at the very bottom of the panel, protected by a faded orange cover. After years of uneventful travel, she’d forgotten it was even there. She flipped up the cover, revealing a less faded orange button underneath, and pressed it.
And grabbed for the handrail as the car screeched to a sudden halt.
For a moment all was silence. “Arihnda?” Juahir called tentatively.
Arihnda found her voice. “I’m okay,” she said. “It stopped. Finally.”
“Where are you?”
Arihnda peered at the indicator. “Level forty-one twenty.”
Juahir whistled softly. “A thousand from the top. Okay. You took your usual turbolift, right?”
“Right.” The car doors slid open. Cautiously, Arihnda peered outside.
She’d never been this far down before, but it looked exactly the way the vids and holos portrayed it. Garish display signs blazed everywhere, much brighter and more strident than the ones higher up, promoting shops or advertising products or flickering with the visual static of malfunction or unpaid bills. Contrasting with the bright colors was the stolid faded-white of the streetlamps, about three-quarters of them working, the rest struggling to maintain illumination or gone completely dark. The walkways beneath the lights, like the lights themselves, were mostly fine, but there were enough broken and missing tiles to emphasize that she was no longer in the city’s upper levels. The building fronts behind the signs ran the gamut from carefully maintained and almost cheerful, to struggling and faded, to dilapidated and slumlike. And everything, even the bravely painted storefronts, seemed dirty.
And then there were the people.
There weren’t many pedestrians on the walkways right now. Most of them were traveling in groups of three or more, as if no one wanted or dared to be alone, and all of them were walking in the odd gait of people who wanted to hurry but didn’t want to look like they were hurrying.
Like the buildings and the walkways, the people also seemed dirty.
“Okay,” Juahir’s voice came from the comm. “You’re going to have to move—that turbolift’s obviously broken, and you don’t want to wait there until someone comes to fix it. There’s another turbolift about six blocks to the west. Can you see the sign?”
Arihnda squinted down the walkway. But the turbolift indicator sign, if it was even theoretically visible from this angle, was completely swallowed up by the glare of the display signs. “No, but I can get there.”
“Okay, go,” Juahir ordered. “We’re on our way—we’ll try to meet you before you get there.”
Arihnda frowned. We? “Is Driller with you?”