The sound seemed to be coming from the upper level of the apartment, from the bedrooms. Obviously, at least a few of the Human League troops had found themselves better billets than surplus Imperial Army cots.
If they ran, they’d make noise and give their friend time to raise the alarm. If they tried to get to their friend upstairs, they’d have to blunder through the darkness of the living room, get up the stairs to the upper level, and search the upstairs bedroom—and it seemed highly unlikely they’d be able to manage all that unimpeded.
Sometimes inaction was the best policy. Leia looked toward Mara and put a finger to her lips. Then she pointed to herself and to Mara, and then at the floor. Stay quiet and stay still. Wait.
Mara nodded, but held her hand out flat at shoulder level and then brought it down slowly. Duck down. Hide.
They were trapped.
Han Solo watched as the vibroblade came up through the stone floor and, with a high-pitched squeal, began slicing out a perfectly circular slab. The vibroblade withdrew, and the slab of stone lifted itself up, until it was hanging in midair a half meter over the open hole, a portable antigrav unit attached to its underside.
A Selonian hand-paw reached up out of the hole and shoved the slab to one side. It slid along on its antigrav unit and floated into the corner, where it bounced gently off the wall and came to rest.
A Selonian head popped up out of the hole and nodded cheerfully at Dracmus. “We are glad to have located the proper cell,” she said in Selonian. “It caused some awkwardness when we detected that you had been moved.”
“It is of no consequence,” Dracmus said. “But let us be on our way.” She turned toward Han and spoke, still in Selonian. “Come, honored Solo, we must go. Or would you still prefer distracting the guard by throwing buns at him?”
Han hesitated a moment. He had no idea what the sides in this fight were, let alone whose side Dracmus was on. Was he being rescued, or just becoming someone else’s hostage? But on the other hand, the idea of facing Thrackan after Dracmus had escaped was not very appealing either. “I am coming,” Han said.
“For a moment there, I thought you were about to refuse,” Dracmus said.
“I almost did,” Han said as he sat down on the edge of the hole and got ready to drop through.
Dracmus sighed. “Humans. Always determined to do things the hard way. Come on. We must begin to move.”
Han went down the hole.
CHAPTER NINE
Getting Involved
Leia crouched down in place, deeper into shadow, putting out her left hand to balance herself a bit. Now if only whoever that was would decide he had been hearing things, or that the wind had blown in through the window and made noise, all would be well. He would go back to sleep, and Leia and Mara could get on about their business.
“Magminds?” The voice was closer, more distinct this time, and sounded a bit more worried. Leia saw a sudden little bloom of light sweep over them and heard a stair creak. He was coming down stairs.
She turned to Mara—and realized that Mara was not there anymore. There was a bump, a thud, from the main room, and the shifting shadows in the kitchen told Leia that the beam of the man’s handlight was sweeping across the room. “Hold it,” the voice said. “I’ve got a blaster trained right on you and—”
The light of a blaster shot flared, briefly illuminating the kitchen like a bolt of lightning that was there and then gone. A crash, a thud, and the glow from the handlight died. Leia’s lightsaber was in her hand and on in an instant. She rushed out of the kitchen—and stopped dead in her tracks as she saw the scene lit by the bloodred glow of her lightsaber blade.
There was a heavyset man—or at least the remains of one—sitting up on the stairs in his nightshirt, a neat hole through his chest. The look on his face was one of pure astonishment.
“He dropped the handlight and broke it,” Mara said, clearly irritated with the dead man, as if he had broken the light on purpose. “We could have used that. The fool didn’t even have a blaster.”
“That’s all you’ve got to say?”
“That’s all there’s time for, if we want to live through this,” Mara said. “If it helps, I was going to try and knock him out, not shoot him, until he claimed to have a gun.”
“It doesn’t help much,” Leia said, staring at the dead man. He was their enemy. If he had managed to raise the alarm, or caught them himself, or if he had had a blaster, things would look very bad. But telling herself those things didn’t make him any less dead. And there was no time. “We have to move,” she said, coming out of it. “If there was one of them sleeping here, there might be more. And someone might have heard—or this one might have called it in before he came out for a look.”
“Right,” said Mara. “Back to the foyer and down. Unless you want to try another three floors on a homemade rope.”
“No, thank you,” Leia said. There were risks in heading down the inside of the building, but nothing like those involved in another run down the outside. “Let’s go.”
It was time to move fast. Leia led the way back to the foyer, stumbling in the darkness once or twice. She had been in the emergency stairs once before, just after the attack on Corona House, but even knowing her way, it was almost impossible to navigate in virtually complete darkness through the heaps of junk that seemed to be strewn about everywhere.
“Step back from me,” she said to Mara, “and shield your eyes for a second. I’m going to switch on my lightsaber.”
Leia shut her own eyes as she unclipped the lightsaber from her belt and activated it. The weapon came alive with the familiar low thrum of power. Even through her closed eyelids, the light from the blade seemed remarkably bright after the gloom and darkness. She gave her eyes a moment to adjust, and then opened them cautiously, being careful not to look at the lightblade itself. She held the blade vertically and looked around the foyer, now lit by the ruby-red glow of the lightsaber.
“First time I’ve ever seen one of those used for a handlamp,” Mara said.
“You work with what you’ve got,” Leia said. “There’s the door to the stairs. Let’s go.”
They picked their way through the broken furniture and heaps of discarded loot and made their way to the stairs. The door to the stairs was slightly ajar, and Leia prodded it with her toe. It swung open a bit but stopped before the opening was wide enough to go through. Leia shoved a little harder with her foot, then with her hip, forcing the opening wider.
Lightsaber at guard, she stepped onto the landing and forced herself to repress the impulse to jump back when she saw what had blocked the doorway.
It was a body, the dead body of a young man, wearing the uniform of the Governor-General’s tech staff. The corpse was lying on its back, and had a neat hole between its open eyes. The shifting red shadows cast by the lightblade made the dead man seem a strange and alien thing. Leia recognized him, though she did not know his name. He had been the one who told her about the interdiction field, just after Han had vanished. How long ago was that? Just a few days? Half a lifetime? He had seemed a nice young man. Now here he was, shot dead and left to rot in a stairwell for some trivial and unknown offense. The Human League made itself awfully easy to hate.
She gestured for Mara to follow her and stepped over the body, down the stairs. Mara came after. Leia made her way down the darkened stairs in a moving pool of dim red light cast by the lightsaber. The emergency staircase was a cold, harsh place, its plain unfinished stresscrete walls looming up hard and gray, every flaw in their surfaces wildly exaggerated by the elongated shadows. Even here, the looting troopers had discarded whatever they could not use. A broken desk lamp, a flurry of papers scattered about, a vase, a hat, a comlink rendered useless by the jamming the Human League had imposed.
She could imagine the League troopers tromping down these stairs a day or so ago, arms full of whatever they had grabbed, not much caring if a woman’s shoe fell out of the heap, deciding that the heavy iron Frozian statue wasn’
t worth carrying. Somehow the crime of theft, the act of looting, was made worse when it was this wasteful, this pointless, this mindless.
“Psst.”
Leia turned and saw Mara holding a finger to her lips, signaling for silence. She pointed to her ear. Listen.
Leia could hear a distant, low booming, and the wind moaning through the building. Rain, she mouthed, and pantomimed rain falling.
Mara shook her head, pointed at the lightsaber, and put a finger to her lips again.
Leia shut off the lightsaber for a moment to silence its hum. They stood in the darkness and listened. The sounds of the rain came through far more clearly with the lightsaber off, but clearly that was not the sound Mara was worried about.
Then Leia heard it, very faint, coming from up above. Voices, rough male voices, speaking in harsh, urgent tones, and the clatter and shuffle of men hurrying about in the background. It was impossible to make out the words, but equally impossible to mistake the cadences of the voice. It was clearly one man giving orders to others.
Their escape had been discovered. Maybe someone had spotted the rope. Maybe the dead trooper in Leia’s apartment had managed to call in before his death. How didn’t matter. Leia switched the lightsaber back on, and the two of them hurried faster down the stairs, past the fourteenth, past the thirteenth floor.
When they reached the twelfth, Mara’s floor back before the world turned upside down, Leia grabbed the door handle and pulled hard. It didn’t budge. She pulled again. Nothing. Had it been welded shut by the League? Had the explosions jammed the doors shut? No way to tell, and no time to examine the door for clues. Not when the League troops were going to start searching for them any second now.
Leia swung the lightsaber down hard, in a carefully-aimed vertical cut down the latch side of the door. She gave the door a good solid kick and it bounced back against the doorframe and swung out toward them. Leia and Mara stepped through it, and Mara pulled the door shut behind them. The lightsaber cuts on the door would provide a clue that even a Human Leaguer could read, but maybe, just maybe, no one would think to look.
Leia turned to Mara. “All right,” she said in a loud whisper, “twelfth floor. Where to now?”
Mara shook her head. “It’s a little hard to say.” Leia looked around, and saw Mara’s point. They were in the twelfth-floor foyer, and if the equivalent space on the fifteenth had been a mess, this foyer was barely there anymore. There had been a major explosion here that had cracked open the floor and left boulder-sized chunks of stresscrete wall and floor lying everywhere.
The handsome wood paneling had been splintered into ruin and half the doors leading to the private rooms were blown clear open. One wall of the foyer had been completely flattened, doors and all, so that the rooms beyond the wall were exposed to view. Most of the remaining doors had been wrenched partly or completely off their hinges. Virtually every window was shattered, and the wind was blowing in everywhere. Leia could hear the splattering rush of rain pouring down. The smell of cold rain seemed to grab at her, speak to her of wet, miserable nights and the trouble yet to come. But there was another, and a worse, smell: the sickly-sweet odor of rotting flesh. People had died here when that rocket hit, died and been smashed as flat as the walls. The dead were buried here, somewhere in the dark, under the debris that had killed them.
But if the ghastly scene was affecting Mara, she did not show it. “My room is this way,” she said.
“If it’s still anywhere at all,” Leia said, following close behind. Mara led her almost to the end of the hallway, far enough away from the blast that the doors were still on their hinges, and one or two were still closed and latched.
Not so the door Mara stopped in front of. It was bent backward at a crazy angle, held in place by just the upper hinge, blocking the entrance rather effectively.
“Allow me,” Leia said, and slashed the lightsaber down on the offending hinge. The door dropped to the floor with a resounding crash, and the women walked over it to the interior of Mara’s quarters.
It was a smaller apartment than Leia’s, but then, Leia was the Chief of State and Mara was just a Master Trader. The apartment was really no more than a bedroom, a refresher, and an autokitchen set into one wall, but the furnishings were opulent and handsome. At least they had been.
Here the wreckage was caused not by looting, but by the violence of the rocket attack. A big chunk of the stresscrete ceiling had fallen in onto the bed, crushing the frame. Leia looked up and saw the hole it had left. The rest of the room was in no better shape. The paintings and other decorations had come off the wall, the chairs and table were overturned, and broken glass was everywhere. She looked toward the window and saw that the rain was coming down in earnest now, a real storm. The rain flared and pulsed in a dull throb of light as a bolt of lightning flashed somewhere nearby. The rumble of thunder rolled in the window as the sodden drapery flapped in the wind.
Mara wasted no time looking around, but went immediately to the closet and wrenched the door open. The contents spilled out onto the floor, and she knelt down and dug through them until she found a small satchel with a long strap. She stood up, put the strap over her shoulder, and opened the satchel, digging through it until she came up with a handlight. She switched it on, and instantly the weird shadows cast by the lightsaber vanished. After the bloodred glow of the saber, it was an amazing relief to see by the warm yellow light of the handlamp. Suddenly even the room full of wreckage seemed like a normal, understandable place, instead of a den of looming shadows.
Leia shut off the lightsaber, but did not clip it to her belt. The League troopers could still show up any moment. “So where’s the slave controller?” Leia asked.
Mara set a side table upright, put the handlamp on it and pointed it at the bed. “Under there. The good news is it’s obvious no one else could have gotten to it. The bad news is that I’m not sure it’ll much matter if we can.”
“You think it might have been crushed?” The largest hunk of stresscrete was about half a meter long and twice as wide, and about eight centimeters thick.
“One way to find out,” Mara said. “Give me a hand clearing the bed off.”
“Stand back and let me get the problem down to size first,” Leia said. She swung the lightsaber down and it slashed through the hunk of stresscrete again and again, chopping it up into smaller pieces. Leia was careful to keep the lightsaber under tight control so as not to slice into the bed beneath it. Needing both hands free, she shut off the lightsaber and clipped it to her belt. “Here,” she said, “grab the other end. And stay away from the cut edges—they’re going to be plenty hot.”
The two women heaved the chunks of stresscrete off the bed, working together on the biggest ones. “That ought to be good enough,” Mara said. “Help me flip the bed over.”
They stood next to each other, got their hands under the broken frame, and heaved up on it. The broken bed came up, and a minor avalanche of debris clattered down onto the floor. The bed wobbled back and forth a bit, but stayed balanced on its side. “Well, we’ve made enough noise to bring in every Leaguer in the building,” Mara said, “but I don’t know how we could have done this quietly.”
“Let’s just hope the rainstorm shields the noise,” said Leia.
“Except that rain isn’t doing us any favors. There’s no way we can get line of sight on the Jade’s Fire through that. We’ll just have to wait until it clears up.”
“No chance of using the comlink frequencies and getting through the jamming?” Leia asked.
Mara shrugged. “No harm in trying, but I can’t see how it could possibly work. Assuming the controller hasn’t been smashed flat. Bring that handlight around here and let’s see what we’ve got.”
Leia retrieved the light and held it for Mara. There it was, a neat, flat little metal package taped to the center of the bed frame’s underside. No one could ever have found it without upending the bed. Even then, they might have missed it. Either by chance o
r design, it was exactly the same dark brown color as the underside of the frame.
Mara peeled the package off the frame and turned it up on its end. The package was a bit crumpled in one corner, but it looked to be more or less in one piece. Mara opened it up and pulled out a small, jet-black device, liberally festooned with buttons and switches. She pushed in the power button and all the other buttons lit up. “That’s something, anyway,” she said. “At least it thinks it’s working.”
Leia was about to make some sort of encouraging reply when they heard a bang and a thud, and muffled voices. Leia immediately shut off the handlight, and both women ducked behind the upturned bed.
They knelt there, staring at each other in the dim light cast by the slave controller, listening. They heard the clatter and rattle of bits of debris falling down, and the sound of heavy boots tromping on the rubble. The voices and footsteps came nearer, became more distinct. Leia undipped her lightsaber once again, her thumb on the power button. Mara shut off the slave controller to extinguish the lights on its control panel, shoved it in the satchel that still hung over her shoulder, pulled Han’s blaster out, and held it at the ready. Then she slipped her hand into the satchel again, and pulled out a smaller blaster from there.
Suddenly one set of footsteps sounded so loud Leia thought the walker was going to step on her. A handlight beam flared into the darkened room and swooped around, casting huge, distorted shadows everywhere. “You check the next one over,” the trooper shouted out into the hall. “I got this one.”
They could hear the mangled door creaking a bit as the trooper stepped on it, the crunch of his boots on the broken glass, his breathing as he stepped fully into the room, the sounds mixing with the steady low roar of the storm outside. Leia could hardly believe the trooper could not hear her heart pounding against her ribs.
He stepped around the bed and looked into the corners of the room, his back to Leia and Mara.
Star Wars: The Corellian Trilogy II: Assault at Selonia Page 15
