Leia had already begun packing the tents.
Chapter
12
When Isolder’s Battle Dragon, the Song of War, prepared to drop out of hyperspace, Isolder was full of hope. Luke had managed to pilot them to Dathomir in seven days, saving ten days from the shortest route that the Hapan astrogation computers could devise! In fact, Isolder realized that he might even beat Han Solo to Dathomir.
Yet when they dropped out of hyperspace, his heart left him. Ten kilometers of shipyard docks were being guarded by two Imperial Star Destroyers and a host of ships in dock.
Automatic alarms began ringing, and all across the Battle Dragon, crew members rushed to their posts.
Luke Skywalker stood at the bridge, gazing at the viewscreen. He pointed up to a Frigate that had peeled away from the docking system and was plunging into Dathomir’s atmosphere, flames shooting out of its sensor towers. “There—” Luke shouted, “Leia’s in that burning ship!”
Isolder studied the monitor quickly. “She’s on that?” Isolder said, astonished. Even with all our rush, he wondered, have we arrived only just in time to watch her crash?
“She’s alive!” Luke said firmly. “And she’s terrified but hopeful. I can feel it. They’re going to try to land! I’ve got to get down there.” He rushed off, heading for his fighter. Already Isolder could see dozens of old Imperial TIE fighters launching from Zsinj’s Star Destroyers, pinpricks of light flaring out from their engines.
“Launch all fighters!” Isolder ordered. “Knock out that Super Star Destroyer at the docks along with anything else you can get. I want this to be messy!” The Song of War’s ion cannons opened fire as torpedoes screamed from their launch tubes. Though the Imperial Star Destroyers were three times the size and more heavily armed than a Hapan Battle Dragon, the Imperials had designed their ships using old-fashioned stationary gun emplacements. After a blaster cannon or ion cannon fired, it took several milliseconds for the cannon’s giant capacitors to recharge. The net effect was that the gun was stuck idle 80 percent of the time.
Not so with the Hapan Battle Dragon. Because the Battle Dragons were designed as huge saucers and the gun emplacements rotated rapidly around the rim of the saucer, idle guns moved on to recharge while fresh guns swung into place.
Both Star Destroyers immediately retreated from the onslaught. Isolder glanced momentarily at Luke’s back as the Jedi left the control deck. Though the Hapan Battle Dragon was a fearsome opponent, it would be no match for Star Destroyers once their fighters scrambled. The fighters would be able to penetrate the shielding and knock out the rotating gun emplacements after they idled. Isolder’s own fighters could keep Zsinj’s war birds at bay for a time, but the Hapans couldn’t hold them off indefinitely.
“Captain Astarta,” Isolder said, glancing at his bodyguard. “Take over the attack. I’m going down to the planet.”
“My lord,” Astarta objected, “my job is to protect you!”
“Then do your job well,” Isolder said. “I need enough confusion to cover my escape. My mother’s fleet won’t be here for ten days. Warn them what to expect, and jump back into the fray with them. I’ll be monitoring radio signals from the planet. If I can, I’ll rendezvous with you at the first sign of your attack.”
“And if you don’t fly up within five minutes,” Astarta choked, “then I’ll kill every one of Zsinj’s men in this solar system, and we’ll scour this planet until we find you!”
Isolder grinned, touched her on the shoulder, then ran from the control room, down the corridors of the Song of War. So much of the ship’s power was being diverted to guns that the corridor lighting had dimmed, and he made his way to the flight decks by marking the emergency light buoys. The decks were pretty much empty, the normal complement of fighters having scrambled.
Skywalker was already powering up an X-wing—not his own, Isolder noticed. A dozen launch techs were checking his guns, lowering his astrogation droid into its seat.
“Problems with your fighter?” Isolder shouted across the room.
Luke nodded. “Weapons didn’t check out. Can I borrow one of yours?”
“No problem,” Isolder said.
Isolder grabbed a flak jacket and helmet from their hangers and tied his own personal blaster on. The launch crew saw him and began readying his own fighter, Storm. A glowing feeling of pride stole over him when he glanced at his fighter. He’d designed and built it himself.
In one startling moment of clarity, Isolder realized that he was much like Solo, perhaps too much. Solo had his Falcon. Isolder had Storm. Both of them had worked as pirates, both loved the same strong woman. And all through the trip to Dathomir Isolder had asked himself why he was coming. His mother knew where Han had run to; the Hapan fleets could retrieve Leia. Isolder didn’t need to risk his life in this senseless encounter.
But when Isolder considered it, he realized that part of him wanted to beat Solo senseless, yet he wanted something more. Solo had thrown down a challenge that Isolder could not refuse. There on the flight deck, Isolder suddenly realized: he’d come to steal Leia back from Han Solo, take her away at gunpoint if he had to.
Luke settled into his fighter, and Isolder shouted, “Skywalker, I’m coming with you. I’ll be watching your tail!”
Luke turned to Isolder, did not take off his helmet as he gave a thumbs-up.
With a surge of adrenaline, Isolder ran across the flight deck, leaped into Storm’s cockpit and fired up the control panel. Overhead, the flight techs battened down the transparisteel bubble as Isolder activated the turbogenerators and armed his missiles and blasters. The techs were taking extra time, rechecking his systems, and Isolder revved the generators as if he would take off, sent them scrambling for cover. Then he erupted into space.
He flipped his transponder settings to identify himself as a Hapan fighter, then screamed over the Song of War’s top saucer.
From space, he could more easily see how the battle was going: the Star Destroyers had backed off in unison and spread apart so that Astarta was forced to choose one of them as a primary target. Instead, she had taken the Battle Dragon over the docks at the shipyard and had begun pummeling the helpless Super Star Destroyer that waited for repairs, doing more damage to the costly machinery in one strafing run than she could ever have accomplished in a pitched battle.
Neither of the active destroyers was hurrying to stop her.
Two of the Victory-class destroyers at the docks must have been partly operational, for TIE fighters and old Z-95 Headhunters were scrambling from their decks. The skies were littered with swarming fighters, chunks of twisted shrapnel, and scattering debris from destroyed ships.
Isolder flipped a switch on his radio, let it search the Imperial frequencies until he could hear the chatter of the enemy fighters. Luke Skywalker was already circling out past the edge of the Hapan Dragon, and Isolder followed the Jedi out, closing on his tail.
“Red One to Red Two,” Luke called over the radio. “There’s a lot of debris falling from the shipyard.” Just as he spoke, a kilometer-long section of scaffolding took a hit, went spinning down into the gravity well while other segments blew out of orbit. “I’m going to shut off my engines and follow some of it down in a minute. But before I do, I want to take out a couple of enemy fighters.”
Isolder considered a moment. He and Luke couldn’t land without being detected. He’d have to eject, then let his ship crash.
“I’m right with you, Red One,” Isolder answered.
Luke accelerated to attack speed, spun out toward a phalanx of twenty incoming Headhunters that glowed red on the scopes like flaming gems. Isolder followed at his right wing, put double power to the front shields, listened to the Headhunters’ chatter strategic codes over the Imperial bands. He hit his jammers, and the Headhunters went silent. He checked his head-up display, noticed something odd, called out, “Luke—your deflector shields aren’t up!”
The Headhunters’ jammers shot static at him, and Isold
er shouted again, “Luke, your shields!”
Through the crackling static, Isolder heard Luke shout, “My shields are up!”
“No,” Isolder shouted. “Your shields are not up!” but Luke threw a thumbs-up sign, trying to calm Isolder, and then the Zebra Headhunters were on them, blaster fire lighting up the skies. Isolder picked a target, fired simultaneously with ion guns and a homing missile, twisted his stick abruptly to the right. From the corner of his eye he watched Skywalker take a hit to the top-right wing, fall into a spin, simultaneously take a hit to the front sensor array. Skywalker’s ship began tumbling through space, breaking apart, and the astrogation droid was hurled from the vehicle. The Headhunter in front of Isolder exploded, and four or five blaster shots hit Isolder’s front deflectors. The shields collapsed. Isolder couldn’t take another run.
Luke rattled around in his falling ship, thrown against the transparisteel like a doll. Isolder silently prayed, then aimed his life-sensors at the cockpit. Nothing. Skywalker was dead.
Isolder cursed, and knew that he could do nothing now but feign his own death. He ejected a thermal detonator out the back of his ship, counted to one. A brilliant explosion pierced the sky behind him, and he flipped off his transponder, powered down, and let the Storm drift and fall beside Luke’s ship. The explosion should have fooled the enemy sensors, and with a pitched battle going on, Zsinj’s men wouldn’t have time to check the wreckage too closely.
Under Isolder’s display console was a storage area. From it, he pulled a reflective blanket, unfolded it, and turned it so that it held his body heat in. Any sensors close enough to detect him would register that his body had cooled, show him as dead. For a moment, Isolder watched Skywalker’s corpse tumbling in his ship, and little explosions seemed to go off in Isolder’s brain. After all the help Luke had given, the Jedi was dead.
Isolder had warned Luke that his shields were down, and Luke hadn’t believed him. Such things didn’t result from technical glitches. The X-wing fighter had to have been sabotaged somehow. Isolder did not doubt that Ta’a Chume had murdered the young Jedi.
Isolder gritted his teeth, pulled the blanket over his head like a shroud, and waited to make planetfall.
Leia pushed through a tangle of creepers under the cover of darkness, looked up the slope to the top of the plateau. In the light of the double moons, she spotted several huge rectangular slabs of black stone. Somewhere in the midst of each rectangle, a hole had been carved in the shape of an eye, and within each eye socket, a huge round boulder served as the pupil to the eye. The rectangular slabs were jumbled, elevated at different levels, so that different eyes pointed half a dozen directions at once.
Leia halted, stared up there for a long moment, mystified. Up on the plateau in the brush beyond her line of sight, something roared, ran across the stone on slapping feet, leaped from the other side of the hill and landed in thick brush, then clambered off through the trees. Leia stopped, heart pounding.
“What was that?” Han asked, standing still to catch a breath. Chewie and Threepio had stopped just behind her.
“Something alive—about the size of the Millennium Falcon, I’d say.” Leia sighed, grateful only that the thing had run off. “I’ll bet it had five toes.”
“At least it wasn’t carrying a blaster.” Han waved his blaster at the sculptures on top of the ridge. “What do you think this means—the eyes, pointing off in different directions?”
“I don’t know,” Leia said. She looked back downhill at Chewie and Threepio. “Any ideas?”
Chewie only whined, but Threepio looked around at the hills. “If I may say,” Threepio answered, “I think it’s a kind of symbolic writing used to instruct creatures of limited intelligence.”
“What makes you say that?” Leia asked.
“My data files contain similar structures found on two other planets. You see, a lookout sits in a particular spot, watching in each direction indicated by an eye. In this instance, the eyes seem to point toward different valleys and mountain passes. Using this method, creatures with superior intelligence can use inferior beings as lookouts.”
“Great,” Han said, “so whatever just ran off, went to tell the boss that we’re here.”
“It would seem so, sir,” Threepio said.
Han swallowed, looked back down the valley they had come from. The trees were extremely thick, and they had just hiked through a deep bed of plants with tall, thick stems and enormous round leaves. “Great. Well, I haven’t heard any Imperial walkers since we went through that thick patch of jungle. I think that might have slowed them down.”
“We’ve been running for hours,” Leia said. “We’ve got to stop and rest, soon.” She wiped the perspiration from her brow.
Chewie growled a question. “He wants to know why there aren’t any speeders yet,” Threepio translated.
Han nodded. “Yeah, I don’t get it. If Zsinj wants us, he could send speeders through these woods pretty effectively. But so far they’ve just brought the walkers. That doesn’t make much sense. Why just come at us with walkers?”
“Maybe Zsinj’s men feel they need the armor,” Leia said, “or the heavy guns.”
“Or both,” Han agreed. He pointed to the ridge top, the ancient stone statues of eyes that stared tiredly from the hill. “I want to go up there.” He began scrambling up the steep hill, grasping roots and the trunks of small trees to pull himself along.
“Wait, Han!” Leia called, too late. Han was already a third of the way up. She ran up after him, fought her way through some heavy briars that would have sliced her hands to shreds if she had not noticed them in time.
When Leia reached the top of the moonlit ridge, Han stood on the lookout point. They were at the base of a mountain where three valleys met, and this small plateau was a single, smooth, windswept rock. A star carved into the stone marked the spot where a lookout would stand, and as Threepio had said, if Leia stood in that spot and looked out, the top of each eye marked a pass or a valley that needed to be watched. Very simple instructions—except that by triangulation Leia calculated that the lookout must have stood between twelve and fifteen meters tall. A hole gouged into the stone was filled with rainwater. Leia took a drink.
Han walked around the plateau, blaster drawn, gazing down the slopes with his infrared goggles. “Whatever was up here, it’s gone. Still, in a place like this, there’s not much to see. An army could walk through some of these forests and never be spotted.”
“Maybe they’re not so interested in watching all of the passes,” Leia said. “Maybe this valley is strategically situated, and it’s more important to be right here, to watch this spot, than it is to watch those ridges.”
Distantly, over the mountains, borne on a slight breeze, came a roaring cry that shook Leia’s bones.
“It’s coming back,” Han said with certainty. “I’d say it’s two, maybe three kilometers away.”
Leia ran off the small plateau, jumped downhill in a dozen strides. Chewie and Threepio were already backing down the hill. Han followed.
“Come on, come on, you guys!” Han said. “Let’s have an organized retreat here.”
“Fine,” Threepio said, “you organize while I retreat.” The droid took off down a valley through the brush as fast as his metal legs would move. Chewie shot one glance back at Han and Leia, then followed Threepio.
Han rushed past Leia, and she whispered at his back, “Some hero you are!” Han caught up with Chewie and Threepio and tried to get them to slow down, but both of them were running scared. Leia didn’t want to be left behind, kept looking over her shoulder as they made their way down a hill, turned up a valley and began following a small creek through thick trees. At one point, Leia felt sure that she had heard a low grunt behind her, but the shadows under the trees were so deep that she could have imagined it.
How long is the night cycle here? she wondered, realizing that she knew nothing about the planet’s rotation, its tilt, its seasons. It seemed that dawn co
uldn’t be far off.
They were running uphill, toward two pillars of stone that pointed upward like jagged canines. Chewbacca was in the lead but he stopped, wavered in his steps. They had been running in a group for the past few minutes, so scared that none dared to take a step without the other, and that proved their undoing.
Behind the stone pillars stood four Imperial walkers.
Floodlights blinded them, freezing them in their tracks. “Halt!” a voice shouted over a loudspeaker, accompanied by the boom of blaster cannons that exploded at Chewie’s feet. “All of you, drop your weapons and place your hands on your heads.”
Leia dropped her blaster rifle, almost relieved to see the Imperial walkers. Chewie and Han did the same. Better a prison camp than whatever lived out in those mountains.
Two of the walkers circled the pillars. Their searchlights played through the trees, then turned back to Leia and the others. “You, droid, pick up the weapons and carry them in your arms. Dump them over the side of the trail.”
Threepio took the weapons from Han, Chewie, and Leia. “I’m terribly sorry about this,” he apologized, piling the guns into his arms. He carried them to the side of the trail, tossed them into the brush.
Han’s eyes smoldered as he glared at the walkers. All four walkers were two-person affairs, scouting models, the only size small enough to maneuver through this mountainous terrain.
“Turn around and head back the way you came,” one pilot shouted over the loudspeaker. “Move nice and easy, and don’t try anything! If any of you try to run, your comrades will be shot first.”
“Where are you taking us?” Han demanded. “By what right? This is my planet: I have a deed!”
“You’re in warlord Zsinj’s territory now, General Solo,” the pilot said over his mike. “And every planet in this sector belongs to Zsinj. If you want to protest this arrangement, I’m sure Zsinj would be happy to discuss it, at your execution.”
Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia Page 13
