Star Wars: Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  “But you didn’t,” Han told her gently. “And you know that, and I know that … and that’s what counts. What’s Luke always saying? Be what you want to seem.”

  She pulled his arms more closely around her, closing her eyes and drifting in the scents of soap, and his flesh, and the thick, slightly sulfurous murk of the night. Had it been only that afternoon they’d stood on the tower? Seen the children of the Jedi playing around the grille that covered Plett’s Well? Felt the lost peace, the stillness of those other days, rising around them like the warmth of a long-forgotten sun?

  Very low, she said, “I have dreams, Han; dreams where I’m hunting through all those rooms on the Death Star, running through corridors, opening doors, looking behind hatches, searching all the lockers, because there’s something somewhere, some key, that will turn off the destructor beams. I dream that I’m running down the hallways with—with whatever it is—clutched in my hand, and if I can just make it to the Ignition Chamber in time, just do the right thing, I’ll save them. I’ll switch off the beam and be able to go home.”

  His grip tightened around her, holding her fast against his body. He knew she had dreams. He’d waked her up from them, and held her against his chest while she cried, too many times to count. She felt the breath of his lips move the hair at the crown of her head. “There was nothing you could have done.”

  “I know. But at least once a day I think: I couldn’t save them, but I can make those who did it pay.” She turned in his arms, looking up at him in the misty apricot light. “Would you do it?”

  Han grinned down at her. “Like a shot. But I’m not the Chief of State.”

  “Would you do it to please me?”

  He laid his hand along her cheek, leaned down to kiss her lips. He said softly, “No. Not even if you asked.”

  He led her inside. As he stopped to close the shutters behind them, Leia paused by the room’s small table, where a half dozen shallow cakes of colored wax floated in a great glass bowl of water. She flicked the switch on the long stem of the lighter, touched in turn each wick. The drifting lights painted wavery circles of amber and daffodil on the ceiling and walls. Her eyes met Han’s over the floating candle flames; she let slip the shawl she’d worn over her shoulders, and held out to him her hand.

  They wouldn’t let her sleep.

  They kept coming into the steel-walled cell, asking her questions, threatening her—telling her this person had told them this, that person had told them that. That she had been betrayed, that everything was known, that her father had been working for the Empire all along, that those she trusted had sold her out … that she would be lobotomized and taken to one of the barracks pleasure houses … tortured … killed. She’d tried to keep her mind on the Death Star plans, on the threat to the Senate, on the danger to hundreds of planets rather than on her own terror …

  No, Leia whispered, trying to surface from the drowning, breathless horror of the dream. No …

  Then the door of the detention cell had slipped open with its evil hissing sound, and Vader had been standing there, Vader huge and black and terrible, surrounded by stormtroopers. And behind him, darker, shinier, more evil still, the black smooth floating bulk of the Torturer …

  “No!”

  She tried to scream but could manage no more than a gasp. Nevertheless it woke her, to darkness, and the faint, sinister whirring of a droid’s engine, and the moving glint of red lights in the dark.

  There was another noise, thin and steady, a half-familiar whining …

  The overload alarm on a blaster?

  “Artoo?”

  Leia sat up in bed, confused and panicky and wondering if it was a dream, if the terrible sense of evil was something left over from her nightmare. Across the room a faint, hissing zap sounded, and the white light of Artoo-Detoo’s electric cutting beam illuminated the round, blocky form of the little droid visible beyond the foot of the bed. A second alarm began to sound. It was unnaturally dark in the room; Leia hadn’t even begun to sort out why when Han flinched and turned beside her, and she heard the door of the small wall cupboard slide shut.

  The sound of the blaster overload alarms grew immediately muffled.

  She felt rather than saw Han reach for the holster that hung beside the bed, and at the same moment, the white glare of Artoo’s cutting beam illuminated, like a tableau, the droid and the corner of the room by the cupboard as he neatly fused the lock.

  “What the …?”

  She hit the light switch by the bed. Nothing happened. In a panic of confusion her mind reached out, groped for the candles that had illuminated the room earlier with such soft, romantic light. Luke had taught her …

  Fire sprang to life again on the floating wicks.

  “You crazy little …” Han strode across the room to where Artoo had definitely posted himself in front of the cupboard door. Muffled and shrill, the fast pulse beat of the alarms was rising; Leia reached for the hideout blaster where Han usually kept it under the pillow and found nothing. In the same instant, it seemed, Artoo swung around and pointed his cutting torch in Han’s direction. The white bolt of electricity leaped out; Han sprang backward, barely avoiding it. In the dim saffron glow his eyes were suddenly wide.

  Han and Leia both looked toward the windows. The shuttering mechanism was a fused blob of metal.

  “Artoo!” cried Leia, confused and suddenly scared.

  Outside the bedroom doors Chewbacca roared, and the door rattled in its sliders. With startling speed Artoo darted for the door, the electric cutter extended; Han yelled, “Let go of the handle, Chewie!” a split second before the droid put several thousand volts into the metal handle, then swung back, cutter still zapping hot, short jolts of blue-white lightning. Han, who in addition to shouting his warning had made a plunge for the cupboard, backed hastily, the droid following him for half a meter or so.

  “Dammit, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  A substitution? thought Leia crazily, catching the pillows from the bed and circling in the other direction. When he’d run away from her on the way to the MuniCenter …? That was insane. She knew it was Artoo.

  Artoo backed against the cupboard again, his welding arm held out, the live end of it gleaming dangerously in the candlelight. Almost inaudible in the cupboard the blasters’ double whine scaled upward, an insectlike warning of an explosion that would certainly destroy most of the house.

  “Leia, put your boots on,” said Han, pulling his own free of the corner and hauling them swiftly onto his feet.

  She dropped her load of pillows and obeyed without question. There couldn’t be more than a minute or so left. They were sealed in the room.… Chewie was hammering on the outer door with something but it was clearly going to take more time than they had.

  Looking a little ridiculous—he wasn’t wearing much besides the boots—Han crossed the bed in two strides to her side. He turned his body, for a moment blocking the droid’s view of his hand as he pointed to her the thing he wanted her to use; she understood his plan by the thing’s very nature. She wanted to say, Not Artoo … but didn’t.

  There was something appallingly, hideously wrong, but there was no time to figure out what or how or why.

  Not Artoo …

  Han was already moving in on the little droid. He had a blanket in one hand, as if he planned to use it to smother the electric charge of the welder. The droid stood still, guarding the locked cupboard where the blasters were screaming into the final stages of overload, but fairly vibrated with deadly readiness.

  Leia thought, He hasn’t made a sound …

  Han struck. Artoo lunged at him, lightning leaping forth, and in that instant Leia scooped the water basin, candles and all, from the table and hurled it with all the strength she could summon at the droid. Han was already leaping back with the hair-trigger reflexes of a man who has lived all his life on his nerve ends, and the vast drench of water doused and grounded the electrical discharge of Artoo’s cutting tool
in a sizzling, horrible spatter of blue light and spraying sparks. Smoke and lightning poured from the droid’s open hatch, small threads of blue electricity leaping and twitching as Artoo gave one frantic, despairing scream. Han sprang in past him, driving one insulated boot sole through the thin wood of the cupboard door and digging out the blasters. It all seemed to happen in the space of one second and Leia thought, If Artoo’s welded the power cells into the triggers they’ll blow up in his hand …

  A ridiculous consideration, she thought—the explosion would kill both of them and Chewie as well …

  Han ripped the power cores out of both blasters and hurled the stripped weapons across the room onto the bed, where Leia buried them under pillows. The triggering blast—without the power that would have vaporized everything in the room—was like a violent hiccup, the kick of some huge, fierce, sullen thing under the bedding.

  An instant later, with a rending crash, Chewbacca smashed his way through the bedroom door.

  For a moment there was stillness, Han standing beside the cupboard, staring down at the two blaster power cores that lay hissing in the puddled water around his feet.

  The room was filled with the stench of burning feathers and scorched insulation.

  Chewie looked at Artoo, bowed forward, blackened by the electrical discharge, motionless and dead. Then he moaned, a long animal howl, grieving his friend.

  Chapter 13

  In addition to cutting all the power in the house, Artoo had fused the comlinks. Chewbacca had to venture forth into the steamy fog of the night to bring Jevax a report of what had taken place. The Chief Person returned to the house with him, concerned and shaken—he had been awake, he said, at the MuniCenter, trying to raise communication with the nearby valley of Bot-Un, whose comm center had gone out for the fifth time in six months.

  “I don’t understand it,” the old Mluki said, looking from the ruin of fried bedding to the charred, motionless droid, upon whom Han was grimly affixing a restraining bolt. “The pump stations and the mechanical feeders, yes—we’re still very much a shoestring operation in some ways, whatever the corporate brass likes to say. Most of our equipment is secondhand, and quite frankly pretty old. But your Artoo unit—”

  “Wait a minute.” Leia had removed her boots by this time and wrapped herself in a darkly patterned crimson-and-black local kimono, her hair hanging in a burnished mass down her back. She’d spent the past fifteen minutes locating every glowrod and emergency power-celled panel in the house, even retrieving the candles from the watery mess on the floor. “Are you telling me programming failures like this are common?”

  “Not common.” The Mluki’s eyes met hers frankly under the heavy ridge of brow. “But every now and then a tree feeder will go mildly amok and wander through the streets squirting nutrient at passersby. Or one of the ice walkers will start hiking away across the glaciers, forcing its passengers to bail out and walk back to the valley. Most people who have business out on the glaciers—who’re traveling to Bot-Un or Mithipsin, for instance—pack thermal suits and distress signals as a matter of course.”

  He spread his white-furred hands, and the silver in his ears glinted as he tilted his head. “Personally—though I’m not a mechanic—I suspect it’s the result of doming the valley. It was always pretty damp here, but enclosing the valley has made it more so, and the pumping stations can’t eliminate or neutralize all the corrosive gases that rise out of the vents at the bottom end of the rift. They’ve never reported mechanical problems like this in Bot-Un.”

  “But it’s not a mechanical problem,” argued Leia. “It’s a programming fault …”

  “Well, that’s what the mechanics here say.” Jevax scratched his head. “But the programmers swear it’s mechanical.”

  They would, thought Leia late the following morning, as she watched Chewbacca poke around in Artoo-Detoo’s mechanical innards in a hissing sizzle of sparks. She had yet to meet a programmer who’d admit that untoward results weren’t universally attributable to either hardware failure or operator error. Even Qwi Xux honestly and sincerely believed to this day that the Death Star would have made a wonderful mining instrument.

  And yes, the air in the Plawal Rift was extraordinarily damp, plastering Leia’s dark linen shirt to her arms and back as she leaned on the railing of the terrace where Han and the Wookiee were working to take advantage of the daylight—Jevax’s promised engineers had yet to arrive to repair power in the house and completely unstick the welded shutters. If they worked on anything like the MuniCenter’s schedules, thought Leia, they wouldn’t see them until the packing plants shut down for the night again.

  And yes, secondhand machinery not designed specifically for work in hyperdamp climates did develop the occasional flutter.

  But presumably the mechanics would install dehumidifier packs in everything—they were certainly present in all the kitchen’s quaintly old-fashioned blenders and choppers. And Artoo had spent considerable time in the marshes of Dagobah without becoming homicidal, a restraint of which Leia wasn’t sure she would be capable, after hearing Luke’s account of that green, snake-ridden world.

  As her old nanny had phrased it, something about it all just didn’t listen right to her.

  Whatever programmers said, thought Leia, perching herself on the stone rail of the balcony, a “mechanical flaw” might possibly account for Artoo’s running amok and trundling off the path into the trees … but by no stretch of the imagination could it cause him to perform a complicated series of specific activities like closing doors, sealing locks, crossing wires within wall panels and blasters.

  It was definitely Artoo: The serial numbers on his main block and motivator housing matched. Chewbacca—his arms and shoulders crisscrossed with strips shaven in his fur and synthflesh patched in beneath but otherwise little the worse for the events in the caverns last night—hadn’t found any kind of relay mechanism inserted into Artoo’s motivators that would have given him instructions from the outside.

  And in any case, when would such a thing have been installed? He hadn’t been out of Leia’s sight last night for more than a few moments, and for part of that time she’d heard him moving.

  “So whaddaya think?” Han wiped his fingers on an already unspeakable rag.

  Chewbacca pushed back his eyeshades and groaned noncommittally. The Wookiee had reassembled the engines of the Millennium Falcon when they’d been in worse shape than this and the thing had flown; Leia, regarding the loose piles of wire and cable still spread around the stone flagging of the terrace, had her doubts.

  Artoo rocked a little on his base and managed a faint, reassuring cheep.

  “What did you think you were …?” began Han, and Leia reached over to touch his shoulder, stopping further words. Artoo had to be feeling utterly wretched already.

  “Can you tell us about it?” she asked gently.

  Artoo rocked harder, swiveled his top, and beeped pleadingly.

  “Can he tell us about it?” demanded Han. “I can tell you about it! He tried to kill us!”

  The droid emitted a thin, despairing wail.

  “It’s all right,” said Leia. She knelt beside Artoo, touched the droid on the joint of base pivot and body, disregarding her husband’s muttered commentary. “I’m not mad at you, and I won’t let anything happen to you.” She glanced over her shoulder at Han and Chewie, a sinister-enough-looking pair, she supposed, leaned against the stone railing with their arms full of drills and grippers. “What happened?”

  All Artoo’s lights went out.

  Leia turned back to Chewie, who had pushed his welding goggles back onto his high forehead. “Are you sure you got his wiring back the way it’s supposed to be?”

  “Hey, he works, doesn’t he?” retorted Han.

  Leia stepped back while Chewbacca knelt and went to work again. Though not much of a mechanic—Luke had taught her to break and reassemble a standard X-wing engine in a pinch, and on a good day she could even identify portions of th
e Falcon’s drive system—Leia had the impression the Wookiee was redoing some of the repairs he’d done half an hour ago. But Han and Chewie, like Luke, were mechanics, and thought in terms of mechanical failure.

  She found herself wondering if there was a way of getting in touch with Cray Mingla.

  It occurred to her that she had heard nothing from Luke or any of his party in days.

  Something moved in the orchard below. A bright-yellow manollium burst out of the ferns like a startled flower and went winging away through the trees, and Leia—who had never lost the watchfulness of those years on the run between the battles of Yavin and Endor—looked automatically for what had startled it.

  She didn’t see much, but it was enough. A ghostlike impression of movement faded at once into the mist, but there was no mistaking the white gown, the night-black tail of hair. From the balcony behind her Han’s voice said, “I never asked you last night, Leia—you find anything in the city records?”

  “Yes,” said Leia briefly, swinging herself over the balcony rail and dropping lightly the meter and a half to the thick ferns below. “I’ll be back.…”

  In the mist it was impossible to see more than a few meters clearly. Tree stems, vines, beds of shrub and fern made dim, one-dimensional cutouts in the glassy grayness. Half closing her eyes, Leia reached out with her senses, as Luke had been teaching her to do, and picked up the subliminal stir of fabric among leaves, the squish of wet foliage underfoot … the trace of perfume.

  Her hand moved automatically to check for the blaster usually holstered at her side, even as she moved in pursuit. Nothing there, of course. Still she didn’t turn back. Not swiftly, but steadily, she worked to keep up with the woman whose face she’d seen under the lamplight of the path through the orchard last night.

  She remembered now where she’d seen her before.

  She’d been eighteen, newly elected the youngest member of the Imperial Senate. It was customary among the old Houses to bring their daughters to Coruscant when they emerged from finishing school at seventeen—or sixteen, if their parents were ambitious to start the long and elaborate jockeying for a good match at Court. Her aunts, she remembered, had been horrified when she’d refused, doubly appalled when her father had backed her up in her decision not to be presented to the Emperor until she could do so as a Senator in her own right, not simply as a young girl in the Court marriage market …