Moving Target: A Princess Leia Adventure

by Cecil Castellucci

  Her eyes turned to the officer next to Nien. She knew Ematt, as well—she’d once sent Han and Chewie to rescue him from the planet Cyrkon.

  “Are you here to brief me?” she asked as the four of them crossed the docking bay to the Mellcrawler, Nien’s cobbled-together star yacht. The chaos and clutter inside made the Millennium Falcon look like a spit-and-polish ship off the line.

  “Afraid not, Princess,” Ematt said. “The purpose of this trip is classified.”

  “Classified?” C-3PO said in disbelief, throwing his head back in a fashion that Leia knew all too well. “I’ll have you know, sir, that Princess Leia safeguarded the plans to the Death—”

  “Technically, Threepio, that information remains classified, as well,” Leia said with a smile, enjoying the golden droid’s horrified reaction. “Lieutenant Ematt’s saying he doesn’t know the reason for our trip himself.”

  “That’s right,” Ematt said.

  “Can I at least know where we’re going?” Leia asked, looking from Ematt to where Nien was scrutinizing a readout at the Mellcrawler’s engineering station.

  “That’s classified, too,” Nien said, one corner of his mouth crooking upward. “Can’t be too careful hauling around known revolutionaries and blabbermouth droids.”

  That set off C-3PO again. As the droid began lecturing Nien, the Sullustan locked down his engineering station and led them forward, chuckling at Threepio’s lengthy objections to the term blabbermouth.

  Leia smiled, too. Nien knew who she was, but he didn’t treat her like a princess or a senator or a rebel leader. To him, she was just Leia—and it was a relief not to have to be more than that. Nien was odd in a way she liked, and encounters with odd but lovely people were too brief in that terrible war.

  Ematt settled himself in the cockpit’s navigator’s chair, shaking his head at the maze of circuitry overhead. Leia saw the look and smiled, remembering how many times she’d been convinced the Falcon was held together with bonding tape and prayers.

  Nien turned and stopped C-3PO before he entered the cockpit.

  “Afraid there’s only room for three,” he said, spreading his arms apologetically. “You can plug in to the engineering station and keep the Mellcrawler’s droid brain company.”

  “Unless my photoreceptors are malfunctioning, this cockpit appears to contain four chairs, Captain Nunb,” said a puzzled Threepio.

  “Right,” Nien said. “But, um, that chair isn’t properly grounded. Gives me a nasty shock every time I touch it. With your high-quality plating, we could have a superconducting event—blow up the ship. And I don’t think you’d want that on your conscience, would you?”

  “Oh! If you don’t mind me saying so, Captain, a malfunction of that sort sounds like something a qualified starship engineer should investigate immediately.”

  “Excellent advice, Threepio—I’ll do just that when we reach our destination,” Nien said. “But for now, I’d suggest the engineering station. Hope you’ve got some good jokes for the Mellcrawler—she likes those. But keep ’em clean, okay?”

  “I regret to inform you that I am not programmed for jokes,” Threepio said.

  “Truly? I never would have guessed.”

  “Don’t be too hard on Threepio,” Leia said after the droid had departed. “He means well.”

  “I’ll make it up to him with the best oil bath the Alliance has to offer,” Nien promised, strapping himself in to the pilot’s seat and warming up the engines.

  “At the risk of pulling rank, now can I know where we’re going?” Leia asked.

  “Zastiga,” Nien said. “For what I gather is a very important meeting.”

  Leia glanced at Ematt, who nodded. Zastiga was a tumbledown trade world near the edge of the Outer Rim, on the fringes of the galaxy and rarely visited by the Empire.

  As the Mellcrawler soared away from the Remembrance, Leia felt an odd tingling she’d experienced before and come to trust. It meant that she’d soon find herself doing something of critical importance for the Rebellion.

  That meant no more standing around feeling useless on the bridge of a frigate. It meant action. And that was an even bigger relief than getting to talk with her old friend Nien.

  THE JOURNEY TO ZASTIGA was a long one, during which Leia’s eagerness for action gave way to impatience and anxiety. Every hour the Mellcrawler spent hurtling deeper into the Outer Rim felt full of peril. She pictured Imperial Star Destroyers descending through the skies of worlds with rebel sympathies, bringing fire and death.

  Lying in her bunk, she would imagine Han free of his carbonite prison, trying to summon a last brave show of defiance as the crime lord Jabba the Hutt sentenced him to death. Though of course he might already be dead. Or cast adrift in space, a speck of carbonite never to be found. Or worse. No cruelty was too inventive for Jabba.

  As she stared into the gloom, other faces would come to her. She thought of the young woman lying in the corridor of the Remembrance. Where was she? Being treated in bacta? Or had she been more badly injured than her rebel comrades had thought? When the medical droid finally reached her, had it been too late?

  She remembered the pilots she’d briefed back on Hoth, young men and women sent up two at a time into the teeth of lurking Star Destroyers. How many of them had died before reaching the rendezvous point?

  She remembered the troopers aboard her blockade runner above Tatooine, hurrying to take up defensive positions against Darth Vader’s stormtroopers. They’d had the grim, empty eyes of men who knew their lives had dwindled to the last few minutes.

  And always there were the faces of her adoptive parents, Bail and Breha. They must have had some warning of the Death Star’s arrival above Alderaan. The battle station hadn’t fired immediately but had waited—waited so Governor Tarkin could try to extract information from Leia and torment her with her own helplessness.

  What had her parents seen? A screen image captured by a defensive satellite? A fixed, bright star in the sky where no star should be?

  And what had they done, there before the end? Had they tried to escape? Or simply waited, as bravely as they could, for the unimaginable to become reality?

  Zastiga’s heyday had come and gone when the Republic was young, and the planet was covered with eroded ruins, interrupted here and there by modern construction. Nien Nunb brought the Mellcrawler into the atmosphere, following a signal transmitted on an encrypted channel, and set the craft down with a final stutter of retrorockets.

  In the docking bay, Luke Skywalker stood next to the barrel-shaped astromech droid R2-D2. Luke was wearing a rebel flight jacket over a black shirt and pants. He smiled at Leia, embracing her, but his eyes were grim and there were lines around his eyes and mouth that she’d never seen before. Not for the first time, she wondered what had happened to him in Cloud City, when he had confronted Darth Vader. Luke had lost his hand and his father’s lightsaber, but she sensed he had lost more than that. Something had changed him, something he was keeping to himself.

  “The others are assembled,” Luke said, smiling as C-3PO and R2-D2 renewed their decades-long argument behind him and Leia. “The meeting can begin as soon as we arrive.”

  “Do you know what this is about?” Leia asked.

  Luke shook his head. “All I know is it’s something big. But I have the latest intelligence report on Han.”

  Leia looked eagerly at him, then away.

  “What is it?” Luke asked, and she had a funny feeling that he was in her head, somehow—where she didn’t want him to be right then.

  “It’s nothing,” she said, not wanting to explain what she’d been wrestling with, the argument she’d been having with herself in the nights aboard the Mellcrawler. “So what is the news about Han?”

  “It’s from General Cracken’s people,” Luke said, referring to the intelligence chief’s operatives, who worked in the galactic shadows to obtain information. “They have a confirmed sighting of Boba Fett’s ship over Tatooine, and supposedly Fe
tt’s been paid and is doing more work for Jabba.”

  “And is Han…?”

  “Unclear,” Luke said. “Lando is trying to gain access to Jabba’s palace so we can know for sure.”

  Leia scowled at the mention of Lando. He’d betrayed them when she and Han had sought refuge on Cloud City, turning them over to Vader as part of a plan to trap Luke. Lando had explained that he’d had no choice—Vader had arrived before the Falcon and imperiled the freedom of Bespin’s people. In the end, Lando had been pushed too far and risked his life to free Leia and Chewie from the Empire, but that had come too late to save Han.

  “Lando’s trying to make amends,” Luke said gently. “You have to believe there’s good in people.”

  “And what will that matter if Han is dead?” Leia snapped.

  In the silence she was aware of Nien and Ematt behind them, trying not to listen.

  “But we can’t dwell on our personal sorrows,” she said. “My duty—our duty—is to the Alliance. That has to be more important than anything else right now.”

  She felt Luke’s eyes on her and could almost sense his surprise. She picked up her pace, putting distance between the two of them as they emerged from the docking-bay complex and into the forlorn streets of Zastiga.

  “Leia, wait,” Luke said, and she turned impatiently, hands on hips. She didn’t want to talk about it. She wasn’t going to talk about it.

  “It’s this way,” Luke said, pointing and smiling apologetically.

  The safe house was at the center of a warren of alleys, and no fewer than three teams of rebel operatives challenged them as they moved deeper into the maze. Leia nodded in approval when the operatives demanded passwords instead of assuming everything was all right because they recognized her and Luke. That way, if there was some threat the operatives couldn’t see—such as a hidden blaster or hovering drone—Luke or Leia could signal the danger by giving an incorrect password.

  The innermost chamber of the safe house was protected by massive walls and meter-thick doors that could withstand anything short of an orbital bombardment, yet swung open smoothly and silently. Luke, Ematt, Nien, and the droids came to a halt at the doorway.

  Leia turned to Luke, puzzled.

  “This is far as I go,” he said. “The meeting’s top clearance only.”

  “What? That’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s all right,” Luke said. “I told Wedge that Nien and I would meet him for a discussion of reconnaissance tactics.”

  “Tactics, hah,” sputtered Nien. “Antilles owes me a drink for saving his tail at Hagar Secundus. I’ve chased him halfway across the galaxy to collect. You can use one of those mind tricks in case he tries to wiggle free again.”

  “You see?” Luke asked Leia. “We have a lot to discuss. I’ll see you later.”

  The second Leia stepped inside the room, she knew whatever had brought her there was of the utmost importance. On one side of the space stood a number of top admirals and generals—she recognized the grim, hatchet-faced Admiral Nantz and the green-skinned Duros Admiral Vassa, along with General Veertag and General Tantor.

  On the other side of the room, the Alliance’s top leaders were standing together in an arc. General Cracken, the intelligence chief, was standing next to the careworn General Carlist Rieekan, who’d been in charge of the rebel defenses on Hoth—and whose immediate evacuation order had saved many lives. Next to Rieekan stood General Madine, a cocksure Corellian from the Alliance’s special-operations wing. Beside them stood Admiral Ackbar, the salmon-colored, goggle-eyed Mon Calamari strategist who commanded the fleet.

  And in the center of the arc of rebel leaders stood Mon Mothma herself—the slim, regal Alliance chancellor. Her service to the galaxy dated back to the Republic, when she’d been the senator from the Core World of Chandrila and an ally and friend of Bail Organa’s. Mothma had continued to oppose Emperor Palpatine in the Imperial Senate while working in secret with Bail and others to forge scattered cells of resistance into a unified rebel movement.

  Mothma greeted Leia with a smile. She held her head high and proud, and there was a deep intelligence behind her eyes. But sadness was etched in her face—the product of too many evils endured and friends lost.

  “Admiral Ackbar,” she said, “I’ll let you begin.”

  Ackbar signaled to a technician in the corner of the room. The lights dimmed and a hologram shimmered to life. Leia stared at it in puzzlement. It was the Death Star, complete with the superlaser dish that reminded Leia of a vast, baleful eye. But huge chunks of the battle station were missing, with skeletal fingers of metal outlining the full sphere.

  “I don’t understand,” Leia said. “Is this from Yavin?”

  That was the site of the rebels’ now-abandoned base. Had the Empire somehow rebuilt the battle station from the fragments left behind?

  “It can’t be,” Admiral Massa said from where he stood on her left. “Commander Skywalker blew that thing to bits with a proton torpedo. It’s space dust.”

  “An old holo, then,” said General Madine. Leia nodded, annoyed that she couldn’t figure out what she was looking at. Perhaps the Empire was trying once again to resurrect the superlaser technology, to build a new kind of planet-killing weapon?

  She scanned the other rebel leaders’ faces. From her experience as a diplomat and politician, she could immediately tell who had seen that holo before and who hadn’t. Madine looked shocked, and Rieekan had his chin cupped in one hand. But Mothma, Ackbar, and Cracken were quietly waiting for the others to get over their surprise at what they were seeing.

  “This footage was obtained by Bothan operatives less than a week ago,” Ackbar said. “It’s from Endor—on the edge of civilized space. The Empire has begun construction on a second Death Star.”

  Leia looked at the military leaders around her. Their faces were grim masks. She felt like she was in a waking nightmare and barely registered the details Ackbar was providing.

  Larger diameter. More powerful superlaser. Advanced specifications.

  Leia knew the Alliance was in no shape to take on another Death Star. Yes, the rebels had gained allies in the fight against the Empire, but the fleet was dispersed—rather than battling the Empire for control of the galaxy’s star systems, the rebels were simply trying to stay alive.

  The first Death Star had taken decades to build, at astronomical cost in credits and resources and lives. By destroying it, the rebels had struck a powerful blow against the Imperial war machine. But the Emperor had simply constructed another one.

  Against such enormous power and wealth, what chance did they have?

  “So we destroy this one, too,” Madine said.

  “It won’t be that easy,” Cracken said, beginning to pace the room. A part of Leia wanted to laugh at the idea that what Luke had done at Yavin was easy. “The Empire will have eliminated the flaw that allowed Skywalker to destroy the first battle station.”

  “Agreed,” Ackbar said. “If this new battle station is completed, it will be invulnerable to external attack.”

  “An infiltration team, then,” Madine said. “My commandos are the best in the galaxy.”

  “I have no doubt that’s true, Crix,” said Mothma, then looked at Leia, her expression almost apologetic. “But even if we succeed, how many worlds will die before we do?”

  Nobody wanted to answer that terrible question. Leia crossed her arms over her chest and closed her eyes. She felt cold and like she couldn’t catch her breath, and for a moment she was back on the Death Star, peering over Tarkin’s shoulder at her homeworld. She’d tried to lunge at Tarkin, only to have Darth Vader grab her shoulder and yank her back. He had held her pinned against his armor, the ghastly noise of his iron mask filling her ears while her world died.

  Mothma let the silence hang over the room for several moments, staring up at the half-completed battle station. Then she held each of them in turn with her eyes.

  “Admiral Ackbar is right,” she said. “The Death
Star isn’t our only enemy—time is, as well. Our attack must come before the battle station is operational—or all will be lost.”

  MON MOTHMA ENDED the meeting after swearing all the rebel leaders to secrecy, saying they would return the next day to review their strategic options.

  Luke had returned from his tactics discussion and joined her for the walk back to their quarters. She found his presence reassuring, even though she knew he was worried by her grim expression. Leia wondered if he’d ask her what she’d learned, then realized he knew better. He would do his duty and wait to be informed by the Alliance’s leadership.

  Or maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe Luke was still struggling with whatever happened to him on Cloud City.

  Glancing at him, Leia felt something stir inside her. It was confusing—what she felt for Luke was so different from what she felt for Han. But it was powerful nonetheless—a connection she could sense somehow. She wondered if Luke felt it, too. He had once had feelings for her—at times, it had been painfully obvious—but she didn’t sense that from him anymore. That was a relief, but she hoped he felt what she did—because he was one of her very few friends in the galaxy.

  And yet they would soon be parted, too—returned to their respective ships to run and hide from the Empire that wanted them both dead. Dead or in captivity, to be paraded on the Holonet and derided as Separatists and criminals.

  We’ll see about that, she thought.

  Luke turned at the door to his own quarters to say good-bye. But Leia put her hand on his shoulder.

  “What are your orders? After this, I mean?” Leia asked.

  “I expect I’ll return to the Redemption,” Luke said, and a shadow seemed to cross his face. “Bound for nowhere in particular.”

  “Bound for nowhere at all,” she said, her frustration boiling over.

  “Mon Mothma’s position is that—”

  “I’m more than familiar with Mon Mothma’s position,” Leia snapped. “I don’t need it explained to me.”

  She looked away, embarrassed by the hurt surprise on Luke’s face. But he simply nodded and waited, and she was grateful to him for forgiving her with simple silence.