Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia Page 10

  Han heard the welcome blam, blam, blam of the quad cannons as Leia returned fire. The Falcon screamed toward the scaffolding and the Frigate beyond. Huge beams of plasteel flashed past, and Han flipped the Falcon sideways to slip through the scaffolding. Han locked his forward targeting computer onto the Frigate’s primary sensor array. Without active shielding on, the huge Frigate was just another hunk of space debris, and Han’s first blast enveloped the sensor array in blue lightning. He fired his proton torpedoes in rapid succession, and they flashed in a brilliant ball that would have fried Han’s eyes if he hadn’t looked away.

  Among the brightening mushroom clouds, Han reversed thrusters, fired two concussion missiles into the thin stem of the Frigate, the walkways that joined the Frigate’s monstrous engines with its forward arsenal. As the slowing Falcon dove for the breach in the Frigate’s hull, chunks of shrapnel burst against the forward concussion shielding.

  Chewie roared and shielded his face with his hands. The Falcon slammed into the yawning hold of the Frigate, and warning sirens screamed. The control panels darkened as the concussion shielding overloaded, brightened again as it died. Smoke was rising from Chewie’s panel, and he growled.

  “Shhh …” Han hissed, putting his hand over Chewie’s mouth. Both of the TIE interceptors screamed into the Frigate and exploded. The corridor that the Falcon had crashed into filled with light and fire.

  That’s the problem with those transparisteel windows on the TIE fighters, Han thought. The worthless things darken when they detect a blast, and then you can’t see anything for the next two seconds. He’d counted on it.

  Han flipped off his radio jamming, began shutting down the Falcon. Leia came running down the corridor. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing? You almost got us killed!”

  “Listen!” Han said, raising a hand for quiet. Between the concussion of the torpedoes and the fighters, and a few well-placed ion blasts, the Frigate’s orbit was already destabilizing. The ship was peeling away from the docks as Dathomir’s gravity well sucked it down.

  “Oh, great!” Leia said. “I’m supposed to be happy that we’re going to crash into the planet instead of blow up in space?”

  “No,” Han said. “Our concussion shielding should have kept us from damaging the Falcon too badly, and now that our sensor jamming is off, Chewie should be able to get the nav computer back on line. Meanwhile, Zsinj’s navy thinks we all crashed, and as the Frigate drops toward the planet, we’ll quietly move out of their interception range for ten minutes or so—plenty of time for us to plot a course. Then we just casually ease our way out of here and head for home. Trust me, I’ve done this before!”

  Han took a deep breath and prayed. “Go ahead, Chewie, turn the nav computer back on. Show her.”

  Chewie growled, shot Han a nasty look and flipped the switch. The monitor stayed dim. Chewie frantically began testing other switches. The hyperdrive motivator stayed off, as did the rear deflector shields. Threepio had been watching behind the pilot’s seat and he began gesticulating wildly but refrained from speaking. When he saw that the motivators wouldn’t go on, he shouted, “We’re doomed!”

  Han jumped out of his seat. “It’s okay, it’s okay, nobody panic. We just have a little fried circuitry here. I’ll fix it.” He shoved his way past Threepio and ran down the corridor to the engineering station and pulled off a face plate to get to the motivator circuitry. The nav computer he could sort of live without—for ten minutes. Just make a quick jump to get out of the solar system, then take a few days to try to fix it nice and leisurely in the cold of space. But the motivators, he needed those now.

  He pulled off his vest, wrapped it around his fist, jerked back the face plate. Fire erupted from the charred slag in the circuit box, and Leia appeared behind him with a fire extinguisher. She began spraying the circuitry and Han stepped back, saw that it was useless.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he muttered and ran back to the cockpit, fired all his circuits and let the diagnostics computer begin a readout. The forward sensor arrays had been smashed during the crash. “That’s okay, I don’t need sensors as long as I can see where I’m going,” he groaned.

  Concussion shielding gone. Top radio dishes clipped off. Most of the rest of it looked pretty good. As long as the diagnostics were correct, they could fly out of here—as long as they could break free of the wreck and no one shot at them and no one caught them and they didn’t try to make it offplanet.

  Han’s head began to whirl, and he realized that the Frigate must be spinning as it sank toward Dathomir. “Hang on, folks, it’s going to be a rough ride down!” he muttered. He glanced back at Leia, saw that she wasn’t mad, wasn’t berating him. Instead, her pale face was set in fear, and her eyes seemed dilated. The hair on her scalp had raised. Han had never seen her so scared.

  “What? What?” he asked, glancing frantically at the diagnostics display.

  “I feel something down there,” Leia said, “on the planet. Something …”

  “What?” Han asked.

  Leia closed her eyes. She didn’t have Luke’s sensitivity yet. But Han knew she had the potential. “I see … drops of blood on a white tablecloth. No—more like sunspots, black against the brilliance. Only the black spots are filthier than that—loathsome …” Leia frowned in concentration, inhaled, sucking deep breaths, her lower lip trembling.

  Leia’s eyes blinked open, and her face was pale again, stark with terror. “Oh, Han, we can’t go down there!”

  Chapter

  9

  At Han’s apartment on Coruscant, Luke felt the walls. It was an odd apartment, one without decorations, without warmth, the kind of place that a person sometimes inhabits but does not live in. The building had been ransacked. Han’s military uniforms lay scattered on the floor with a ripped mattress, torn pillows. The floors were littered. Dozens of people had already searched the place, but not the way Luke planned to search it.

  Luke touched the pillow, closed his eyes. He could feel Han’s desperation on the pillow, and something older and odd—a trace of manic glee, of hope.

  Luke stood. Such strong emotions carry a unique scent, and he ran his fingers along the wall, tasting it, followed the scent down Coruscant’s long avenues. Sometimes the scent would elude him at a corner, and Luke would stop for a moment, concentrating.

  After hours of following the taste of that manic hope, he found himself in the upper layers of the underworld, in an ancient gambling hall. He stood, looking at a sabacc table where a trio of rodents played while a mechanical dealer dropped cards into their hands.

  He went to the manager, a batlike Ri’dar who watched over his domain with half-open eyes while gripping an overhead cable with his toes. Luke asked, “Do your dealer droids keep a visual record of games, to make sure there is no cheating?”

  “Why?” the Ri’dar asked. “I run an honessst placcce. Are you trying to imply that my dealersss cheat?”

  Luke was tempted to roll his eyes at the Ri’dar. Their paranoia was a species trait and could lead to problems if Luke didn’t placate the creature quickly. “Of course not,” Luke said, “the thought never crossed my mind. But I have reason to believe that a friend was here recently, and that he played cards at the corner table. If the films are available, I’d like to see the video. I could pay you.”

  The Ri’dar’s dark eyes flashed, and he looked around furtively. He reached up with one winged hand, grasped the cable, and dropped to the floor. “Thisss way.”

  Luke followed him to a back room, and the Ri’dar glanced at him suspiciously. “Money firssst.”

  Luke handed him a credit chip worth a hundred. The Ri’dar shoved the chip into some hidden pocket in its vest, showed Luke how to scan through the video display unit that could not have been less than a hundred years old. It was rusting and crusted with dirt, but the rewind on it went incredibly fast. Luke hit pay dirt within moments, stopped the video, and watched Han win his planet. There was no sound to the video,
only the holograph of the planet on the table, gleaming. So that was the source of his joy.

  “Who is the Drackmarian here?” Luke asked.

  The Ri’dar looked at the Drackmarian, his eyes flickering furtively between the image and Luke. “Hard to sssay. They all look alike to me.”

  Luke pulled out another credit chip.

  “Yesss, I remember now,” the Ri’dar said. “Warlord Omogg.”

  Luke knew the name. “Of course. Only she would lose a planet in a card game. Where can I find her?”

  “Gambling,” the Ri’dar said. “When she isss not here, she playsss elsssewhere. Drackmarianss do not sssleep.”

  Luke got the names of Omogg’s haunts, closed his eyes and let his forefinger drift down the list. It stopped at the third name on the list—a nearby place down four more levels in the underworld.

  He drew his robes tight around him, felt the lightsaber hanging at his side. Something in the air warned him to keep it handy, so he unclipped it, put it in a pocket.

  The trip down took only a few minutes, but it seemed as if he’d entered a different world. The air down lower was stale, the lights dimmer than above. Hundreds of levels down, there were places in the underworld where even the bravest humans wouldn’t venture. Already living down here were aliens from races that Luke had never seen—a large turquoise, bioluminescent amphibian walked by, flapping on webbed feet, eating some type of fungus in its broad mouth. Something huge, with tentacles, slithered over the wet stones. Luke didn’t know if it was sentient or some form of vermin. Luke found the place he was searching for by a dim light over its door: “The Stowaway.”

  He walked in, squinted into the gloom. The only light in the place came from the headlamps of a cleaning droid and from bioluminescent amphibians like the one Luke had seen outside. Down here, the creatures did not use artificial lights.

  And in the depths of the shadows, Luke heard choking sobs that could only have been death cries.

  Luke whipped out his lightsaber, and its brilliant blue glow cut through the shadows. Dozens of aliens screamed and covered their eyes in pain, and many shouted in dismay as they leaped for the door. A dozen rat people scurried deeper into the shadows to watch the fray with glittering eyes.

  At the far back of the gambling room, at a table, three humans stood over the Drackmarian. Two of them held her with her back pinned to the table, while the third worked desperately to pull off her helmet, open her to the oxygen atmosphere that would surely poison her. The Drackmarian fought them, digging into their arms with her talons till she drew blood, kicking at them with clawed feet, batting at them with her tail. Two other humans were already on the floor, but the Drackmarian was near the end of her struggle. The men had her pinned now. All three of the men wore infrared goggles, a sign that they were not accustomed to life here in the underworld.

  “Let her go,” Luke ordered them.

  “You stay out of this,” one of the men said in Basic, using an odd accent Luke had never heard. “This one has information.”

  Luke stepped forward, and the inquisitor who had been ripping off Omogg’s helmet pulled up a gun, fired at him. Blue sparks shot from the gun and enveloped Luke, and for a portion of a second Luke’s mind went blank—it felt almost as if his head were immersed in freezing ice water. He blinked and let the Force flow through him. The three men had turned back to their task, apparently satisfied that the confrontation was over.

  “Let her go,” Luke repeated, louder.

  The inquisitor glanced up at Luke in surprise, pulled the gun again. Luke waved, used the Force to rip the weapon from his hand.

  “Get out of here, all three of you—” Luke warned.

  The men stopped, stepped back from the Drackmarian. She lay gasping on the table, fighting the effects of the oxygen that leaked past her helmet seal. One man said, “This creature has information that could lead us to a woman who has been kidnapped. We will get that information.”

  “This woman is a citizen of the New Republic,” Luke said, “and if you do not take your hands off her, I will take your hands off you.” Luke swung the lightsaber threateningly.

  The men looked nervously at each other, backed away. One pulled up a communicator, began speaking into it quickly in a foreign language, obviously calling for reinforcements. The rat people in the corner scurried away, unwilling to brave the situation any longer, and the room seemed strangely quiet, with only the dull hum of food processors in the background.

  Within ten seconds, a female voice spoke behind Luke. “What is going on here?”

  All three of Omogg’s attackers folded their arms, bowed their heads. “O Queen Mother, we found the Drackmarian warlord as you requested, but she has been loath to answer us. We could get no information from her.” Luke turned to look at their leader. She was a tall woman with a gold circlet and a golden veil to hide her face. Every inch of her spoke of regality and wealth. She wore a long flowing dress that could not disguise her shapely figure. Behind her were at least a dozen armed guards, blasters at the ready.

  “You tortured her, a foreign dignitary?” the queen mother asked, eyes flashing behind her veil. Luke could feel her wrath, but he wasn’t sure if she was truly angry at her men, or angry that they had failed.

  “Yes,” one of the men muttered. “We thought it best.”

  The queen mother grunted in disgust. “Get out, all three of you. Place yourselves under arrest.” For a moment Luke wondered if this were all an act, and he further tested the Force of the newcomer. She was not surprised or appalled by her men’s actions, but that told him little. Leaders tend to become jaded, hardened.

  “I owe you a debt of gratitude for stepping in here,” she told Luke. She gestured, and two of her guards hurried to the fallen Drackmarian, made sure her gas mask fit snugly over her snout. Omogg was still gasping but seemed to be coming around. She moved her arms, and her tail twitched feebly. The guards lifted her to a sitting position, adjusted the valves on her backpack, increasing the amount of methane she received. She inhaled deeply.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” the queen mother said to the Drackmarian. “I’m Ta’a Chume, of Hapes, and I asked my men to find you, but I did not order them to question you like this. They are already under arrest. Name whatever punishment you think just.”

  “Mmmake themmm breathe mmmethanne,” Omogg hissed.

  The queen mother bowed her head slightly in sign of acceptance. “It will be done.” She paused a moment. “You already know why I have come. I need to know where Han Solo is. It is said that you are organizing your own private party to follow him. I will pay whatever price you ask, within reason. Do you know where he is?”

  Omogg studied Ta’a Chume for a moment. The Drackmarians were noted for their generosity, but they were an independent people and could not be coerced. They had been fearless opponents of the Empire and could only loosely be considered allied to the New Republic. They resisted coercion to the death. Omogg glanced at Luke. “Isss thisss what you wannnt, too?”

  “Yes,” Luke answered.

  The Drackmarian studied Luke a moment. “You have saved mmmy lllife, Jedi. Yourrr rrreputationnn prrrecedes you. Nnnammme yourrr rrrewarrrd.”

  The Drackmarian hesitated, and Luke understood. She would tell him where Han had gone, but she did not want to speak in the presence of Ta’a Chume. Yet Luke could feel something from the queen mother. Confidence? If Omogg truly had planned to send a party after Han—and the New Republic was offering enough of a bounty to make that reasonable—then Ta’a Chume had probably already done her homework. She knew which ship Omogg would take, perhaps had even questioned crew members and bugged the ship so that they could follow it.

  “As my reward, I ask that you leave General Solo to me, and that you not reveal the name of the planet to anyone, but that you look into my eyes and think of the name.”

  Omogg glanced up, and the dark orbs of her eyes shone from behind the wisps of green methane in her helmet. Luke let the Force conne
ct him to her, and distinctly heard the name of the planet in his mind. Dathomir.

  The name struck Luke, and for a second he recalled the holo of Yoda in a younger shade of green saying, We tried to free the Chu’unthor from Dathomir …

  “What do you know of the place?” Luke asked.

  Omogg said. “Forrr a mmmethannne breatherrr, it hass little valllue …”

  “Thank you, Omogg,” Luke said. “The Drackmarian reputation for graciousness is well deserved. Do you need a doctor? Anything?”

  Omogg waved Luke’s thanks away, began coughing again.

  Ta’a Chume studied Luke openly as if Luke were some slave she might buy in a market, and finally he felt her nervousness. She wanted something from him. “Thank you for coming when you did,” she said. “I suppose you are a bounty hunter of some type, looking for a reward?”

  “No,” Luke said defensively. “You might say I’m a friend to Leia—and Han.”

  The queen mother nodded, seemed loath to leave him. “Our fleet will leave tonight”—she glanced at the room, empty of all but her guards, Luke, and Omogg—“for Dathomir.” She must have seen Luke’s startlement when she spoke the name, for her voice took on a note of confidence. “Omogg made the mistake of running a course check on her nav computer. Once we learned that she planned to make the trip, we had no trouble finding where she might go. Yet I see no reason that Han would choose to go to such a world.”

  “Perhaps it holds … sentimental value,” Luke said.

  “Of course,” Ta’a Chume agreed. “A probable choice for a crazed lover who has just kidnapped a mate. So you agree that it is worth checking out?”

  “I’m not sure,” Luke said.

  “I’ll check it out,” Ta’a Chume said thoughtfully. “I have not seen a Jedi since I was a small child. Even then, the one that I met was an old man, balding. Nothing like you—but interesting. I would like you to join me on my ship for an hour or two, for dinner. You will come tonight.”