by Troy Denning
“I’m very fond of my man.” Leia put as much ice into her voice as she could—and she had been told she could give a wampa the chills. “I would be very upset if an unnecessary accident befell him.”
“Then I hope he’s as good as you say.” Ulda’s carefully maintained poise slipped a little. “For both our sakes.”
The trio reached the test loop, a thin ribbon of sand track circling the inner pit area, no more than a kilometer in length. Chewbacca held the swoop while Han climbed on. Ody spent a few moments trying to show Han the controls, then seemed to realize he already knew them and stepped away.
That was when Ulda pulled a comlink from her sleeve. “Ody, didn’t he check the control vanes?”
Ody nodded and raised a comlink to his lips. “In the hangar.”
Han activated the ion thrusters.
“So he fixed them?”
Ody shook his head, and Chewbacca stepped back.
“Then don’t just stand there! Get him off that—”
Han twisted the throttle and was gone. Ulda’s shoulders slumped, the handicappers stood and went gasping to the transparisteel wall, and Leia reached for the holdout blaster in her pocket.
Han was halfway down the first leg of the loop when the swoop’s nose suddenly came up, and he shot into the air like a missile.
Ulda was on her comlink instantly. “Ody! What’s happening?”
Ody spread his hands, then Han reached the first turn, spun the swoop upside down, and began a sharp banking descent that carried him to the back side of the loop. He did not turn the swoop right-side up again until he was so close to the ground that a sand plume began to shoot out behind him.
Showing off, as usual.
Ulda let out a long sigh of relief, and the handicappers returned to their seats, jabbering to each other and making notes on the datapads. Leia left her hand in her pocket, still grasping the hold-out blaster.
Han climbed into the air again as he came to the second turn, then flipped the swoop over and repeated the maneuver. He was still rounding the corner when Ulda raised the comlink to her lips again.
“Ody, get Rao’s swoop ready. And put a vidmap aboard.”
The Er’Kit waved and started back toward the hangar—then hit the sand as a long line of white-armored figures on Imperial speeder bikes entered the track from the direction of Mos Espa. They rounded the curve, speeding toward the far end of the arena.
“Don’t tell me,” Leia said. “They’re going into—”
“Arch Canyon.” Ulda nodded toward the canyon mouth at the far end of the arena. “That’s the fastest way in.”
“Kit!” Tamora gasped.
Ulda surprised Leia again by laying a hand over Tamora’s. “It’s going to be okay. Your friend will find him first.”
“He will?” This from Leia.
“Of course.” Ulda continued to look at Tamora. “He’ll know where Kit’s going.”
Tamora appeared dazed. “How?”
“Kit was mine for a lot of years.” Ulda could not resist smirking. “And I guess I still know some things about him that you never will.”
Chapter Eight
Rao’s “swoop” was little more than a seat laser-welded onto the top of an old IPG Longtail Podracing engine, with a few jury-rigged control vanes, a big landspeeder repulsorlift to keep it off the ground, and a transparent plastoid pilot’s cowling. A heavily dented engine housing and bloodstained seat suggested it was even more dangerous than Ulda claimed, and it was obviously a home design made to win races regardless of risk.
Han loved it, but the idea of riding the thing frightened him. It would be a little like life as a smuggler, he supposed. The trip was going to be fast, dangerous, and a whole lot of fun, but filled with wild detours and possibly subject to an unscheduled and violent end.
As Ody mounted a hands-off vidmap between the handlebars, Han slipped into the flight suit Ulda had insisted he would need, then spent a few moments walking around the machine, checking to see that all control surfaces moved freely. He had to admire the builder’s insight into swoop racing. Because of the swoop’s size, a factory engineer would have doubled or even tripled the size of the vanes, then relied on computer-assisted movement mechanisms to refine adjustments at high speeds. The builder of this machine had used undersized vanes, knowing they would be more forgiving at high speeds—and less likely to malfunction in a sandy environment like Tatooine.
By the time Han finished his survey, the vidmap was mounted and programmed. Han’s destination was an empty, isolated little house in the desert, about two-thirds of the way to Jabba’s old palace.
“This is where Kitster goes to find peace of mind,” Ulda explained. “I understand it has a splendid view of the Western Dune Sea.”
“So you’ve never been there yourself?” Leia asked.
Ulda shook her head. “I had Kitster followed once, when I suspected him of seeing other women. It turned out he was gleaminking a desertscape.” She cast a venomous glance in Tamora’s direction. “Perhaps that’s why I was so easily betrayed later.”
Tamora’s face reddened, and she bit her lip.
“Yeah, well, no use living in the past.” Eager to change the subject, Han rubbed his hand along the swoop’s engine housing. “I’ll have to be careful about breaking the sound barrier with this baby.”
“Yes, do.” Ulda handed him a bulky helmet with a full-face mask, built-in comlink, and heads-up display linked to the vidmap. “It wobbles just before you punch through.”
“Really?” Han forced a smile to cover his astonishment; he had been joking about breaking the sound barrier. “You can’t be serious.”
Ulda nodded that she was.
“Don’t get so excited, Flyboy,” Leia said. “You’re not sixteen anymore.”
“Good, because I couldn’t have handled this thing at sixteen.” Han closed his face mask and nodded to Chewbacca. “Give me a boost, will you?”
Chewbacca groaned and glanced over at Leia. Han turned to find her jaw hanging slack with disbelief, her eyes brown and liquid with hurt.
“What are you worried about?” He opened the face mask and kissed her, making certain to linger until she let him go. “I am coming back, you know.”
Leia was still thinking about Han’s parting words half a standard hour later, as Tamora guided them through a warren of sand-and-mud huts in Mos Espa’s poorest section of town. She was drawn to the scoundrel in him, to the aura of danger and promise that clung to him like a bad holo job. But it was the hero in her husband that she loved, his casual courage, the way he thought nothing of hopping onto a saddled rocket and racing out into a desert full of stormtroopers to recover a priceless painting with a secret code. The only thing Leia didn’t like was the reason he was doing it. No man should feel compelled to put himself in peril to please the woman he loved.
But it was sweet that Han would.
They pulled up in front of a small shabby hut packed tight against dozens of other small shabby huts.
“This old slave hut came with the parts yard—I think it belonged to your father’s master, Watto.” Tamora waited until the cowling rose, then climbed out of the speeder and went to the door, opening it with a security code Wald had provided over a comlink. “Wald lets a lot of junk peddlers and stranded spacers stay here, so we won’t attract much attention. It’s a good place to lie low.”
“Slave hut?” Leia followed Tamora through the door. “How many of these did Watto own?”
Tamora shrugged. “Wald has just the one.”
Leia glanced around. Though dusty and disordered, the hut was more spacious inside than she had imagined, with a central vault and three bumpout rooms, one on the same level for cooking and two elevated sleeping chambers.
Despite the grime and a dismal shortage of windows, the place did not seem at all unappealing. In fact, it felt strangely… comfortable.
Though it had been Tamora who suggested staying there, Leia began to suspect something el
se had led them to the hut. As she looked around, she half expected to see a pair of white eyes shining out of a shadowed doorway, or to hear a wispy voice calling to her from the corner of an empty room.
Leia turned to Tamora. “Could this have been where Anakin Skywalker and his parents lived?”
Tamora shrugged. “Maybe—and there was just a mother, I think. Kit never mentioned Anakin’s father.” She ran a finger over the table and looked at the dust it picked up. “No cleaning droids here, I guess.”
“It’ll be fine. We won’t be here that long.” Leia saw a flash of impatience in Tamora’s eyes and realized she might not have been the one Tamora was thinking about. “For us, I mean. If you think it’s too dirty for Ji and Elly—”
“Hardly,” Tamora said. “Those two would sleep in a sand dune, if I let them.”
“Well, I’m sure we can find something around here better than that,” Leia said. “Chewbacca will take you to fetch them from Wald’s, as soon as I get something out of the landspeeder.”
Chewbacca oowralled a question.
“Our mobile holocomm,” Leia said. “I need to send a message to Mon Mothma to let her know what happened at the auction.”
Chewbacca nodded and fetched the holocomm from the landspeeder cargo bay, then left for Wald’s with Tamora. After setting up the unit and calibrating the antenna dish, Leia sent C-3PO outside to watch for Imperial spy craft above the city. Though the New Republic used a synchronized ghost wave—a technological byproduct of the Shadowcast system—to camouflage its clandestine transmissions, Leia was taking extra precautions. So far, everything that could go wrong with such a simple mission had.
After computing the local time in the Coruscant government district, Leia decided Luke was the only safe person to contact. Her report could not be trusted to an attaché, and waking Mon Mothma at this hour would draw attention that Imperial spies might well notice—and the last thing Leia wanted to do now was provide the Chimaera’s new admiral any more hints as to Killik Twilight’s true importance.
And Leia had been wanting to talk to Luke since her dream aboard the Falcon, to see the smiling face she knew and loved and be sure all was well. Whether she should also tell him about what she had seen, Leia was uncertain. She did not want to be the one who put that fear into his mind—especially not when she remained so unclear about it. Besides, it had only been a dream.
She opened a channel to Luke’s apartment. It took only a moment for a hazy, fist-sized image of his head to appear over the holocomm pad, his dimpled chin propped on his thumbs and his blue eyes fixed on the documents. Though the image was not distinct enough for Leia to be sure, she suspected the records were the ancient archives they had recovered from the Chu’unthor, the lost Jedi training vessel they had stumbled across on Dathomir earlier that year.
“Just a moment.” Luke finished what he was reading, then looked up. “Thanks. Go ahead.”
“Anything in there about Jedi Masters needing their sleep?” Leia asked.
Luke lowered his hands out of the image and stared at her across space. “Why would I sleep when I knew you would be calling?”
“Knew? Those training records must be…” Leia saw the corners of his mouth rise and, realizing she had fallen for the “Master act” again, let the sentence trail off. “I suppose you know what I want, too?”
“Of course.” Luke’s face remained straight. “To talk to me.”
Leia rolled her eyes. “I’m beginning to wonder about that.” She leaned toward the holocomm and spoke in a quieter voice. “Listen, we had some unexpected company at the auction.”
Leia told Luke about the old code key hidden inside Killik Twilight, the Imperial attempt to purchase the painting, its subsequent theft, and how the situation had deteriorated since.
“I’m afraid we alerted the Chimaera to the painting’s significance when we tried to destroy it,” Leia said. “And matters just keep growing worse.”
Luke nodded, but said, “You did the right thing. With the code key hanging in some admiral’s stateroom, the New Republic would have had to scrap Shadowcast anyway. And if they found it later, there might still be a lot of dead spies.”
“I know,” Leia said. “But the way things stand now, if Han doesn’t recover that painting first, we’ll have our dead spies a lot sooner.”
This time, Luke did not try to reassure her. “What can I do?”
“Not much, I’m afraid,” Leia said. “Things are moving too fast for you to get here. But I need you to inform Mon Mothma—personally. Nobody else knows the real reason we want Twilight.”
“I’ll see her first thing in the morning.”
“Thank you,” Leia said. “And tell her that if she doesn’t hear from us before Wraith Squadron leaves—”
“Leaves?” Luke interrupted.
Leia had a sinking feeling. “In two days,” she said. “Don’t tell me they’re gone?”
“Wedge canceled a get-together we had planned for tomorrow night,” he said. “He didn’t say why, but I had the impression that something was happening sooner than expected.”
“That’s bad,” Leia said.
The Wraiths had been scheduled to leave on a mission to Askaj to capture Grand Moff Wilkadon during his annual inspection of his tomuon holdings. The plan called for Wedge Antilles, who would be in command of the operation, to use Shadowcast to activate a cell of local resistance fighters who would provide most of the dirt-side intelligence and firepower. If the network was compromised, either there would be no one to help the Wraiths when they arrived—or there would be an entire Imperial armada waiting to ambush them. Possibly both.
“Very bad,” Leia added.
“Should I ask Mon Mothma to have a recall message sent?”
Leia shook her head. “We might do more harm than good. They’re going deep, under total comm silence, and the only way to contact them is Shadowcast itself.”
She did not need to explain that what Shadowcast offered in security, it suffered in speed. Every message had to be laboriously encoded, then inserted as a ghost wave into a predesignated commercial program and holocast on the regular schedule. What all this meant was that it would take at least a day to recall the Wraiths, by which time they could well be beyond the point of no return. And if Wedge had already activated the local resistance cell, there would be no way at all to stop them from beginning their part of the operation.
“We just have to get that code key,” Leia said.
“And if you can’t?”
“It’ll take the Imperials at least a few days to crack the codes,” Leia said. “That might be long enough.”
“May the Force be with you, then.”
“Thank you,” Leia said, thinking of how ironic those words really were under the circumstances. “Tell Mon Mothma that we’ll keep her informed. If she doesn’t hear from us within two days, she should assume Shadowcast has been compromised.”
“I’ll tell her.” Luke pursed his lips and, when Leia made no move to break the connection, said, “I sense there’s more you’d like to talk about.”
Leia smiled wryly and asked, “Is it the Force, or am I growing predictable?”
“A little of both. Had all you needed been someone to pass a message to Mon Mothma, you would have called Winter.” He narrowed his eyes, and in the hazy hologram they grew dark and empty. “Something else is bothering you.”
“This place, I guess,” Leia sighed. “Luke, why didn’t you tell me Anakin Skywalker grew up in Mos Espa?”
“How did you find that out?”
“I met his best friend,” Leia said. “He still lives here. He’s the one who stole Killik Twilight.”
“Our father’s best friend stole your painting?” Luke looked confused. “And you’re sure he was a friend of our father?”
“His name is Kitster Banai,” Leia said. “He put a holocube of Anakin Skywalker in the auction. And you still haven’t answered my question.”
Luke’s head tipped
forward. “Honestly, Leia, I just didn’t think you wanted to know. Every time I try to talk about our father, you get that look.”
“That look? Thanks a lot.” Leia looked away from the transceiver, silently cringing at the lecture she would receive when she told Luke about the other things that had been happening to her on Tatooine. She would start small and see how much she could stomach. “Did you know he was a Podracer?”
Luke’s image nodded. “I did a name search over the HoloNet. He won his freedom in the Boonta Eve Classic. The only human ever, I believe.”
“So they say,” Leia said. “He’s a local hero.”
Luke smiled. “Really?”
“Really.” Leia’s voice dripped sarcasm. “They say he never cheated.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“It does me,” Leia said. “I’m having a hard time believing a lot of what I’m hearing. Everybody who knew him loved him. They still do.”
“Leia, he was just a boy. Do you think he came out of the womb wearing a breather and black helmet?”
Leia recalled her dream aboard the Falcon. “The thought had crossed my mind.” She paused, wondering if she should—if she dared—tell him about that. It was a little like telling someone that you had seen how they were going to die… they might be better off not hearing it. “Luke, did you ever feel anything strange around Tatooine?”
“Define strange,” Luke said. “You know what kind of place Tatooine is.”
“I can’t say. His presence, maybe—or yours.” Leia told him about her conversations with Wald and Teemto and the odd feelings of familiarity she had been having around Mos Espa, leaving out mention only of her dream.
“I keep feeling like the Force is leading me down a Skywalker path, and I’m not sure I like it.”
Luke’s head grew larger as he leaned closer to his holocomm. “You don’t have to like it. Just don’t fight it.”