“Howergh?”
“Because…” Han made a face. “Because I have a bad feeling about this, too,” he said, and vanished up the boarding ramp.
Lando Calrissian walked down the ramp of his personal command shuttle looking every centimeter the general he was, from the millimetrically level brim of his gleaming cap to the subtly iridescent uppers of his similarly gleaming boots. The elegantly close-fitting jumpsuit he wore was also subtly iridescent, so that its powder-blue sheen could pick up complementary highlights from whatever environment he might find himself in—because a gentleman and an officer must never, ever clash—and it fit as if it had been designed specifically for him, which, of course, it had. He’d designed it himself.
Thrown over one shoulder he carried his custom belt-length uniform jacket—jet black, naturally, because black goes with everything—which he’d commissioned after being reliably informed that Ackbar and Republic Command would absolutely draw the line at an opera cape. At his side walked Fenn Shysa, wearing only his usual battered flight gear—which, Lando had to admit, suited him rather well.
When Lando had come into the shuttle’s cabin for the first time wearing these dress blues, Shysa had snorted openly. “Don’t recall ever seeing a holo of Madine in an outfit like that.”
“That’s because Crix can’t pull it off,” Lando had replied with a shrug, admiring the jacket’s cut in a full-length mirror. “He carries a bit much in the middle, know what I mean?”
“And you’re wonderin’ why Mandalorian mercenaries don’t seem to respect you.”
Lando grinned. “I like being underestimated.”
“I’m thinkin’ it’s mostly that you like your fancy clothes.”
“If looking good ever becomes a crime, Fenn my friend, I’m ready to do life.”
Shysa marched through the busy docking bay with his usual straight-ahead military stride. Lando lagged a bit, nodding to this tech and that deckhand, greeting most of them by name, introducing himself to those he didn’t know. The same uncanny knack of memory that let him mentally track the tactics and tells of thousands of gamblers across the galaxy also helped him recall the names of anyone he’d ever met—often the names of their children and details of their homeworlds, too. It was more than just a trick, though; he genuinely liked people, and this had made him almost ridiculously popular with the rank and file of the RDF. But it could slow him down when he had to move through a crowd, which was why he was a bit late to catch what Leia was saying to Fenn as he came up, something about C-3PO waiting in the conference room with full briefing and status report.
Something had brought an entirely lovely blush to Leia’s cheeks, which Lando automatically assumed must be the result of some clumsily flattering compliment from Shysa. Since to be outsmoothed by a gruff-mannered fighter jock would never be part of Lando’s life plan, he stepped up and bowed over Leia’s hand. “Princess, I apologize in advance for my inadequate words,” he said, “because as usual, your beauty leaves me entirely speechless.”
“Stow it.” Leia reclaimed her hand with a brisk yank; that high color in her cheeks was apparently not due so much to pleasure as to, say, rage. “Answer a question instead.”
Lando blinked. “Princess?”
“Why is it,” she said through clenched teeth, “that the only man I know under the age of sixty who is capable of even pretending to be a grown-up is my own brother?”
Before Lando could begin to stammer out anything resembling an answer, she swept off along the corridor, stalking toward the docking bay in a stiff-backed march that reminded him uncomfortably of a Socorran granite-hawk’s threat display.
Fenn leaned toward him. “What’s with her?”
“She does seem a bit wrought up.”
“I thought she’s a diplomat—isn’t she supposed to be more, I dunno, kinda self-possessed?”
“She is. She was once interrogated by Darth Vader himself and never so much as blinked. Look up unflappable on the HoloNet, you’ll find her profile.”
“She’s sure flappin’ some right now.”
“I’d say so.”
“So what is it that can get a girl like her so spittin’ mad and all?”
“It’s not a what, it’s a who,” Lando said with a smile of fond remembrance. “In her defense, he could make a Jedi Master throw a full-scale hissy fit.”
Shysa nodded. “You must be talkin’ about Solo.”
Leia broke into a trot as she entered the docking bay cavern, but stopped short when she registered the absence of a familiar silhouette that should have been in the repair bay beyond the lines of shuttles and fighters. She pushed her way through the deck gangs to the place where the Falcon had been docked. There was nothing to be seen there except some grease and coolant stains, a few scraps of hull plating and random electronic components, and one lone gauss wrench with a dented head. Setting her jaw, she swept the gauss wrench up and weighed it in her hand. But then she lowered her arm and just gazed balefully out into the dark of space beyond the docking bay’s particle shield.
She should never have sent Han in the first place. She should have made him stew in that stifling conference room listening to C-3PO struggle to find polite translations of that Mandalorian’s sneers. He hadn’t been gone ten minutes when she’d realized what a mistake she’d made. And why.
It was because she didn’t take herself seriously enough.
Even after all these months, she couldn’t make herself entirely believe that actual Jedi blood ran in her veins—not only Jedi blood, but the blood of arguably the most powerful Jedi in history. She had never entirely gotten her mind around the truth that her instincts and intuitions and premonitions were much more than psychological phenomena: that they were, really and truly, the whispers of the Force itself. She had sent Han because, deep down, she’d really believed that he’d just run on up to the communications center and check on the real-time subspace status reports coming from Luke’s task force, and when he found out that all was well, he’d just run on back and tell her so. With maybe a bit of teasing about some static today on the Feminine Intuition Channel, huh?
Coming to grips with their Jedi heritage must have been easier for Luke; growing up on the Outer Rim, he’d barely even known what a Jedi was. Leia, on the other hand, had been raised in a household that was steeped in reverence for the Jedi Order and everything it had stood for. The man she still thought of as her father—Bail, the Prince Consort—had had an inexhaustible fund of tales of the Jedi, not just from the Clone Wars but from the whole history of the Republic. He had never spoken of any Jedi with less than absolute respect for the way they had devoted their lives wholly to the cause of peace and justice, sacrificing everything in the tragic Clone Wars.
Was it any wonder that she couldn’t quite believe it? That one of those legendary heroes had been Anakin Skywalker, her real father… and that this legendary hero had somehow been transformed into the most ruthless, homicidal, and terrifying enforcer of the Empire’s tyranny… and that the eager puppy of a Tatooine farm boy who had burst into her cell on the Death Star to rescue her—without the faintest ghost of a plan beyond a naive faith in the essential justness of the universe—was her twin, who now expected her to follow in his, and their father’s, footsteps…
It was all just too preposterous. She might, just barely, be able to believe it could possibly have happened… to somebody else.
Right up until something equally preposterous would happen. Like sitting in a bleak conference room on an airless asteroid and suddenly knowing, just flat knowing, that her brother—thousands of light-years away—was so deep in danger that even he didn’t have a chance of surviving on his own.
But then she’d still had to hack through the thickets of Oh, I’m just being silly second thoughts; what finally cleared her mind and righted her course was the added premonition, after some fifteen minutes spent fitfully waiting for his return, that now Han was also in danger. Even then, after she’d become alarmed enough t
o mutter a lame excuse to the Mandalorians and leave the room, she’d had to go all the way up to the communications center to confirm in person what was going on. When she found out that the RRTF’s subspace real-time reports had suddenly gone dark—and that Han had been up here some fifteen minutes earlier and had gotten the same information—she had turned straight for the docking bay cavern, because she knew Han would jump out of here just as fast as he could get the Falcon’s engines hot.
She also knew why: Han could no more leave a friend in danger than he could jump to lightspeed by flapping his arms. And she knew that he’d leave without telling her he was going, because he knew she was, in this respect, no different than he was, and he still had this profoundly silly masculine notion that he could somehow keep her from danger just by leaving her behind. Just how profoundly silly this masculine notion was she planned to demonstrate graphically as soon as she caught up with him. Maybe she’d draw him a picture. On his skull. With the gauss wrench.
But how could she catch him?
She looked around the docking bay, but in the chaos of hustling crew and tugs and the clouds hissing out from gas exchangers and the space dust billowing away from hulls hooked up to electrostatic reversers, there were no answers to be found. She thought, What would Luke do?… and when she closed her eyes and took a deep breath or two, she decided that right now she should be going that way…
She drifted aimlessly through the docking bay cavern for a few minutes, bemusedly waiting for another feeling to strike her; she was so focused on her inner feelings that it took her a second or two to register that the handsome profile of that tall pilot up ahead, the one chatting with the deck crew men who were cleating down his B-wing, belonged to a friend of hers.
“Tycho!” She waved and headed over to him. “Tycho, I am so glad to see you!”
Tycho Celchu greeted her with a bemused look of his own. “Princess? Aren’t you supposed to be in the negotiations?”
“Forget the negotiations,” she said. “I need a ride. It’s a diplomatic emergency.”
Tycho frowned. “Um…”
“I’m a rated gunner on that thing,” she said, nodding toward the B-wing. “I need you to get it space-ready as fast as possible.”
His frown deepened. “Princess, you’re a civilian—”
“And my mother was your queen.” Trading on her family’s station always left a sickly weight in the pit of her stomach, but this was an emergency. “You’ve been Alderaanian a lot longer than you’ve been an officer. Will you do this for me, or should I ask somebody else?”
“Ask somebody what?” Wedge Antilles had come up beside her. “Hi, Princess. How go the negotiations?”
“Wedge, hi.” Leia winced—another friend she’d have to lie to. “Uh… something’s come up. I need to borrow Tycho and his B-wing. Maybe for just a few hours.”
“If it were up to me…” Wedge spread his hands apologetically. “But Lando—that is, General Calrissian—he’s a real nice guy, y’know, easygoing and relaxed when he’s out of uniform. But the first time you violate his orders, you find out he’s got no sense of humor at all.”
She looked from one to the other. Why would the Force have sent her in this direction in the first place if there were no chance she could—
What would Luke do?
She took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and sighed it out again. When she opened her eyes, she could now see the two men before her clearly. Tycho had been only a vehicle for her, Wedge only a roadblock… but now they were men, good men, friends who honestly cared about her obvious distress. They deserved better than to be conned into helping her.
Slowly, clearly, simply, she said, “Luke’s in danger.”
Wedge and Tycho exchanged an unreadable glance. Wedge said, “What kind of danger?”
She couldn’t keep a hint of quaver out of her voice. “The fatal kind.”
Tycho looked at Wedge. Wedge’s mouth compressed and he stared down at the deck. Not for long—less than a second—and then he huffed a sigh, and gave a decisive nod. Tycho wheeled and sprinted away.
Leia watched as the Alderaanian raced headlong through the chaos in the docking bay cavern. “Where’s he going?”
Wedge was already jogging toward his own X-wing. “To round up the rest of the Rogues,” he called back over his shoulder. “Fifteen minutes.”
Lando sat in the conference chair Han had only recently vacated. He’d stopped listening to Fenn Shysa argue with the mercenary commander about thirty seconds after he’d finished the introductions; Lando had enough Mando’a to get along in conversation or fleece an unwary Mandalorian over a sabacc table, but he’d seen in those first thirty seconds that the commander wasn’t buying what Fenn was selling—a combination of “Lord Mandalore Commands You” and an appeal to civic responsibility and Defend Our Honor sentimentality. Lando probably should have mentioned to Fenn before they’d gone in that those kinds of arguments worked only on people who already believed in that stuff, and people who believed in that stuff didn’t often end up spilling blood for Imperial credits.
Like most fundamentally decent men, Fenn seemed to believe that down deep, nearly everybody else was fundamentally decent, too. He seemed to think that because he had once been a mercenary, other mercenaries were just like him: a cynical shell over a core of natural nobility. But Fenn had never been exactly your factory-issue mercenary.
Lando, on the other hand, was a gambler. A successful gambler. Like all successful gamblers, he knew that “natural nobility” was more rare than a flawless Corusca gem, and that over the long run, you never lost by assuming that everyone you met was driven by a combination of greed, fear, and stupidity.
After half an hour, he’d found himself wondering how Han had managed to sit through two days of this without taking his own life. After an hour, it became clear to him that neither Han nor Leia was going to be returning to the conference room anytime soon. Nearly another hour had passed before the ensign he’d sent looking for Leia had returned to the conference room door with a look on his face that indicated either failure or chronic illness.
Lando leaned forward to speak softly in Fenn’s ear while the opposing commander was making yet another long, insultingly skeptical-sounding speech. “I have to step out for a minute or two. Cover for me, huh?”
Fenn nodded without hesitation. He must not have been really listening either. “Don’t blame you,” he said from the side of his mouth. “Are you as sick of this fella as I am?”
“I never get sick of people,” Lando said, smiling. “I’ll be right back.”
Out in the corridor, the ensign looked like he was wishing he could be just about anywhere else. “She was last seen, General, getting into Lieutenant Celchu’s B-wing.”
“Really.” Lando was still smiling. He’d been a gambler too long to give anything away. “And where was the lieutenant last seen?”
“Well, I—I mean, General, you would know… wouldn’t you?”
Lando’s smile went wider. “Pretend I don’t.”
“Rogue Squadron lifted off over an hour ago, sir—traffic control says they were on one of your, ah, special missions, sir…”
“One of my special missions?”
“Yes, sir. Commander Antilles gave the verification code.”
“Did he, now?”
“Yes, sir. Is—is there, uh, a problem, sir?”
“Why would there be a problem?”
“Well—the Princess had just been up to ComOps, sir. She was asking about General Solo.”
“Of course she was.”
“And General Solo had been there just a few minutes earlier. He was asking about General Skywalker.”
“And what did General Skywalker have to say?”
“Oh, uh, well—nothing, sir. I mean, he’s out of contact—the whole RRTF has gone dark.”
“Has it? Well, well.”
“Yes, sir. And, um, there is this, as well, sir.” The ensign held out a datareader. “It’s a
transcript of an automated burst-transmission that is being fed into the HoloNet over and over again, at five-minute intervals. The transmissions began less than a minute after the RRTF went dark.”
Lando weighed the reader in his hand. “Summarize it for me, will you?”
“Well—it claims to be from Lord Shadowspawn, sir. ComOps hasn’t verified authenticity yet, but—”
“But you thought I might want to know about it. Because you think it might have something to do with our missing princess and her two favorite generals.”
“In the transmission, sir, Lord Shadowspawn claims to have captured the entire task force—and he says he will kill them all in three Standard days unless the Republic agrees to an immediate cease-fire… and acknowledges his claim on the Imperial Throne.”
“Really. Hm. Well, well again.”
“But like I said—” The ensign licked nervous sweat from his upper lip. “We don’t know if—ComOps hasn’t verified its authenticity—even if it really is from Shadowspawn, we have no way of knowing if any of it is true—”
“Sure we do. It’s all true,” Lando said. “Luke’s already there. Han and Leia are on their way. Not to mention Rogue Squadron.”
“Sir? I don’t understand.”
“That’s because you’re new around here, son.”
“Sir?”
“Forward your personnel file to my exec. I can use a man like you.”
The ensign’s mouth dropped open. “Sir—? I don’t—I mean, I failed—”
“When you submit your file, put a note in there that I’m promoting you to lieutenant j.g.”
The ensign’s eyes went as wide and slack as his mouth “Sir—?”
“You’ve just saved a general from being bored to death. If I thought I could get away with it, I’d give you a medal, too.” He left the ensign gaping in the hallway.
Inside the conference room, Lando nodded a grin at Shysa and kicked his empty chair out of the way. “Let me handle this.”
Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 8
