by Troy Denning
“Chubba!” Emala reached up and briefly depressed the transmit switch. “Will you just click it and see what happens?”
Chewbacca’s double click answered almost instantly.
Leia and Han crept down the gulch until they had a clear view of the sky over the Dune Sea, then Han raised the electrobinoculars and knelt down to watch. A minute passed… two… Leia began to wonder if Herat had decided not to take the risk after all.
Then Han finally said, “They’re buying it.”
He passed the electrobinoculars over, and Leia saw a dozen TIEs—a full squadron—dropping down over the Dune Sea. She activated the range finder but saw only a 1 followed by two blurs of changing numbers.
“A hundred kilometers? That can’t be right!”
“Closer to a hundred fifty, I think,” Han said. “Herat must have the sandcrawler’s power core running close to critical. She wants that Mark Fifteen.”
“She deserves it.”
Leia passed the electrobinoculars back, then clicked the captured comlink again. This time, Chewbacca did not answer, for they were trying to communicate as little as possible to avoid drawing attention. But Leia knew he would be piloting the hoverscout down the last few hundred meters of canyon and out onto the Great Mesa, racing for the Falcon’s hiding place. Assuming the diversion kept the Imperial eyes focused on the Dune Sea long enough for him to melt into the general traffic patterns running between Mos Espa and Mos Eisley, they had guessed this part of the trip would take about an hour. The entire return journey—assuming the Falcon was still in the smuggler’s cave when he reached it—would take about three minutes.
A series of blue hyphens flashed in the distant sky.
“They’re firing,” Han reported.
“At Herat?” Emala asked.
“Can’t tell,” Han said.
“They’re warning shots.” Leia was recalling the command directive they had seen. “Chimaera command wants us alive. Even more than that, they want to know where we are. They won’t take the chance of hitting the reactor core and vaping the whole crawler.”
They watched in silence for two minutes more, Leia’s ears aching to hear a voice coming over the built-in comm receiver in her helmet, an officer issuing orders or a trooper asking a question, anything to indicate how the Chimaera was reacting to the diversion. Normally they would have. But, exhibiting a discipline lacking in Imperial troops since the days of the Emperor, the two companies of ambushers maintained comm silence, and she heard nothing over the channels to suggest one way or the other how well her plan was working.
“Blast!” Han said. “We’ll have to do this the hard way. They must be bringing another company down from orbit.”
Leia nodded. “We should have realized they would have a ready reserve. These Imperials… they’re new and improved.”
They put away the electrobinoculars and started toward the oasis again, Leia and Han alternating fifty-meter advances with Emala so they could cover each other and watch for Imperials. After two hundred meters, they began to hear the rumble of lowing banthas and retreated into the Jundland Wastes. Creeping along the convergence zone at the edge of the Dune Sea would certainly be the quickest and most concealed approach to the oasis—but it was also the most obvious.
They found the first pair of stormtroopers thirty meters up the gulch, sprawled against the slope with their weapons at their sides and blood smeared over their armor. One had a single slugthrower hole in the lens of his helmet. The other had been shot in the throat, in the vulnerable area between his breastplate and his chin.
“Looks like we picked the wrong disguises.” Filtered through his helmet vocabulator, Han’s voice sounded like the voice of every stormtrooper Leia had ever heard. “Did we plan for this?”
“Not really,” Leia said. “See any sign of the sniper?”
Han scanned the opposite hillside with the electrobinoculars for several minutes, then finally shook his head. “Plenty of places to hide, though.”
“He probably moved on,” Leia said.
“Probably,” Han agreed. “But cover me anyway.”
Holding his blaster rifle ready to fire, Han raced across the killing zone and ducked between two boulders on the other side. Leia followed and joined him, then turned to see Emala rubbing her muzzle against the helmets of the dead troopers. When she had finished, she strapped their equipment belts over her shoulders bandolier-style and joined the Solos between the boulders.
Noticing their attention, she said, “I had to be sure they were dead, didn’t I? They might have been laying a trap for you.”
Han shook his helmet and started to ascend the hill-side—but stopped when the thunder of a set of huge repulsorlift engines echoed off the canyon walls. Leia pulled him back down behind the boulders, then looked toward the sound and saw a curtain of dust boiling down the gulch. A moment later, the armored form of an Imperial assault shuttle rounded the bend, flying past only meters above their heads before disappearing through the canyon mouth.
“That’s more like it,” Leia said.
In her head, she could almost see the last few minutes aboard Herat’s sandcrawler. A company of stormtroopers drops on top via zipline, cuts through the roof to discover an abandoned bridge, and begins a cautious search. Someone finds an Imperial hoverscout on the lower cargo deck, its holomap damaged and the transponder that caught the interest of Chimaera Intelligence randomly short-circuiting. Someone else locates Herat locked inside a tool bin. She is quite relieved to hear that the hijackers have fled her sandcrawler and thanks the Imperials profusely for saving her life—until she discovers that the thieves took a shipment of brand-new speeder bikes with them. The officer reluctantly breaks comm silence to report that the Rebels may be fleeing across the Dune Sea on speeder bikes…
Leia nodded in satisfaction. “They’re buying it.”
“Maybe,” Han said. “Or maybe that shuttle’s just running off to pick up a—”
Han was interrupted by a voice in their helmet receivers. “Company A, report to your shuttle for transport. Company B, redeploy and maintain the ambush.”
“Maintain? Alone?” came an angry voice. “I’ve already lost half my company to—”
A deeper voice came over the comm channel. “Are you actually questioning your orders, Captain?”
The captain’s voice grew instantly obsequious. “N-no, sir. Just asking for clarification.”
“Ah, a clarification,” the voice said. “I wish you to redeploy to maintain the ambush in the Dune Sea as well as the canyons. Any losses this causes you are unimportant, so long as you remain strong enough to capture the Rebels—should they arrive. When I decide the time is right to recover the painting, I will send reinforcements to aid your survivors. Is that clear enough?”
“Y-yes, sir.”
“Very good, Captain. All units return to Priority Yellow comm silence.”
Leia turned to Han. “Why do you ever doubt me?”
“Slow learner, I guess.”
Leaving Emala to hide amid the boulders for now, Leia and Han angled up the dusty slope to within a few paces of the crest, then crept over to an outcropping of tilted slabstone where they could cross the ridge without presenting an obvious silhouette. Han dropped to all fours and crawled into a long V-shaped trough that would shield them from most sides. Leia covered him until the trough descended a level and he turned to wave her forward. Pushing her blaster rifle along in front of her, she started forward—then saw the rag-swaddled figure of a Tusken Raider rise behind him, gaffi stick poised to strike.
Leia stopped and snatched for her blaster rifle, and that was when a shadow fell across the slabstone beside her. Han brought his blaster rifle up to fire, but the Tusken behind him was already swinging his gaffi stick.
“Han! Behind—”
The Tusken’s chest exploded outward in a gout of smoke and light, then a blaster bolt flashed over Han’s head and struck something behind Leia. A strangled gasp sounded above a
nd behind her, then the shadow disappeared. She turned to look. A third shot lit the air and struck something behind her on the other side. This time, she did not turn to look. She stood up and ran, leaping over Han’s head into the far end of the trough.
When no gaffi sticks smashed her helmet on the way down, she scrambled to her feet and stuck her head over the edge of the trough, blaster rifle cradled and ready to fire.
The only targets were the three Tuskens sprawled over the slabstone with smoking holes in their chests, two motionless and obviously dead, one reaching for his gaffi stick and muttering something guttural. Han reached over Leia’s shoulder and shot him.
“Sneak up on my wife, will you?”
Leia studied the three warriors for a moment, allowing herself a moment to stop trembling, then turned to Han. “Who just saved our hides? Is Lando here somewhere?”
“I doubt it.” Han turned and pointed toward the next ridge, a good two hundred meters away. “The shots came from somewhere over there.”
A stormtrooper armed with what appeared to be a two-meter stick—a sharpshooter’s longblaster—stepped out of a cranny and waved. Han waved back, and a second trooper, this one with the orange shoulder pauldron of a squad leader, motioned them over. Leia signaled okay and helped Han drag the three dead Tuskens out of sight. Then, under the pretext of gathering a stray gaffi stick, she turned to warn Emala about the sniper.
The Squib was nowhere to be seen.
“Sharpshooter,” Leia said anyway. “Watch yourself.”
“Don’t think you’ll be rid of me that easy,” a nearby rock said. “I know what you’re doing.”
Knowing there was no point in arguing, Leia turned without speaking and followed Han toward the squad leader. They were careful not to present an easy shot to any unseen Tuskens, but made no further attempt to remain concealed. They could see at least a dozen stormtroopers working their way toward the Dune Sea in a similar manner, and any attempt to be stealthy would only draw attention.
“What’s the plan?” Leia asked. “Get close and shoot ’em?”
“If we have to,” he said. “But let’s try something else first. You still have that datapad from the hoverscout?”
Leia turned her back to Han so he could retrieve it from her pack, then they ascended the slope—passing two more stormtrooper bodies on the way—and joined the squad leader in a small stone breastwork concealed in a nook between two sandrock outcroppings.
The leader eyed Leia up and down, no doubt contemplating her ill-fitting armor and small size, then demanded, “Service numbers?”
“He’s doing a tactical efficiency study,” Han said, jerking a thumb at Leia. “I’m his combat escort.”
The squad leader continued to look at Leia. “The training staff doesn’t have service numbers?”
“I’m command, not training.” Leia stared into the leader’s vision processors and let the sentence hang as though that answered his question.
After a moment, the squad leader turned to Han. “What about you?”
“Don’t answer that, trooper.” Leia took the datapad from Han and passed him her blaster rifle. “He’s on loan to command. You understand.”
The squad leader, who clearly did not understand, continued to look at Han.
Han shrugged and spread his hands.
The squad leader turned back to Leia. “Pushy for such a young fellow, aren’t you?”
“Your devotion to procedure is to be commended,” Leia said, ignoring the comment. “I’ll make a note of it. What’s your service number?”
“ST-Three-Four-Seven.” The number came from the trooper’s mouth almost by reflex. “Sir.”
“Thank you.” Leia made a show of entering it on the datapad. “We were with Company A until the redeployment. We’ll be working with you now. We need a blind overlooking the camp, as close to the action as possible.”
“Sir?”
“Alone,” Leia said. “My observations are classified.”
“You can take this place.” ST-347 hooked a thumb toward the front of his breastwork. “You have a clear field of view, and as long as you have a pair of electro—”
“Close to the action,” Leia repeated sternly. “We need to be in place before Company A finishes redeploying. You understand.”
ST-347 sighed through his vocabulator. “Close, huh?” He motioned at the datapad. “You’ll want to put that thing away. And keep your head down—the Tuskens seem to think our helmet lenses make for good target practice.”
Once they were ready, ST-347 led them to the crest of the ridge, where he dropped to his belly and crawled forward until they could see the camp ahead. To Leia’s surprise, it lay a considerable distance out in the sands, a smear of rocky ground along the base of the first massive dune. She could make out the woolly forms of wandering banthas and the smaller domes of the Tusken huts, but that was about all with her naked eye.
“The closest we can get you is the top of that dune,” he said. “But if you were with Company A, you just came from there.”
“Funny how much closer these hills looked from there.” Leia turned to Han. “Didn’t I tell you to check the range, trooper?”
ST-347 glanced at Han over Leia’s back, sharing a moment that soldiers have no doubt been sharing since there were officers. Then he looked down the slope behind them, ordered a pair of passing stormtroopers to wait, and turned back to Leia.
“You can tag along with Seven-Eight-Nine and Six-Three-Six, sir. They’ll get you there in one piece.”
“Very efficient of you, ST-Three-Four-Seven.” Leia backed away from the edge and stood, then allowed her helmet lenses to linger on Han for a moment. “Obviously, I wasn’t assigned a very capable escort.”
As Leia started down the slope to join her new escorts, she heard ST-347 ask Han, “Who is that kid? One of Pellaeon’s nephews?”
“Worse,” Han replied. “Quenton’s son. Straight out of the academy.”
“Quenton has a son?”
“He likes to keep it quiet. You can see why.”
“Tough break, trooper,” ST-347 said. “Good luck keeping him alive.”
Forty painful and exhausting minutes later, Leia and Han were crawling the last few meters to the dune’s crest. The suns were beating down mercilessly on the sands, and even with her cooling unit turned to maximum, Leia felt as though she were squirming across a frying pan.
She glanced over at Han. “You okay in there?”
“Don’t worry about me. Seen any sign of Emala?”
“No,” Leia said. “And I’m not worried about her. We told her this would happen.”
“Sure you aren’t.”
“Aren’t what?”
“Worried about her.”
They reached the top and found themselves looking down the dune’s steep side. Two hundred meters below, thirty bantha wool huts stood amidst the rocks at one end of a small oasis. At the end opposite the camp stood a permanent hut, still covered in bantha wool but supported by an exterior framework of bantha bones. Next to it, just behind a bantha rib arch, lay a pile of what appeared to be bleached sticks, though Leia had a feeling they were something else. Banthas roamed the oasis freely, but their Tusken riders were not visible anywhere.
Leia took out the electrobinoculars and turned them on the hut standing next to the bantha-rib arch. Care had been taken to sink the fabric walls deep into the sand, and a simple bantha bone drawbar locked the door from the outside.
“Look at the hut next to the bone pile,” Han said.
“Good idea,” Leia said dryly. “It’s a holding cell.”
Even without the drawbar she had observed through the electrobinoculars, Leia would have known what she was seeing. Simply looking at the hut sent a shiver down her spine. It was a place of torture and death, a place where suffering and despair had permeated the Force to such a degree that Leia could feel it even atop the dune. Her shoulder began to ache again, then all of her old wounds as well—especially those i
nflicted by her father’s interrogation droid aboard the Death Star.
Leia lowered the electrobinoculars and looked away. “This is going to be fun.”
“Fun?” Han asked. “Maybe you need to adjust your cooling unit.”
“It won’t do any good,” Leia said. “I can feel what happens down there.”
“More Force-sensations?” Even through the voice filter, Han sounded uneasy. “Do you mean what happened down there? Or what’s going to?”
Leia shrugged. “That’s not clear. What I’m feeling is just phantom pain.”
“Great… like the real stuff isn’t bad enough.” Han’s helmet turned back toward the oasis. “Maybe it’s Kitster. That’s where he’d be, if he’s still alive.”
Leia pictured Kitster’s face and forced herself to look at the hut. The phantom pains did not intensify, but the oasis began to feel more familiar to her, much as Mos Espa had after departing Watto’s—much as Shmi’s hovel had when Leia went there to hide.
Her stomach grew cold and hollow. A moment later, she began to experience a time-muted sense of loneliness and despair from the direction of the hut, and the electrobinoculars slipped from her grasp. She watched absently as they slid twenty meters down the dune, then vanished beneath a small landslide.
“Leia!” Han gasped. He peered in both directions along the crest of the dune, then asked, “What’s wrong? I think the captain saw you drop those.”
“This is where they kept her,” Leia said, still in shock. “This is where Shmi Skywalker was tortured.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chewbacca and the Squibs had taken a few scenic detours on the way to Mos Espa, first sweeping around the back side of the Mospic High Range to avoid a company of hoverscouts fanning out across the flats south of Mos Espa, then ducking through Arch Canyon to lose a flight of TIEs they had picked up entering Xelric Draw. Now C-3PO—who had been using a pair of electro-binoculars to reconnoiter the entire trip—was reporting what seemed to be the ultimate roadblock, an Imperial AT-AT walker moving into position to block the mouth of the smuggler’s cave where the Falcon sat hidden in the darkness.
