by Timothy Zahn
She gazed at him coldly. “Just so you know I can handle it. In case you should feel tempted to try and make a grab for my blaster.” She glanced upward at the darkening sky. “Come on—get busy with that travois. We’ll need to find some kind of clearing to put the sonde balloon up, and I want to get that done before nightfall.”
CHAPTER
24
“I must apologize for chasing you out like that,” Karrde said as he walked Han toward the central building. “Particularly in the middle of a meal. Not exactly the sort of hospitality we strive for here.”
“No problem,” Han told him, eyeing him as best he could in the gathering dusk. The light from the building ahead was casting a faint glow on Karrde’s face; with luck, it would be enough to read the other’s expression by. “What was that all about, anyway?”
“Nothing serious,” Karrde assured him easily. “Some people with whom I’ve had business dealings wanted to come and look the place over.”
“Ah,” Han said. “So you’re working directly for the Empire now?”
Karrde’s expression cracked, just a little. Han expected him to make some sort of reflexive denial; instead, he stopped and turned to look at Lando and Ghent, walking behind them. “Ghent?” he asked mildly.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the kid said, sounding miserable. “They insisted on coming out to see what was happening.”
“I see.” Karrde looked back at Han, his face calm again. “No harm done, probably. Not the wisest of risks to take, though.”
“I’m used to taking risks,” Han told him. “You haven’t answered my question.”
Karrde resumed walking. “If I’m not interested in working for the Republic, I’m certainly not interested in working for the Empire. The Imperials have been coming here for the past few weeks to collect ysalamiri—sessile creatures, like the ones hanging onto the tree in the greatroom. I offered my assistance in helping them safely remove the ysalamiri from their trees.”
“What did you get in return?”
“The privilege of watching them work,” Karrde said. “Giving me that much extra information to try to figure out what they wanted with the things.”
“And what did they want with them?”
Karrde glanced at Han. “Information costs money here, Solo. Actually, to be perfectly honest, we don’t know what they’re up to. We’re working on it, though.”
“I see. But you do know their commander personally.”
Karrde smiled faintly. “That’s information again.”
Han was starting to get sick of this. “Have it your way. What’ll this Grand Admiral’s name cost me?”
“For the moment, the name’s not for sale,” he told Han. “Perhaps we’ll talk about it later.”
“Thanks, but I don’t think there’s going to be a later,” Han growled, stopping. “If you don’t mind, we’ll just say our good-byes here and get back to the ship.”
Karrde turned to him in mild surprise. “You’re not going to finish our dinner? You hardly had a chance to get started.”
Han looked him straight in the eye. “I don’t especially like sitting on the ground like a practice target when there are stormtroopers wandering around,” he said bluntly.
Karrde’s face hardened. “At the moment, sitting on the ground is preferable to drawing attention in the air,” he said coldly. “The Star Destroyer hasn’t left orbit yet. Lifting off now would be an open invitation for them to swat you down.”
“The Falcon’s outrun Star Destroyers before,” Han countered. But Karrde had a point . . . and the fact that he hadn’t turned the two of them over to the Imperials probably meant that he could be trusted, at least for now. Probably.
On the other hand, if they did stay . . . “But I suppose it wouldn’t hurt us to stick around a little longer,” he conceded. “All right, sure, we’ll finish dinner.”
“Good,” Karrde said. “It will just take a few minutes to get things put back together.”
“You took everything apart?” Lando asked.
“Everything that might have indicated we had guests,” Karrde said. “The Grand Admiral is highly observant, and I wouldn’t have put it past him to know exactly how many of my associates are staying here at the moment.”
“Well, while you’re getting things ready,” Han said, “I want to go back to the ship and check on a couple of things.”
Karrde’s eyes narrowed slightly. “But you will be back.”
Han gave him an innocent smile. “Trust me.”
Karrde gazed at him a moment longer, then shrugged. “Very well. Watch yourselves, though. The local predators don’t normally come this close in to our encampment, but there are exceptions.”
“We’ll be careful,” Han promised. “Come on, Lando.”
They headed back the way they’d come. “So what did we forget to do back at the Falcon?” Lando asked quietly as they reached the trees.
“Nothing,” Han murmured back. “I just thought it’d be a good time to go check out Karrde’s storage sheds. Particularly the one that was supposed to have a prisoner in it.”
They went about five meters into the forest, then changed direction to circle the compound. A quarter of the way around the circle, they found a likely looking group of small buildings.
“Look for a door with a lock,” Lando suggested as they came out among the sheds. “Either permanent or temporary.”
“Right.” Han peered through the darkness. “That one over there—the one with two doors?”
“Could be,” Lando agreed. “Let’s take a look.”
The left-most of the two doors did indeed have a lock. Or, rather, it had had a lock. “It’s been shot off,” Lando said, poking at it with a finger. “Strange.”
“Maybe the prisoner had friends,” Han suggested, glancing around. There was no one else in sight. “Let’s go inside.”
They slid the door open and went in, closing it behind them before turning on the light. The shed was less than half full, with most of the boxes piled against the right-hand wall. The exceptions to that rule . . .
Han stepped over for a closer look. “Well, well,” he murmured, gazing at the removed power outlet plate and the wires poking through the gap. “Someone’s been busy over here.”
“Someone’s been even busier over here,” Lando commented from behind him. “Come have a look.”
Lando was crouched down beside the door, peering into the inside of the door lock mechanism. Like the outside, half of its covering plate had been blasted off. “That must have been one beaut of a shot,” Han frowned, coming over.
“It wasn’t a single shot,” Lando said, shaking his head. “The stuff in between is mostly intact.” He pushed back the cover a little, poking at the electronics inside with his fingers. “Looks like our mysterious prisoner was tampering with the equipment.”
“I wonder how he got it open.” Han glanced back at the removed power plate. “I’m going to take a look next door,” he told Lando, stepping back to the entrance and tapping the release.
The door didn’t open. “Uh-oh,” he muttered, trying again.
“Wait a second—I see the problem,” Lando said, fiddling with something behind the plate. “There’s a power supply been half spliced into the works . . .”
Abruptly, the door slid open. “Back in a second,” Han told him, and slipped outside.
The shed’s right-hand room wasn’t much different from the other one. Except for one thing: in the center, in a space that had very obviously been cleared for the purpose, lay an open droid restraint collar.
Han frowned down at it. The collar hadn’t been properly put away, or even closed again—hardly the way someone in an organization like Karrde’s would be expected to take care of company equipment. Roughly in the center of the collar’s open jaws were three faint marks on the floor. Skid marks, he decided, formed by the restrained droid’s attempts to move or get free.
Behind him, the door whispered open. Han spun around, b
laster in hand—
“You seem to have gotten lost,” Karrde said calmly. His eyes flicked around the room. “And to have lost General Calrissian along the way.”
Han lowered the blaster. “You need to tell your people to put their toys away when they’re done,” he said, nodding his head at the abandoned restraint collar. “You were holding a droid prisoner, too?”
Karrde smiled thinly. “I see Ghent was talking out of turn again. Amazing, isn’t it, how so many expert slicers know everything about computers and droids and yet don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.”
“It’s also amazing how so many expert smugglers don’t know when to leave a messy deal alone,” Han shot back. “So what’s your Grand Admiral got you doing? Formal slaving, or just random kidnappings?”
Karrde’s eyes flashed. “I don’t deal in slaves, Solo. Slaves or kidnapping. Never.”
“What was this one, then? An accident?”
“I didn’t ask for him to come into my life,” Karrde countered. “Nor did I especially want him there.”
Han snorted. “You’re stretching, Karrde. What’d he do, drop in out of the sky on top of you?”
“As a matter of fact, that’s very nearly the way it happened,” Karrde said stiffly.
“Oh, well, that’s a good reason to lock someone up,” Han said sardonically. “Who was he?”
“That information’s not for sale.”
“Maybe we don’t need to buy it,” Lando said from behind him.
Karrde turned. “Ah,” he said as Lando stepped past him into the room. “There you are. Exploring the other half of the shed, were you?”
“Yeah, we don’t stay lost very long,” Han assured him. “What’d you find, Lando?”
“This.” Lando held up a tiny red cylinder with a pair of wires coming out of each end. “It’s a micrel power supply—the kind used for low-draw applications. Our prisoner wired it into the door lock control after the power lines had been burned away—that’s how he got out.” He moved it a little closer. “The manufacturer’s logo is small, but readable. Recognize it?”
Han squinted at it. The script was alien, but it seemed vaguely familiar. “I’ve seen it before, but I don’t remember where.”
“You saw it during the war,” Lando told him, his gaze steady on Karrde. “It’s the logo of the Sibha Habadeet.”
Han stared at the tiny cylinder, a strange chill running through him. The Sibha Habadeet had been one of the Alliance’s major suppliers of micrel equipment. And their specialty had been—“That’s a bioelectronic power supply?”
“That’s right,” Lando said grimly. “Just like the kind that would have been put in, say, an artificial hand.”
Slowly, the muzzle of Han’s blaster came up again to point at Karrde’s stomach. “There was a droid in here,” he told Lando. “The skid marks on the floor look just about right for an R2 unit.” He raised his eyebrows. “Feel free to join the conversation anytime, Karrde.”
Karrde sighed, his face a mixture of annoyance and resignation. “What do you want me to say?—that Luke Skywalker was a prisoner here? All right—consider it said.”
Han felt his jaw tighten. And he and Lando had been right here. Blissfully unaware . . . “Where is he now?” he demanded.
“I thought Ghent would have told you,” Karrde said darkly. “He escaped in one of my Skipray blastboats.” His lips twisted. “Crashing it in the process.”
“He what?”
“He’s all right,” Karrde assured him. “Or at least he was a couple of hours ago. The stormtroopers who went to investigate said that both wrecks were deserted.” His eyes seemed to flatten, just for a minute. “I hope that means they’re working together to make their way out.”
“You don’t sound sure of that,” Han prompted.
The eyes flattened a little more. “Mara Jade was the one who went after him. She has a certain—well, why mince words. In point of fact, she wants very much to kill him.”
Han threw a startled glance at Lando. “Why?”
Karrde shook his head. “I don’t know.”
For a moment the room was silent. “How did he get here?” Lando asked.
“As I said, purely by accident,” Karrde said. “No—I take that back. It wasn’t an accident for Mara—she led us directly to his crippled starfighter.”
“How?”
“Again, I don’t know.” He fixed Han with a hard look. “And before you ask, we had nothing to do with the damage to his ship. He’d burned out both hyperdrive motivators tangling with one of the Empire’s Star Destroyers. If we hadn’t picked him up, he’d almost certainly be dead by now.”
“Instead of roaming a forest with someone who still wants him that way,” Han countered. “Yeah, you’re a real hero.”
The hard look hardened even further. “The Imperials want Skywalker, Solo. They want him very badly. If you look carefully, you’ll notice that I didn’t give him to them.”
“Because he escaped first.”
“He escaped because he was in this shed,” Karrde retorted. “And he was in this shed because I didn’t want the Imperials stumbling over him during their unannounced visit.”
He paused. “You’ll also notice,” he added quietly, “that I didn’t turn the two of you over to them, either.”
Slowly, Han lowered the blaster. Anything said at the point of a gun was of course suspect; but the fact that Karrde had indeed not betrayed them to the Imperials was a strong argument in his favor.
Or rather, he hadn’t betrayed them yet. That could always change. “I want to see Luke’s X-wing,” he told Karrde.
“Certainly,” Karrde said. “I’d recommend not going there until tomorrow morning, though. We moved it somewhat farther into the forest than your ship; and there will be predators roaming around it in the darkness.”
Han hesitated, then nodded. If Karrde had something subtle going here, he almost certainly would have already erased or altered the X-wing’s computer log. A few more hours wouldn’t make any difference. “All right. So what are we going to do about Luke?”
Karrde shook his head, his gaze not quite focused on Han. “There’s nothing we can do for them tonight. Not with vornskrs roaming the forest and the Grand Admiral still in orbit. Tomorrow . . . We’ll have to discuss it, see what we can come up with.” His focus came back, and with it a slightly ironic smile. “In the meantime, dinner should be ready by now. If you’ll follow me . . .?”
The dimly lit holographic art gallery had changed again, this time to a collection of remarkably similar flame-shaped works that seemed to pulsate and alter in form as Pellaeon moved carefully between the pedestals. He studied them as he walked, wondering where this batch had come from. “Have you found them, Captain?” Thrawn asked as Pellaeon reached the double display circle.
He braced himself. “I’m afraid not, sir. We’d hoped that with the arrival of local nightfall we’d be able to get some results from the infrared sensors. But they don’t seem able to penetrate the tree canopy, either.”
Thrawn nodded. “What about that pulse transmission we picked up just after sundown?”
“We were able to confirm that it originated from the approximate location of the crash site,” Pellaeon told him. “But it was too brief for a precise location check. The encrypt on it is a very strange one—Decrypt thinks it might be a type of counterpart coding. They’re still working on it.”
“They’ve tried all the known Rebellion encrypts, I presume.”
“Yes, sir, as per your orders.”
Thrawn nodded thoughtfully. “It looks like we’re at something of a stalemate, then, Captain. At least as long as they’re in the forest. Have you calculated their likely emergence points?”
“There’s really only one practical choice,” Pellaeon said, wondering why they were making so much of a fuss over this. “A town called Hyllyard City, on the edge of the forest and almost directly along their path. It’s the only population center anywhere for mo
re than a hundred kilometers. With only the one survival pack between them, they almost have to come out there.”
“Excellent,” Thrawn nodded. “I want you to detail three squads of stormtroopers to set up an observation post there. They’re to assemble and depart ship immediately.”
Pellaeon blinked. “Stormtroopers, sir?”
“Stormtroopers,” Thrawn repeated, turning his gaze to one of the flame sculptures. “Better add half a biker scout unit, too, and three Chariot light assault vehicles.”
“Yes, sir,” Pellaeon said cautiously. Stormtroopers were in critically short supply these days. To waste them like this, on something so utterly unimportant as a smuggler squabble . . .
“Karrde lied to us, you see,” Thrawn continued, as if reading Pellaeon’s mind. “Whatever that little drama was this afternoon, it was not the common pursuit of a common thief. I’d like to know what, in fact, it was.”
“I . . . don’t think I follow, sir.”
“It’s very simple, Captain,” Thrawn said, in that tone of voice he always seemed to use when explaining the obvious. “The pilot of the chase vehicle never reported in during the pursuit. Nor did anyone from Karrde’s base communicate with him. We know that—we’d have intercepted any such transmissions. No progress reports; no assistance requests; nothing but complete radio silence.” He looked back at Pellaeon. “Speculation, Captain?”
“Whatever it was,” Pellaeon said slowly, “it was something they didn’t want us knowing about. Beyond that . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t know, sir. There could be any number of things they wouldn’t want outsiders to know about. They are smugglers, after all.”
“Agreed.” Thrawn’s eyes seemed to glitter. “But now consider the additional fact that Karrde refused our invitation to join in the search for Skywalker . . . and the fact that this afternoon he implied the search was over.” He raised an eyebrow. “What does that suggest to you, Captain?”
Pellaeon felt his jaw drop. “You mean . . . that was Skywalker in that Skipray?”