“Yeah,” muttered Dash, “real friendly. Friendly with those Imperials, I’ll bet.” He nodded to port, where two Imperial cruisers peeked menacingly around the planet’s equator. They were making no moves toward the Millennium Falcon, though.
The descent was uneventful, though nerve racking as far as Dash was concerned. The only thing that set his mind at ease was that Javul did not seem so much nervous as determined. He saw less and less the touring diva and more and more the Rebel operative.
The autopilot took control as they entered atmosphere and drew them to the planetary capital, Aldera—more specifically to the main docking facility in a secure part of the spaceport. That made both Dash and Han a bit squeamish.
By the time they were approaching their landing bay, Mel had made his way to the cockpit, as well. The Millennium Falcon slowed. All four humans watched in silence as a warren of docking pads and service facilities passed beneath them.
As they approached a cluster of hemispherical buildings, Mel turned a solemn gaze on the two Corellians. “I want you both to know,” he said, “Al—I mean Javul—was perfectly serious when she suggested you’d be an asset to the Rebel Alliance. To say you’ve been invaluable to us would be a tremendous understatement. We simply wouldn’t have survived this far without you—either of you.”
“I’ll second that,” said Javul. “Seriously, Dash, Han, the offer still stands—”
Han was already shaking his head. “Sorry, sister. Dash’ll tell you—I don’t do causes. I’m the only cause I …” He hesitated. “I’m used to being responsible for me and nobody else. I’m not at my best when other people are depending on me.”
Mel fixed him with a laser gaze that Dash knew from experience cut right to the soul. “Your friend Chewbacca doesn’t depend on you? Can’t trust you to be at his back? I find that hard to believe, Captain Solo.”
Han just shook his head and returned his gaze to the view from the cockpit.
“What about you, Dash?” Javul said softly. “Are you ready to sign on? It seems to me you already have.”
Suddenly Dash felt as if he and Javul were the only two people in the cockpit. He looked into those intense silver eyes and knew he was being drawn in—reeled in, maybe. He had the unworthy thought that Javul Charn was one heckuva Rebellion recruitment tool. He shook off the thought, but the chill remained.
“I can’t argue with the ends, Javul,” he said finally, “but I … I’m a freelancer. I’m the boss on the Outrider. You understand? I’m not real good at taking orders from on high.”
She looked sincerely aggrieved. But was there anything personal in it, or was it just the disappointment of losing an asset for the “cause”? He wished he could ask, but with Han sitting there, watching him out of the corner of his eye …
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” Javul said. “For a lot of reasons. But think about it—both of you—” She turned her head to take in Han. “The Empire is tightening its hold on our lives—all our lives—day by day. You function freely now—if you can call it that—so maybe you think this isn’t your fight. You’re wrong. It is your fight. It’s our fight. All of us. If you wait to act until the Empire reaches out for you, personally, you will have waited too long.”
“I can’t,” Dash said, and felt a deep and sincere regret. “I’m just not made for this sort of work. I’m my own man. I make my own rules. Fly my own course. It’s safer that way—for everyone concerned.”
Mel smiled and shook his head. “You really believe that, do you?”
“C’mon, Mel. You’ve seen me operate. I’m just bad at taking orders. And he’s even worse.” He jabbed a thumb at Han. “We might look like assets, but in the end we’d be liabilities. We’d go rogue at some point. Screw something up. I wouldn’t want that.”
The control beeped just then, and Dash looked out through the forward viewport to see that one of the docking domes had opened up below them. They were descending toward it.
“Charn,” said the woman from the control center, “prepare your crew for landing. You should be on the ground in approximately two minutes. Standard procedure.”
Javul pressed the TRANSMIT button on the console. “Affirmative.” She turned back to Dash. “I guess we’d better get ready to debark.”
“What’s to get ready?” Han grumbled. “They’re running the show. All we have to do is show up at the air lock. What’s gonna happen to our cargo?”
“I don’t know,” Javul answered. “This wasn’t what was supposed to happen.”
Han blinked. “You mean you’re making this up as you go along?”
She smiled, dazzlingly. “Pretty much.”
The ship settled gently into her berth in the landing bay and the dome slid shut, closing her in. Han, looking up through the forward viewport, shook his head.
“I don’t like this. This feels bad.” He climbed out of the pilot’s chair and headed aft.
Mel followed him. Javul didn’t. She turned to Dash as he rose from his jump seat.
“You won’t reconsider?”
“Who’s asking—the Rebel operative or the woman?”
“One and the same, Dash. The Rebellion isn’t something I do. It’s something I am.” She took a deep breath, let it out. “But if you’re asking if I, personally, would like you to stay on for my own selfish reasons … the answer is yes. My motives aren’t entirely defined by what the Alliance needs. And that worries me a little. Sometimes I think it’s a bad idea to form attachments here, now, under these circumstances. And other times I think …”
“That life’s all about attachments?” he finished.
She nodded. “That those attachments to people we care about are essential to the fight … and make the fight essential.”
She kissed him this time, and he thought about attachments and things worth fighting for. He’d fought for her during this tour again and again. He’d almost died a few times. Eaden had died fighting for both of them and for his dead master. Dash knew, on some level beneath the clamor of his hormones and heartbeat, that there was a truth of some sort in what Eaden had done.
In a blinding flash of insight, as their lips parted and Javul pulled away, he thought he knew part of that truth: Eaden hadn’t died to avenge his master’s murder. He had died to save the lives of the two remaining members of his order—his sister and his cousin.
Watching Javul walk away from him toward the main cargo hold, Dash almost called her back to tell her he’d throw in with her—with them, with the Rebels. But something stopped him. He tried to tell himself it was common sense.
There was an escort awaiting them when they left the ship—half a dozen soldiers armed with blaster rifles. The crew of the Millennium Falcon were quickly disarmed and led to a holding area. Leebo, who had exited the ship with them, was ordered back aboard. The human members of the group were marched into a small, spare room and left. They’d been there only moments when another set of guards appeared to take Mel and Javul away for questioning.
The look Javul gave him as she left the room made him squirm. We’re on Alderaan, he reminded himself. They’re civilized people. They won’t do anything nasty.
“Those soldiers,” murmured Han. “Did you notice?”
“Notice what?” Dash brought his mind forcibly back from his unwelcome thoughts.
“They weren’t regular army. They were some sort of elite corps.”
That was alarming. “What sort of elite corps?”
“Not sure. Didn’t recognize the uniform. There was an insignia on the collar. Gold. Sort of an upside-down triangle.”
Dash shook his head. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning they could have been Royal Guards—House of Organa.”
“Is that good or bad?”
Han gave him a strange look. “You tell me. Who’s your girlfriend’s liaison on Alderaan?”
“I don’t know.”
“I guess she doesn’t trust you that much after all.” Han grinned.
Da
sh felt a flare of anger under his breastbone, but tamped it down. “It makes sense that she wouldn’t tell me. That way if I ended up in enemy hands—”
“Like now, for example.”
“Maybe like now. The point is, I couldn’t give up critical information, put that person’s life in danger. If I were—you know—interrogated or something.”
Han seemed darkly amused. “ ‘Or something’? You mean like tortured?”
But as it turned out, they were neither interrogated nor tortured. Instead, after roughly an hour in the holding area, the doors slid back and they were marched back to the docking bay with an invitation to leave. Quickly, quietly, and anonymously.
“Why wouldn’t they at least question us?” Han asked as the landing bay doors slid shut with an emphatic thud, as if to underscore the “invitation” to get lost.
“Maybe because we’re not members of the Rebel Alliance,” Dash said.
“You mean you think they believed Javul when she told them we were just unlucky mercs?”
“Yeah. Something like that.” The impulse to throw himself at the durasteel doors and demand that Javul be sent out was strong, but not strong enough to overthrow his rationality … or his dignity. Instead of making such a token display, he turned on his heel and went back to the ship.
The main cargo hold was empty. Every piece of Javul’s equipment had been removed. Han stood and stared at the empty compartment for a moment.
“Blast! I wonder what else they took.”
He and Dash moved methodically from hold to hold. Sure enough, every scrap of Javul Charn’s presence had been removed from the Falcon. Even her personal effects were gone.
Anxious, Han hurried to the secret compartments beneath the decking in the starboard passageways. He knelt to activate the hydraulic mechanism on the aftmost deck plate. Apparently it rose too slowly for his taste; he poked his head beneath the rising hatch cover to check the contents, then sat back with a sigh of relief. The cargo he’d picked up on Bannistar was intact.
“Good news. They didn’t find this stuff.”
“No, they found it, they just didn’t care,” Dash amended. He was looking down into the forward compartment. “The container is gone.”
“The container? You mean the one we lifted from Bannistar? Sure it’s gone. They stowed it aboard the Nova’s Heart.”
“No, they didn’t. They moved the droid and reengaged his signaling devices. They put the container back. We had it all the time. They took it.”
“Who took it?”
“They knew where to look,” Dash murmured half to himself. “That means she must’ve told them.” He hoped that meant she’d wanted them to know where it was. He closed the deck plate that covered the now-empty compartment. It glided shut with a solid thump and a click from the locking mechanism.
Han straightened. “Let’s get out of here.”
Dash didn’t move. “Yeah. I guess.”
Han came to put a hand on his shoulder. “Dash, old buddy, there are just some things you can’t do anything about. This is one of them. We don’t know who took the container. We don’t know where it is. We don’t know where she is.”
Dash didn’t comment that he did know that much. He’d seen her as they crossed the landing bay. She’d been standing, unfettered, beside a petite, dark-haired woman, looking down on them from a high, glassed-in gallery that ran partway around the upper latitudes of the dome. The body language between the two women hadn’t been that of prisoner and captor, which gave Dash some reason for hope that Javul had things under control. That, and the fact that Han had been right about the soldiers on duty here—every one of them was a member of Bail Organa’s elite guard. And Bail Organa, he knew, was not often a friend of Imperial policy. He had been outspoken in his opposition to the Emperor’s more draconian measures—such as the infamous order to hunt down and annihilate the Jedi.
“C’mon,” Han said, heading for the cockpit. “Let’s go.”
Dash followed. “Yeah. Sure. Where’s Leebo?”
“Dunno. They sent him back to the ship, so he’s gotta be here somewhere.”
Dash activated his comlink. “Hey, Leebo—where are you?”
There was no answer. He tried again.
“Leebo? Leebo! Where are you, tin man?”
Still no answer.
He entered the cockpit in Han’s wake and slid into the copilot’s seat, reaching forward to activate the ship’s intercom system.
“What’s up?” Han was already doing his preflight prep, checking systems one by one.
“Can’t raise Leebo. Maybe his comlink is down. Leebo, this is Dash. Get your tin can up to the cockpit.”
Still nothing. Dash felt a tickle of apprehension. “They’d better not have confiscated him.” He opened a channel to the facility control even as the dome rolled back overhead. “Docking Control, this is Dash Rendar in Docking Bay Alpha Nine. Did you remove my droid from the ship?”
“Sir?” The controller sounded startled.
“My droid. A modified LE-BO2D9 model. I can’t locate him. Did your guys remove him from the ship?”
“I don’t know, sir. Let me check.”
The channel went dormant. Dash turned to Han. “Why’re they being so polite?”
“Don’t knock it.”
When the connection went live again, the female controller was back, her voice crisp and businesslike. “Specialist Rand says you were asking about your droid. What seems to be the problem?”
“The problem is I can’t find my droid. What did you do with him?”
“The droid unit was returned to your ship.”
“You didn’t impound him or something?”
“The whole ship was impounded, Captain, with your LE unit aboard. No one saw it leave.” Now she sounded faintly amused.
“He might have snuck out while your guys were off-loading the cargo.”
“Why? Is your droid prone to wandering off without orders?”
“Not normally,” Dash fibbed. “Did your guys turn him off?”
“That I can’t tell you. I suppose they may have. Are you ready to launch?”
“Not without my droid!”
“I assure you, Captain, the unit is aboard somewhere. If by some wild fluke it’s not, we’ll find it and return it to you. Right now I need you and your friend to get off the planet. Please.”
“Uh, Control?” said Han. “This is his friend. We’re getting.” He turned to Dash. “Go look for your droid. He’s gotta be here somewhere.”
“Right.” Dash pulled himself out of the copilot’s chair and went in search of Leebo.
THIRTY-TWO
DASH MADE HIS WAY AFT, PORT-SIDE FIRST, POKING INTO every compartment … again. He saw nothing amiss, but also no Leebo. He called out. He tried the comlink several more times. He even looked in the storage lockers in the crew’s quarters, checked the engine room, the weapons batteries, the galley.
No Leebo.
Frustrated and worried, he made his way back around to the starboard side, thinking that just maybe the droid had hidden himself in one of the secret cargo holds. While Han had peeked into them to make sure the cargo was intact, neither of them had gone below to check them thoroughly.
Dash started with the aftmost compartment, kneeling to depress the near-invisible locking mechanism on the first deck plate. It glided upward on its hydraulic pistons, revealing cargo and nothing else. He poked his head into the opening, pulling out a glowlight and playing it about the interior.
Negative. He closed that deck plate and moved to the next. More nothing. He knelt to activate the next plate. His fingers had no sooner released the lock than it opened suddenly beneath him, flinging him from his feet. The hydraulics gave a whine of protest. Dash tumbled back and sideways, slamming his left shoulder against the hatch frame of the starboard docking ring and landing on his back across the threshold of the access corridor.
Breath knocked from his body, he looked down between his knees—and saw
the impossible. Edge—battered, torn, but still alive—was rising out of the cargo compartment like an avenging demon, his body armor holed and awry. He wielded a cortosis staff in one hand and a darkstick in the other. Dash saw immediately that the Anomid assassin had not made the same mistake twice—the end of the darkstick’s horrific claw dripped with a red liquid Dash knew was lethal.
He pushed himself farther up the access and scrabbled for his laser pistol, only to recall as it met his hand that the Alderaanians had removed its power cell and he hadn’t yet reloaded.
No time for that now. The big Anomid already loomed over him, one knee on the edge of the cargo compartment. Without warning the assassin swept the cortosis staff toward Dash’s midsection, its plasma blade spitting fire. Dash lashed out with booted feet. His heel connected with Edge’s left hand. The staff spun from his grip, searing across the top of Dash’s left thigh. He gasped in pain and kicked again, knocking the staff away, but Edge had the darkstick raised, ready to strike.
Dash met the strange orange eyes. They had been cold before—implacable, emotionless. Now they were filled with fire. This had obviously become personal. Edge probably wasn’t used to having his prey skitter to safety or unseat him not once, but twice.
Dash felt a supreme sense of betrayal in the frozen moment before the darkstick began its downward descent toward his heart. Not his own betrayal, but Eaden’s. He was angry. Angry that the Universe—or the Force or the Deity or whatever—had allowed Eaden to die and this death machine to survive. The injustice was galling and Dash roared aloud with it.
From out of nowhere, Leebo’s pet MSE droid shot through from one side of the corridor to the other. The sudden, unexpected movement distracted Edge—only momentarily, but that was all that was needed. Two pulses of light flashed from behind the Anomid. One energy bolt hit his shoulder where the armor had been shot away. The other caught him with pinpoint accuracy in the back of the neck where the body armor met his helm. He jerked upright, his knees slipping from the rim of the compartment.
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