Leia clipped her lightsaber back on her belt and climbed up onto the windowsill one-handed, carrying the handlight with her. She immediately found she had to be careful of her footing. The glass in this window had not come out anywhere near as cleanly as it had on the floors above. Jagged shards still hung in all the window frames, and broken bits of it were all about. But with a little care, she managed to get clear of it all.
The trouble started the moment she stepped out onto the rain-swept ledge and moved toward the right side of the window, trying to get out of sight. The rain instantly soaked her to the bone, and the wind was deafeningly strong. Moving on the rain-slicked stone was like walking on wet ice. Leia put her back to the wall, grabbed onto one of the sodden drapes flapping the window, and hung on for dear life. Knowing it was a bad idea, she glanced downward, down toward the ground twelve flights below, made invisible in the driving rain. So easy to put a foot wrong and—
But then Mara was coming out onto the ledge, and Leia had other things to worry about. Mara was moving a bit faster than she should have. She slipped, and Leia caught her just barely in time. Mara twisted awkwardly and managed to recover, catching her left calf on a jagged piece of glass in the process. Mara grabbed at Leia and hung on for dear life. It took her a moment to compose herself, and then she clambered over Leia to get past her on the ledge. Leia let her pass, and then, still holding on to the drape, edged out of view of the window. She put her back to the building’s outer wall and braced herself there, with her eyes shut, able to do nothing more than concentrate on the need to keep breathing.
They were here, they were alive, and that was about the best that could be said. Sooner or later the Leaguers would search again, and someone with more brains than yesterday’s rancid gumbah pudding would notice the telltale marks of a lightsaber on the door of Mara’s room, or on the neatly sliced strips of stresscrete, and then, perhaps, even think of looking out the window. Or else the wind would shift, and simply blow them clean off this ledge. Or they would drown like hive rats in the rain.
Or else Mara could get that blasted slave controller working, and her ship would come and rescue them.
Leia opened her eyes and looked over to Mara. She already had the controller out, trying to work it in the driving rain. Leia glanced toward the open window and decided that the odds were very low they could see a light through all the rain, so long as she was careful. She adjusted the handlight so it put out a tight beam and pointed it down at the controller.
Mara glanced up at her and nodded her thanks, and tried the unit again. Then she shook her head. “No good,” she shouted into Leia’s ear, struggling to be heard over the pouring rain. “Comlink mode is jammed for sure, and there’s not a chance in the Galaxy of a laser punching through all this. We’ll just have to wait out the rain.”
Leia nodded. Mara turned off the slave controller and shoved it into her satchel. Leia turned off the handlight and tucked it inside her blouse.
“Wait,” she said to herself, in a voice so low that Mara could not possibly hear. She knew as well as Mara that they could not wait for long. She told herself that she should look on the bright side. If this rain had come out while they were on the rope, they would never have made it. At least they had gotten this far. Besides, these rainstorms never lasted long. The faster they came up, the faster they blew themselves out. “Just wait,” she said, “and hope to the stars that slave controller is really working—”
Suddenly the wall of rain in front of her bloomed with light, light coming from inside the building, from the room they had come from. Someone was back in there, looking around. Leia gave Mara a very gentle nudge to get her attention and nodded toward the light. Mara’s eyes widened, and she nodded back. But what could she do?
They were trapped, but Leia was not interested in going down without a fight. She mouthed the words “pocket blaster” to Mara. The trader nodded, pulled the blaster out of her satchel, and handed it over. Leia took it in her right hand. Her left hand was still holding onto the drapery, and she let go of it and moved the blaster to that hand. She unclipped her lightsaber and held it at the ready in her right hand. Anyone who came out that window was going to pay dearly for doing so.
But then the light from the inside went away. Another reprieve. Leia realized she had been holding her breath, and forced herself to exhale. Maybe it was going to be all right.
At that moment the wind shifted, and suddenly the rain was fading away, the line of squalls passing over Coronet and moving on to other business elsewhere on the coast.
Leia looked to Mara, but she already had the slave controller back out and powered up. She aimed it in the general direction of the spaceport and switched it on. Almost immediately a new light flashed on the control panel. “Positive lock!” Mara said, looking back toward Leia—and then, in the same instant, behind Leia.
Leia had the lightsaber on before she could turn back around. A Human League trooper had his head out the window, was bringing his blaster to bear. She had the lightsaber up over her head for a downward strike before she was finished turning. The trooper fired, and she deflected the shot with her lightsaber. She swung the blade around for an upper cut that chopped through the blaster before it sliced the trooper’s head off at the neck.
The man’s head tumbled down into the darkness, and his body fell back into the room. Now it was too late. Another man stuck his head out, out of range of the lightsaber, and Leia fired with the pocket blaster. He pulled his head back in. Either she just clipped the man or else he had the sense to retreat.
A hand appeared, threw a mini-detonator toward Leia, and then vanished. Leia caught the detonator on her lightsaber blade and flipped it back into the building. It went off a split second later, with enough force to have thrown her off the ledge if she hadn’t dropped the blaster and grabbed at the drapes again. A gout of flame spewed out the window, close and hot enough to singe her hair. She could feel Mara grab onto her right arm, and it took all the presence of mind Leia had to shut off the lightsaber before the backswing on the blade sliced a few parts off both of them.
Flames were blossoming inside what had once been Mara’s room. They were running out of time and chances and choices with alarming speed. Leia looked toward the spaceport, off toward the horizon. There it was! She could see it. A spot of light headed straight for them at high speed. It had to be the Jade’s Fire, riding to the rescue. She pointed it out to Mara, who nodded and let go of Leia. She worked the controls on her slave controller, looking back and forth between the incoming ship and the controller. They still weren’t out of the woods. Mara had to fly that thing right to them.
Leia looked to the burning room, watching for more unwelcome visitors. Nothing from that quarter, and not likely to be unless they had some troopers who didn’t mind being roasted alive. She looked over her right shoulder and checked the window on the other side, behind Mara—and saw lights and movement inside. “Mara!” she cried—but either Mara had been deafened by the blast, or else flying the ship by remote was too delicate for anything else to interfere. Leia let go of the drapes, scooped up the pocket blaster, and spun around. She fired behind Mara’s head, straight at the hand coming out of the window. She hit the blaster the hand was holding and blew it up, clearing the threat from that corner for the moment, but starting another fire—and leaving her completely flash-blinded.
Leia closed her eyes and shook her head. She reopened her eyes and looked out into the sky. There. Coming close enough to be a recognizable shape. The Jade’s Fire, rushing closer.
But there, behind it, were other dots of light rising from the spaceport. PPBs—Pocket Patrol Boats—sent to chase down the ship that had suddenly launched itself.
The flames were growing brighter on either side of Leia and Mara, but Leia could hear the chuff, chuff of fire extinguishers being brought into play. The troopers would have the fires under control soon.
“Leia!” Mara shouted over the roar of the flames. “Get ready. I’
m not sure how close I’ll be able to fly her in, but the second she’s close enough, jump! You might not get a second chance. If you get aboard, go to the pilot’s station and be ready to take control once I’m aboard!”
“Will do!” Leia shouted, and watched as the Jade’s Fire rushed closer. She was a bigger ship than Leia had expected, significantly larger than the Millennium Falcon. She was a craft of graceful lines. She had a snubbed-off nose and a wide fuselage that blended into the two thick elliptical wings. She was painted in a flame-pattern of oranges and red. Leia certainly wouldn’t want to try flying anything that size up to the side of a building by remote. And it looked like the job was giving Mara just a bit of trouble at that. The Fire slowed as it came nearer, and wobbled a bit in flight. Turbulence.
Mara swore under her breath and made the slightest of adjustments to the controls. The Fire slowed down even more, and eased down just a trifle, bringing the top of the craft more or less even with the window ledge. Mara brought her in to a complete halt in midair, about fifty meters from the ledge. At that moment a blaster fired from one of the upper windows of Corona House. The shot pinged off the Fire’s hull. A door opened in the top of the fuselage and a gun turret popped out. It immediately swiveled about and returned fire. “Shoot-back system,” Mara shouted before Leia could ask. “Automatically returns fire at anything that shoots at it. Which reminds me. Don’t do any more shooting yourself, or that thing will paste you for sure.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Leia replied. Better late than never. She shoved the pocket blaster into her pocket and clipped the lightsaber to her belt.
Mara began sidling the Fire in closer, slowly closer, in toward Corona House. Another blaster fired, and the topside turret responded with a torrent of fire. Closer, closer. A topside hatch was opening, yellow light streaming out of the ship’s interior. Leia looked down at the portside wing of the big ship, and judged the distance as about two meters. A meter and a half.
Close enough. Don’t give yourself time to think, she told herself. She jumped.
She landed hard on the upper hull of the ship and for a long, heart-stopping moment felt herself sliding down and off the rain-slicked hull. But then her hand found a purchase, and she pulled herself up and was on her feet, scuttling toward that open hatch, trying not to think of all the troopers in the building who might decide she would be worth taking a potshot at.
She heard a bump on the hull behind her and hoped to hell it was Mara, but there was no time to look back. She jumped down the hatch, not worrying about how she was going to land or what her ankle felt like, interested only in getting hull metal between herself and the line of fire.
Leia managed to land full on her twisted ankle, and collapsed in a heap on the deck at the intersection of two corridors. She pulled herself up just as Mara came swarming down the hatch ladder. Mara hit the hatch-close button the moment her head was clear of the hatch and came down the ladder.
Leia caught Mara as her leg collapsed under her, and saw the blood soaking through the left leg of her coverall. That cut on Mara’s calf must have been worse than it looked. But no time for that. “This way,” Mara shouted, pointing down one of the corridors.
Heavier blaster fire sounded from the rear of the craft, nearly knocking them over. The overhead shoot-back system returned fire. “That’ll be the PPBs,” Leia said. “Can the hull take that fire without shields?”
“For a while,” Mara said. “But let’s not try and find out how long.” Leia half-carrying Mara, the two women hurried for the control room. They stopped in front of a hatch, and Mara punched codes into a keypad. The hatch slid open. Mara half lunged, half fell into the pilot’s station and instantly powered up the shields. “That’ll hold the PPBs,” she said, and then hit the throttle. The Jade’s Fire leaped forward, grabbing for speed and altitude.
Leia got herself to the navigator’s station and collapsed. Soaked through to the bone, her teeth chattering, her ankle throbbing, her body no doubt a mass of bruises and sores she couldn’t feel yet, onetime Princess, onetime Senator Leia Organa Solo, Chief of State of the New Republic, breathed a sigh of relief. They were going to make it. She watched through the forward viewport as the Jade’s Fire left Corellia behind.
She was not sorry to say good-bye.
CHAPTER TEN
Getting There
Gaeriel Captison sat down at one end of the long table and nodded to the man standing at the far end. “Admiral,” she said, “I think we are ready to begin.”
“Thank you, Madame Captison.” Admiral Hortel Ossilege of the Bakuran Navy looked around the table. “I wish to review the situation,” he said, “and make sure that I understand it completely. Mr. Skywalker, once more, please, how long until your New Republic can refit and redeploy its ships in order to assemble a fleet of its own?”
“Our best estimate is that massing a force and preparing for action will take another forty-five standard days,” Luke said.
“Indeed?” Ossilege asked, eyebrows raised. “I begin to wonder how you won against the Empire.” He was a small man, of slight build, well-scrubbed and pink-skinned, completely bald on top of his head, but sporting a quite dramatic pair of bushy black eyebrows and a sharply pointed goatee. He wore a Bakuran dress naval uniform of creamy white, with a perfect fruit salad of ribbons and decorations on his chest. On the face of it, he should have looked ridiculous, a comic-opera caricature of the sort of officer who only fought—and won—the sort of battles that took place in buffet lines, and in front of promotion boards.
Luke had learned very early on that appearances were deceiving. In a day and a half of talks, Ossilege had demonstrated that his was a first-class mind, and that he had little time for nonsense of any sort. “Readiness is very low. There’s no doubt about that,” he said. “But we have good evidence that the plotters on Corellia have penetrated our security system and timed their operation carefully.”
“In short, they caught you with your pants down,” said Ossilege. He turned toward Kalenda. “Lieutenant, once more, please, your best estimate of the enemy’s naval strength. Have you any reason to revise your opinion?”
“No sir, but I wish I did. I am forced to report that, from all I could see, the naval strength of the Human League and their allies is almost negligible. They seem to have a large number of fighter craft and corvette-class craft, but nothing at all larger. That’s the evidence, but I just can’t believe it. I think it would be suicidal to take that information at face value. They must have more ships somewhere. We have to assume that they are hiding their strength. We just don’t know where they are hiding the ships, or why they are hiding them.”
“Doesn’t your outfit keep track of that sort of thing?” Lando asked.
Kalenda shrugged. “The NRI does its best to track ship inventories, but it’s almost impossible. And it’s hard to get the information you have to the people who need it. We’ve got agents all over the Outlier Worlds, but their intelligence reports would go through Coruscant before they were sent on here. The reports haven’t caught up with me yet. Maybe a courier ship will bring all sorts of news tomorrow. On the other hand, maybe it won’t. And even if does, I wouldn’t put much stock in the information. The Galaxy is pretty big. You can hide whole fleets full of ships, or whole shipyards, without much trouble. And there’s an awful lot of surplus hardware from the Republic—Empire war floating around.”
“You have no way of counting ships?” Ossilege asked in astonishment. “You, the much-vaunted NRI?”
“With respect, Admiral, you only have your own star system to contend with. But we have to watch everything. Suppose someone patches up a derelict cruiser and sells it on the black market in a system our people have never been to? Or what if a shipyard takes on a military-to-civilian conversion job and tears all the weaponry out of a frigate, and turns the frigate into a cargo for a nice, peaceful, well-established shipping company—except it turns out that the weapons were never actually removed, and the shipping com
pany never existed except in whatever database the slicers got into? How are we supposed to deal with that? Or suppose someone just builds whatever ships they want for themselves, and never tells anyone about it? How would you count all the ships fitting that description within a thousand light-years of Corellia?”
Ossilege raised one bushy eyebrow. “You have just described a large fraction of the Bakuran procurement process,” he said, “a subject I would prefer not to discuss further. I take your point.” He turned toward Lando. “Captain Calrissian. You were to attempt a more detailed analysis of the so-called starbuster plot. Your findings?”
Lando turned his palms upward in a gesture of helplessness. “The droids and I went over every bit of data we could squeeze out of the datachip Kalenda brought out. Nothing. We crunched the numbers as hard as we could, and it still came up ambiguous. There is no way to prove, absolutely, that the message to Leia was sent before the star blew up—and likewise no way to disprove the idea that the message was sent after the explosion, in such a way as to make it look as if it were delayed. But one thing we do know for sure—someone blew that star. There is simply no natural explanation for its having detonated on its own.
“There is also the imagery sent to Governor-General Micamberlecto, showing the star blowing up at close range. That could have been faked, but it would be extremely difficult. If we assume it’s genuine, either whoever shot the imagery just happened to have the probe in exactly the right position at exactly the right time, or else they had a probe waiting and ready to collect the imagery that would prove their claims.”
“There’s another related issue,” Luke said. “The New Republic has to at least try to evacuate the next planetary system on the starbuster list. Plans weren’t finalized before we left, but more than likely the Naritus and two or three other ships currently on patrol duty in the Coruscant system will be diverted to that job. That means that many fewer ships for operations in Corellian space.”
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