Chewbacca stopped brushing his fur long enough to offer a nominal sum against odds that Bran Kemple had been one of the tunnel guides, and Mara said, "Not on your life."
Leia rested her hands on Han's damp, towel-wrapped shoulders. "And Drub McKumb was one of the guys who ran the Corridor."
"Drub McKumb?" Mara's usually cold expression relaxed into a grin at the memory of the man. "Is he still around? Yes, he was one of the Corridor runners. How's he...?"
She saw the stillness in Han's face, and her eyes went cold and flat.
"What happened?"
Han told her, and went on to outline his and Chewie's adventures underground. "They were smugglers, Mara," he said after a long--and somewhat expensive--silence on both ends of the Holonet transmission. "Whiphids, a Twi'lek, a Carosite, a couple of Rodians... local Mluki. Humans. They looked like they'd been down there years. Like Drub."
Mara swore: briefly, comprehensively, and filthily. Then for a time she sat in silence again, staring into the darkness beyond memory and time.
"Does it sound like anything you know about?" asked Leia. She came around and Han made room for her on his chair. "They didn't find any drugs in him."
"No," said Mara distantly. "They didn't use drugs."
"Who didn't?"
Mara didn't answer. Leia said, still more quietly, "Vader?" Again her skin grew hot, around a core of bitter ice. Her father. Luke's father.
No, she thought. Bail Organa had been her father.
The smuggler nodded, once. "Vader and Palpatine." She brought the words out, crisp and cold and without qualification, as if she knew nothing could make it easier. "They mostly did it with semisentients: Ranats, Avogui, Zelosian Aga, Cidwen. They'd use them for enclosure guards in places where they needed stormtroopers for other work. Drug them with a hallucinogen like brain-jagger or Black Hole, something that worked on the fear/rage centers of the brain. They'd use the dark side of the Force to burn it into them, make it permanent, like a constant waking nightmare. They'd hunt and kill anything that came their way. Palpatine could drive them with his mind, call them or dismiss them... I don't know of anyone else that could calm them down."
"Would yarrock work?" Han put an arm around Leia's waist, felt her body rigid as wood. "To calm them? The healers on Ithor seem to think it would, though I don't know how Drub would get any in the tunnels."
Mara shook her head. "I don't know."
In the silence Artoo bleeped faintly from the door, to let them know the coffee and supper Leia had put in the heater were done. Nobody said a word and the little droid, evidently reading the atmosphere of the room, did not signal again.
"Thanks, Mara," said Han at length. "I owe you dinner when we get back to Coruscant. If you can get back with me on the coordinates of those pads it might help. Sorry about waking you up..."
"It beats being pulled out of bed by an airstrike."
"One more thing." Leia looked up suddenly. "You say you were keeping an eye on Belsavis. Did anybody from Palpatine's Court take refuge there after Coruscant fell? Anyone you know about?"
The woman who had been the Emperor's Hand settled back into her chair, running memories, rumor, recollection through her mind like bolts of colored ribbon, seeking some flaw or slip. In time she shook her head. "Not that I know about," she said. "But Belsavis isn't that far from the Senex Sector. That's practically a little Empire itself these days--the Garonnin family and the Vandrons and their kind always wanted it to be. Who were you thinking of?"
Leia shook her head. "I don't know," she said. "I just wondered."
"You okay?"
Leia turned sharply. She'd folded back one of the metal shutters to step out onto the balcony, and the diffuse light from the orchard fell in a muzzy bar into the room behind her, picking out the hard edge of Han's arm muscle, the sharp points of collarbone and shoulder, the small scar on his forearm. The dark print of the sarong he wore was like the black-on-black mottling of a trepennit's hide, lost in the shadows of the room.
She didn't answer. She wasn't sure what she could have said, and she'd long ago learned that lying to Han was impossible. In the sticky warmth of the night his hand, dry and cool from the air-conditioning of the house, was a welcome strength on her bare arm.
"Don't worry about Keldor." His hands went from her shoulders to her hair, gathering its auburn weight against his face. "Somebody'll find him one of these days. Same--”
She felt in the very slight flinch of his hand the swift cutting off of speech and thought midsentence. As if, she thought, he believed she didn't know. Hadn't been thinking the same.
"Same way someone found Stinna Draesinge Sha?" she asked. "And Nasdra Magrody... and his family? The way some... some so-called patriot from the New Alderaan movement came to me a month ago hinting there were people ready to foot the bill if I used my "influence" to have Qwi Xux murdered? And all the rest of the list who were just "following orders"?"
"I don't know about Qwi," said Han softly, naming the fragile genius whose mind had been manipulated into participating in the Death Star's design. "She always seemed to me more a victim than anything else even before what she went through later... but I've never talked to anyone who didn't think you had every right to take a shot at the rest of them."
"No." Leia sighed, feeling as if it had been years since she'd last relaxed enough to breathe. It was good beyond words to feel his arms around her, his body pressing into her back. "No. I don't have any right. Not if I'm the Chief of State. Not if I stand for doing things in accordance with the law. Not if I stand for everything that Palpatine was not. That's what hurts, I think. That it's what I want to do--and what I cannot let myself do--and everyone thinks I did it anyway. So why not do it?"
"But you didn't," Han told her gently. "And you know that, and I know that... and that's what counts. What's Luke always saying? Be what you want to seem."
She pulled his arms more closely around her, closing her eyes and drifting in the scents of soap, and his flesh, and the thick, slightly sulfurous murk of the night. Had it been only that afternoon they'd stood on the tower? Seen the children of the Jedi playing around the grille that covered Plett's Well? Felt the lost peace, the stillness of those other days, rising around them like the warmth of a long-forgotten sun?
Very low, she said, "I have dreams, Han; dreams where I'm hunting through all those rooms on the Death Star, running through corridors, opening doors, looking behind hatches, searching all the lockers, because there's something somewhere, some key, that will turn off the destructor beams. I dream that I'm running down the hallways with--with whatever it is--clutched in my hand, and if I can just make it to the Ignition Chamber in time, just do the right thing, I'll save them. I'll switch off the beam and be able to go home."
His grip tightened around her, holding her fast against his body. He knew she had dreams. He'd waked her up from them, and held her against his chest while she cried, too many times to count. She felt the breath of his lips move the hair at the crown of her head. "There was nothing you could have done."
"I know. But at least once a day I think: I couldn't save them, but I can make those who did it pay." She turned in his arms, looking up at him in the misty apricot light. "Would you do it?"
Han grinned down at her. "Like a shot. But I'm not the Chief of State."
"Would you do it to please me?"
He laid his hand along her cheek, leaned down to kiss her lips. He said softly, "No. Not even if you asked."
He led her inside. As he stopped to close the shutters behind them, Leia paused by the room's small table, where a half dozen shallow cakes of colored wax floated in a great glass bowl of water. She flicked the switch on the long stem of the lighter, touched in turn each wick. The drifting lights painted wavery circles of amber and daffodil on the ceiling and walls. Her eyes met Han's over the floating candle flames; she let slip the shawl she'd worn over her shoulders, and held out to him her hand.
They wouldn't let her sleep.
No, Leia whispered, trying to surface from the drowning, breathless horror of the dream. No...
Then the door of the detention cell had slipped open with its evil hissing sound, and Vader had been standing there, Vader huge and black and terrible, surrounded by stormtroopers. And behind him, darker, shinier, more evil still, the black smooth floating bulk of the Torturer...
"No!"
She tried to scream but could manage no more than a gasp. Nevertheless it woke her, to darkness, and the faint, sinister whirring of a droid's engine, and the moving glint of red lights in the dark.
There was another noise, thin and steady, a half-familiar whining...The overload alarm on a blaster?
"Artoo?"
Leia sat up in bed, confused and panicky and wondering if it was a dream, if the terrible sense of evil was something left over from her nightmare. Across the room a faint, hissing zap sounded, and the white light of Artoo-Detoo's electric cutting beam illuminated the round, blocky form of the little droid visible beyond the foot of the bed. A second alarm began to sound. It was unnaturally dark in the room; Leia hadn't even begun to sort out why when Han flinched and turned beside her, and she heard the door of the small wall cupboard slide shut.
The sound of the blaster overload alarms grew immediately muffled.
She felt rather than saw Han reach for the holster that hung beside the bed, and at the same moment, the white glare of Artoo's cutting beam illuminated, like a tableau, the droid and the corner of the room by the cupboard as he neatly fused the lock. "What the...?"
She hit the light switch by the bed. Nothing happened. In a panic of confusion her mind reached out, groped for the candles that had illuminated the room earlier with such soft, romantic light. Luke had taught her...
Fire sprang to life again on the floating wicks.
"You crazy little..." Han strode across the room to where Artoo had definitely posted himself in front of the cupboard door. Muffled and shrill, the fast pulse beat of the alarms was rising; Leia reached for the hideout blaster where Han usually kept it under the pillow and found nothing. In the same instant, it seemed, Artoo swung around and pointed his cutting torch in Han's direction. The white bolt of electricity leaped out; Han sprang backward, barely avoiding it. In the dim saffron glow his eyes were suddenly wide.
Han and Leia both looked toward the windows. The shuttering mechanism was a fused blob of metal.
"Artoo!" cried Leia, confused and suddenly scared.
Outside the bedroom doors Chewbacca roared, and the door rattled in its sliders. With startling speed Artoo darted for the door, the electric cutter extended; Han yelled, "Let go of the handle, Chewie!" a split second before the droid put several thousand volts into the metal handle, then swung back, cutter still zapping hot, short jolts of blue-white lightning. Han, who in addition to shouting his warning had made a plunge for the cupboard, backed hastily, the droid following him for half a meter or so.
"Dammit, what the hell do you think you're doing?"
A substitution? thought Leia crazily, catching the pillows from the bed and circling in the other direction. When he'd run away from her on the way to the MuniCenter...? That was insane. She knew it was Artoo.
Artoo backed against the cupboard again, his welding arm held out, the live end of it gleaming dangerously in the candlelight. Almost inaudible in the cupboard the blasters' double whine scaled upward, an insect-like warning of an explosion that would certainly destroy most of the house.
"Leia, put your boots on," said Han, pulling his own free of the corner and hauling them swiftly onto his feet.
She dropped her load of pillows and obeyed without question. There couldn't be more than a minute or so left. They were sealed in the room.... Chewie was hammering on the outer door with something but it was clearly going to take more time than they had.
Looking a little ridiculous--he wasn't wearing much besides the boots--Han crossed the bed in two strides to her side. He turned his body, for a moment blocking the droid's view of his hand as he pointed to her the thing he wanted her to use; she understood his plan by the thing's very nature. She wanted to say, Not Artoo...but didn't.
There was something appallingly, hideously wrong, but there was no time to figure out what or how or why.
Not Artoo...
Han was already moving in on the little droid. He had a blanket in one hand, as if he planned to use it to smother the electric charge of the welder. The droid stood still, guarding the locked cupboard where the blasters were screaming into the final stages of overload, but fairly vibrated with deadly readiness.
Leia thought, He hasn't made a sound...
Han struck. Artoo lunged at him, lightning leaping forth, and in that instant Leia scooped the water basin, candles and all, from the table and hurled it with all the strength she could summon at the droid. Han was already leaping back with the hair-trigger reflexes of a man who has lived all his life on his nerve ends, and the vast drench of water doused and grounded the electrical discharge of Artoo's cutting tool in a sizzling, horrible spatter of blue light and spraying sparks. Smoke and lightning poured from the droid's open hatch, small threads of blue electricity leaping and twitching as Artoo gave one frantic, despairing scream. Han sprang in past him, driving one insulated boot sole through the thin wood of the cupboard door and digging out the blasters. It all seemed to happen in the space of one second and Leia thought, If Artoo's welded the power cells into the triggers they'll blow up in his hand...
A ridiculous consideration, she thought--the explosion would kill both of them and Chewie as well...
Han ripped the power cores out of both blasters and hurled the stripped weapons across the room onto the bed, where Leia buried them under pillows. The triggering blast--without the power that would have vaporized everything in the room--”
like a violent hiccup, the kick of some huge, fierce, sullen thing under the bedding.
An instant later, with a rending crash, Chewbacca smashed his way through the bedroom door.
For a moment there was stillness, Han standing beside the cupboard, staring down at the two blaster power cores that lay hissing in the puddled water around his feet.
The room was filled with the stench of burning feathers and scorched insulation.
Chewie looked at Artoo, bowed forward, blackened by the electrical discharge, motionless and dead. Then he moaned, a long animal howl, grieving his friend.
Chapter 13
In addition to cutting all the power in the house, Artoo had fused the comlinks. Chewbacca had to venture forth into the steamy fog of the night to bring Jevax a report of what had taken place. The Chief Person returned to the house with him, concerned and shaken--he had been awake, he said, at the MuniCenter, trying to raise communication with the nearby valley of Bot-Un, whose comm center had gone out for the fifth time in six months.
"I don't understand it," the old Mluki said, looking from the ruin of fried bedding to the charred, motionless droid, upon whom Han was grimly affixing a restraining bolt. "The pump stations and the mechanical feeders, yes--we're still very much a shoestring operation in some ways, whatever the corporate brass likes to say. Most of our equipment is secondhand, and quite frankly pretty old. But your Artoo unit--”
"Wait a minute." Leia had removed her boots by this time and wrapped herself in a darkly patterned crimson-and-black local kimono, her hair hanging in a burnished mass down her back. She'd spent the past fifteen minutes locating every g
lowrod and emergency power-celled panel in the house, even retrieving the candles from the watery mess on the floor. "Are you telling me programming failures like this are common?"
"Not common." The Mluki's eyes met hers frankly under the heavy ridge of brow. "But every now and then a tree feeder will go mildly amok and wander through the streets squirting nutrient at passersby. Or one of the ice walkers will start hiking away across the glaciers, forcing its passengers to bail out and walk back to the valley. Most people who have business out on the glaciers--who're traveling to Bot-Un or Mithipsin, for instance--pack thermal suits and distress signals as a matter of course."
He spread his white-furred hands, and the silver in his ears glinted as he tilted his head. "Personally--though I'm not a mechanic--I suspect it's the result of doming the valley. It was always pretty damp here, but enclosing the valley has made it more so, and the pumping stations can't eliminate or neutralize all the corrosive gases that rise out of the vents at the bottom end of the rift. They've never reported mechanical problems like this in Bot-Un."
"But it's not a mechanical problem," argued Leia. "It's a programming fault..."
"Well, that's what the mechanics here say." Jevax scratched his head. "But the programmers swear it's mechanical."
They would, thought Leia late the following morning, as she watched Chewbacca poke around in Artoo-Detoo's mechanical innards in a hissing sizzle of sparks. She had yet to meet a programmer who'd admit that untoward results weren't universally attributable to either hardware failure or operator error. Even Qwi Xux honestly and sincerely believed to this day that the Death Star would have made a wonderful mining instrument.
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