Queen's Peril

by E. K. Johnston

  Saché walked even though she was exhausted and wanted nothing more than to sleep. There was no promise of rest at their destination, but there was no way she was staying in the camp any longer than she absolutely had to. She didn’t want to get hemmed in by droids ever again.

  They exited the sewer through a grate that went into one of Naboo’s many lakes. Several landspeeders waited there, and Panaka ferried them back to the place where the Queen’s party had established themselves. Panaka told them about the plan to talk to the Gungans, and how they had to wait for their emissary to return. And then Saché saw bright gold stripes that lined the handmaiden’s outfits in the dark and knew that she was truly safe. The Queen maintained some distance, of course, but Padmé was close enough to get a good look at them.

  Saché could tell she had a hundred questions and probably even more apologies, but now was not the time for any of that. Instead, when Padmé held out her arms, Saché hesitated for a moment—too aware of her own smell—and then wrapped her arms around her.

  “I’m so glad,” Padmé said. “I’m so glad.”

  Eirtaé and Rabé hugged them as well. Saché wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. It was possible that she was finally going into shock. She and Yané splashed their faces in the creek and tucked away their hair. When they were as clean as they could manage, they changed into the maroon and gold battle uniform the others wore. Sabé took their hands, which was as much as she could do while she wore the Queen’s face. They were together again, and Padmé Amidala had a plan.

  The Trade Federation didn’t stand a chance.

  The moment Padmé stepped in front of her, Sabé knew that she had failed. Sabé was always supposed to stand between the Queen and danger, and not only had she faltered in her task, she had stood there and gaped as Padmé walked forward. It was her moment, and she had let it slip right through her fingers.

  They had practiced as much as they could. She’d observed Jar Jar, and she and Padmé had hammered out exactly what to say. She’d never been more nervous in her life than when she stepped forward to address Boss Nass, and she had delivered what she knew was a perfect performance of everything she had prepared.

  And it hadn’t been enough. Padmé had stepped in and changed the script. It was brilliant of her, of course, to change so quickly once she realized what Boss Nass wanted to hear, but it had also exposed her in front of everyone, and that was something Sabé was supposed to avoid at all costs.

  She never wanted to get up from her knees, but of course she had to. When Padmé rose, smiling with Boss Nass’s approval, Sabé followed suit. At least now she might be able to get out of the Queen’s makeup and dress.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Padmé said. She came over to where Sabé was sitting on a log, which wasn’t queenly at all. At least as herself, she could slouch. “You did exactly what we planned.”

  “And it wasn’t enough,” Sabé said. “I could have been better. If I were more like you, I would have seen that it wasn’t working and reached the same conclusion you did. I could have talked to him the same way.”

  “But it wouldn’t have been the truth,” Padmé said. “And in that moment, we needed the truth.”

  “You know, most of the time I’m okay with being second best,” Sabé said. She looked at Padmé and saw her friend’s face, not the Queen’s disappointed understanding. “You get invited to all the fancy parties and you rarely have to speak in public. There’s never any pressure on you. That’s what it’s like being Amidala. I just try to be you, and that’s all anyone will remember. But sometimes I know I could have done better, and by the time I’ve figured out how, it’s too late. I hate that. I feel like I failed you.”

  “And I feel like I failed you,” Padmé said. “We only prepped one speech. I should have been more flexible when we were getting ready.”

  Sabé straightened.

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” she admitted.

  “It’s in our natures to blame ourselves, I think,” Padmé said. “That’s definitely one way we are the same.”

  “Do you want to change?” Sabé asked. “We’ll have to do it fast.”

  “There isn’t time,” Padmé said. “Captain Panaka wants to get moving right away. And even if we had time, I need you to be the Queen for a bit longer. We have to take the throne room, and if there’s any way you can be a distraction again, we should use it.”

  Sabé nodded, a bit disappointed. The decoy maneuver was exciting, but after holding the character for so long, she longed to be herself again. It was ridiculous to put her personal wishes first in such serious circumstances, but she couldn’t entirely help it.

  “Sabé,” Padmé said seriously. “You might die.”

  “I know,” Sabé said. “That’s always been part of the job.”

  “But it’s for real this time,” Padmé said. “Before, if we died we were all going together, blown up on the royal starship or something. But you’ll be alone. You’ll be exposed. And you’ll be Amidala.”

  “I know,” Sabé said.

  “I want to be noble and tell you I won’t order you to do it,” Padmé said. “But that would be cowardly, too, and you deserve better than letting me make a martyr of you.”

  “I appreciate that,” Sabé said. It was strange to talk about this out loud after turning it over in her head so many times, but it was remarkably freeing to hear Padmé say it out loud. “My hands are yours.”

  And they always had been.

  Gregar Typho had not been in Theed when the invasion came. His leave had begun as soon as the summit was concluded, so he’d gone home. His uncle and aunt Panaka were supposed to follow him a few days later, assuming his uncle could be talked into leaving the Queen, but of course that hadn’t happened.

  Instead, Typho had spent the Occupation in camp three, which was mostly populated by civilians who had been incarcerated in the campus dormitories of Gallo Mountain University. Sanitation and fresh water hadn’t been an issue, but food ran short almost immediately, and Typho divided his time between protecting his family and making sure that the children in the camp had as much food as he could manage to scrounge for them.

  The Trade Federation hadn’t bothered to scan the dorms before installing their prisoners, assuming that everyone who attended higher education on Naboo was an artist or a philosopher. Typho was able to find a working transmitter almost immediately, and assigned shifts to people he could trust to monitor communication channels in case someone broke through. As his fellow prisoners weakened under the food shortage, he took on a few shifts himself, and it was he who was on duty in the early hours when the call finally came through. The Queen was back, and resistance was finally possible.

  Gregar Typho rubbed the grit from his eyes and got ready to fight.

  Sabé hovered in the back of the briefing while Panaka outlined their plan for what she’d already started to think of as the Battle of Naboo. There would be three fronts. The Gungan army would meet the bulk of the droids on open ground outside the city. It was the force that had been trying to exterminate them, so the Gungans were itching for a fight. The second front would be in space. Panaka and the Jedi would get the pilots to the hangar, and get as many of them as possible into the air, before moving on to take the throne room. The third front would be in the city itself. Once the fighting began, a splinter force led by Mariek Panaka would rally whatever Naboo citizens they could find and try to spread word of what was happening in the city via the short-range comms.

  It was almost a relief that everyone present knew she was a fraud. If she’d still been playing Amidala, she would have been at the front, trying to coordinate Padmé’s facial expressions into a proper response. It was much easier this way, to observe and worry about protecting the Queen later. Panaka dismissed them to make last-minute preparations, and Sabé wandered a few steps away from the main group to gather her thoughts.

  “What’s your name?” someone asked. She turned. It was Anakin Skywalker, loo
king at her quite directly. Neither of the Jedi had asked.

  “Sabé,” she told him. There was no reason to keep it a secret. He would leave and she would probably never hear of him again.

  “It’s good to meet you, Sabé,” he said. “Thank you for keeping her safe.”

  Qui-Gon called out for him, and he wandered off. Sabé was oddly touched.

  The handmaidens gathered together while Padmé discussed the final few details with Panaka and the Jedi. They’d all been given blasters for the coming battle. They had been trained in both close and ranged combat, but none of them felt particularly prepared.

  They’d all seen the marks on Saché’s skin, but she hadn’t volunteered anything about them, and they were reluctant to ask. Instead, Rabé had told them about everything that had transpired on Coruscant. They tried to fill the time, but there was nothing any of them wanted to say. All they could do was wait for their marching orders.

  At last, the final battalion of Gungans departed for the grassy plain where they would make their stand. The rest of them got into speeders and headed for the capital.

  Whatever happened, they were going to reach the throne room.

  The battle plan fell apart almost immediately. No sooner had the pilots made their escape than a dark figure with a red blade had appeared in the hangar, blocking the main access to the palace. Padmé declared they would take the long way and left the Jedi to their fight. Sabé didn’t want to be anywhere near the person who was attacking them, but she was also worried about leaving them behind. Without the Jedi, the plan to take the throne room became more complicated.

  The two teams split up, with Sabé heading through the palace gardens and Padmé taking the corridors. Sabé tried not to think about how the others were doing. She knew the Jedi could probably handle themselves, but the Gungans faced truly overwhelming odds and were entirely reliant on the Naboo pilots knocking out the control ship as soon as possible. She focused on the droids in front of her, the feel of her blaster in her hands, and moved up through the palace as quickly as possible.

  “Sabé!”

  Someone called her name, and Sabé turned to see Rabé’s group down a corridor that should have been off their route. The group was too small: Padmé wasn’t with them. Sabé got the attention of her party and brought the two groups together.

  “Report!” she said, deciding that was what the absent Panaka would do.

  “They’re okay,” Rabé said. “We got pinned in a hallway, and they took ascension cables as a shortcut.”

  A weight lifted off Sabé’s chest.

  “There are a lot of droids in the palace, even with the Gungan maneuver,” a guard informed them. “We are still trying to get to the throne room in case they need us.”

  “In case she needs me,” Sabé said. “Our route has been busy, but not too bad. Come with us.”

  Sabé would do whatever it took. This time, there would be no room for mistakes. If she was called to be the Queen, she would have to act immediately. She had never been more scared of anything in her entire life.

  Anakin Skywalker liked flying.

  Mariek and Tonra pelted up the stairs to the towers that surrounded the market square. They knew from Yané’s weaving which tower had droids on the lowest charge at this time of day, and that was their target. It was an ugly fight, as blaster bolt exchanges at close quarters always were, but the two of them managed to get the drop on the droids. From there, they took control of the tower’s gun and blasted the other lookout points to smithereens.

  It wasn’t a prearranged signal, but the guards still in the camp knew to expect something eventually, and the destruction of Trade Federation property was a pretty obvious call to action. At considerable risk, they charged the battle droids, hoping to strike them from an angle where their bodies were the weakest and immediately salvage the blasters. Most of them were successful, though none of them escaped without at least minor injury.

  Usan Ollin stood in the doorway of her office, shrieking orders at droids who were too busy to pay attention to her. Mariek saw the opening, and it was too tempting to pass up. Leaving Tonra in charge of the gun, she ran down the stairs to the main camp and crossed the ruined market square one last time. She could have stopped for a blaster, but she didn’t. Instead, she tackled the droid closest to Ollin and, when the clanker went down, punched the overseer right in the face.

  Anakin Skywalker really liked flying.

  When Captain Panaka implemented the handmaidens as Queen Amidala’s personal guard, he introduced a high number of moving pieces to a very high-stakes field of play. He had his methodologies, the Queen had hers, and the handmaidens each brought something different to the table. It could have gone very badly, but the girls worked hard and adapted to each scenario they encountered. It wasn’t a perfect system, not yet, but they had all quickly settled into their roles.

  He’d selected Tsabin because she was used to being second best. She was used to people looking right through her while she played her part. She was used to being out of the spotlight and out of everyone’s mind. Tsabin had tried to convince the Gungans to join their fight, and Tsabin had failed. Sabé was determined that it would be the last time.

  When she got to the throne room, she surveyed the scene quickly. Her heart sank. There were too many droids. Nute Gunray had Padmé, and he thought she was Amidala. They were outgunned and overwhelmed, but had reached their primary objective. They were in the throne room. All Padmé needed was a moment. A distraction.

  A decoy.

  Sabé moved before she was finished thinking it through. She left the relative safety of the guards who surrounded her and ran toward the throne room. They followed her, as she knew they would. She stood in full view of the Neimoidians and their droids.

  “Viceroy!” she called out in the Queen’s voice. “Your occupation here has ended.”

  And then she ran.

  She went back through the line of guards, steps pounding on the marble floor of the hallway as the droids came after her. She was moving so fast the headpiece she wore slid loose of its pins and canted backward on her head. She heard the hiss-slam of the blast doors sealing the throne room shut and knew that her desperate ploy had worked. The droids were on her side of the blast doors, and Padmé was on the other, the royal pistol in her hands. All Sabé had to do now was stay alive.

  The droids had followed her without doing a tactical analysis of what she was running toward, and slammed straight into the wall of guards. By the time Sabé was able to turn around, most of the droids were down. She took out one of them, and then the blaster fire was silenced. In the quiet, she could hear her heart pounding. She had no idea what was really happening in the throne room. She just had to trust that everything had gone as she hoped.

  Padmé Amidala stood victorious in her throne room with the viceroy at her mercy and the planet back under her control. She lowered her blaster and looked around the room. There was carbon scoring on the floors and scrape marks from where metal had been dragged over marble. A few of the art installations had been destroyed, and more than one window was broken. The rest of Theed was probably the same way, but there would be time for that after she discussed the new treaty.

  The buildings were damaged, but they were fixable. The people were hungry, but they could be fed. And once again, Naboo was theirs.

  The first thing they had to do was bury the dead.

  The Gungans took their fallen warriors to their sacred place. Amidala was invited to go and witness the funeral, but there was no time. She sent Eirtaé and Yané, who both gave a full report of the moving ceremony when they returned.

  The Naboo dead were sent to their family burial plots or interred in the city cemetery. Everyone who perished in the battle would have the Queen’s crest carved into their headstone, and Padmé decided that one year later, she would do a tour of the planet to see the finished stones and hold memorials.

  The droids were salvaged and melted down. They were made of hig
h-quality materials. They would be remade into fence posts and garden trellises and art.

  Qui-Gon Jinn was laid out on a pyre by the waterfall on the cliff at the end of the river. They waited to burn him until the Jedi Council arrived to witness his funeral. The newly elected Chancellor Palpatine would be arriving with the Jedi, and Padmé looked forward to offering her congratulations almost as much as she was looking forward to turning Nute Gunray over to Republic justice.

  A Jedi funeral was a solemn affair, and Padmé knew that it was a great honor for the Naboo to be trusted to see to his remains. She wore the dark purple dress again, but this time instead of Sabé’s hands alone, those of all of the handmaidens dressed her. Yané arranged the headpiece and Rabé did her makeup. Saché polished her shoes and Eirtaé sealed the seams up her back. Sabé turned the heavy velvet down to let the lighter silk show through, and Queen Amidala was ready to mourn.

  The ceremony itself was simple. No one spoke, except quietly amongst themselves. Instead they watched as Qui-Gon’s body was lit up in bright fire, and they kept watching until he had been reduced to ash. Padmé’s grief felt more personal than she had expected. The Jedi Master had trusted her when he knew she was keeping secrets, had let her try to keep control of a wildly unpredictable situation, and had respected her judgment enough to at least listen to her arguments. She would never get to thank him for any of that. They would never look back at what they had experienced together and find the lighter side of it. It would always be an open wound.

  The Jedi drifted away from the pyre alone or in pairs, mysterious and sad in a way that defied description. Obi-Wan and Anakin stayed until the last ember burned out, and so did the Queen and her court. The night air was chill and they were all exhausted, but it was the best way to show their thanks to the soft-spoken Jedi Master who had risked much and given all to save their home.