The Affytechans were waiting for them down in the bright, warm lighting of Deck 15, like an ambulatory garden of enormous and slightly pixilated flowers. "We've located the transport craft, sir," said the captain--the post seemed to have shifted to a stalky tubulate of blue and white. "Two Beta-class Telgorns with a capacity of a hundred and twenty apiece, in the Deck Sixteen portside landing bays." It saluted him smartly. "Dr. Breen here has been working on getting the schematics program repaired."
The former orange-and-yellow captain saluted as well. "Simple transposition of numbers, sir. Probably due to operator error. Easily fixed."
Dr. Breen?
"This way, sir."
"Even if you are able to pilot one, or both, transport craft, sir," protested Threepio hesitantly, "however will you prevent the defenses of the Eye of Palpatine itself from destroying them, as they destroyed our scout craft? You said yourself they had an almost human targeting capability. And for that matter, how in the galaxy are you going to get the Klaggs and the Gakfedds into the craft to take them off the ship? Or the Kitonaks?"
A little to Luke's surprise, they passed a small group of the stumpy, putty-colored aliens, shambling along the corridor at the top of the communicating gangway to Deck 16 with excruciating slowness, conversing in their soft, rambling burble of rumbles and whistles. Luke couldn't imagine coaxing the torpid creatures into the shuttlecraft or making them stay there once they'd arrived. And as for rounding up the tripods, or the Jawas...
"I don't know." He wondered how he'd managed to get himself elected savior to this ship of fools. "But if I'm going to destroy the ship before it attacks Belsavis, Threepio, I've got to get them off it somehow. I can't leave them. Not even the Jawas. Not even the--”
They turned a corner and Luke halted, shocked. The corridor before them, low-ceilinged and slung with the heavy barrels of one of the ship's main water-circ trunks, was strewn with the hacked and dismembered bodies of Affytechans. Ichor and sap smeared the walls and floor with pungent, sticky streams of green and yellow, speckled with spilled pollen and floating seed. Hacked limbs and trunks were scattered in a ghastly rainbow, as if someone had overturned a clothes basket of gaudy silks. Mouse-droids swarmed, and the whole corridor reeked of the Affytechans' sour, pungent musk.
The blue-and-white captain and his followers kept walking through the carnage as if there were nothing there. "You were right about making sure of the location of the transport, Major," the captain was saying. It stepped over most of the torso of what had been the magenta captain in the laundry room. ”I've always liked the Beta-class Telgorn transport. Two or three of those, plus an escort of Blastboats, should take care of any minor trouble no matter what--”
Luke spun, ducked, and had his lightsaber in hand and bladed as the weighted end of a gaffe stick nearly took his head off. The four Sand People who'd sprung from the pump station behind him fell on him, howling. Luke slashed the first one clean through the body, shoulder to hip, and took the hands off a second as it was bringing its rifle to bear. Threepio bleated, "Master Luke! Master Luke!" as he was knocked over in the fray and lay against the wall where he'd been kicked. "Switch off!" Luke yelled and dropped the blade a split second before a third Tusken fired its blaster at him, the bolt whining off the concentrated core of laser light.
He lunged through a doorway, hitting the closer, which refused to work. The Sand People, joined by two more with others audible in full cry in the corridors beyond, sprang after. Luke levitated a worktable and hurled it at them, scrambled across the room to the opposite door and hit the opener--that, too, refused to work.
Luke cursed, ducked a roaring blaze of blaster fire and levitated the worktable to throw at them again. Someone else fired a blaster and the bolt whined sharply as it ricocheted around the room--it was a long shot and frequently didn't work, but Luke reached out with his mind and flicked the ricochet into the door mechanism, exploding it in a sizzle of sparks. The door jerked up about half a meter and Luke rolled under it, dragging his staff through after him and scrambling to his feet, limping and staggering away.
He seemed to be in the heart of the Sand People's hunting territory. Two more sprang at him, from opposite sides, pressing him back into a corner. He sliced and parried, flattened against the walls for support, then fled again, falling, rising, dragging himself painfully down the dark length of a corridor, while on either side ahead of him doors hissed shut and the hoarse, baying yowl of the Sand People echoed against the walls all around.
He flung himself around a corner and jerked back just in time to avoid being cut in half by a blast door smashing down; fled back, half recognizing the lights of what looked like a laundry drop, which would have a repair shaft behind it, only to have the room's door slam shut when he was a few meters away. He decapitated another Tusken that leaped on him from the open black doorway of what looked like a lounge, scrambled over the body and fled through, throwing himself, rolling, just in time to avoid being shut into t room by its suddenly activated door.
The corridor in which he found himself was very dark. Tiny orange worklights made a thin trail along one side of the ceiling. Gasping for breath, Luke dragged himself to his feet, leaned trembling on his staff, his leg hurting as if the ax that had smashed it were slamming again with each beat of his heart.
The Will, he thought. The lightsaber weighed heavy in his hand, unbladed but ready at a second's notice. It was only a matter of time before it steered him into another wired gangway, or back to the arms of the Sand People.
Their yowling broke out again, close by; a lot of them, by the sound. Luke scanned the corridor. Shut doors. No vents. No cover.
Then, halfway down, a door opened.
It didn't hiss and spring, as doors did. The laborious creaking was more characteristic of someone turning the manual crank. It cracked a jagged line of grimy orange emergency light perhaps thirty centimeters wide, and stopped.
Luke glanced at the blast wall that sealed one end of the corridor, the darkness at the other end, shrieking with the cries of the approaching Sand People. Between them himself, breathless, lamed, a sitting target...
And that uneven line of orange light.
And the sense of waiting that seemed to press on him from the darkness like the dense watchfulness of some unseen mind.
Yet strangely he felt no sense of dread.
He stepped closer. Through the opening he could see the blank-eyed dark consoles of one of the lower-level gunnery chambers, the semicircles of consoles, the glistening dark levers and somber shadow.
Silence now, but he knew, could feel, the Sand People coming near.
In that silence, very faintly, he thought he heard the almost-whispered thread of melody: ”The Queen had a hunt-bird and the Queen had a lark, The Queen had a songbird that sang in the dark...."
Luke glanced back over his shoulder at the darkness, then stepped, very quickly, through the door.
It slid shut.
For some moments the only sound that came to his ears was his own breathing, steadying as he caught his wind. Shadow clustered thick around him, hid the far end of the long room like an obscuring curtain. Then, dimly, on the other side of the door, the scratch of metal on metal, the swift-moving whisper of feet.
Luke braced his body against the nearest console and held his lightsaber ready, still unilluminated, in his hand.
Dim with the muffling of the walls, he heard the harsh gronch of their voices, the crash of gaffe sticks against the other doors along the hall. Six of them at least. If the door before him were to open again he could probably kill two or three, but shooting through the door at him they'd have him. He looked around at the dark chamber. Even the chairs were bolted down.
The door in front of him rattled under blows, but held.
If the Will wanted it to open, something else prevented it from doing anything about it.
It occurred to Luke that the Will had effectively imprisoned him here. All it needed to do was not open the gun roo
m door again--ever.
The silence returned, lengthened. The pain in Luke's leg increased, the deep internal burning of infection unmistakable now. Keeping his senses stretched, his mind forced to attention on the corridor, he opened the patch in the leg of his coverall and affixed a new dose of perigen, though his supply was running perilously low. Anything to keep the pain at bay, to free his concentration for the use of the Force. Exhaustion and perigen-suppressed fever made him dizzy. He realized it had been some time since he'd eaten or slept, and his hand, when he straightened up to lean on his staff again, trembled.
After a very long time, the door opened, again that narrow crack, again that labored, dragging motion, as if against the strength of the Will.
Luke listened, breathed, sending his senses out. Far off he could still smell the stench of the dead Affytechans, but no whiff of the Sand People. Aching, he limped toward the door, lightsaber still in hand.
Movement caught his eye. He startled, swinging around, but it was only his own reflection in the dark mirror of the nearest monitor screen. It stared back at him, scarred face, fair hair, the stained gray coverall of a Star Fleet mechanic.
And beside it, behind it, just past his shoulder, he saw another face. A woman's face, young, framed in a cloud of smoky brown hair like a thick-leaved tree in summer, the gray eyes looking into his.
He swung around sharply, but of course there was no one there.
Chapter 12
"What? Who is it?"
Leia prodded her husband's shoulder. "I told you you should have waited for her to call back." She turned back to the holo image of the woman in the field, fiery hair tousled, green eyes blinking into the dim glow of the lights on her end of the transmission. She wore a gold chain around her neck and a shirt Leia recognized as belonging to Lando Calrissian. "Mara, I'm sorry..."
"No, it's all right." Mara Jade rubbed her eyes with a quick gesture, and that seemed to take care of any residual sleepiness, as if she'd clicked off a switch. "I must look like one of the Nightsisters of Dathomir. What time is it where you are? What's up? Is there a problem?"
"We don't know, exactly," said Han. He shoved back the towel from his still damp hair. "We know we got a problem but we're not sure what it means. What can you tell us about Belsavis?"
"Ah." Mara settled back in the white leather of her chair, which shifted around her like a flower, drew up her long legs, and folded her hands around her knees. Her eyes narrowed, as if she watched something scrolling past on some inner readout screen: thought, memory, surmise. "Belsavis," she said thoughtfully. "You find out what was there that the Empire thought was so important?"
"You mean the children of the Jedi?" asked Leia.
"Is that what it was?" Her dark brows lifted, then she thought about it, and a corner of her lip curved down, wry and speculative. "Makes sense. The file on it was closed when I started working for the Emperor, you see. Closed and sealed behind six kinds of security locks."
She shrugged. "Well, closed files always have the same effect on me. But in this case even when I broke into it I couldn't find out anything except that at the end of the Clone Wars there'd been some kind of secret mission whose target was one of the rift valleys on Belsavis. Security was so heavy that even the people who worked on it didn't know what was going on. If it was a move against the Jedi--against their families and children-I can see why they did it that way."
She was silent a moment, a small upright line between her brows as she called back to mind the old data. Beyond the metal shutters that blocked the orchard lights from the bedroom, Leia heard the sleepy trilling of pellata birds and manolliums among the trees, making one final stakeout of their territories before nestling down for the night. Chewie, smelling as only a damp Wookiee can smell, paused in brushing out his fur and growled softly.
"A fighter wing was sent to Belsavis, interceptors mostly, fast but light," said Mara after a time. "And a whole chain of remote-trigger relay stations was set up, mostly on satellites, or hidden ground stations; completely automated, but what it was they were supposed to activate or signal I never could find out. The mission file was cut to paper dolls. I gathered there was supposed to be a linkup with something that never arrived, something heavy. But later I got copies of some of the Emperor's private invoices, and there were millions paid out about that date to an engineer named Ohran Keldor..."
"I know about Ohran Keldor," said Leia softly. Even after all these years her body went hot at the thought of his name, as if a thousand needles were rising up through her skin. "He was a student of Magrody's, one of the designers of the Death Star. One of the teachers at the Omwat orbital platform that produced the rest of that design." Her hands trembled involuntarily and she tightened them hard; felt Han's swift, worried glance.
"That's him," said Mara. She regarded Leia for a time, her own thoughts hidden behind the cool mask of her face, but if she understood the hatred of one who has had her world destroyed, she made no comment, and Leia herself said nothing. Could say nothing.
"Same guy?" asked Han, a little too quickly, seeking to cover. "I mean, that was, what? Twenty years before they put the Death Star together..."
"Twenty years isn't that long," said Mara. "And Keldor was a boy genius back then, Magrody's best. Looking at the kind of thing he designed later--military and industrial both--I'd say the Emperor paid him to design a supership of some kind. That was back when they needed a vessel the size of a city to carry the blasting power they wanted. Whatever was on Belsavis, it looks like the Emperor didn't want anything breathing when the dust settled. Logically, it has to have been an installation, because of the firepower and because of the trade that started up later in xylen chips and gold wire, salvage goods; far too much to be just the gleanings of a battlefield. But I always wondered what kind of installation was so important that they'd go to that much trouble."
Han crossed his legs and pulled the dark-patterned native sarong he wore up to cover his knees. "But somebody dropped the ball."
Mara shrugged. "That part had been pulled out of the file, but it sounds like it, yes. The supership--or whatever it was that those automated relays were designed to summon--never arrived. Most of the relays were destroyed or lost, so somebody must have guessed what they were. The interceptors got mauled by a small planetary force, pretty badly by the sound of it. The file said "subjects departed." The officers in charge said they strafed everything in sight and did maximum damage with the weaponry available, but most of them were cashiered when they came home. A couple of high-ranking designers of artificial intelligence constructs and automated weapons systems were reassigned to places like Kessel and Neelgaimon and Dathomir..."
"Real vacation spots," murmured Han, who'd visited all three.
Mara's red mouth quirked in a small, chilly smile. "There are worse places. Ohran Keldor dropped out of sight for a while."
Chewbacca growled.
"Yeah," agreed Han, "I would have, too. But it looks like somebody reinstated him."
"That was probably Moff Tarkin," said Mara. "He was a man who never lost track of so much as a paper clip. He was in charge of the Omwat orbital and that's where Keldor showed up again, trying to work himself back onto the Emperor's good side."
She shook her head again, a look on her face that was half speculation, half wonderment. "So it was the Jedi and their families. No wonder he wanted the whole planet done."
She was silent for a time, and looking at her, Leia wondered suddenly if that was what had drawn Mara to the Emperor in the first place: that Palpatine, Force-strong as he was, had been the only one who could teach Mara, the only one like herself that she knew.
Having grown up herself with the knowledge that she was somehow just slightly different, without knowing how, Leia could understand that need. The need to have someone who understood.
"Nothing in the records about where those "subjects" went?" she asked. The bitter heat in her chest had chilled, but her own voice still sounded like a recording i
n her ears. "Nothing about the group itself? How big it was? How many ships they had? What direction they took off in?"
The smuggler shook her head. "The file didn't even mention who and what they were. Just that they "departed.""
"So you went to Belsavis to see who they'd been?"
"Not exactly. But I was curious. I filed the whole thing away in my mind, but I kept an eye out for mention of the place. For a few years there was a lot of salvage running out of there: xylen chips, gold wire, polarized crystals, the kind of thing you'd see if an old base was being tapped. Rock ivory from antigrav units. Some old jewelry. I went there once, around the time of the Battle of Hoth, but Nubblyk the Slyte had a tight grip on the locals and I couldn't stay long enough to figure things out."
"Look familiar?" Solo fished the gleaming chip from his pocket. "The Slyte was making a good living off these, but the supply pinching out wasn't why he quit. You know what happened to him?"
Mara leaned forward a little to study the chip through the Holonet's shimmering transceiver field, then sat back with a long flash of white leg. "That's the stuff. You ever do the Belsavis Run, Han? There's a spot in the southern hemisphere that's far enough from any rift or vent to be atmospherically stable about the same time every twenty-four hours. The Corridor, it's called. Because of the storms and the ionization in the upper atmosphere they can't track anyone who's not coming down a charted beam. You come in high, drop fast, and run along close to the ice to one of the pads."
"I heard about the pads out on the ice," said Han.
Chewie rumbled a comment.
"Yeah," agreed Han. "Not something I'd want to do, either. I guess there's still one or two in operation."
"There were twelve or thirteen back then," said Mara. "Most were within a few kilometers of the rifts, about half of those near Pletwell... Plawal, they call the place now. I could look up the coordinates for you if it would help. Nubblyk started thermoblasting the pads right after the Clone Wars, when Brathflen and Galactic first came to the planet. He'd sound out geothermal fissures below the ice, tunnel down to them, then t-blast the pads within half a kilometer of the tunnel heads. That kept the people running the goods in and out through the Corridor dependent on Nubblyk, because only Nubblyk knew where the tunnel heads were. The Jedi." She shook her head again. "I'd never have guessed that."
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