by James Luceno
She snorted. “Listen, buddy boy, it was you who took us down, not me. My only mistake was being stupid enough to be sitting too close to your tail when you hit the trees. Put the bag down and get that droid out of there.”
Luke did as he was told. By the time Artoo was down beside him she had the survival kit’s lid open and was fiddling one-handed with something inside. “Just stay right there,” she told him. “And keep your hands where I can see them.”
She paused, cocking her head slightly to the side as if listening. A moment later, in the distance, Luke could hear the faint sound of an approaching ship. “Sounds like our ride back is already on the way,” Mara said. “I want you and the droid—”
She stopped in midsentence, her eyes going strangely unfocused, her throat tight with concentration. Luke frowned, eyes and ears searching for the problem …
Abruptly, she slammed the survival kit lid shut and scooped it up. “Move!” she snapped, gesturing away from the wrecked fighters. With her blaster hand she picked up the flat box she’d been carrying and wedged it under her left arm. “Into the trees—both of you. I said move!”
There was something in her voice—command, or urgency, or both—that stifled argument or even question. Within a handful of seconds Luke and Artoo were under cover of the nearest trees. “Farther in,” she ordered. “Come on, move it.”
Belatedly, it occurred to Luke that this might all be some macabre joke—that all Mara really wanted was to shoot him in the back and be able to claim afterward that he’d been running away. But she was right behind him, close enough that he could hear her breathing and occasionally feel the tip of her blaster as it brushed his back. They made it perhaps ten meters farther in—Luke leaned down to help Artoo across a particularly wide root—
“Far enough,” Mara hissed in his ear. “Hide the droid and then hit dirt.”
Luke got Artoo over the root and behind a tree … and as he dropped down beside Mara, he suddenly understood.
Hanging in midair over the wrecked fighters, rotating slowly like a hovering raptor searching for prey, was an Imperial shuttle.
A small motion caught the corner of his eye, and he turned his head to look directly into the muzzle of Mara’s blaster. “Not a move,” she whispered, her breath warm on his cheek. “Not a sound.”
He nodded understanding and turned back to watch the shuttle. Mara slid her arm over his shoulders, pressed her blaster into the hinge of his jaw, and did the same.
The shuttle finished its circle and settled gingerly to the torn-up ground between the ruined fighters. Even before it was completely down, the ramp dropped and began disgorging stormtroopers.
Luke watched as they split up and headed off to search the two ships, the strangeness of the whole situation adding an unreal tinge to the scene. There, less than twenty meters away, was Mara’s golden opportunity to turn him over to the Imperials … and yet, here they both lay, hiding behind a tree root and trying not to breathe too loudly. Had she suddenly changed her mind?
Or was it simply that she didn’t want any witnesses nearby when she killed him?
In which case, Luke realized abruptly, his best chance might actually be to find some way of surrendering to the stormtroopers. Once away from this planet, with the Force as his ally again, he would at least have a fighting chance. If he could just find a way to distract Mara long enough to get rid of her blaster …
Lying pressed against his side, her arm slung across his shoulders, she must have sensed the sudden tensing of muscles. “Whatever you’re thinking about trying, don’t,” she breathed in his ear, digging her blaster a little harder into his skin. “I can easily claim you were holding me prisoner out here and that I managed to snatch the blaster away from you.”
Luke swallowed, and settled in to wait.
The wait wasn’t very long. Two groups of stormtroopers disappeared into the fighters, while the rest walked around the edge of the newly created clearing, probing with eyes and portable sensors into the forest. After a few minutes those inside the fighters emerged, and what seemed to be a short meeting was held between them at the base of the shuttle ramp. At an inaudible command the outer ring of searchers came back in to join them, and the whole crowd trooped into their ship. The ramp sealed, and the shuttle disappeared once more into the sky, leaving nothing but the hum of its repulsorlifts behind. A minute later, even that was gone.
Luke got his hands under him, started to get up. “Well—”
He broke off at another jab of the blaster. “Quiet,” Mara muttered. “They’ll have left a sensor behind, just in case someone comes back.”
Luke frowned. “How do you know?”
“Because that’s standard stormtrooper procedure in a case like this,” she growled. “Real quiet, now; we get up and grab some more distance. And keep the droid quiet, too.”
They were completely out of sight of the wrecked fighters, and probably another fifty meters past that, before she called a halt. “What now?” Luke asked.
“We sit down,” she told him.
Luke nodded and eased to the ground. “Thank you for not turning me in to the stormtroopers.”
“Save it,” she said shortly, sitting down carefully herself and laying her blaster on the ground beside her. “Don’t worry, there wasn’t anything altruistic about it. The incoming shuttles must have seen us and sent a group over to investigate. Karrde’s going to have to spin them some sort of sugar story about what happened, and I can’t just walk into their arms until I know what that story is.” She set the small flat box on her lap and opened it.
“You could call him,” Luke reminded her.
“I could also call the Imperials directly and save myself some time,” she retorted. “Unless you don’t think they’ve got the equipment to monitor anything I send. Now shut up; I’ve got work to do.”
For a few minutes she worked at the flat box in silence, fiddling with a tiny keyboard and frowning at something Luke couldn’t see from his angle. At irregular intervals she looked up, apparently to make sure he wasn’t trying anything. Luke waited; and abruptly she grunted in satisfaction. “Three days,” she said aloud, closing the box.
“Three days to what?” Luke asked.
“The edge of the forest,” she told him, gazing at him with unblinking eyes. “Civilization. Well, Hyllyard City,4 anyway, which is about as close as this part of the planet gets to it.”
“And how many of us will be going there?” Luke asked quietly.
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” she agreed, her tone icy. “Can you give me any reason why I should bother taking you along?”
“Sure.” Luke inclined his head to the side. “Artoo.”
“Don’t be absurd.” Her eyes flicked to the droid, back at Luke. “Whatever happens, the droid stays here. In pieces.”
Luke stared at her. “In pieces?”
“What, you need it spelled out?” she retorted. “The droid knows too much. We can’t leave it here for the stormtroopers to find.”
“Knows too much about what?”
“You, of course. You, Karrde, me—this whole stupid mess.”
Artoo moaned softly. “He won’t tell them anything,” Luke insisted.
“Not after it’s in pieces, no,” Mara agreed.
With an effort, Luke forced himself to calm down. Logic, not fervor, was the only way to change her mind. “We need him,” he told her. “You told me yourself the forest was dangerous. Artoo has sensors that can spot predators before they get close enough to strike.”
“Maybe; maybe not,” she countered. “The vegetation here limits sensor ranges down to practically zero.”
“It’ll still be better than you or I could do,” Luke said. “And he’ll also be able to watch while we’re sleeping.”
She raised her eyebrows slightly. “We?”
“We,” Luke said. “I don’t think he’ll be willing to protect you unless I’m along.”
Mara shook her head. “No good,” s
he said, picking up her blaster. “I can get along without him. And I certainly don’t need you.”
Luke felt his throat tighten. “Are you sure you’re not letting your emotions get in the way of your judgment?” he asked.
He hadn’t thought her eyes could get any harder than they already were. He was wrong. “Let me tell you something, Skywalker,” she said in a voice almost too soft for him to hear. “I’ve wanted to kill you for a long time. I dreamed about your death every night for most of that first year. Dreamed it, plotted it—I must have run through a thousand scenarios, trying to find exactly the right way to do it. You can call it a cloud on my judgment if you want to; I’m used to it by now. It’s the closest thing I’ve got to a permanent companion.”
Luke looked back into those eyes, shaken right down to the core of his soul. “What did I do to you?” he whispered.
“You destroyed my life,” she said bitterly. “It’s only fair that I destroy yours.”
“Will killing me bring your old life back?”
“You know better than that,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “But it’s still something I have to do. For myself, and for—” She broke off.
“What about Karrde?” Luke asked.
“What about him?”
“I thought he still wanted me kept alive.”
She snorted. “We all want things we can’t have.”
But for just a second, there was something in her eyes. Something else that had flickered through the hatred …
But whatever it was, it wasn’t enough. “I almost wish I could drag it out a little more,” she said, glacially calm again as she lifted the blaster. “But I don’t have the time to spare.”
Luke stared at the muzzle of her blaster, his mind frantically searching for inspiration … “Wait a minute,” he said suddenly. “You said you needed to find out what Karrde had told the Imperials. What if I could get you a secure comm channel to him?”
The muzzle of the blaster wavered. “How?” she asked suspiciously.
Luke nodded toward her survival kit. “Does the communicator in there have enough range to reach back to the base? I mean, without satellite boosting or anything.”
She was still looking suspicious. “There’s a sonde balloon included that can take the antenna high enough to get past most of the forest damping. But it’s nondirectional, which means the Imperials and anyone else in this hemisphere will be able to listen in.”
“That’s okay,” Luke said. “I can encrypt it so that no one else will be able to get anything out of it. Or rather, Artoo can.”
Mara smiled thinly. “Wonderful. Except for one minor detail: if the encrypt is that good, how is Karrde supposed to decrypt it?”
“He won’t have to,” Luke told her. “The computer in my X-wing will do it for him.”
The thin smile vanished from Mara’s face. “You’re stalling,” she snarled. “You can’t do a counterpart encrypt between an astromech droid and a ship computer.”
“Why not? Artoo’s the only droid who’s worked with that computer in more than five years, with close to three thousand hours of flight time. He’s bound to have molded it to his own personality by now. In fact, I know he has—the ground maintenance people have to run diagnostics through him to make any sense out of them.”
“I thought standard procedure was to wipe and reload droid memories every six months to keep that from happening.”
“I like Artoo the way he is,” Luke said. “And he and the X-wing work better together this way.”
“How much better?”
Luke searched his memory. Maintenance had run that test just a few months ago. “I don’t remember the exact number. It was something like thirty percent faster than a baseline astromech/X-wing interface. Maybe thirty-five.”
Mara was staring hard at Artoo. “That’s counterpart-level speed, all right,” she agreed reluctantly. “The Imperials could still crack it, though.”
“Eventually. But it would take some specialized equipment to do it. And you said yourself we’d be out of here in three days.”
For a long minute she stared at him, her jaw tight with clenched teeth, her face a mirror of fiercely battling emotions. Bitterness, hatred, desire for survival … and something else. Something that Luke could almost believe might be a touch of loyalty. “Your ship’s sitting all alone out in the forest,” she growled at last. “How are you going to get the message back to Karrde?”
“Someone’s bound to check on the ship eventually,” he pointed out. “All we have to do is dump the message into storage and leave some kind of signal flashing that it’s there. You have people who know how to pull a dump, don’t you?”
“Any idiot knows how to pull a dump.” Mara glared at him. “Funny, isn’t it, how this scheme just happens to require that I keep both of you alive a while longer.”5
Luke remained silent, meeting that bitter gaze without flinching … and then, abruptly, Mara’s internal battle seemed to end. “What about the droid?” she demanded. “It’ll take forever to get it across this terrain.”
“Artoo’s made it through forests before. However …” Luke looked around, spotted a tree with two low branches just the right size. “I should be able to rig up a dragging frame to carry him on—a travois, or something like that.” He started to get up. “If you’ll give me my lightsaber for a minute I can cut a couple of those branches off.”
“Sit down,” she ordered, standing up. “I’ll do it.”
Well, it had been worth a try. “Those two,” he told her, pointing. “Be careful—lightsabers are tricky to handle.”
“Your concern for my welfare is touching,” she said, her voice dripping sarcasm. She drew the lightsaber and stepped over to the indicated tree, keeping an eye on Luke the whole time. She raised the weapon, ignited it—
And in a handful of quick, sure swipes trimmed, shortened, and cut the branches from the tree.
She closed down the weapon and returned it to her belt in a single smooth motion. “Help yourself,” she said, moving away.
“Right,” Luke said mechanically, his mind tingling with astonishment as he stumbled over to collect the branches. The way she’d done that … “You’ve used a lightsaber before.”
She gazed at him coldly. “Just so you know I can handle it. In case you should feel tempted to try and make a grab for my blaster.” She glanced upward at the darkening sky. “Come on—get busy with that travois. We’ll need to find some kind of clearing to put the sonde balloon up, and I want to get that done before nightfall.”
C H A P T E R 24
“I must apologize for chasing you out like that,” Karrde said as he walked Han toward the central building. “Particularly in the middle of a meal. Not exactly the sort of hospitality we strive for here.”
“No problem,” Han told him, eyeing him as best he could in the gathering dusk. The light from the building ahead was casting a faint glow on Karrde’s face; with luck, it would be enough to read the other’s expression by. “What was that all about, anyway?”
“Nothing serious,” Karrde assured him easily. “Some people with whom I’ve had business dealings wanted to come and look the place over.”
“Ah,” Han said. “So you’re working directly for the Empire now?”
Karrde’s expression cracked, just a little. Han expected him to make some sort of reflexive denial; instead, he stopped and turned to look at Lando and Ghent, walking behind them. “Ghent?” he asked mildly.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the kid said, sounding miserable. “They insisted on coming out to see what was happening.”
“I see.” Karrde looked back at Han, his face calm again. “No harm done, probably. Not the wisest of risks to take, though.”
“I’m used to taking risks,” Han told him. “You haven’t answered my question.”
Karrde resumed walking. “If I’m not interested in working for the Republic, I’m certainly not interested in working for the Empire. The Imperials have b
een coming here for the past few weeks to collect ysalamiri—sessile creatures, like the ones hanging on to the tree in the greatroom. I offered my assistance in helping them safely remove the ysalamiri from their trees.”
“What did you get in return?”
“The privilege of watching them work,” Karrde said. “Giving me that much extra information to try to figure out what they wanted with the things.”
“And what did they want with them?”
Karrde glanced at Han. “Information costs money here, Solo. Actually, to be perfectly honest, we don’t know what they’re up to. We’re working on it, though.”
“I see. But you do know their commander personally.”
Karrde smiled faintly. “That’s information again.”
Han was starting to get sick of this. “Have it your way. What’ll this Grand Admiral’s name cost me?”
“For the moment, the name’s not for sale,” he told Han. “Perhaps we’ll talk about it later.”
“Thanks, but I don’t think there’s going to be a later,” Han growled, stopping. “If you don’t mind, we’ll just say our good-byes here and get back to the ship.”
Karrde turned to him in mild surprise. “You’re not going to finish our dinner? You hardly had a chance to get started.”
Han looked him straight in the eye. “I don’t especially like sitting on the ground like a practice target when there are stormtroopers wandering around,” he said bluntly.
Karrde’s face hardened. “At the moment, sitting on the ground is preferable to drawing attention in the air,” he said coldly. “The Star Destroyer hasn’t left orbit yet. Lifting off now would be an open invitation for them to swat you down.”
“The Falcon’s outrun Star Destroyers before,” Han countered. But Karrde had a point … and the fact that he hadn’t turned the two of them over to the Imperials probably meant that he could be trusted, at least for now. Probably.
On the other hand, if they did stay … “But I suppose it wouldn’t hurt us to stick around a little longer,” he conceded. “All right, sure, we’ll finish dinner.”
“Good,” Karrde said. “It will just take a few minutes to get things put back together.”
