In the viewscreen, he could see the chamber below. It appeared that the
tunnel was in the ceiling of one corner. The chamber itself was mostly lined
with computer equipment, but in one corner was a doorway that probably led to a
hallway or stairs, and in the opposite corner was a son of stall. This was about
the same size as a refresher's shower and, like a shower, was bounded by
transparent walls; in the bottom of the stall was a mound of what looked like
broken transparisteel shards.
Next to the stall was a chair. In it sat a Bothan male, bound hand, arm,
and foot. Leaning over him was a human male in a mechanic's jumpsuit.
Tam thought for a moment that the Bothan was diseased. There were irregular
bumps on his face, on his fur wherever his garments did not cover it. Then he
realized that the bumps were moving, writhing.
Bugs of some sort. As Tam watched, the mechanic Brought his hand to the
Bothan's forehead. There was an audible crunching noise and the Bothan screamed
again. When the mechanic lowered his hand, the Bothan's forehead had one more
wiggling bump on it.
Wolam, where are you? But Tam realized that he could neither wait for Wolam
to finish persuading the security forces to come, nor speed that process along.
The Bothan might die, a death that truly would be on Tam's conscience. But what
could he do? He took stock of his possessions. One hand-sized holocam, various
data cards, a comlink, a small vibroblade he'd always carried because it made
him feel better, not because he knew how to use it well.
And his brain. A brain that didn't always work in an admirably efficient
fashion.
He left the vibroblade switched off and put it between his teeth. He had
other tools. The chamber below was dark, lit only by terminal screens. Screams
would cover small noises. And he was a strong man-though no fighter, he had size
and muscle mass that fighters had often admired.
On the ledge where the moss grew, he set the holocam. He advanced it
through its recording memory until he reached one recently recorded scene, then
set it to play back on a sixty-standard-second timer.
He waited until he heard another question, answer, and scream. As the
scream began, he lowered himself into the chamber below.
Now all the mechanic-a Yuuzhan Vong operative, it was obvious, possibly a
warrior-had to do was turn his head to see Tam. One look, one attack, and Tam
would be dead.
But the mechanic didn't turn. He leaned in close to witness the Bothan's
agonies. Tam, at arm's extension, let go with one hand and swung, but the extra
reach brought his toe into contact with the floor. A moment later, when with
wrist strength he stopped swaying, he let go and stood.
And knelt. And immediately crept to the side of the room, huddling in the
deep shadow beside a bank of unlit terminals, He took the vibroblade from his
mouth, positioning it so that its switch was beneath his thumb.
He'd always been inconspicuous despite his size. Now he feared that, even
with his best efforts and wishes, he wouldn't be inconspicuous enough. "Now,
again. Where is the crystal-" A voice floated out of the tunnel Tam had just
left, a woman speaking with a Corellian drawl: "Yes, we're going to pound the
Vong, pretty much."
The mechanic snapped upright, turning to stare at the hole. His expression
displayed no emotion, but his body language spoke eloquently of alarm,
confusion.
The voice continued, "It doesn't matter how hard they hit us. We have
twenty thousand years of galactic civilization to draw on. They can't ever
destroy that."
The mechanic ran to stand beneath the hole, then leapt up.
Tam charged forward, thumbing the vibroblade on. He could see the Bothan's
expression, alarm and pain, through the rivulets of blood that flowed down his
face. Tam slashed the man's bonds, one-two-three, and they fell away from the
Bothan. "Run," Tam whispered.
There was a crunching noise from the tunnel opening, hate-filled words in
the Yuuzhan Vong language, then a scraping noise as the mechanic descended.
And there it was, a moment of decision, an initiative to seize or abandon.
With it was fear, more fear than Tam had ever felt, even when he had been a
Yuuzhan Vong captive and certain that every moment would be his last. Tam turned
and charged back toward the hole. As he lurched forward, he saw the mechanic's
legs descending, heels toward him, toes toward the corner.
The mechanic's feet hit the floor and he began to turn. Tam slammed into
him with all his considerable mass, hammering him into the room's corner,
stabbing wildly with the vibroblade, kneeing and screaming and battering. He
felt blood on his knife hand, felt fingers around his left wrist.
Then his wrist was being twisted, mercilessly, as if by a machine, and he
was facedown on the chamber floor. There was pain like an explosion in his left
arm and when he twisted his head he could see that it was dislocated, the ball
of his arm levered out of its socket.
He hurt too much to move, almost too much to hear, but he caught the
mechanic's words: "You fight like child."
Then there was the sizzling noise of a blaster shot, a roar of such noises
as a rifle on full autofire opened up. Blood sprayed down onto Tam's back.
The mechanic fell atop Tam. The mechanic's hand, vibroblade still held in
it, hit the floor beside Tam's ear.
Tam strained to look up. The door into the chamber was open and uniformed
security operatives were flooding in. With them was a brunette woman he'd seen
around the base: lella Wessiri, head of Intelligence for this operation, General
Antilles's wife.
She knelt before him and one of her men rolled the mechanic's body off.
"Tam?" she asked. "Can you hear me?"
"I'm going to pass out now," he said.
And he did.
Aphran System, Aptiran IV
They came for Han and Leia in the quietest hour of the night, rushing into
their bedchamber and leveling blasters before the two of them could stagger out
of bed.
Han stared into the bright lights affixed to the rifles.
"What's the meaning of this?" he asked. His voice was calm, the words
perfunctory.
The leader of the intruders, only a silhouette behind the lights, answered,
"Han Solo, Leia Organa Solo, you are charged with falsification of
identification, smuggling, entering Aphran space on false pretenses, and crimes
against the state."
"Is that all?" Han offered them a dismissive wave. "That's only a couple of
hours' worth of crimes."
"Get up. Get dressed."
Han and Leia rose and began groping in the semi-darkness for their
piratical garments.
R2-D2 whistled.
C-3PO, running through a self-diagnostic sequence in trickle-power mode,
heard the alarm in his counterpart's musical tones and started up full-power
mode. In a fraction of a second he regained use of his motivators and other
systems.
They were where they'd been when he'd performed his partial power-down, in
the now empty starboard cargo hold of the Millennium Fal
con. "What's that you
say? Performing a bypass of what?"
The ominous clanking noise from the exterior cargo hatch just meters away
made any answer unnecessary.
"Oh, dear, oh, dear." Surely there was some procedure in his memory for
coping with an intrusion, but the only thing that occurred to the protocol droid
was to run and hide.
The astromech whistled again at him, clearly irritated with him for
dithering. R2-D2 leaned forward into wheeled-transport mode and rolled out of
the bay into the circular corridor that provided access to most of the Falcon's
compartments.
C-3PO trotted along after his partner. "Could you slow down? This is an
undignified pace."
He followed the astromech into the stern compartment that provided access
to the Falcon^ escape pods. R2-D2 already stood at the portmost pod, his
manipulator arm activating its access button. The door slid partway open and
then jammed. The data screen on the front read MALFUNCTION. But the astromech
tapped on the button, a rhythm C-3PO did not recognize, and the door slid open
the rest of the way.
That noise was drowned out by the groan of the starboard cargo hatch
opening, by shouts of "Commence search!" and "Move all this out of here!"
C-3PO trotted into the pod after R2-D2. "This is entirely inappropriate,"
he said. "Master Han and Mistress Leia are not doing anything illegal."
The astromech whistled and tweetled at him as he activated the controls
inside the pod.
"Oh, they are? Well, yes, 1 suppose illegal is defined by local
authorities, so there would be variations causing an accidental violation of
local ordinances." Tweetle. "What, on purpose?"
The escape pod hatch slid closed.
In the hour before dawn, R2-D2 finally opened the pod door and glided out
again. The Millennium Falcon was quiet; sheltered from weather by the bay walls,
she did not even creak under pressure from wind gusts. "How very ominous," C-3PO
said.
Tweetle.
"No, I will not be quiet."
Tweetle.
"Well, yes, for the sake of safety, I will lower my volume, but I will not
cease speaking."
C-3PO followed the astromech up into the cockpit. R2-D2's hemispherical
head turned around, a complete sweep, as he evaluated the situation outside the
cockpit viewports.
There were no guards to be seen, but his musical trill alerted C-3PO to the
holocams placed so that they could observe the port and starboard hatches and
ramp, the upper hatch.
"Yes, Artoo, it appears that we are to remain here."
The astromech trilled at him again, insistently.
"Well, no, they would not have placed a holocam to monitor the secret hatch
out of the false escape pod."
Tweetle.
"Are you mad? I can't go out there alone! I'll be captured and scavenged
for parts,"
R2-D2's response was decidedly unmusical. It sounded like air being forced
through a Hutt's blubbery lips.
"There's no call for that. I recognize the danger Master Han and Mistress
Leia face. I just have no wish to be terminated."
Tweetle.
"Yes. Perhaps they face termination, too."
C-3PO struggled with the notion the astromech had handed him. His duty was
clear; though he had no skills pertinent to this task, he did have to rescue Han
and Leia.
But rescue meant exposing himself to physical danger.
This was something he'd done many times over the decades usually under
protest dictated by his self-preservation programming, but now that programming
had become something more.
It had become an actual dread. The notion that he could be assaulted so
vigorously that his mental process might be suspended forever filled him with an
eerie programming static that made it hard for him to move.
On the other hand, the notion that Han and Leia might experience a similar
amount of damage was even worse, and allowed him to regain use of his limbs.
"What do I have to do?"
Tweetle.
"Oh, no."
The concealed hatch in the Falcon's lower hull slid open. Shiny droid legs
lowered through it, waving fu-tilely as they sought the bay floor meters below.
"Much farther, Artoo?"
The astromech whistled at him.
C-3PO's torso, then head emerged as he was lowered at a steady rate through
the hatch. He held on to a gray cord that looked more like a power cable than
climbing gear. In fact, the knob under his hand was a dataport plug. C-3PO
looked around and then down at the dura-crete beneath him. "Oh, I can't look.
Please make it fast."
Moments later, his feet touched down. The cable continued lowering, piling
up in irregular coils on the bay floor.
R2 tweetled, impatient.
"Yes, yes, I'm going." C-3PO walked with exagger - ated care, like a sneak
thief in a holocomedy, to the wall nearest the Falcon's stern. Then he turned
and crept along the wall to the corner, turned again, and crept toward the bay
doors providing access to the street beyond. He kept his photoreceptors alert
for other holocams, but saw none beyond those R2 had mentioned.
He plugged the cable into the dataport at the door. Now, in theory, R2-D2
would be able to work his magic on the computer handling access into and out of
this bay.
The astromech offered a musical trill, a noise of victory.
"Excellent, Artoo! And-what? I have to what?"
"What we must know," said the man on the other side of the table, "is why
you are here and what you are doing." He was of average height, with a dark
little beard, a dark little mustache.
Dark little beady eyes, Han decided.
The man wore the uniform of Aphran's military security forces, but his
accent was not of this world. He spoke Basic with the tones of someone from one
of the Corporate Sector worlds.
"We're here testing the effectiveness of a series of spacer costumes being
produced on Commenor," Han said. "And what I must know is, how did you see
through them? Our sponsors will want to know, to make the costumes better next
time."
"This is not funny," the man said.
"What's your name, pal?"
"I am Mudlath, Captain Mudlath, of Aphran Plane-taryExosecurity."
"Well, that's funny. See, you don't lack a sense of humor."
Leia gave her husband the eye. What he was doing wasn't likely to make
things much worse, hut there was no way his taunts would make the situation
better, either.
They sat around a table in a duracrete-lined room deep in the spaceport
base. Han and Leia, their hands manacled behind their backs, their ankles bound
together by cutproof cords half a meter long, sat on one side of the table;
Captain Mudlath sat opposite, with two of his men, unfriendly-looking ones,
flanking the one door out of the chamber.
"I am pleased that you're comfortable enough in your current circumstances
to remain jovial," Mudlath said. "Now, you should admit it: you are here engaged
in some military action directed against the Yuuzhan Vong, knowing full well
that any action you take could embroil the
people of this peaceful world in your
destructive war."
Han considered. "Isn't destructive war kind of redundant? Until I see a
constructive war, or even a giggly war, I have to think so."
Clearly exasperated, Mudlath turned his attention to Leia. "Surely you can
ease your situation by being more cooperative than your husband."
"Well, he's angry," Leia explained. "And rightly so. We employed costumes
precisely to save your people from any inconvenience. If the Yuuzhan Vong knew
we were here, they might come, but if they didn't, they wouldn't. We were
thinking of you, your needs and feelings, and you reward us with hostility. He
should be angry."
"An interesting notion," Mudlath acknowledged. "But it still doesn't
explain your mission here. I need the names of everyone you've spoken with since
your arrival."
"Oh, dear." Leia thought about it. "Well, there was the officer who
contacted us first. The one with the spaceport authority. I transmitted him our
documents and we got a homing beacon from him."
"That's right." Han nodded. "He was friendly. Unlike you, Captain. Then
there was the baymaster who met us outside our bay. Rulacamp, wasn't it?"
"Elderly woman," Leia said. "Not very talkative."
"Then there was her aide, the one who liked my scar."
Sighing, Captain Mudlath cupped his chin in his hand. "Are you going to
make me resort to sterner measures?"
"You mean torture?" Han perked up. "Well... if you have to. But make it a
good one. One I haven't seen before. I was tortured by Darth Vader."
"So was I," Leia said. "That was before we met."
"You'll have to go some to top him."
"Take them out of here." Mudlath suddenly sounded weary. "We'll get our
answers later, and probably very unpleasantly."
C-3PO moved away from the bay where the Millennium falcon was being held.
It was the hour before dawn, so he was slightly less conspicuous than a gleaming
golden droid would be during the daylight, but he felt as obvious as a two-meter
glow rod.
A pack hung around his neck; filled and then lowered to him by R2-D2, it
held items the astromech had thought he would need for his trip. He pulled out
one of these now, a datapad, and opened it up. He keyed its audio input. "Artoo?
Rebel Stand Page 16