by Martha Wells
Sian flashed her a sudden grin, proving Leia’s estimation of her correct. “Can do.”
As Sian turned their uncontrolled tumble into a deliberate spiral, Leia adjusted what was left of the shields to compensate for the failed sections and directed more sensor data to the screen. She had to fumble for controls that weren’t where she expected them to be; fortunately Sian was a quicker study and seemed to adjust rapidly to the layout of the console. The ship shuddered again at a near miss; on the weapons screen Leia could see the Gamble’s turbolasers still returning fire.
Sian put the ship through an evasive maneuver that made all the failing systems redline. She flew the converted heavy freighter like an X-wing, a strategy that Leia highly approved of, even though it was probably the only way Sian knew to fly. Then suddenly the ship swung out of the corvette’s kill zone and into a clear starfield.
“Come on, come on,” Leia muttered, glancing at the navicomputer. The alert pinged as it finally fixed on a set of coordinates. She confirmed them and configured the jump, narrowing her eyes in concentration, trying to think past the aching pain in her head and make sure she didn’t tell the computer to drop them into a star. “We’re going into hyperspace,” she said, and slid the control levers down.
Leia felt the engines stutter; then sudden power surged through the ship and the starfield blurred into streaks of light.
The readouts jumped between redline and normal, then finally settled on a range Leia interpreted as “not great but not likely to explode anytime soon.” She slumped back and put her pounding skull gently against the worn headrest. That was the kind of excitement she could have lived without.
Sian let out a long breath. “We made it.” She glanced at Leia. “Sort of.”
“Yes, sort of,” Leia agreed grimly.
While Sian went to see if she could get the blocked blast doors open to the lower decks, Leia took a moment to find a data card in the supply case in the auxiliary control locker. She checked the navicomputer and saw it had the transmission, copied over from the main console in the bridge when she had transferred control here. She saved the transmission to the data card and then deleted the original from the system.
The comm was starting to buzz with reports of wounded. The Gamble had a small medical unit and a medic, whom Leia hoped could handle the injuries until they could get to a safe facility with a medical droid.
And she needed to find out who had told the Imperials where the Gamble would be coming out of hyperspace. It was tempting to think that the intel could have come from somewhere in Kearn-sa’Davit’s organization. He was the Alliance agent who had arranged the meeting with the traders with whom she was to negotiate. But Leia knew the leak was far more likely to have come from someone in the Rebel Alliance’s chain of communication. She rubbed her eyes wearily. This could be a terrible setback to their plans for Echo Base.
The screen signaled that the transmission had been transferred to the data card and deleted from the nav system. She popped the card out of the slot and slipped it into her vest pocket. She would still need to decode it, but at least the transmission was safe. Even if the Imperial corvette had intercepted it, only Leia and General Willard had the decoding key. So it’s just as safe as we are, Leia thought, appreciating the irony. With a groan, she unstrapped herself and started to climb back up the shaft to the bridge deck.
The gravity returned when she was in mid-climb, slamming her against the wall before the compensators in the shaft adjusted. “That’s great,” she told the compensators and the universe in general. “Thank you so much.”
She climbed out of the shaft just as Han bolted around the corner. Sian must have gotten the blast doors open to the lower part of the ship. “Good,” Leia said. “I need help with General Willard. He’s hurt—”
“Leia—” Han caught her shoulders. He didn’t look injured, except for a developing bruise on his forehead and some smudges and burn marks on the sleeve of his white shirt that must have come from proximity to an explosion. “Can you hear me?”
Leia glared up at him. “Yes, obviously.”
Han touched the right side of her face and held up his hand. It was covered with blood. “You’re bleeding.”
“Oh. No, it’s—” She stepped back and pressed a hand to her ear. No wonder Han thought she was hurt. The blood was all down her cheek, in her braids—it must have been sprayed across the bridge cabin when Denlan and Esrai had been hit. “That’s from Captain Denlan. Or Lieutenant Esrai. They were both—they’re both dead.” Leia turned away and started down the corridor, almost swaying into the bulkhead. She couldn’t stop moving now; if she did, she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to start again.
General Willard still lay in the corridor where she and Sian had left him. Leia knelt beside him, overbalanced when her head swam at just the wrong moment, but managed not to fall on him. He was still breathing, and when she carefully felt his skull she found blood and a lump but nothing more alarming. She looked around, realizing she had misplaced Han at some point, but he arrived a moment later with a medkit.
He knelt on Willard’s other side, tearing the kit open. “You look like hell, Princess.”
“I know that, thank you.” Leia reached for the diagnostics scanner, and Han handed her a coldpack instead. Maybe that was best. The small readout on the scanner just looked like a green blur to her at the moment. She put the pack against the lump on the general’s temple and was relieved when he stirred a little and murmured something. She said, “That’s a good sign.”
“Here.” Han was trying to hand her another coldpack.
“I don’t know where else he’s hurt yet,” Leia said, exasperated.
“It’s for you.” When she stared at him, Han said, slowly and clearly, “Put it on your head.”
“Oh.” Leia pressed it against the side of her face and winced in relief. The chill revived her a little, the darkness that hovered at the edges of her vision receding as the vertigo faded. Which was a good thing, because Sian and Jerell, General Willard’s aide, were hurrying down the corridor toward her.
“Your Highness!” Jerell said, sounding horrified. “The general—”
“He’s alive,” Leia told him. “He was knocked out when the first blast hit. Who is the ranking officer on board?”
Jerell was a slim, pale human, another Alderaan survivor, and he looked very young at the moment. Uneasily, as if all too conscious of giving bad news, he said, “You are, Your Highness.”
“Right.” That’s what I was afraid of, Leia thought grimly. Han aimed the diagnostics scanner at her, then frowned at the results. Leia pretended to ignore him. She was fairly certain she had a concussion, but she didn’t have time for it just now. “I need a status report on the damage and the wounded. Are all the crew accounted for?”
Still watching her worriedly, Jerell said, “Yes, Your Highness. There’s seven wounded, including General Willard. Mostly burns from when a panel in the engineering compartment and a laser cannon operating console exploded.” He glanced at the sealed door to the bridge compartment again and swallowed hard. “Captain Denlan and Lieutenant Esrai are the only dead.”
That was almost half the crew injured. Leia needed to see the medic and find out exactly how bad it was. Minor burns and breaks could be dealt with on board, but if they needed to get to a medical facility, finding one that wasn’t under Imperial control could be …
“Should I prepare a transmission to the Independence?” Jerell said.
“I’ll do that.” Leia made herself focus on the here and now. She hoped it hadn’t looked as if she had zoned out for a moment there. “Someone told the Imperials where we were coming out of hyperspace. I’m not convinced it wasn’t someone in the fleet.”
“An Imperial agent?” Sian asked.
Jerell frowned, startled and apparently offended. “There can’t be. Our security is too thorough.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” Han put in. Leia would have rolled her eyes, but
her head hurt too much. Jerell was one of the officers in charge of secure communications, and Han knew it.
“It’s far more likely to be someone involved with this merchant Davit.” Jerell glared at Han. “Maybe you’re more used to civilian traders and criminals who don’t have any loyalty—”
Han started to reply, but Leia interrupted with, “Jerell, if you have to make that kind of slight, don’t do it in front of me. Han, you know exactly what you’re doing, please stop. Sian—”
“I didn’t say anything. Your Highness,” Sian said.
Leia extended her hand. “You can help me up.”
As Sian hauled her to her feet, Leia added, “You’re on watch in auxiliary control until I can find someone to help you. And be sure you take care of your nose.”
“Take care of my—” Sian touched her nose and winced. “Right.”
Commander Degoren leaned back in his seat, his jaw so tight with suppressed anger it made his teeth ache. The rebel ship had vanished into hyperspace, a dissipating ion trail the only trace left behind. He had never cared for commanders who raged or threw ranting fits, so he just made himself say flatly, “That’s unfortunate.”
The crew at the bridge consoles didn’t cringe outwardly, but he could read the tension in the set of their shoulders. They knew as well as he did that if Degoren had to report to his superiors that he had lost this chance, a quick execution was the best they could hope for. The worst was a long, slow execution in the form of a transfer to a post on whatever hellhole the Empire currently sent its disposable personnel to.
Sorvir, his second in command, said, “If we’d had more time to prepare—”
Degoren cut him off. “Yes, because excuses always impress Lord Vader.” Even when the excuses were true. The Imperial agent hadn’t been able to get a transmission out until it was almost too late, and theirs had been the only ship within range. They hadn’t even had time to summon the surveillance ship they worked with in this sector. It was several systems away at this point, acting as a decoy for a smuggling operation they had been on the point of breaking up before they had received these emergency orders. He shook his head. “All we can do is wait for another contact.”
From what Degoren understood, the agent had been in deep cover for a long time, waiting for the right opportunity. The fact that Degoren’s customs corvette had been the closest Imperial ship able to respond was both a blessing and a curse. If Degoren succeeded, the reward would be unimaginable. Advancement in the Empire had been something he had always wanted but that had always seemed just out of reach. But if he failed to capture Princess Leia Organa, the punishment would also be unimaginable.
He didn’t intend to fail.
CHAPTER TWO
WITH A FRESH COLDPACK pressed to her head, Leia tried to sort out the disaster that was currently the Gamble. After calling Sorel, the chief engineer, on the comm and getting a status report that amounted to “It’s really bad, but I don’t think the ship is going to blow up,” she asked Han to go down to engineering to help out.
According to Sorel, an energy pulse from one of the first blast impacts had traveled through the ship’s drive train, causing two consoles to explode in engineering and damaging one of the laser cannons. It sounded like the uninjured personnel needed all the help they could get to keep the hyperdrive online long enough for the ship to get where it was going, and to make what repairs they could to the sublight engines and other systems.
Once the medic, Sarit, appeared with a portable stretcher on a repulsor unit, Leia went with him to take General Willard below.
They settled the general in a cabin near the medical cubby, where the crew member who had been pressed into service as Sarit’s assistant was handing out bacta patches for burns and medication for minor concussions. Willard was still too groggy to really seem to know what was happening, though he woke enough to squeeze Leia’s hand when she spoke to him.
The general taken care of, Sarit told her, “All the other injuries reported so far are treatable with what I have here, mostly burns and some contusions.” He was an Andulian, with gray skin, long white hair, white furry brows, and atrophied gills in his cheeks that gave him what on a human would have been drooping jowls. To Leia, the “jowls” made him look old and reassuringly knowledgeable, but after talking to him for a short time she realized he was young, maybe even younger than she was, and unnerved by the whole situation. He peered at her uncertainly. “Ah, your head?”
Leia lowered the coldpack and saw that it was bloodstained. “It’s someone else’s blood,” she said.
To his credit, Sarit just made a sympathetic noise and handed her a packet of antiseptic cleaning pads. Leia went to the tiny refresher attached to the cabin and scrubbed until the blood was out of her hair. It didn’t do her headache any good, but it was a relief to get the blood off.
Then she found a command console in a small compartment that had once been an office for a cargo agent. She put the data card into the slot, displayed the recording on the screen, and entered the decoding algorithms. After a moment, she could read the transmission. There were the coordinates, and a short note explaining that the destination was a commercial space platform called Arnot Station; Kearn-sa’Davit would be waiting for them there.
The message also included a warning that the station was deep in pirate territory, which was annoying but hardly surprising. Pirates weren’t uncommon in sectors where the Empire’s attempts to consolidate its power or root out rebels had left local governments in disarray.
Davit, the Alliance agent, was a distant acquaintance of Han’s, apparently met years earlier during a stint of work in the Corporate Sector Authority. Leia assumed that by “work,” Han meant smuggling and other criminal activity, but she hadn’t tried to find out; one thing she had learned in the two years since the Battle of Yavin was that knowing too much about Han and Chewbacca’s non-Alliance-related business, past and present, just made her left eyelid twitch.
Frowning thoughtfully, Leia accessed the nav data. Once they came out of hyperspace, Arnot Station would be only another short jump away. She was pleased to see there were other commercial stations within reach, and at least two fairly large trading ports. The existence of other nearby ports would make their destination less obvious, if the light corvette was still out there searching for them. And she had no reason to think it wasn’t.
Leia tapped her nails on the console. If she was right that the intel that had brought the Imperial light corvette down on them had come from the Alliance fleet or its communication chain … It didn’t matter. She still had to see Davit. They couldn’t give up this chance to get the materials for Echo Base.
The next thing Leia needed to do was find help for Sian up in auxiliary control. Looking over the crew roster, Leia noticed they had a young combat transport pilot by the name of Ilen aboard who had logged shifts flying the Gamble in the past. She flushed him out from under a console in the engineering bay and sent him up to take over for Sian.
“That’s all right,” Chief Engineer Sorel told her when she informed him of the change in assignment. “He’s good with weapons systems, but he doesn’t know much about working on hyperdrives. There’s also Barani, the young Mon Calamari. He’s got freighter piloting experience. I’ll send him up, too.”
“Good.” Distracted, Leia looked down the bay, where every access hatch seemed to be open and every console half taken apart. The whole place still smelled like it was on fire, and smoke drifted in the air. Not far away, an older woman with a torn tunic and pressure bandages wrapped around her shoulder and collarbone carefully adjusted the settings on a console, then shouted down into the open access hatch at her feet, “How about now?” Fluctuating light reflected up from the hatch, and the answer was an incomprehensible grumble.
Cautiously, Leia asked, “What exactly is our situation?” She found herself wincing in anticipation of the answer.
“Uh.” Sorel wiped at the sweat on his forehead. “It’s … Did we fin
d a safe port yet? I think we’ve got one more short jump in us.”
“That’s my priority right now. Do you think we can manage this?” She showed him the relative position of Arnot Station.
Sorel’s expression cleared. “We could do that.”
Leia made her way through the bay until she found Han; he was on the floor and hanging halfway down into an access hatch, using a sensor to check various components in the coolant systems and swearing a lot at the results. She crouched beside him.
“How is it going?”
Han rolled over and propped himself up on a cross brace. “How does it look?”
“Terrible,” Leia admitted, keeping her voice low.
“Good guess, Your Worship.”
Oh, good, he’s calling me that again, Leia thought sourly. She knew better than to react to it by now. Her friendship with Han had been somewhat more fraught than the easy camaraderie she had with Luke Skywalker. Leia knew Han still had mixed feelings about working with the Rebel Alliance, and while he often expressed those feelings in the most aggravating way possible, she wasn’t unsympathetic. Han was as reticent about his past as it was possible to be and still communicate with other beings, but it was obvious that he had had a hard scrabble to survive at times and was fairly bristling with trust issues. Leia had grown up with the Rebel Alliance and bent most of her life and will toward it, but she wasn’t so narrow that she couldn’t see Han’s perspective. She just felt compelled to argue with it a lot.
She held up the datapad so he could see the screen. “Have you ever heard of Arnot Station?”
“No.” Han frowned at the readout. “What is it?”
“It’s the location your friend Davit sent us for the meeting. Fortunately, it’s close enough to reach, even with our damaged hyperdrive.”
“He’s not my friend.” Han considered the limited information on the station. “That’s pirate territory.”
