“Just routine precautions.” The captain scanned Jacen and Jaina, showing visible discomfort at having to do so. When his task was complete, he still refused to move aside.
Leia crossed her arms over her chest. “Now what?”
“Your droid, Minister,” the captain said. “We need to run a complete systems check. He could have assassin droid programming.”
“Me, sir?” Threepio said. “Oh, my! You can’t be serious.”
Leia rolled her eyes at the mere thought of the prissy protocol droid being an assassin. “And how long will this complete systems check take?”
“Not long.” The captain took a different scanner that trailed disconnected leads.
“Mistress Leia, I object!” Threepio’s voice carried an edge of panic. “If you will recall, I have been maliciously reprogrammed in the past! I never want to trust a strange probe again.”
Leia spoke to the droid but let her gaze bore into the stormtrooper captain’s eyes. “Let him do it Threepio. And if your programming is altered in the slightest, this man will be responsible for a galactic incident that could well lead to war—a war in which his own home system of Carida would be the prime target for the combined forces of the New Republic.”
“I will be very careful, Minister,” the stormtrooper said.
“Indeed, sir, you will!” Threepio insisted.
When they finally managed to get through to the reception area, the rainfall dwindled to a trickle. People wandered along the tour-paths to observe the brilliant and bizarre shapes of alien plant life. As the guests stepped through forcefield environmental barriers, the humidity and temperature changed drastically to provide proper growing conditions for various types of plants. Tiny placards displayed scientific names written in a dozen different alphabets.
Holding their mother’s hands, Jacen and Jaina stared with amazement at the people garbed in diplomatic finery, the exotic plants from distant worlds.
In a bright desert scenario at the center of the chamber, a monstrously large tentacle-cactus served hors d’oeuvres, waving its thick stalks back and forth and displaying tiny sandwiches, fruit slices, sausages, and pastries stuck on its long spines. Guests snatched snacks from the spines whenever the tentacle-cactus waved in their direction.
Stocky Ambassador Furgan seemed the center of attention, but everyone looked at him from the corners of their eyes rather than speaking to him directly. Feeling her political obligations, Leia sighed and walked toward him, the children trotting beside her.
Furgan fixed his gaze on the twins and drained the drink he was holding. She watched as he held the empty glass to a pump flask at his right hip. Furgan depressed the button and squirted himself a new drink of honey-greenish liquid. Of course, she thought, anyone paranoid about poisons would bring his own supply. He wore an identical flask on his left hip.
“So, Minister Organa Solo, these are the famous Jedi twins? Jacen and Jaina, I believe you named them? Don’t you have a third child as well, named Anakin?”
Leia blinked, unnerved that Furgan knew so much about her family. “Yes, the baby is elsewhere—safe and protected.” She knew he could not possibly have uncovered the location of the sheltered planet, but a mother’s instinct magnified her fear.
Furgan patted Jaina on the head. “I hope you protect these two as well. It would be a shame for such sweet children to become political pawns.”
“They are very safe,” Leia said, suddenly feeling helpless. Keeping an eye on the ambassador, she turned the twins around. “You two take Threepio and go play now.”
“It will be a very educational experience for them, Mistress Leia,” Threepio said, bustling the children off to look at the plant exhibits.
Furgan continued his conversation with Leia. “If you want my opinion, it’s too bad the Emperor didn’t manage to wipe out all of the Jedi. Incomplete tasks always end up causing trouble.”
“And why are you so afraid of the Jedi Knights?” Leia said. Though she disliked this line of conversation, she might glean some information from Furgan.
The ambassador took a long sip from his drink. “My feeling is that with our sophisticated technology, we should not cringe in fear of sorcery and bizarre mental powers that belong only to a few random individuals. It seems elitist. Jedi Knights? They were like strongmen for a weak old government.”
Leia took up the debate. “The Emperor whom you revere so much was very powerful in the Force, as was Darth Vader. How are they so different?”
“The Emperor is entitled to special powers,” Furgan said, as if stating the obvious. “After all, he’s the Emperor. And Vader turned out to be a traitor in the end. As I understand it, he was the one who actually killed the Emperor. All the more reason to outlaw such powers.”
Leia knew he must have seen Luke’s widely broadcast speech to the Council. “Nevertheless, the Jedi have managed to survive, and the entire order of Jedi Knights will be restored. My brother will see to that. Within a few years the new Jedi Knights will fill the same role as the old, as protectors of the Republic.”
“Too bad,” Furgan said, turning away to seek other conversation, but no one seemed to want to talk to him.
Threepio lost track of the twins almost immediately, when they decided to play hide-and-seek among the flora exhibits, crawling under guardrails too low for Threepio to manage, then chasing each other around areas marked DO NOT ENTER. When the droid called for them to come back, Jacen and Jaina developed a selective hearing difficulty and continued to dash away.
He chased them through a grove of mucus trees that dripped yellow pollinated ooze all over his polished body shell; but at least the slime left a trail of footprints for him to follow. Threepio wailed in dismay when he saw the small footprints leading directly into the “Carnivorous Plants” area.
“Oh, my!” he said, imagining bloodthirsty shrubs already digesting pieces of the small children. Before he could sound an all-out alarm, though, Threepio heard Jacen’s high-pitched giggles, joined by his sister’s laughter. Using directional locators, Threepio bustled back to the center of the exhibit.
Sitting in the middle of the giant tentacle-cactus, the twins played with the waving fronds, oblivious to the thorns. Somehow they had blithely eased their way past the daggerlike points and made a pillow out of the central mass of fine new bristles.
“Master Jacen and Mistress Jaina, come out of there this instant!” Threepio said in a stern voice. “I must insist!” Instead, Jaina giggled and waved to him.
In a tizzy Threepio wondered how he could rescue the children from the great plant without dislodging any of the hors d’oeuvres.
A lull fell in the conversation, the type of pause that often occurs in forced social situations. During the quiet Ambassador Furgan made his move. “I require your attention!” he called.
Leia watched him suddenly step away from her. Not knowing what he might do, she tensed, ready for anything.
The few conversations stuttered to a halt. All eyes turned to the Caridan ambassador. Mon Mothma had been chatting with General Jan Dodonna, the aged tactician who had planned the strike on the first Death Star. Mon Mothma raised her eyebrows, curious at Furgan’s call for silence. Jan Dodonna stopped telling his tale and held his hands in midgesture as he stared.
Furgan took his empty glass and dropped it to his hip, filling it from the left hip flask this time. Leia wondered if he had already emptied the right flask.
Raising his glass high, he took one step toward Mon Mothma, grinning. Leia watched in disbelief. Was the rude ambassador going to propose a toast?
Furgan looked around the enclosed Skydome, making certain he had everyone’s attention. Even the patchy rain had ceased. “To all gathered here, I wish to be heard. As ambassador of Carida, I have been empowered to speak for the Imperial military training center, my planet, and my entire system. Therefore, I must deliver a message to you all.”
He raised his voice and raised his glass. “To Mon Mothma, who calls hersel
f leader of the New Republic—” With a vicious sneer he hurled his drink into her face. The honey-green liquid splashed on her cheeks, her hair, her chest. She staggered back, appalled. Jan Dodonna caught her shoulders, steadying her; his mouth gaped open in astonishment.
The New Republic guards at the door immediately drew their weapons but somehow refrained from firing.
“—we denounce your foul rebellion of lawbreakers and murderers. You have tried to impress me with the number of other weak-minded systems that have joined your Alliance, but no amount of rabble can erase your crimes against the Empire.”
He smashed his empty glass on the floor and ground the shards under his boot heel. “Carida will never surrender to your so-called New Republic.”
With a flourish Furgan took his entourage and stormed off. At the doorway the gathered stormtroopers triumphantly placed the white helmets back on their heads, hiding their faces, and followed the ambassador out. The New Republic guards stared after them, weapons ready but not knowing what to do.
After a shocked silence the crowd erupted into a babble of outraged conversations. Leia ran to the Chief of State. Dodonna was already swabbing at Mon Mothma’s damp robes.
The sticky drink drying on her face, Mon Mothma forced a smile for Leia. Into the rising hubbub of indignation she said, “Well, we didn’t lose anything by trying, did we?”
In her disappointment Leia could not answer.
The tinny voice of Threepio burst over the background noise. “Excuse me, Mistress Leia?”
Leia frantically looked around for the twins, afraid Furgan had somehow kidnapped them during his diversion, but was relieved when she saw Jacen and Jaina standing with their faces pressed against the curved window looking out at the skyline of Imperial City.
Finally, from the corner of her eye, she noticed a golden arm flailing about in alarm. Somehow Threepio had gotten tangled in the tentacle-cactus exhibit; even from across the room Leia could see how badly scratched his plating had become. Hors d’oeuvres lay scattered about the floor.
“Could anyone assist me in getting free from this plant?” Threepio cried. “Please?”
21
Han Solo Beamed to be drowning in a syrup of nightmares. He could not escape the drugged and painful interrogation, as the hardened and porcelain-beautiful face of Admiral Daala stared at him and pummeled him with questions.
“Just put him over here,” a woman’s trilling voice said. Not Daala.
His body was being dragged like luggage across a floor.
“We have been ordered to stand guard,” said a fuzzed voice filtered through a stormtrooper helmet.
“Stand guard, then, but do it outside my lab. I want to talk to him in peace.” The woman’s voice again.
“For your own protection—” the stormtrooper began. Han felt himself dropped to the floor. His limbs didn’t seem to remember how to bend.
“Protection? What is he going to do—he doesn’t seem to have the energy to sneeze. If you left any unscrambled memories in his head, I want to pick at them without any interference.”
Han felt himself hauled upright again, his arms wrapped behind him. Cold, smooth stone pressed against his back. “Yes, yes,” the woman’s voice said, “chain him to the column. I’m sure I’ll be safe. I promise to stay out of reach of his fangs.”
He heard the marching boots of stormtroopers leaving the room. His mind became active long before his body figured out how to respond. He remembered parts of the interrogation, but not all of it. What had he told Admiral Daala? His heart began pounding harder. Had he divulged any crucial secrets? Did he even know any crucial secrets?
He was fairly certain he had told her the basic events about the fall of the Empire and the rise of the New Republic—but that caused no harm, and it might even lead to benefits. If Daala knew she had no chance, perhaps she would surrender. And if banthas had wings …
His eyes finally opened grudgingly, letting light slam inside. He flinched away from returning vision, but eventually his eyes focused. He found himself in a spacious room, some kind of laboratory or analysis center, not his detention cell on the Gorgon. He heard singing and the sound of flutes.
Han turned his head to see a willowy alien woman standing in front of a device that seemed to be a combination musical keyboard and data-entry pad. He had heard her voice arguing with the stormtrooper. She hummed a complex string of notes as her fingers played on the musical keys; in front of her a rotating blueprint of a three-dimensional triangular shape took form, like a shard of glass capped with a tetrahedron and some sort of energy pod dangling from the lower point. With each tone the woman processed, additional lines appeared on the complicated diagram.
Han worked his tongue around in his mouth and tried to talk. He meant to say, “Who are you?” but his lips and vocal cords would not cooperate. The sounds came out more like “Whaaaaa yuuuurrrr?”
Startled, the female alien fluttered her slender hands around the 3-D geometrical image. Then she pranced over to where Han lay. She wore a badge on her smock, imprinted with her likeness and glittering holograms of the kind used for cipher-locks.
She was an attractive humanoid, tall and slender, with a bluish tint to her skin. Her gossamer hair seemed like strands of pearlescent feathers. When she spoke, her voice was high and reedy. Her eyes were wide and deep blue, carrying an expression of perpetual astonishment.
“I’ve been waiting for you to wake up!” she said. “I have so many questions to ask you. Is it true that you actually set foot on the first Death Star, and you got a look at the second one while it was under construction? Tell me what it was like. Anything you can remember. Every detail would be like a treasure trove to me.”
The babbled questions came at him too quickly to assimilate. What did the Death Star have to do with anything? That was ten years ago!
Instead, Han focused his gaze past her. Pastel gases glowed on the other side of the broad window, swirling around the insatiable mouths of the black holes. He counted all four Star Destroyers in orbital formation high above. That meant he must be somewhere in the little cluster of planetoids in the center of the gravitational island.
And he was alone. Neither Kyp nor Chewbacca had ended up here with him. He hoped they had at least survived Daala’s vicious interrogation. He worked his mouth, trying to form words again. “Who are you?”
The alien woman touched her badge with one of her long-fingered hands. “My name is Qwi Xux. And I know that you are Han Solo. I’ve read a hardcopy of the debriefing you gave Admiral Daala.”
Debriefing? Did she mean the interrogation, the torture chair that made his entire body spasm?
Qwi Xux’s entire demeanor seemed superficial and distracted, as if she were paying only a small amount of attention to details while she kept her mind preoccupied with something else. “Now then, please tell me about the Death Star. I’m very eager to hear what you remember. You’re the first person I can talk to who was actually there.”
Han wondered if the interrogation drugs were still muddling his brain, or if there really was a reason why someone should want him to talk about the defunct Death Star. And why should he tell this Imperial scientist anything anyway? Had he divulged anything important to Daala? What if she took her four Star Destroyers and attacked Coruscant?
“I’ve already been interrogated.” He was pleased to hear his words come out clearly enough to be understood this time.
In one bluish hand Qwi held up a short printout. “I want your real impressions about it,” she continued. “What did it sound like? What did it feel like when you walked down the corridors? Tell me everything you can remember.” She wrung her hands in barely restrained excitement.
“No.”
His response apparently shocked Qwi enough that she took a step backward and let out a startled musical squawk. “You have to! I’m one of the top scientists here.” Her mouth hung partly open in confusion. She began to pace around the pillar where he had been bound, forcing H
an to turn his head. The effort nearly made him pass out.
“What good does it do to withhold information?” Qwi asked. “Information is for everyone. We build on the knowledge we have, add to it, and leave a greater legacy for our successors.”
Qwi struck him as being impossibly naive. Han wondered how long she had been sheltered in the middle of the black hole cluster. “Does that mean you share your information with anyone who asks?” he said.
Qwi bobbed her head. “That’s the way Maw Installation works. It is the foundation of all our research.”
Han barely managed a grin of triumph. “All right, then tell me where my friends are. I came in here with a young man and a Wookiee. Share that information with me, and I’ll see what I can remember about the Death Star.”
Qwi’s uneasy reaction told him that she had never before considered anything but clear-cut cases. “I don’t know if I can tell you that,” she said. “You don’t have a need to know.”
Han managed a shrug. “Then I see how much your own code of ethics means to you.”
Qwi glanced toward the door, as if contemplating whether to summon the stormtroopers after all. “It is in my charter here as a researcher that I have access to all the data I need. Why won’t you answer my few simple questions?”
“Why won’t you answer mine? I never signed your charter. I’m under no obligation to you.”
Han waited, fixing his eyes on her as she fidgeted. Finally, Qwi pulled out her datapad and hummed as she keyed in a request.
She looked at him with wide deep-blue eyes that blinked rapidly. Her hair seemed like a glittering waterfall of fine down spilling to her shoulders. When she whistled again, the datapad gave a response.
“Your Wookiee companion has been assigned to a labor detail in the engine-maintenance sector. The physicist formerly in charge of concept development and implementation always swore by Wookiee laborers. He had about a hundred of them taken from Kashyyyk and brought to the Installation when it was formed. We don’t have many left. It’s hard and dangerous work there, you know.”
Star Wars: The Jedi Academy Trilogy I: Jedi Search Page 24