“Go where?” Kidi asked.
“I did a little poking around while the rest of you were climbing. Yoth’s chimney ends not far above us, but there’s another down this way, and it goes all the way to the surface.”
“How do you know that?” demanded Kidi.
“Because there’s a gale blowing up into it,” Lokmarcha said with his usual infuriating shrug. “And because I can see light at the top. It’s pretty high, but we can make it.”
“Oh,” Kidi said, embarrassed.
“Kidi, see if you can get a transmission through this rock to the surface,” Leia said. She couldn’t hear that skittering noise any longer, but she didn’t like being entombed in the dark heart of a mountain, knowing something cloaked in darkness might be creeping closer to them.
Her spirits sank when Kidi couldn’t get any signals on her ship-to-surface receiver, but Lokmarcha suggested they try underneath the pipe he’d found. They crawled twenty meters down the low tunnel, the commando keeping his rifle aimed in front of him. As they went, the slight breeze steadily strengthened until it became a constant flow of air whistling past them.
Kidi adjusted a control on her receiver and gave Leia a thumbs-up.
“We can set up the beacon here,” she said.
“There’s even room,” Leia said, relieved. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as she’d feared.
Lokmarcha stood between Kidi and Antrot and whatever might be in the darkness, sweeping his light back and forth. Behind him, Antrot extended the beacon’s tripod legs to keep it upright. He opened a panel on the orb’s side and punched in the activation code, then turned to Kidi. She typed in a long string of numbers, then nodded.
“Got it,” she said. “Signal is transmitting, alternating between Alliance codes Osk and Peth.”
“Wait a minute,” Lokmarcha said. “Did you enter those codes by hand?”
Kidi nodded. “I have all the Alliance encryption codes memorized.”
“How is that possible?” Leia asked. “Each of them is dozens of random characters long.”
Kidi shrugged. “I don’t know. I just like numbers, I guess.”
“It’s also an enormous security risk,” Lokmarcha said.
Kidi looked puzzled. “Why?”
“Because if you’re captured the Empire will have all of those codes,” the Dressellian said.
Kidi’s face fell. “Oh. I never thought of that.”
Lokmarcha shook his head, muttering.
“All right,” Leia said, trying to stop another argument before it began. “It’s not like Kidi can make herself forget them. Anyway, good work.”
She peered into the pipe above them and saw a distant circle of white light. “The beacon will keep transmitting until the rendezvous?”
“I programmed it,” Antrot grumbled. “That means it will work.”
“Good,” she said, peering into the darkness. “I’d like to get out of here, then.”
Within a hundred meters Leia’s fingers were hurting again. By then the problem wasn’t just the rough-hewn walls but also the plunging temperature. Leia could see her breath, and her fingers and toes were numb. Above her, Kidi urged Antrot to keep going, assuring him it wasn’t much farther. Leia wished she had someone below her to encourage her with little white lies—and to listen for things that might be crawling up the pipe after her.
“Watch out,” Lokmarcha called down from above. “The rock up here is full of holes. We can still climb, though—and we’re only about two hundred meters from the exit.”
Leia stopped for a moment, her aching legs bracing her above the long drop into darkness. She tucked her hands into her armpits, trying to warm them. Her ears and nose were throbbing with cold.
“Princess?” Kidi called down. “Are you all right?”
Leia looked up and realized she’d fallen some thirty meters behind the Cerean.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m coming.”
She forced her aching limbs to move, climbing until she reached the area of broken rock Lokmarcha had mentioned. The walls looked as though they’d been drilled, and she thought the air was slightly warmer up there. Perhaps that was because of the sun she could see above. Or maybe it was just her imagination.
It also smelled funny—faintly of rot. And there was no way she was imagining that.
Go faster, she thought, reaching into the holes to get a better grip on the rock and climbing more quickly.
“Ow!” she said. She must have cut her finger inside one of the holes. It was hard to tell with her fingers so battered and numb.
She peered at the hurt finger, but it was too dark to see. She stuck it in her mouth and the taste was sharp and coppery—blood.
Then something bit one of the fingers on her other hand. She pulled it back, twisting too far, and felt her body slipping. She flung out her hands and caught herself as she started to fall, one foot kicking wildly in the darkness, and clung to the wall, heart hammering in her chest.
“Princess?” Kidi called again.
“There’s something alive down here,” Leia said.
“What? Antrot, shine the light.”
In the weak light from above, Leia saw malevolent red sparks glittering in the holes in the rock. They were below her now, too, forming a ring around the shaft. And she heard movement—tiny wet sounds that made the hairs on her neck stand up.
She began to climb, her movements growing frantic as the black shapes came boiling out of the walls. She could feel them on her hands, then her arms. And then they were everywhere—in her hair and on her face, moist and cold and slippery.
She cried out when something bit her ear. Then something else bit her hand. She could hear screams above her, too.
“Princess!” That was Lokmarcha. “Get out of the way, you two!”
“Don’t fire!” Leia managed to yell. “You’ll hit one of us!”
When she yelled one of the unseen creatures crawled into her mouth. Terrified that it would continue into her throat, she bit down, her teeth sinking through cold, wet rubbery skin. It tasted acidic and vile, and she spat it out, stomach heaving, the squelching sound of the swarm loud in her ears.
They were biting her everywhere then, and she shook her head violently, trying to dislodge them, but only smacked her head against the rock.
“Princess!” Lokmarcha yelled. “We’re out! Come on! I can see you!”
She looked up and could see the others then, too, their heads silhouetted against a white circle of light. Panic drove her toward them. When she got within a meter of the top, the swarm stopped biting and scuttled away, seeking refuge in the crevices and holes lining the shaft.
They were afraid of the light, she realized. Probably night feeders that hid during the day.
Lokmarcha seized her arm and dragged her through the opening. She lay on the cold rock, gasping. Below her, countless eyes winked in the gloom and the walls of the shaft seemed to be in constant motion.
“Are you all right?” Lokmarcha asked, yellow eyes wide and staring.
“I think so,” Leia said, hoping that was true. She sat up and looked around, hands exploring the bites on her face, dabbing at the little spots of blood left where the swarm had fed. The other members of the team were dotted with bites as well.
“What were those things?” Kidi whimpered.
“I don’t know,” Leia said, spitting to get the rest of the awful taste out of her mouth. “But if any tourists visit Basteel, I’d recommend they skip the chimney climb.”
The shaft emerged in a low saddle between jagged mountains painted deep orange by the sunlight. It was freezing, so cold that the thin air was hard to breathe, and the wind was cruel, piercing their clothing.
“Kidi, tell Nien to come get us,” Leia said. “We won’t last long in these conditions.”
The Cerean nodded, pulling out her comlink, then called for Nien.
There was no response.
“He better not be still hanging out in the bar,” said L
okmarcha. He was shivering.
“He wouldn’t do that,” Leia said. “Keep trying, Kidi.”
“Look!” Antrot said after Kidi had made four more unsuccessful attempts to raise Nien.
Leia followed the Abednedo’s pointing finger and saw three dots in the sky. They were far away, but she could swear they looked like…
“Find cover!” she said. “Get down!”
They scrambled into the sparse shelter of a boulder that had detached itself from the mountain ages before. A moment later the TIE fighters shrieked overhead, their solar panels winking in the sun.
“If we’re captured, Princess, don’t panic—I have a plan B,” Lokmarcha said quietly to Leia. “One no one will ever find.”
“I don’t panic,” Leia said. “But good to know, Major.”
“Do you think the Imperials caught Nien?” Kidi asked.
“I hope not,” Leia said. She was shivering, her teeth chattering uncontrollably. And, she realized, the sun was sinking toward the horizon.
Lokmarcha had seen it, too.
“We can’t stay up here,” he said grimly. “We have to climb back down.”
“Past those things?” Kidi asked, her face gone pale with fright. “No. No way. I’d rather freeze to death.”
“They’re waiting till the sun goes down,” Lokmarcha warned. “When night comes they’ll emerge to feed.”
Kidi shook her head, eyes fixed on the pipe from which they’d emerged.
“Kidi, relax,” Leia said. “Panic won’t help us. We have to keep trying Nien. Now, does anybody have any survival gear? Anything that could help us?”
Lokmarcha shook his head. “I thought we’d only be out here for a couple of minutes.”
“Kidi? Antrot?”
The tinkerer scowled, then brightened.
“I have a sheet of flexible insulation in my pack,” he said. “It’s for electronics—meant to keep heat out. But it will keep it in just as effectively. It works by preventing thermal radiation—”
“I don’t need to know how it works right now,” Leia said.
Antrot extracted a thin, metallic-looking sheet from one of his apparently infinite pockets. Unfolded, it was about two meters square.
“Give it to the princess,” Lokmarcha said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, her teeth clacking together. “We’ll share.”
“It’s not big enough for all four of us,” Antrot said.
“So we’ll shift positions,” Leia said. “Twenty minutes at a time. Come on, huddle up. We’ll need our body heat to stay warm.”
She put her arms out, drawing Kidi and Antrot close and wrapping the insulated sheet around them, then inclining her head at Lokmarcha. He crouched a few centimeters away, clearly reluctant to come closer.
“It’s not the Grand Coruscant Ball, Lok,” Leia said, amused despite the desperate situation. “Come here, Major. That’s an order.”
The four of them clung together, the wind whipping at them. If it weren’t so cold, Leia thought, she might have appreciated the view. The mountains were almost impossibly tall, their jagged peaks jabbing into the sky, and the colors were glorious.
They huddled together, shifting positions every twenty minutes, taking turns enduring the exposed space the sheet couldn’t cover. At first Leia nervously watched the sinking sun, trying to figure out how long they had until it disappeared, and she ducked her head when TIE fighters passed overhead. But soon she was too numb and exhausted to care about either peril. She wondered if Han had felt like that as the liquid carbonite froze in place around him, forcing him into hibernation. She wondered if he dreamed in that state.
And if he did, was it of her?
She couldn’t remember if it was time to tell Kidi to try contacting Nien again, or if they were supposed to rotate places. Her brain was skipping between random bits of memory—things that had happened so long before, on Alderaan and Coruscant and Bespin and other worlds. Planets that had been warm and full of life and noise.
Noise.
She forced herself to raise her head. The sun was low in the sky—opposite its fading glow, the first stars had appeared. The wind was a banshee wail, ceaseless and pitiless.
And a voice was leaking out of Kidi’s headphones.
“Kidi!” Leia yelled, shaking the Cerean tech frantically. On Leia’s other side, Antrot clutched her more tightly, moaning a complaint. Lokmarcha looked up, his yellow gaze dull.
After a moment Kidi’s eyes snapped open. She looked at Leia reluctantly, uncomprehendingly. And then she heard the voice, too, and remembered what it meant.
“Nien!” she yelled into her headset. “Nien! I’m transmitting our position!”
Above them, a bright star was moving.
It was the Mellcrawler.
They were going to live.
LEIA HADN’T KNOWN that warming up could be so painful. The four of them lay in the Mellcrawler’s lounge, wrapped in slightly musty blankets Nien had found somewhere in the hold. They sipped soup from chipped mugs while the Sullustan fretted over them, asking if they wanted broth or tea or anything else.
“You should lie still and recover your strength, Princess,” Lokmarcha said, huddled beneath a blanket on the other side of the acceleration couch.
“No, she shouldn’t,” Kidi protested. “She should sit up if she’s ready. Keep the blood moving.”
“I can tell we’ve survived because you two are bickering again,” Leia said, and had to smile when both Kidi and Lokmarcha looked embarrassed.
Leia wondered what her aunts would say if they could see her—filthy, half-frozen, and covered with bites. They’d probably lecture her about maintaining her appearance and the company she kept.
Ladies don’t crawl up chimneys, she thought with a smile. At least not in House Organa they don’t.
“Why did you not respond to our communications, Nien?” asked Antrot from where he was lying on the deck. “Were you still consuming the Novanian grog you remembered?”
“I wish,” Nien said. “It was the Empire.”
“I guessed that,” Lokmarcha grumbled. “The TIE fighters were a giveaway.”
“The Empire arrived with a landing craft,” Nien said. “Stormtroopers fanned out and started searching the tunnels. The Imperials checked every ship’s registration and captain’s license. Fortunately for us, my documents were forged by the best slicers in the Outer Rim. But it still took forever. And then I couldn’t raise you.…”
The Sullustan’s ears drooped. Leia smiled at him.
“You did fine, Nien,” she said, reaching up to squeeze his hand. “We’re alive because of you.”
“Well, I might have had something to do with it,” Nien said with a smile. “Anyway, we’re safely in hyperspace and heading for the Sesid system. And before we made the jump I did a frequency scan—the beacon was transmitting loud and clear.”
“I don’t understand, though,” Kidi said. “Did the Empire just happen to be there? Or were they looking for us?”
Leia looked up to find Lokmarcha’s eyes on her. She knew what he was thinking—that their plan was working. But was that true? Or was it a coincidence—some kind of crackdown that had nothing to do with them? No star system was truly beyond the Empire’s reach.
She shoved the thought away—it wouldn’t help them complete their mission.
“We can worry about it in the morning,” she said. “For now, I suggest we get some sleep. It’s been a very long day.”
“That’s an excellent idea,” Lokmarcha said, getting to his feet and heading for the cabin he shared with Antrot. Then he turned and offered them a little bow.
“Good night, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “Don’t let the hideous bugs in the walls bite.”
Kidi stiffened. “That’s not funny.”
Lokmarcha shrugged, but he was grinning.
“All right, maybe it’s a little funny,” Kidi said.
In the morning, though, Kidi was in no mood for humor
.
Leia was in the Mellcrawler’s cramped head, removing bacta micropatches from her face, when someone knocked at the door.
“I’ll be out in a minute,” she said, annoyed.
“Princess, I need to talk to you,” Kidi replied. “It’s urgent.”
Leia heard no alarms, and the Mellcrawler was flying smoothly as it followed its course through hyperspace. She opened the door and peeked past Kidi down the corridor to the lounge. Antrot was fiddling with the innards of a beacon while Lokmarcha was sharpening a wicked-looking knife big enough to hold off a wampa.
Whatever was wrong, it wasn’t an imminent threat to their lives. And that meant Leia could make a cup of caf first. She desperately needed one.
“Now then,” she said a few minutes later, gratefully cradling the warm mug in her still raw hands. “What’s wrong, Kidi?”
“Codes,” Kidi said. “It’s the codes!”
“I’m not following. Kidi. Take it slow. Tell me what’s wrong.”
“Antrot downloaded the codes Alliance Intelligence gave us to use during the mission,” Kidi explained. “But when I saw the reports from Basteel, I got worried. So I checked the codes and they’re ones we stopped using weeks ago, on suspicion that they’d been broken by Imperial slicers.”
Over Kidi’s shoulder, Leia saw Lokmarcha watching the conversation.
“I see,” she said, stalling for time.
“I followed the orders that General Cracken’s team gave me,” Antrot said, looking more baffled than defensive.
“I’m not blaming you—it’s my fault,” Kidi said, her eyes wet. “I should have checked. And now I’ve put us in danger—us and anyone who hears our message. And everything that’s happened on Basteel is my fault, too.”
“Wait a minute,” Leia said. “I missed when you said that earlier. What’s happened on Basteel?”
“I saw it on an unauthorized holofeed this morning—there are still a lot of them operating in the Outer Rim,” Kidi said. “I’ll show you.”
Nien emerged from the cockpit, looking as if he had something to tell them. But when he saw Kidi’s agitation, he looked questioningly at Leia.
Moving Target: A Princess Leia Adventure Page 6
