by Troy Denning
Tobyl smiled. “Thanks. After my last review, I could use—”
“Not those files,” Jaina said. “Ours.”
Tobyl’s smile turned to an expression of dismay. “GAG has a file on me?”
Jaina frowned. “Come now, Officer,” she said. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
She stepped past Tobyl and continued toward the medwagon, where her mother had already deactivated both MD droids and was closing the doors of the patient compartment. Jaina went directly to the front of the blocky medwagon and used the Force to deactivate the security circuit on the pilot’s hatch, then stood back as the door swung up to reveal an operator’s compartment nearly as packed with controls and gauges as a starfighter’s cockpit—though with nearly a meter of empty space separating two thickly padded safety seats, it was far roomier.
A surprised Bith looked out from the pilot’s seat, his lidless eyes bulging in alarm. “What are you doing?” He reached up to pull the hatch closed. “Get back! You’re not author—”
“Officer Tobyl will explain.” Jaina caught his arm, then slapped the quick-release latch on his crash webbing and pulled him out of the seat. “These patients are my responsibility now.”
“What?” The Bith tried to return to the pilot’s seat, only to find Jaina’s hand in the middle of his chest, sending him stumbling back toward the control line. “Who do you think you—”
“Officer Tobyl will explain.”
Jaina hopped into the pilot’s seat, pulling the hatch closed in the same motion, and engaged the repulsorlifts. The medwagon lurched into the air with a shrill whine and sent dozens of bystanders scrambling out of its path. She held back on the throttle under the pretense of giving them time to clear a lane, but she was also peering over their heads in the direction of Ben’s Doomsled, watching as it streaked across the plaza toward the rectangular maw of the Arakyd Towers ThroughPass.
Jaina activated the routing screen on the instrument panel and saw the logo of the Borsk Fey’lya Center across the top. Below that was a schematic of Monument Plaza and the surrounding area, with a series of blinking red arrows running out through the TravRat Gap and up into the Four-Thousand Skylane. She turned in the direction indicated by the screen’s waypoint dot, and found herself looking at a dark stripe of emptiness about an eighth of the way around the plaza from where Ben was headed.
The patient compartment access panel opened, filling the operator’s area with the stinging smell of disinfectant and antiseptic. Leia came forward, now minus the extra set of Codru-Ji arms but wearing the belt and equipment that had been stowed inside them. She had also donned a tan robe, but continued to wear the wig and face makeup that had completed her disguise.
“What are you doing?” Leia pointed across the plaza toward the Doomsled, which was just vanishing down the black mouth of the Arakyd Towers ThroughPass. “That way!”
“Can’t,” Jaina said. “We have to make this run look legitimate, at least until we’re out of the plaza.”
“Who cares about legitimate?” Leia demanded. “I’m not letting Ben out of—”
“They care.” Jaina pointed through the upper canopy, where the dark rectangles of half a dozen troopsleds were still circling the plaza. “And they’ve got auto blasters.”
Leia glanced up at the black rectangles, then let her breath out in frustration. “Stang. They probably would notice.”
“Once we’re clear of the surveillance umbrella, we won’t have any trouble finding Ben,” Jaina assured her mother. “We know where Tahiri’s taking him, and that Doomsled sticks out like a Gamorrean at a state banquet.”
“Good point.” Leia began to tap the routing screen keypad. “We should be able to catch up at Big Snarl. After that, we can take them somewhere in Galactic City.”
Jaina slipped the medwagon into the narrow chasm between the transparisteel monolith of the Traveler’s Palace and the octagonal cylinder of the Curat Commercial Center. A transparisteel safety wall flashed past beneath them, marking the end of the plaza decking, and suddenly they were traveling over a band of dark nothingness barely ten meters wide and so deep that it took a kilometer just to reach the murk.
Jaina counted to three to make certain they had passed beyond view of the troopsleds still circling Monument Plaza, then shoved the throttle forward. The medwagon shot past so close to the Palace’s guest rooms that she could see the eyes of some occupants widen with astonishment, and a pair of loud crashes sounded from the rear of the medwagon as the two MD droids tumbled against the doors.
“What about our patients?” she asked.
“They should be okay as long as the droids don’t land on them,” Leia said. “They’re strapped in, and their gurneys are magclamped to the floor.”
“Mom, I’m not worried about their health,” Jaina said. “I want to be sure we’re secure.”
“Oh.” Jaina felt her mother’s gaze on her, not necessarily disapproving, but certainly evaluating. “They won’t be giving us any trouble, Jaina. They’re sedated.”
Jaina sighed. “Look, I’m not suggesting you blast them in their sleep. Just be sure this isn’t part of Tahiri’s setup.”
A wave of relief rolled through the Force. “Of course.” Leia slipped out of her seat and turned toward the access panel. “For a moment, I was worried you’d learned a little too much from Fett.”
“Well, I did learn not to underestimate my enemy,” Jaina replied. They reached the end of the TravRat Gap and shot out between two levels of perpendicular traffic. “Hold on!”
She banked hard and dropped toward the leftbound lane, leaving her mother momentarily weightless, and another series of crashes sounded from the rear of the medwagon—this time from up near the ceiling. She felt Leia exert herself in the Force, then glimpsed her settling onto the floor again.
As the medwagon neared the skylane level, an air taxi shot up ahead of them, the furry little pilot flashing his front incisors and making a rude gesture. To avoid a collision, Jaina had to bring the medwagon’s nose up sharply, then ease off the repulsorlifts and more or less hull-flop into the traffic lane. The MDs banged to the floor, shaking the whole medwagon, and Leia let out a grunt as she struggled to stay standing.
“You are your father’s daughter!” she complained. “What do you think I am, a why-vee?”
“Not my fault,” Jaina replied. “Squib air taxi.”
“You dislocated my knees to avoid hitting a Squib?” Leia asked. “What, you didn’t want to scratch our paint?”
Leia retreated into the patient compartment and began to bang around, securing the Rodians to their gurneys and magclamping the MDs to the floor. Jaina decided not to activate the medwagon’s blue emergency beacon. That would only necessitate a three-level climb into the emergency lanes, where finding the Doomsled would be next to impossible. Besides, it was going to be hard enough to sneak up on Tahiri without advertising their arrival with a flashing light.
Jaina checked the traffic screen, rotating each cam through its full angle of view, but she found no signs of pursuit. In fact, the only hint of GAG at all was a single troopsled crossing two lanes overhead on its way back to headquarters.
Jaina didn’t trust anything this easy.
Leia came back through the access panel with the miniature signal scanner from her equipment belt in hand.
“Our patients were starting to come around already,” she reported. She began to run the scanner over the interior of the pilot’s cabin, working from the top down, paying special attention to the light and overhead instrument panels where an eavesdropping bug or tracking device was most likely to be located. “I gave them a little something extra to fix that problem.”
Leia scanned the seats and instrument panels next, then dropped to the floor and checked even the rudder pedals beneath Jaina’s feet. By the time she had finished, a maelstrom of traffic had appeared at the end of their skylane, with speeder vehicles of every type zipping past in a blur of dark streaks and glowing ribbo
ns.
“Big Snarl coming up,” Jaina reported. Big Snarl was one of the countless ventilation chimneys that helped draw hot, humid air up out of Coruscant’s lower levels; its role as a traffic interchange was only a secondary function. “And it looks really charged.”
Fully aware of the dangers of entering a traffic vortex unsecured, Leia returned to her seat and began to strap in, and it occurred to Jaina how strange it felt to be an infiltrator here. Coruscant was the planet that always came to mind when she imagined a safe place to rest, the home that she was always fighting to defend. The steady drone of traffic that echoed through its duracrete canyons was as familiar to her as her own voice, and its endless panorama of skyscrapers would always make her feel like she was gazing out the viewport in her parents’ living room.
Now her own brother had made it hostile territory.
They reached the end of the skylane, and Jaina swung the medwagon into a steep bank as she followed a SoroSuub Touristar sightseeing van into the vortex. Through the viewing bubble, she glimpsed arms, tentacles, and prehensile tails flying up in alarm as the van entered the unpredictable air currents. Then her seat slammed up beneath her, and she found herself struggling to retain control as the medwagon slipped, rolled, and pitched around the vast ventilation chimney that was the Big Snarl.
“There’s Ben!” Leia pointed about a quarter of the way around the vortex, at a steep downward angle. “Looks like they’re heading for the Pipe.”
“The GeeCee?” The Galactic City SpeedPipe was a private speeder tunnel that shot under Galactic City diagonally, cutting an hour-long trip to fifteen minutes … for a price. To keep traffic light, the one-way toll was a hundred credits. “Any escorts?”
“There are a couple of troopsleds ahead, but they’re still high—probably taking the skylanes back.” Leia paused for a moment, then said, “They’re making this easy on us. You couldn’t ask for a better place to take down an unescorted Doomsled than the SpeedPipe.”
“Yeah, too easy.” Jaina began to work the medwagon over to the descent lanes on the interior ring of the vortex. “And, like Fett says, when something’s too easy, something—”
“—stinks,” Leia finished. “He stole that line from your father, you know.”
Jaina smiled. “I think there are a lot of things Fett learned from Dad,” she said. “That’s probably why he carries a grudge.”
“That, and the Sarlacc’s pit,” Leia said. “But Fett had the pit coming.”
“No argument here.” Jaina thought of Fett’s wife, Sintas, and all those years alone because Fett had needed his revenge more than he needed her, of Ailyn growing up hating her father, of Fett spending the rest of his life alone—three lives wasted because of his pride. And he probably deserves a couple more decades, too.
Finally, they reached the inner rings of the vortex. Jaina lowered their nose and began to spiral toward the SpeedPipe along with the rest of the traffic. Her mother pulled and armed her blaster, then pressed her forehead to the viewport on her side of the wagon and peered down the chimney.
“What’s the holdup?” Leia demanded. “Worried you’ll lose your speeder license again?”
“Lose my what?” Jaina asked. She got the joke an instant later and chuckled, though she also understood what her mother was really saying:
Stop poking around in traffic and catch that Doomsled now. “We’d be tipping our hand.”
“Jaina, we don’t have a hand,” Leia said. “The SpeedPipe’s a traoaaa—!”
The sentence ended in a startled cry as Jaina rolled them toward Leia and let the medwagon slide sideways into the center of the chimney, where traffic laws and heavy updrafts kept the eye of the Snarl free of vehicles. The yoke started to jump and shudder as they were caught by the fierce winds, then a steady stream of trash—rumpled flimsiplast, discarded clothing, the occasional hawk-bat—came at them like ground flak. Jaina dropped their nose again and poured on the throttle, and the whole vehicle began to lurch as it powered its way downward.
A couple of jaw-clenching moments later, Jaina spotted the Doomsled four levels below, still at least half a kilometer above the brightly lit entrance to the SpeedPipe. She picked a cutoff angle and swung their nose around—then heard a faint, muffled voice coming from the rear patient compartment.
“Activate, activate, activate!”
Jaina glanced over to find her mother looking at her with a puzzled expression.
“Was that … Tahiri?” Jaina asked.
“You heard it, too.” Leia frowned and started to turn toward the access panel—then her eyes flashed with sudden comprehension. “The Rodians!”
Leia released her safety webbing and jumped up, using the Force to keep her balance in the diving, bucking medwagon as she clambered up into the patient compartment. Jaina started to ask what was so worrying about the Rodians when she remembered that her mother had been forced to give them another shot of anesthesia … because whatever the MDs had given them was wearing off. Perhaps the original dose had been meant to last only a few minutes—just long enough to trick a pair of Jedi hijackers into believing their “patients” were not a threat?
A soft hiss began to sound beneath the instrument panel, and Jaina knew she had guessed correctly. “Gas!”
Jaina did not inhale after shouting the warning, did not even think about trying to pull down a quick breath before the gas filled the compartment. She simply pressed her tongue up against the roof of her mouth and concentrated on not wanting to breathe, on using her Jedi discipline to convince her mind that she did not need air.
A few hundred meters below, not far from a disk of bright light surrounded by the blue spiral-arrow logo of the Galactic City SpeedPipe Concern, a hangar door opened. Jaina reached out to her mother in the Force, passing along a silent warning, and was relieved to feel a conscious presence.
A line of armored aircars slid out of the hangar, causing a chain of minor accidents as they shot across seventy lanes of traffic and began to ascend the center of the chimney. The aircars were all GAG black, with a trio of thrust nozzles flaring from their tails and a single cannon protruding from a small turret on their roofs.
Funny how even a human Jedi could hold her breath for four or five minutes underwater without much effort … but try to do the same thing in air, and her body began to fight her after less than a minute, to demand what it could feel available just a skin’s thickness away.
Jaina craned her neck around, looking over her shoulder through the medwagon’s upper canopy, and saw troopsleds dropping into the eye of the Snarl from all directions. Trapped. No place to go, so she kept going down.
Her head began to swim, but not from oxygen deprivation. Too early for that. Probably coma gas—sneaky stuff. Didn’t even have to breathe, just let it get into your nose. Absorbed through the nasal passages.
Vision dark around the edges. Jaina snapped the lightsaber off her belt, jammed the emitter against the side hatch. Thumbed the activation button on and off. Acrid smell of melted metal, then a piercing whistle. Rushing air.
Didn’t help. Darkness still closing in, losing battle to hold breath. Doomsled the only thing Jaina can see, turning toward a bright blur. SpeedPipe entrance.
Chin dropping … going … going … Reach out in Force. Mom still alert, worried not frightened … gone.
Darkness.
Came back to the shrill whistle of rushing air, bright flashes blossoming all around. Dizzy, but grogginess lifting fast. Cool breath filling her lungs, something warm and synthetic-smelling clamped over her mouth and nose.
Detonations booming through the medwagon, bouncing Jaina against her safety restraints … not just detonations. G forces. Two hands in front of her, not hers, jerking the steering yoke side-to-side, up and down.
The hands were attached to a pair of arms attached to an unfamiliar woman in a tan Jedi robe. The lower part of her face was hidden by a breath mask, but above that she had the long barbed ears and upward-slanting eyebrows o
f a Codru-Ji female; still, there was something wrong with the eyes themselves. They were too big and round, and they were a rich deep brown that Jaina recognized as the color of her mother’s.
And then Jaina recalled that her mother had been disguised as a Codru-Ji in Monument Plaza. The whole mess came back to her, Ben’s capture and their pursuit into the Big Snarl, trying to catch the Doomsled before it disappeared into the …
… big white disk ahead, surrounded by a spiraling arrow of blue light. The Galactic City SpeedPipe. Leia was taking them in after Ben.
Something about that bothered Jaina.
Leia juked when she should have jinked, and a deafening bang rang out from the patient compartment. The medwagon swung into a sideslip, tail threatening to overtake the nose, and began to drop toward the busy traffic lanes below. Jaina glimpsed the bubble-topped wedge of a cannoncar pouring colored bolts of energy toward them, and then she remembered the problem with going into the SpeedPipe after Ben.
Tahiri.
A line of cannon bolts streaked along the pilot’s hatch, pinging and sizzling along the outer skin. The GAG gunners were good—almost good enough to make it look like they were really trying to shoot the Jedi down. But the medwagon was a big soft target at such close range, and Jaina had fired enough blaster cannons to know that even average gunners could have reduced it to so much fluttering jetsam within a few seconds. Now that there was no question of catching the Doomsled outside the SpeedPipe, Tahiri and her GAG cohorts had returned to the original plan and were trying to trap Ben’s backup team in a carefully controlled environment with no escape routes.
Leia brought the medwagon under control barely a dozen meters above the closest traffic lane, then raised the nose back toward the luminous white mouth of the SpeedPipe.
“Mom, wait!” Jaina grabbed the yoke, but did not try to change course while her mother was still steering. “We can’t go in there!”
Leia did not yield control. “Wad?” Her voice was so muffled by the breath mask that it was difficult to understand even that single word. “We hab to! Ben’s in there!”