Large stretches of the city were blacked out. Even in the places where there were lights, there were not enough of them. The city in the cold, clear night seemed lonely, half-empty, half-abandoned. And maybe it was. Surely any nonhuman with a modicum of sense would have gotten out of town or gone into hiding by now.
But looking at the city was not what she was out here for. She made sure the rope was running through the crude climbing harness properly, took another deep breath, tested the strength of her climbing rope one more time, and put her weight on it as she eased her way over the window ledge. She started down the side of the building, hoping against hope that she and Mara had worked out the distances properly and the improvised rope was going to reach to the fifteenth floor.
The going was a lot easier than she had expected, at least at first. The rope was taking her weight without any trouble, and the knots holding the lengths of torn bedding together were likewise behaving, sliding around her body, and through the climbing harness without undo fuss. So far, so good. Leia moved slowly, carefully, down the wall. She paused when her feet were just about at the top of the seventeenth-floor window. Pushing off against the wall, she walked herself over to one side of it, both trying to get herself out of view of the window, and trying to avoid walking on the glass. Probably the glass was strong enough to support her weight, but on the other hand someone had been shooting at this building not so long along, and the window might well have taken some damage.
She managed to get over to one side of the window, though with considerable difficulty. Gravity wanted her to hang straight down from the tie-off point of the rope, and it was hard to get enough purchase to hold herself off to one side as she eased down the sheer side of the building.
A gust of wind blew in from the opposite direction of the steady breeze. It lasted only a few seconds, but it seemed to blow right through her clothing, chilling her to the bone and, worse, blowing her hair back into her face, blinding her. Making very sure she had a good solid grip on the rope with her left hand, and even surer that the rope wasn’t going anywhere, she let go of it with her right hand long enough to push her hair away and force it back behind her ears as best she could. She realized as she let go of the rope how stiff and cold her hands were already.
Leia looked down at the window ledge coming up below her. Almost there. Almost there. She glanced at the window itself, and saw to her relief that the shades were drawn. But she knew she still had to be careful. Noises outside windows tended to be very noticeable seventeen stories up.
She reached the window ledge and was very much relieved to put her feet down on something solid, if only for a moment. But even standing here, she was by no means safe. She could slip and fall. The wind could blow her off. She still had the climbing harness on, and she needed to keep some tension on the rope, with the result that part of her weight was still on it. If it broke, over she would go. Nevertheless, being on the ledge was an improvement on dangling on the end of the rope.
She rubbed her hands together and blew on them, trying to get at least some circulation back. There was no excuse for further delay. She flexed her fingers, took hold of the knotted sheets she was trusting her life to, and stepped backwards off the edge of the window ledge.
Almost immediately, she realized something was wrong. The rope was showing more and more stretch, sagging down a bit more under her weight with every step she took. That was not good. Not good at all. If it stretched enough, if one crucial bit of thread snapped under the strain and unraveled, and that opened a wider tear, then—
Leia looked down, straight down, and instantly wished that she hadn’t. If the rope broke, she would fall, and that was all there was to it. “Come on,” she whispered to the rope. “You don’t have to kill me. Lots of other things can go wrong and do that for you.”
For example, walking down the wall of the sixteenth floor might do the trick. If her suspicions were correct, this was where the Human League guards had their barracks. She looked down and saw the top of the sixteenth-floor window—with her climbing rope dangling right in front of it. She swore under her breath and wondered how she could have been so negligent.
Never mind. Never mind. She walked herself sideways, away from the window, and asked the wind to blow the right way and keep the rope from being visible from the window. Of course, the rope would then be visible from the next window over, but never mind. Leia moved down the wall, struggling to keep well away from the window. She looked at the window, and was alarmed to see the shades were open. Worse, she could count at least four Human League troopers in the room, asleep on their Imperial-Army-Standard-Issue-Surplus cots.
Leia took a deep breath and moved on. Quiet. Careful, slow movements. There. Below her. The next window ledge. Set down on it, but just for a moment. Resist the strong temptation to do more than catch your breath and flex your fingers one more time. Move.
Leia went over the next ledge, down to the fifteenth floor, the VIP level, a double-high floor built to give the residents therein very high, grand ceilings. This was the level her apartments had been on. Leia didn’t expect to be lucky enough to come in on top of her own window, and she wasn’t. But one piece of luck she was hoping for was to find a smashed-out window at least nearby. The fifteenth floor had taken a lot of damage in the attack, and unless the Leaguers had been spending all their waking hours replacing broken windows, she ought to be able to find a way in.
She paused after she got over the last ledge and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw that virtually all the windows were blown out, curtains billowing out into the wind. That was the good news. It would be easy to get in. The bad news was that she had forgotten that the double-high ceilings meant it was twice as far down to the window ledge. They had made their rope as long as they possibly could, but she had no idea if it would reach down a whole extra story. It was impossible to make any sort of useful eyeball estimate of how much rope she had. It was dark, it was hard to judge a straight vertical drop, and the rope was blowing in the wind.
Suddenly Leia’s foot slipped, and she was swinging through the air, bouncing off the side of the building as the rope slid and twisted. She dropped a half meter or so as the rope cleared some snag or another on one of the two ledges above.
Leia scrambled as best she could and finally managed to steady herself against the building, resisting the temptation to stop and catch her breath. That might do nothing more than give her a chance to get the shakes, and that she could not afford.
But she had received a very clear reminder that the rope had two ledges to rub against, tear against. She had best get off it as soon as possible. There, directly below her, was some sort of smashed-open window. It would have to do. She rappelled down the wall until the wall wasn’t there anymore, and she was face-to-face with the missing window. She slid down the rope, praying that chance would not pick this moment to send another gust to send her swinging back and forth.
The drapes of the blown-out window billowed below her, and there was very little she could do to avoid getting tangled up in them. She kicked them out of the way as best she could, but they simply blew back into her. She kicked them back again, and then again—and then she was past them, just in time to be blinded again as the wind knocked her hair back into her face.
And then her foot hit the ledge, hard enough that she turned her ankle. Never had Leia so welcomed a jolt of pain. She was down. She set both feet firmly on the ledge—and discovered that the rope ended just a meter below the surface of the ledge. That was cutting things awfully close. The drapes slapped her in the face again, but she ignored them, and just stood there for a moment, eyes closed, trying to settle herself down.
But there was no time for more than that. She shoved the drapes out of the way and stepped through the broken window onto the windowsill. She slid the rope out from her climbing harness and pulled on it three times, paused, pulled three times more, paused again, and pulled three times more. The signal told Mara she had arrived safely.
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The rope immediately twitched and jerked as Mara signaled back.
Being careful of the broken glass that was scattered everywhere, Leia stepped down off the low windowsill and into the darkened room. She would have to go back out in a moment to help Mara in, but she could take just a minute to collect herself.
It was all going well so far, and, in a sense, that was the frightening part. She was chilled to the bone, her hands were aching and raw, she had twisted her ankle and nearly fallen at least twice—and everything was going well.
If only she had developed her Jedi skills the way Luke had. If she had, she probably could have simply walked down the side of the building, carrying Mara in one hand and swinging her lightsaber in the other—a gross exaggeration, of course, but never mind. As things were, she knew that her skills were too undeveloped and unreliable to put much faith in them at a time like this.
Once her eyes had adapted to the gloomy room, she spotted a knocked-over chair. She set it upright, brushed the broken glass off it, and sat down. So far so good. There were dozens of things that could still go wrong, but they had made a start … assuming that Mara wasn’t involving her in some incredibly elaborate setup, and the guards weren’t about to bust in the door so she could be “shot trying to escape,” or whatever.
That was a happy thought, and one that inspired her to get up and check on Mara’s progress. Going to the window, she climbed back up on the sill. The rope was flailing around most vigorously in the wind. Leia’s first impulse was to grab at it and try to steady it, but it was hard to know if that would make matters better or worse. She decided to leave well enough alone. One thing she could do was to pull the heavy curtains into the room and shove them out of the way. She got that done and went back out on the window ledge and looked up, watching for Mara.
The rope was bouncing and gyrating more and more vigorously as Mara came closer. In a surprisingly short time Mara herself appeared, coming over the last of the ledges, moving well. Down she came. She paused just over the top of the smashed window and looked down. “Leia,” she shouted above the rising wind. “I’ve got to get down fast. Spot me coming down.”
Had something gone wrong? Leia positioned herself as best she could on the narrow ledge and watched Mara come in. The rope was clearly stretching more and more. Leia would not want to trust it again.
Down Mara came, her expression grim and intense, her hair flying wildly about in the wind. Leia reached up and steadied the rope as Mara slid the last two meters or so of the climb down. She guided Mara through the broken window and hurried in after her.
“The rope,” Mara said, massaging her hands and stamping her feet. “It was getting more and more stretched out. The wind caught it and it banged against the sixteenth-floor window where the guards were sleeping. It’d take a bloody miracle for them all to have slept through it.”
“Maybe I can keep them from spotting where the noise came from,” Leia said. “I’ll be right back.” She stepped onto the windowsill and grabbed at the rope. She could not help but notice it had stretched itself out by at least another half meter. Well, that might be all to the good at this point. She pulled the rope along to the next smashed-out window. Still holding the rope, she stepped inside and examined the situation. The window frame was still in one piece, even if the glass was gone. Good. She pulled the frame open, snaked the rope through it, and pulled it as taut as she could. She slammed the empty frame shut on the rope and then went back out the way she had come.
She paused on the ledge, just before she rejoined Mara. Was it her imagination, or was there a different feel to the air, in just the few minutes that had passed since she had been inside? Coronet was a seaside town, and the weather had a way of coming up suddenly. At least it had waited until they were in off the rope. But would the comlaser mode of Mara’s slave controller work with a rainstorm sweeping through the area? No way to know.
Mara was in the same chair Leia had been in. “That climb takes it out of you,” she said.
“That’s for sure,” Leia agreed. “I pulled the rope along to the next window and snubbed it off. With a little luck, the angle will keep them from seeing it from the window. I think I pulled it tight enough that it won’t bang against any more windows, either. But they might have spotted it already. And I think we might have some weather on the way. We’d better keep moving.”
“Weather? That’s not good,” Mara said, getting up. “We have to hurry. So where to?”
They were on the fifteenth floor, past the main barracks of the Human League, and on the same floor where Leia’s quarters had been.
“Follow me.” Leia started searching for the way out of the suite of rooms that led into the central foyer for the floor. She fumbled through the near-total darkness and was forced to backtrack twice before she got her bearings. The going was not easy. There seemed to be a great deal of debris strewn about, and most of it might as well have been invisible. Leia longed for some sort of handlight or glowlamp, but the Human League guards had not been so considerate as to provide such amenito their prisoners. She considered trying to get the lights on, but that would be sure to attract unwanted attention.
At last she found the way out of the apartment, into the central foyer. She had been worried about locked doors or other obstacles. If the way into her apartment were sealed, they would be forced to backtrack and walk around the exterior of the building, on the window ledges—and that did not strike Leia as an attractive option. But the moment they were in the central foyer, she breathed a sigh of relief. The Human League troopers had done a fairly efficient job of looting on this floor, that much was clear. Even in the darkness of the foyer, she could see all sorts of odds and ends flung about—and the doors to all the apartments left wide-open, the faint, ghostly radiance of starlight glowing through them. She moved toward her own door, Mara right behind her.
Leia stopped just short of the door, and Mara nearly walked up her back.
“What’s wrong?” Mara asked. “What is it?”
Leia knelt down and picked up the small object she had spotted. How she had seen it in the virtual darkness, she could not say. It was a little model hover car, one of Anakin’s toys. Suddenly it all hit her hard. Her child’s toy. Had he dropped it there himself in the midst of the frantic escape during the attack? Or had the Human League’s thugs seen fit to root through the children’s toy chest in their search for loot? What had happened to her children? Where were they? Were they safe? Could Chewbacca protect them?
Stop. Stop. She had a job to do. For them, as much as anyone. She had to get free, and set about organizing some sort of resistance to the monsters who had scattered her family. Nor did it escape her that it was a member of her family who was responsible for all this. Thrackan Sal-Solo would pay.
Leia wrapped her hand around Anakin’s toy, around the bit of plastic and metal that was suddenly all she had of her son. She slipped it into her pocket and then moved on without explaining to Mara what had made her stop. How could she expect Mara to understand?
She stepped into the apartment that had been her home not so long ago. The furniture had been thrown about, and the windows smashed to bits. She smelled the damp, cold smell of a long-dead fire mixed with rain, but forced herself not to think of home and family. In all probability the League thugs were already searching for them. There was no time.
She went straight to the kitchen and knelt down by the main cooking unit. There was a storage cabinet under its heating compartment. She opened it up and pulled the pots and pans out as quietly as she could, though every unavoidable clatter and rattle seemed deafeningly loud. She reached into the rear of the compartment and found what she was looking for. Two cloth-wrapped packages. She pulled them out.
One package was covered with the finest black velvet and tied with a silver ribbon. That one she opened first. Her lightsaber, a gift from her brother Luke. He had given it to her just before she had set off on this trip. She rolled the velvet up and shoved it in a p
ocket, suddenly unwilling to leave anything more behind. She clipped the lightsaber to her belt. The other object was wrapped in much plainer cloth, a scrap from one of Han’s old shirts.
She hesitated before opening it. But there was no point in not going the whole way at this point. If Mara had wanted to kill her, all she would have needed to do was cut the rope when Leia was dangling out over nothing at all. She unwrapped the scrap of cloth. Han’s spare blaster was inside.
“Take it,” Leia whispered.
Mara looked at Leia, her expression unreadable in the dim light from the shattered windows, she made no move to take the weapon. “Are you sure you want me at your back with this thing?” she whispered back.
“No more than you want me at your back with my lightsaber. But we can get back to not trusting each other later. Right now isn’t the time. Take it.”
Mara took the weapon—but Leia hung on to the scrap of cloth and stuffed it in the same pocket with the velvet and Anakin’s toy. Her husband was gone, too. That little bit of torn shirt might be the last she would have of him. But there was no time.
“All right,” Mara whispered. “Anything else from here?”
Leia thought for a moment. They needed light, and there should be some sort of portable lamp somewhere in the apartment. But how could she find it in the dark—and suppose the League thugs had grabbed all the lamps when they had looted the place? No. No time to waste searching for what might not be there anymore. “No,” she whispered. “Nothing I’d be sure of finding. We have to move.”
“Anybody there?” Mara and Leia froze. It was a man’s voice, a bit sleepy, and coming from inside the apartment. Suddenly Leia’s heart was pounding in her chest.
“Magminds, is that you? Magminds?”
Star Wars: The Corellian Trilogy II: Assault at Selonia Page 14
