How many attempts had she made on Luke’s life? That was all supposed to be in the past—but suppose it wasn’t? Leia wasn’t sure what to think.
The tableau held for a moment longer, but then Mara made the first move. “Hello, Leia,” she said, stepping forward and nodding her head very slightly, her tone and behavior formal, even if she called Leia by her first name. “It is good to see you.” She made no effort to offer her hand, or come closer. She looked cool, calm, well-fed, well rested. The troubles of the last few days—if they had indeed been troublesome days for her—had left no mark on her. Mara was tall and slender, with a dancer’s body and grace. Her red-gold hair flowed over her shoulders, set off by the plain black tailored jumpsuit she wore.
“And it’s good to see you,” Leia said, not quite sure if she was lying or not. She turned and went back around the table, and retook her seat there, if for no other reason than to break up the awkward scene. “However I must admit I am surprised.”
“I think it would be a bit more accurate to say you’re not quite sure what to think,” Mara said evenly, taking a seat opposite Leia at the table. “If I were in your shoes, I’d be wondering about me. You’re no fool, and neither am I. I can see all the reasons you might suspect me. Nothing I can say will convince you that I had no role in all this. I don’t know how strong your Jedi powers are, but I doubt they are strong enough for a complete probe of my mind.”
“Not one that I’d have any faith in,” Leia admitted.
“So there we are,” Mara concluded.
“Are you saying I’ll just have to trust you?”
Mara shrugged. “Trust me to do what? We’re not allies in this, so far as I know. The one thing we can both be sure we have in common is that we’d both like to escape.”
“Can I even be sure of that?” Leia asked.
Mara smiled. “Yes,” she said. “You can. I want out of here. The longer I am cooped up here, the worse it will be for my trading business. You’ve never known me to be shy about admitting my personal interests. I’m losing time and money sitting here.”
“And that’s supposed to satisfy me.”
“No,” said Mara, “but it’s all I’ve got. I’m not involved in this madness, but how can I prove a negative?”
Leia looked long and hard at Mara. She had the very strong impression that Mara could say more if she wished, but it was clear she was not going to say another word on the subject. “What can you tell me about what’s going on out there?”
“Not much,” Mara said. “I’ve been locked up three doors down. My ex-roommate accused me of being a League sympathizer, it got a little sticky, and so here I am. I haven’t heard anything more than you.”
“How about a theory, then?” Leia asked. “I’ve had nothing to do but think about the situation, and I can’t make sense of it at all. The pieces don’t fit together. What do you think is going on?” The question was broad enough for Mara to answer however she liked, and that was the point. Leia wanted to know Mara’s opinion—or, perhaps likelier, Mara’s pretended opinion.
“I don’t have a theory, exactly,” Mara replied, “but it seems very clear to me that Diktat Thrackan Sal-Solo knows what he is doing. He’s controlling the situation, and he knows it. He’s smart enough, has enough political savvy, that he’d be able to predict the results of his actions. I don’t think he has to do anything. I think he just has to say he’s going to do things.”
“And the results of what he has said about kicking nonhumans off the planet has been riot and upheaval,” Leia said. “His words have caused further hardening of bad feelings between the three races. People have been radicalized, pushed into extreme positions by extreme circumstances.”
“And my guess is that is exactly what Sal-Solo hoped would happen,” Mara said. “Maybe he just wants to make the New Republic look bad. He’s certainly put you in a bad position.”
“That’s for sure,” Leia said. “He’s set it up so I have to make one of two politically, and physically, impossible choices. Let thousands, maybe millions, die as their planet is wiped out, or else forcibly deport millions of people from their ancestral home. Whatever I do, the New Republic’s reputation is going to be badly damaged, if not wrecked beyond all repair.”
“That might be his ultimate goal,” Mara said. “The destruction of the New Republic. He wants to set up the Corellian Sector as an independent state. Seems to me that the weaker the New Republic is, the more luck he’s going to have making his independent state last.”
“So he doesn’t much care what happens or what we do, so long as we end up looking bad. Is that it?”
“It’s one theory.”
“But we can’t do anything at all as long as we’re prisoners,” Leia said. “What good does it do him to hold us?”
“None that I can see,” Mara said. “So I don’t think he will, much longer. I think he is going keep his troops in Corona House until he is satisfied that the situation is under control. Then he’ll withdraw the troops and shut off the jamming. You and Micamberlecto will be able to give whatever orders you like—to whatever forces you can reach. Except you won’t have much in the way of forces to order around by then. You’ll be very ineffectual. And you won’t be able to leave the system. There’s still the interdiction field. He’s not going to drop that. That keeps you from getting out, and keeps your friends from getting in.”
“But the interdiction field won’t stop the New Republic from intervening,” Leia said. “It will just slow it down. If they have to spend a month or two or three flying at sublight speed to get here, they will.”
“Leia—Madame Chief of State. With all due respect, I am a master trader. Information is the lifeblood of my work. If I know the Republic Navy is in no shape to fight right now, and if the enemy can read your private cipher, I don’t think they know less than I do. They probably know as much as you do on the subject.”
“If not more,” Leia conceded. “And even if Thrackan sets us free, he’ll keep very close tabs on us. He’d try and bully me into talks, and I’d be negotiating with a gun to my head.” She paused. “No thank you. No way. I have to get out of here before that happens.”
Mara looked hard at Leia. “I was sort of coming around to that,” she said.
“What do you mean?” Leia asked, immediately suspicious. “You have something in mind.”
Mara hesitated a moment, and then shrugged. “I give up. There’s no way I can tell you this without it sounding like a setup. So I’m just going to tell you and let it sound like whatever it will. I have a slave-circuit controller for my ship, the Jade’s Fire.”
Leia stared at Mara, but her mind was anywhere but on Mara’s appearance. Suddenly there were a dozen new variables in the equation. A slave-circuit control was basically a remote control for a spacecraft. The simplest of them were no more than homing devices. Push a button and the ship would come to you. The more sophisticated slave systems could operate virtually every major system on a starship. Leia didn’t quite know how to react to the news. It was easy to imagine all the ways this might be a trap. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that Mara had such a device, but on the other hand, if she had it, why hadn’t she used it by now? “Where is the control unit?” Leia asked.
“It’s hidden—well hidden—in my quarters on the twelfth floor. I never had a chance to get to it. For that matter, I still don’t see any chance.”
“Nor do I,” Leia agreed. “Unless you can come up with a way to get through locked doors and breeze through their guard stations on the stairs. I know from the door numbers that we’re on the eighteenth floor—but I also know the League probably has its own barracks set up on the sixteenth or seventeenth.”
“And how do you know that?”
“My quarters were on the fifteenth floor,” Leia said, “and I saw what shape the building was in before we got locked up. Fifteen was a mess after the attack, and everything between eight and fifteen is even worse, so they can’t be lower than sixtee
n. And my guard mentioned bringing food from downstairs, and he’s always out of breath when he shows up.”
“That’s it?” Mara asked. “That’s all you’ve got?”
“It seemed pretty convincing to me,” Leia said. “But this slave controller of yours. Wouldn’t the guards have found it yet?”
“I doubt this bunch of thugs would be able to find their own heads in the dark,” Mara said. “I got the distinct impression that they were more interested in browsing through whatever valuables they could slip into their pockets.”
Leia thought fast. She was starting to get an idea. “It’s possible—just possible—that I could help you get the slave controller. If I can, and if the controller is still there, can you make it work?”
“How are you going to get the controller?” Mara asked.
“Let’s just say that maybe I could,” Leia said. There was a flaw, an obvious one. “The jamming,” Leia said. “How is your slave controller going to get past that?”
“The Human League isn’t the first to jam com frequencies. The slave unit has a backup mode, a comlaser mode that works on line of sight.” Mara stood up, went to the window, and drew open the curtains. She pointed out the window. “There’s the spaceport. She’s just a dot on the horizon from here, but I can see her. The Jade’s Fire is out there, sealed up tight and locked down. As long as the slave controller can see her, I can bring her in. It might take a little extra doing through the jamming, and at this range, but I can do it.”
“So you think that if you got the controller, you could get the ship here.”
“Something can always go wrong, but I’d say the odds were about ninety-five percent.”
“But could you bring her close enough alongside the building so that we could get aboard?”
Mara frowned. “It would take some piloting. I’d put that at about seventy-five percent.”
“That’s better odds than we have at the moment,” Leia said.
“But how are you going to get to the slave control?” Mara asked again.
Leia looked hard at Mara. There was no more proof than before that the trader was not involved with the Human League, but somehow, now Leia believed her. But suppose Mara wasn’t on the level. Then what? How bad could things get? The worst-case scenario that Leia could see was that she might get killed. Not an appealing prospect, needless to say, but from the standpoint of what was best for the New Republic, a martyred Chief of State was probably preferable to one forced to choose between letting millions die or helping to deport a whole planetful of innocent people. Death she would risk for a reasonable chance of escape. “It’s going to take some luck,” Leia said at last. “And more than a little bit of planning. Let’s sit down and get to it.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Hard Way
I have the start of wondering if I should have said one thing to you about your wife’s circumstance,” said Dracmus.
“I thought you said you’d speak Basic better once you had a little practice,” Han said as he paced back and forth in the cell.
“Oh, I would been having to get better,” Dracmus said, “but honored Solo is driving me bolts by acting so nervous. I cannot concentrate.”
“#160;‘Nuts,’ ” Han said. “The expression is ‘driving me nuts.’ ”
“Bolts or nuts, you are going around the corner.”
“The bend,” Han said as he paused to examine the door of the cell for at least the hundredth time. “I’m going around the bend.”
“Truly so,” said Dracmus.
“Listen. I think I have this figured out. Two guards bring our meals. One carries the food, and the other covers him with the blaster. I take my food tray from the first guard, and throw it in the face of the second guard. He dodges the tray, and I grab his blaster while you knock out the first guard and take his weapon. Then we get out into the corridor—”
“And while bravely you are hurling your dinner buns at the first two guards the third guard and the fourth guard and the fifth and sixth and seven guard shoot many holes in all of us both,” Dracmus said, calmly sitting on her cot. “And just in case they all miss, all the exits will be getting locked up hard, and all in complex go on lovely red alert until they hunting us nicely down.”
Han glared at the Selonian. “You’re an awful big help. You know that?”
“More so than you think. Patience, honored Solo. All that is required is just a little patience.”
“Patience! You’re the one who reminded me that my wife is right under Jade’s thumb. I’ve got to get out of here and warn her, rescue her!”
“Dead you cannot do this,” Dracmus said. “Dead I can also do nothing, and I wish to do more than nothing, and your mad plans will get us killed both. Remain calm. Remain calm.”
“Calm? What is there to remain calm about?”
But suddenly Dracmus was on her feet, her head cocked to one side, her hand signaling for quiet. “Please, silence!” she said.
Han stared at his cell mate. “What are you—”
“Zzzzsss!” Dracmus said. “Silence!”
Han stood stock-still, listening. Finally he heard it. A low, far-off humming, with an occasional clittering, clattering noise.
Dracmus turned toward Han and bared her teeth in a disconcerting Selonian equivalent of a smile. “Do you hearing that?” she asked. “I wonder what that could be.”
* * *
“Are you ready?” Mara asked.
Leia smiled. “Not really, but I’m not going to get any readier. Let’s just hope it all works.” The plan seemed more logical than practical, somehow. In theory, it ought to work. In practice, lots of things were bound to go wrong.
“Let’s get started,” Mara said.
Corona House had been designed as the Governor-General’s residence, not as a prison. As such, it had no holding cells, but a good number of guest suites and state apartments of various sizes and degrees of luxury, depending on the rank of the guest. The smaller rooms more or less resembled conventional hotel rooms, and it was these that the Human League had pressed into service to confine its New Republic prisoners. As such, they lacked such amenities as bars on the windows, although the beds were provided with linens. Now that night had fallen, Leia and Mara planned to take advantage of both these features of the room.
Step one had already been accomplished. They had stripped the sheets and blankets off both beds, sliced them into strips using a dull knife quietly swiped from Leia’s dinner tray, and tied the strips together to form a crude rope—which Leia hoped was stronger than it looked. Step two was a bit trickier. There are ways to smash out a window quietly, but they are not foolproof. It would be far better if they could get the window open, but that was not going to be easy. The guards had spot-welded all the windows on the floor shut. At least they had more or less done so. They had done a proper job on one of Leia’s windows, a solid weld that nothing was going to shake, but the weld on the other was downright sloppy, a weak little splotch of melted metal that didn’t look strong enough to hold anything.
Except that it proved to be stronger than it looked. They spent twenty minutes taking turns trying to lever a crack into the weld. First Mara and then Leia and then Mara tried to wedge the knife into the seam between window frame and sill. The effort left them no farther forward than before, aside from a badly bent knife and a well-gouged windowsill. Leia was well into her second turn with the knife, and just about ready to give up and risk smashing the window, when something went snap and the weld cracked clean in half. Leia looked at Mara with a grin, and slid the window up. It was the work of a moment to gouge a hole in the screen and tear it open.
Then came the hard part.
They tied one end of the improvised rope around the bed frame. Leia tied an improvised climbing harness onto herself, snaked the bedsheet rope through it, then climbed up onto the windowsill and threw the end of the rope out the window.
“Wish me luck,” she said to Mara.
“Oh, I do,”
Mara said. “After all, I get to go next.”
Leia swallowed hard and stepped out onto the ledge just outside the window. She gave the rope a good hard tug. It seemed to be holding. She paused, just a moment, and looked around. The night was cool and clear, the wind blowing steadily, just enough to catch at her hair and blow it into her face. The city of Coronet was spread out below her—directly below her, if she looked straight down, which she chose not to do. But looking out toward the horizon was all right. She could do that without any problem. Without window glass between her and the view, everything seemed closer, sharper, nearer to hand.
The city was quieter than it should have been. There should have been the sounds of traffic, the occasional far-off voice carried by the wind, perhaps a snatch of music floating up now and then. But all Leia could hear was the muffled boom and roar of the surf, far off on the horizon. She looked out to the water and could just barely make out the line between sand and sea. She could see the lines of whitecaps moving into the shore. She turned her gaze toward the city of Coronet itself.
Large stretches of the city were blacked out. Even in the places where there were lights, there were not enough of them. The city in the cold, clear night seemed lonely, half-empty, half-abandoned. And maybe it was. Surely any nonhuman with a modicum of sense would have gotten out of town or gone into hiding by now.
But looking at the city was not what she was out here for. She made sure the rope was running through the crude climbing harness properly, took another deep breath, tested the strength of her climbing rope one more time, and put her weight on it as she eased her way over the window ledge. She started down the side of the building, hoping against hope that she and Mara had worked out the distances properly and the improvised rope was going to reach to the fifteenth floor.
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