by Martha Wells
Han could get the Falcon ready to launch in three minutes, and this time she thought he did it in two. As the ship lifted out of the plaza, Leia dropped into the comm station. Chewbacca stepped into the cockpit and sank into his oversized copilot’s chair.
She tried to hail the Aegis immediately but Luke was right, the signal was weak until they lifted into the upper atmosphere. As the Aegis’s comm station acknowledged her she could hear Kelvan giving orders in the background, Terae’s urgent voice. “What’s your situation?” she demanded.
The crewman monitoring the comm answered, “We’re out of the sensor disruption area. The corvette’s destroyed one ship and damaged two others. We’ve been engaged by three.” His voice was young and he sounded tense, at the edge of fear. It’s bad, Leia thought.
Finally, Kelvan’s voice said, “Your Highness, are you safe?”
“Yes, we’re on the Falcon.” Leia hesitated, and thought, You have to do this. They could be destroyed at any moment. She didn’t want to lose them. But she had to let them go. “Kelvan, get out of there. Take the Aegis into hyperspace.”
There was a hesitation. “Princess, we can’t leave you—”
“We’re about to enter hyperspace ourselves. You need to get out of here, and get rid of that tracer. If you—I gave Terae a list of message drop sites. If you change your mind about the Alliance, come to the first one on the list a month from now. I’ll meet you.”
“Your Highness, I can’t promise you—I don’t know what the others will want—I don’t know what I want—” A blast that must have rocked the bridge interrupted him.
“Kelvan, please, go!” Leia said, and cut the connection.
The Falcon circled the planet and blasted into space.
As they shot away from the disruption field, contacts sprang up all over the sensors. But Han had chosen their escape route well, and none of the incoming pirate ships was close enough to reach them. The corvette was drawing most of the fire, and Leia saw the Aegis disable a persistent opponent with a pair of concussion missiles and then power away from the battle.
The coordinates for the nearest fleet rendezvous point were already programmed in, and Leia set the navicomp to calculate the jump. Most of his attention on the console, Han said, “They’ll be all right.”
Leia shook her head. She hoped … She just hoped. The Aegis’s ID vanished from the contact screen as it disappeared into hyperspace. A few moments later, the Falcon followed it.
EPILOGUE
Leia was anxious about the Aegis, though there were plenty of emergencies with the fleet to keep her occupied while she waited until it was time to go to the message drop point. Still, she found herself counting the days.
By the end of the month, Sian had recovered from her wound, Luke had been sent off on another mission, and Itran had been questioned extensively by Madine. One of the things that had kept Leia busy had been tracing Itran’s progress through the Alliance, changing any codes or procedures or bolt-holes he might have had access to, checking heretofore unexplained mechanical failures and losses of supply sources that he might have engineered. Fortunately, Itran hadn’t wanted to do anything that would have caused suspicion or drawn attention; he had been biding his time, waiting until he was transferred to the Independence.
Leia knew they had been lucky to uncover him when they did. He could have continued to lie low and collect information and perform small acts of sabotage until he learned the location of Echo Base. But he had decided to risk it all with an attempt to hand Leia and General Willard over to Commander Degoren. Leia knew that was why Itran had volunteered to go with her to the Aegis; it must have been a spur-of-the-moment decision, caused by fear of losing one of his prizes. “He could have done much more damage to us, if he hadn’t been so ambitious,” Madine had told Leia at one point.
“Perhaps we should take that as a lesson,” Leia had said. They had just come out of a meeting with Mon Mothma and several members of the High Command and Leia felt like she would have rather gone another round with Viest’s mad mining droid. That she had dealt as much damage as she had taken wasn’t much of a consolation.
“We should,” Madine had admitted. “But we won’t.”
At least the whole episode of the clearinghouse hadn’t been for nothing. Not long before the month was up, Han had taken the opportunity to find Kearn-sa’Davit at the trading port he was operating out of and get an update on the situation for the merchant consortium. With Viest out of the picture, things had gotten drastically better for shipping around Arnot Station and its trading partners. Davit wasn’t certain, but he figured that many pirates had been frightened away from the clearinghouse permanently and wouldn’t be coming back to the sector. The word through the black markets was that at least one, maybe two, of Viest’s would-be successors had died at Rethel Point during the battle with the Aegis and the customs corvette.
But there hadn’t been any noticeable gains for the Alliance out of the situation, no new supply source for Echo Base, and that had been made clear to Leia. So she was glad for more than one reason to slip away from the fleet on the Millennium Falcon, with no one but Mon Mothma and Madine’s knowledge, to spend the time in Han and Chewbacca’s occasionally irascible but undemanding company. She had brought C-3PO with her, and had more than enough work to keep her occupied while they waited for the Aegis to arrive.
When they reached the message drop point, the Aegis wasn’t there, but Leia wasn’t too worried. Depending on where its travels had taken it, and what repairs it had needed, it might take a while for the gunship to make its way here.
“Here” was a small trading port on a world at the edge of the Inner Rim, a long way from the clearinghouse and Arnot Station. The port was built out on raised platforms above a shallow freshwater sea, with docking pads, supply depots, cargo factors, shipwrights, and the usual clusters of drink and food service establishments. Everything was accessed by bridges, with small fishing boats sailing beneath, and several causeways connected the structures to the small city spread out across the nearest archipelago. It wasn’t a bad spot to bide some time, even with the humidity and the morning mists—though Chewie frequently ended up being the one to go out to get food, and he had made it clear that he didn’t take requests and they would eat what he brought back and like it. Leia settled in to wait, and to read the reports she had collected on her datapad.
After the second day with no sign of the Aegis, she was too anxious to relax. Waiting was becoming nerve racking rather than a pleasure.
The pointed absence of the Aegis was so painful to her that Chewbacca just watched her sympathetically, and even Han didn’t mention the ship’s failure to appear.
But finally, after four days, he said reluctantly, “If we stay here any longer, we’re going to have to get jobs, or grow crops, or something.”
“I know.” Leia rubbed her eyes. They were sitting in the cockpit, where they had a good view of the other landing pads. The Falcon’s platform was a little higher than the others, and they could see the other ships, mostly freighters and small local transports, in between the stretches of water and the tall, green fern-reeds that grew between the pilings. “I just hoped they would change their minds.”
It hadn’t been just a hope—it had been almost a certainty. At the last, she had really thought Kelvan and even Terae had become open to the possibility of joining the Alliance. They had had every chance to betray Leia for profit, yet they hadn’t done it. They had been honest with her, and trusted her. They were honest with you, they wanted to help you, they trusted you. You, not the Alliance, she thought. And in the end, you failed them. “I pushed too hard. I should have tried to set up another meeting just to talk. There was an implied commitment in coming here—that was a mistake.”
Han swung the pilot’s chair back and forth. “I don’t know what else you were supposed to say. They know the situation. They needed to make a decision.”
Leia looked away, at the busy crews and droids loading
and unloading cargo. “And they must have made it.”
“Hey,” Han said softly. She turned back to look at him. “Let’s give it one more day.”
Leia got to her feet. She wanted to nurse her disappointment in private. “One more night,” she said. She appreciated Han’s generosity, but she knew there wasn’t any point to remaining longer. “We can leave tomorrow morning.”
Then she woke at dawn the next morning to Han banging on her cabin door. Leia had already drawn her blaster, thinking the ship was being attacked, when she realized he was saying, “Get out here, Your Worship, there’s something you need to see.”
She threw her clothes on hastily, and ran up to the cockpit just in time to watch something very like an Alderaanian gunship landing on the next platform over.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TK
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TK
by TK
PUBLISHED BY DEL REY BOOKS