by James Luceno
She also knew why: Han could no more leave a friend in danger than he could jump to lightspeed by flapping his arms. And she knew that he’d leave without telling her he was going, because he knew she was, in this respect, no different than he was, and he still had this profoundly silly masculine notion that he could somehow keep her from danger just by leaving her behind. Just how profoundly silly this masculine notion was she planned to demonstrate graphically as soon as she caught up with him. Maybe she’d draw him a picture. On his skull. With the gauss wrench.
But how could she catch him?
She looked around the docking bay, but in the chaos of hustling crew and tugs and the clouds hissing out from gas exchangers and the space dust billowing away from hulls hooked up to electrostatic reversers, there were no answers to be found. She thought, What would Luke do?… and when she closed her eyes and took a deep breath or two, she decided that right now she should be going that way …
She drifted aimlessly through the docking bay cavern for a few minutes, bemusedly waiting for another feeling to strike her; she was so focused on her inner feelings that it took her a second or two to register that the handsome profile of that tall pilot up ahead, the one chatting with the deck crew men who were cleating down his B-wing, belonged to a friend of hers.
“Tycho!” She waved and headed over to him. “Tycho, I am so glad to see you!”
Tycho Celchu greeted her with a bemused look of his own. “Princess? Aren’t you supposed to be in the negotiations?”
“Forget the negotiations,” she said. “I need a ride. It’s a diplomatic emergency.”
Tycho frowned. “Um …”
“I’m a rated gunner on that thing,” she said, nodding toward the B-wing. “I need you to get it space-ready as fast as possible.”
His frown deepened. “Princess, you’re a civilian—”
“And my mother was your queen.” Trading on her family’s station always left a sickly weight in the pit of her stomach, but this was an emergency. “You’ve been Alderaanian a lot longer than you’ve been an officer. Will you do this for me, or should I ask somebody else?”
“Ask somebody what?” Wedge Antilles had come up beside her. “Hi, Princess. How go the negotiations?”
“Wedge, hi.” Leia winced—another friend she’d have to lie to. “Uh … something’s come up. I need to borrow Tycho and his B-wing. Maybe for just a few hours.”
“If it were up to me …” Wedge spread his hands apologetically. “But Lando—that is, General Calrissian—he’s a real nice guy, y’know, easygoing and relaxed when he’s out of uniform. But the first time you violate his orders, you find out he’s got no sense of humor at all.”
She looked from one to the other. Why would the Force have sent her in this direction in the first place if there were no chance she could—
What would Luke do?
She took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and sighed it out again. When she opened her eyes, she could now see the two men before her clearly. Tycho had been only a vehicle for her, Wedge only a roadblock … but now they were men, good men, friends who honestly cared about her obvious distress. They deserved better than to be conned into helping her.
Slowly, clearly, simply, she said, “Luke’s in danger.”
Wedge and Tycho exchanged an unreadable glance. Wedge said, “What kind of danger?”
She couldn’t keep a hint of quaver out of her voice. “The fatal kind.”
Tycho looked at Wedge. Wedge’s mouth compressed and he stared down at the deck. Not for long—less than a second—and then he huffed a sigh, and gave a decisive nod. Tycho wheeled and sprinted away.
Leia watched as the Alderaanian raced headlong through the chaos in the docking bay cavern. “Where’s he going?”
Wedge was already jogging toward his own X-wing. “To round up the rest of the Rogues,” he called back over his shoulder. “Fifteen minutes.”
Lando sat in the conference chair Han had only recently vacated. He’d stopped listening to Fenn Shysa argue with the mercenary commander about thirty seconds after he’d finished the introductions; Lando had enough Mando’a to get along in conversation or fleece an unwary Mandalorian over a sabacc table, but he’d seen in those first thirty seconds that the commander wasn’t buying what Fenn was selling—a combination of “Lord Mandalore Commands You” and an appeal to civic responsibility and Defend Our Honor sentimentality. Lando probably should have mentioned to Fenn before they’d gone in that those kinds of arguments worked only on people who already believed in that stuff, and people who believed in that stuff didn’t often end up spilling blood for Imperial credits.
Like most fundamentally decent men, Fenn seemed to believe that down deep, nearly everybody else was fundamentally decent, too. He seemed to think that because he had once been a mercenary, other mercenaries were just like him: a cynical shell over a core of natural nobility. But Fenn had never been exactly your factory-issue mercenary.
Lando, on the other hand, was a gambler. A successful gambler. Like all successful gamblers, he knew that “natural nobility” was more rare than a flawless Corusca gem, and that over the long run, you never lost by assuming that everyone you met was driven by a combination of greed, fear, and stupidity.
After half an hour, he’d found himself wondering how Han had managed to sit through two days of this without taking his own life. After an hour, it became clear to him that neither Han nor Leia was going to be returning to the conference room anytime soon. Nearly another hour had passed before the ensign he’d sent looking for Leia had returned to the conference room door with a look on his face that indicated either failure or chronic illness.
Lando leaned forward to speak softly in Fenn’s ear while the opposing commander was making yet another long, insultingly skeptical-sounding speech. “I have to step out for a minute or two. Cover for me, huh?”
Fenn nodded without hesitation. He must not have been really listening either. “Don’t blame you,” he said from the side of his mouth. “Are you as sick of this fella as I am?”
“I never get sick of people,” Lando said, smiling. “I’ll be right back.”
Out in the corridor, the ensign looked like he was wishing he could be just about anywhere else. “She was last seen, General, getting into Lieutenant Celchu’s B-wing.”
“Really.” Lando was still smiling. He’d been a gambler too long to give anything away. “And where was the lieutenant last seen?”
“Well, I—I mean, General, you would know … wouldn’t you?”
Lando’s smile went wider. “Pretend I don’t.”
“Rogue Squadron lifted off over an hour ago, sir—traffic control says they were on one of your, ah, special missions, sir …”
“One of my special missions?”
“Yes, sir. Commander Antilles gave the verification code.”
“Did he, now?”
“Yes, sir. Is—is there, uh, a problem, sir?”
“Why would there be a problem?”
“Well—the Princess had just been up to ComOps, sir. She was asking about General Solo.”
“Of course she was.”
“And General Solo had been there just a few minutes earlier. He was asking about General Skywalker.”
“And what did General Skywalker have to say?”
“Oh, uh, well—nothing, sir. I mean, he’s out of contact—the whole RRTF has gone dark.”
“Has it? Well, well.”
“Yes, sir. And, um, there is this, as well, sir.” The ensign held out a datareader. “It’s a transcript of an automated burst-transmission that is being fed into the HoloNet over and over again, at five-minute intervals. The transmissions began less than a minute after the RRTF went dark.”
Lando weighed the reader in his hand. “Summarize it for me, will you?”
“Well—it claims to be from Lord Shadowspawn, sir. ComOps hasn’t verified authenticity yet, but—”
“But you thought I might want to know about it. Because
you think it might have something to do with our missing princess and her two favorite generals.”
“In the transmission, sir, Lord Shadowspawn claims to have captured the entire task force—and he says he will kill them all in three Standard days unless the Republic agrees to an immediate cease-fire … and acknowledges his claim on the Imperial Throne.”
“Really. Hm. Well, well again.”
“But like I said—” The ensign licked nervous sweat from his upper lip. “We don’t know if—ComOps hasn’t verified its authenticity—even if it really is from Shadowspawn, we have no way of knowing if any of it is true—”
“Sure we do. It’s all true,” Lando said. “Luke’s already there. Han and Leia are on their way. Not to mention Rogue Squadron.”
“Sir? I don’t understand.”
“That’s because you’re new around here, son.”
“Sir?”
“Forward your personnel file to my exec. I can use a man like you.”
The ensign’s mouth dropped open. “Sir—? I don’t—I mean, I failed—”
“When you submit your file, put a note in there that I’m promoting you to lieutenant j.g.”
The ensign’s eyes went as wide and slack as his mouth “Sir—?”
“You’ve just saved a general from being bored to death. If I thought I could get away with it, I’d give you a medal, too.” He left the ensign gaping in the hallway.
Inside the conference room, Lando nodded a grin at Shysa and kicked his empty chair out of the way. “Let me handle this.”
He slipped around the corner of the table, to the mercenaries’ side. He sat on the edge and grinned down at the astonished commander. “Okay. Negotiation’s over. You win.”
Shysa frowned. “They do?”
The commander blinked. “We do?”
“Sure. I’ll put it in writing. No Republic forces will land on, permanently orbit, or otherwise occupy this world or this system while you live to serve the Empire. Satisfied?”
“Well, I—ah, I suppose, I mean—well, yes.”
“Great!” Lando’s grin got wider. “Now what?”
“Now?” The commander blinked again. He was still so astonished he entirely forgot he was supposedly refusing to speak Basic. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you’ve won. Your victory is complete. What now?”
“Well, we—I suppose, I mean—”
“How are you planning to get paid?”
“Paid?”
“I have to tell you, our sensors aren’t picking up any sign of Imperial ships dropping out of hyperspace to, y’know, jettison bags of cash or anything.”
The commander’s face clouded over. “I see what you mean.”
“Strikes me,” Lando said carelessly, examining his flawless manicure, “that failure to deliver payment qualifies as a breach of contract, doesn’t it? Not to mention scampering off and leaving you all here to die. Forget that part. I guess they figured that with you all dead, they’d never have to pay. And if you live, well, you’re trapped on a planet deep in Republic space. How are you supposed to collect?”
The commander scowled. “You’re trying to trick me.”
“Not at all.” Lando winked at him. “I’m trying to hire you.”
The commander looked thoughtful.
“Might you and your men be interested in, ah, a new position? Working for people who give a damn whether you live or die? Who will actually—believe it or not—pay you?”
The commander’s scowl got deeper and deeper the longer he thought it over; after what seemed like a long, long time, he turned that scowl on Lando.
The commander said, “In advance?”
CHAPTER 6
“What do you mean, Luke Skywalker is dead?”
Lord Shadowspawn’s holoprojected image was only a half meter tall, but something in his posture, or his inhumanly corpse-pale face, or the glittering malice that dripped from every word, made the nervous wing commander, Norris Prang, feel even smaller than that. He felt roughly the size of a Kashyyyk mouse-spider, and he had a feeling that Lord Shadowspawn was about to come down on him like a Wookiee’s heel.
He swallowed hard and snugged his gleaming black flight-trooper helmet more tightly into his uncomfortably damp armpit. One good thing about this black armor—the sweat didn’t show much, even when it leaked through the wicking fabric joints and trickled down his chestpiece, which it had started to do right about the same time Lord Shadowspawn had started to smile.
Had Shadowspawn’s teeth always been so large? And so white … and kind of pointy-looking?
He couldn’t remember. In fact, now that he thought of it, he couldn’t remember ever having seen Shadowspawn smile. Until now. Which could not bode well for his future.
Maybe this was why his commanding officer, Group Captain Klick, had insisted that he report this personally. “I had, uh, thought, my lord, that my lord might find this to be good news.”
“You thought?”
“The, uh, death of Luke Skywalker,” the wing commander struggled on gamely, “will be a substantial blow to the Rebels—”
“It would be a substantially greater blow to me. Tell me again. Slowly.”
“The gravity slice worked as well as can be expected, given that the Rebels fired first,” Prang said.
“They have been known to do so.”
“While the Rebel flagship was not entirely destroyed, the g-slice did manage to cut it into three pieces, of which the two largest are currently derelict in orbit. The smallest section included the bridge, which retained some manu—”
“Wing Commander.”
Prang felt himself swallow again. Involuntarily. “Yes, my lord?”
“Speak to me of how you plan to capture Luke Skywalker.”
“Plan to—? My lord, the only evidence we have of his presence is a single unencrypted EM transmission, which could easily have been some kind of a trick.”
“A trick? Luke Skywalker doesn’t use tricks. The only evidence we need is that someone landed a third of a Mon Calamari starship using nothing but attitude thrusters. That’s a Skywalker at work.”
“My lord, the bridge section exploded on impact.”
Shadowspawn’s interstellar-black eyes narrowed dangerously.
“If Luke Skywalker had perished, I would have felt it in the D … in the Force. Find him, Wing Commander. Find him and bring him to me. Alive. No harm must come to him, do you understand? Do this as though your own life depends on it.”
The wing commander threw his hand up in an enthusiastic salute. “It will be done, my lord.”
Luke toiled up the outer slope of the crater left by the final destruction of the Justice: a ring of half-fused volcanic rock thrown up five meters above a hillside that was itself piled and fused rock. In fact, from here it looked like the whole planet was nothing but fused and blasted rock; the only colors were the dull reds and shabby blues, rot-green and vomit-yellow of exposed minerals, and the iridescent metallic smears left by meteorites from the daily rock storms.
At the lip, he lay flat and slowly, cautiously, lifted the rad sensor above the rim. He used his artificial hand. The scant bacta he and the crew had been able to salvage from the wreck wasn’t sufficient to treat the casualties they already had; no sense adding to the burden by getting himself rad-burned.
At the base of the ring below him, R2 bounced from side to side, whistling a caution. “I know,” Luke said, squinting up at the rad sensor. “But I have to confirm destruction before we abandon this position—we can’t afford to let these guys get their hands on next-generation Mon Cal tech.”
R2’s answer sounded vaguely scolding, and Luke let himself smile. “Once you get that rollerped back in working order, you can do these jobs again. Till then, though—”
This time, R2’s terrooweepeepeep came out distinctly defensive.
“If you worried as much about yourself as you do about me, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Honestly, I think you s
pend too much time with Threepio.”
The rad sensor flickered blue, then red, then blue again; radiation levels were low enough that Luke decided he could risk a peek. The interior of the crater was only about fifteen meters deep at its lowest point, though it was several hundred meters in diameter; the sponginess of the volcanic rock appeared to have absorbed a lot of the blast. As for the Justice itself, Luke could see that Mon Calamari scuttling charges were as efficient as everything else they made: he could spot no remaining piece of the ship bigger than his doubled fists. He would have taken a longer look, but the smothering-hot wind was whipping streamers of dust into his face.
He ducked back below the rim, fighting the urge to wipe his eyes until he could produce enough tears to wash out the sand; lacking bacta, a scratched cornea would be no picnic, either. He took a couple of seconds to retie the scrap of battle-dress blouse that he wore across his face. He held his breath till he got the rag in place, and tight. Breathing that dust was even less fun than getting it in his eyes. But keeping out the dust was only a partial solution; the atmosphere itself was mildly caustic. He’d been dirtside barely a Standard hour before a rasp had begun to scrape inside his throat with every breath.
Terroo-weet-weet-weet-weet-weet!
R2’s insistent warning brought Luke’s head around. “What is it?”
The astromech’s holoprojector lit up trails of blue-tinged fire streaked toward the schematized curve of a planetary surface. Luke bared his teeth and turned toward the south, where the lightning-orange sky already blazed with an incoming meteorite storm.