Star Wars - Thrawn Trilogy - Dark Force Rising 02 (17 page)

Han frowned. "Again?"

"Those were his words."

Han looked at Lando, found the other looking back at him. "Some old friend you've never mentioned?" Lando asked.

"I don't recall having any friends who own Dreadnaughts," Han countered. "What do you think?"

"I think I'm being nicely maneuvered into a corner here," Lando said, a little sourly. "Aside from that, whoever this Commander is, he seems to be in contact with your Bothan pals. If you're trying to find out what Fey'lya's up to, he'd be the one to ask."

Han thought it over. Lando was right, of course. On the other hand, the whole thing could just as easily be a trap, with this talk about old friends being designed to lure him in.

Still, with Irenez sitting behind him with a blaster riding her hip, there wasn't really a graceful way to get out of it if she and Sena chose to press the point. They might as well be polite about it. "Okay," he told Irenez. "What course do we set?"

"You don't," she said, nodding upward.

Han followed her gaze. One of the three Dreadnaughts they'd passed had now swung around to fly parallel with them. Ahead, Sena's ship was heading up toward one of a pair of brightly lit docking ports. "Let me guess," he said to Irenez.

"Just relax and let us do the flying," she said, with the first hint of humor that he'd yet seen from her.

"Right," Han sighed.

And with the flashes of the rear guard battle still going on behind them, he eased the Lady Luck up toward the docking port. Luke, he reminded himself had apparently not sensed any treachery from Sena or her people back in the city.

But then, he hadn't sensed any deceit from the Bimms on Bimmisaari, either, just before that first Noghri attack.

This time the kid better be right.

The first Dreadnaught gave a flicker of pseudomotion and vanished into hyperspace, taking the transport and the Lady Luck with it. A few seconds later, the other two Dreadnaughts ceased their ion bombardment of the Star Destroyer and, through a hail of turbolaser blasts from still-operating Imperial batteries, made their own escape.

And Luke was alone. Except, of course, for the squadron of TIE fighters still chasing him.

From behind him came an impatient and rather worried-sounding trill. "Okay, Artoo, we're going," he assured the little droid. Reaching over, he pulled the hyperdrive lever; and the stars became starlines, and turned to mottled sky, and he and Artoo were safe.

Luke took a deep breath, let it out in a sigh. So that was it.

Han and Lando were gone, to wherever Sena and her mysterious Commander had taken them, and there really wasn't any way for him to track them down. Until they surfaced again and got in touch with him, he was out of the mission.

But perhaps that was for the best.

There was another warble from behind, a questioning one this time. "No, we're not going back to Coruscant, Artoo," he told the droid, an echo of d?j? view tugging at him. "We're going to a little place called Jomark. To see a Jedi Master."

The little fast-attack patrol ship had dropped out of hyperspace and closed to within a hundred kilometers of the Falcon before the ship's sensors even noticed its presence. By the time Leia got to the cockpit, the pilot had already made contact.

"Is that you, Khabarakh?" she called, slipping into the copilot's seat beside Chewbacca.

"Yes, Lady Vader," the Noghri's gravelly, catlike voice mewed. "I have come alone, as I promised. Are you also alone?"

"My companion Chewbacca is with me as pilot," she said. "As is a protocol droid. I would like to bring the droid along to help with translation, if I may. Chewbacca, as we agreed, will stay here."

The Wookiee turned to her with a growl. "No," she said firmly, remembering just in time to mute the transmitter. "I'm sorry, but that was the promise I made to Khabarakh. You'll stay here on the Falcon and that's an order."

Chewbacca growled again, more insistently this time : and with a sudden prickly sensation on the back of her neck, Leia became acutely aware of something she hadn't really thought about for years. Namely, that the Wookiee was quite capable of ignoring pretty much any order he chose to.

"I have to go alone, Chewie," she said in a low voice. Force of will wasn't going to work here; she was going to have to go for logic and reason. "Don't you understand? That was the arrangement.

Chewbacca rumbled. "No," Leia shook her head. "My safety isn't a matter of strength anymore. My only chance is to convince the Noghri that I can be trusted. That when I make promises I keep them."

"The droid will pose no problem," Khabarakh decided. "I will bring my ship alongside for docking."

Leia switched the transmitter back on. "Fine," she said. "I also have one case of clothing and personal items to bring along, if I may.

Plus a sensor/analyzer package, to test the air and soil for anything that might be dangerous to me."

"The air and soil where we shall be is safe."

"I believe you," Leia said. "But I am not responsible only for my own safety. I carry within me two new lives, and I must protect them."

The comm speaker hissed. "Heirs of the Lord Vader?"

Leia hesitated; but genetically, if not philosophically, it was true enough. "Yes.

Another hiss. "You may bring what you wish," he said. "I must, be allowed to scan them, though. Do you bring weapons?"

"I have my lightsaber," Leia said. "Are there any animals on your world dangerous enough for me to need a blaster?"

"Not anymore," Khabarakh said, his voice grim. "Your lightsaber, too, will be acceptable."

Chewbacca snarled something quietly vicious, his wickedly curved climbing claws sliding involuntarily in and out of their fingertip sheaths. He was, Leia realized abruptly, on the edge of losing control : and perhaps of taking matters into those huge hands of his-

"What is the problem?" Khabarakh demanded.

Leia's stomach tightened. Honesty, she reminded herself. "My pilot doesn't like the idea of me going off alone with you," she conceded. "He has a-well, you wouldn't understand."

"He is under a life debt to you?"

Leia blinked at the speaker. She hadn't expected Khabarakh to have ever heard of the Wookiee life debt, much less know anything about it. "Yes," she said. "The original life debt was to my husband, Han Solo. During the war Chewie extended it to include my brother and me."

"And now to the children you bear within you?"

Leia looked at Chewbacca. "Yes."

For a long minute the comm was silent. The patrol ship continued toward them, and Leia found herself grip ping the seat arms tightly as she wondered what the Noghri was thinking. If he decided that Chewbacca's objections constituted betrayal of their arrangement:

"The Wookiee code of honor is similar to our own, Thabarakb said at last. "He may come with you."

Chewbacca gave a throaty rumble of surprise, a surprise that slid quickly into suspicion. "Would you rather he have said you had to stay here?" Leia countered, her own surprise at the Noghri's concession quickly covered up by relief that the whole thing bad been resolved so easily. "Come on, make up your mind."

The Wookiee rumbled again, but it was clear that he'd rather walk into a trap with her than let her walk into one alone. "Thank you, Khabarakh, we accept," Leia told the Noghri. "We'll be ready whenever you get here. How long will the trip to your world take, by the way?"

"Approximately four days," Khabarakh said. "I await the honor of your presence aboard my ship."

The comm went silent. Four days, Leia thought, a shiver running up her back. Four days in which to learn all that she could about both Khabarakh and the Noghri people.

And to prepare for the most important diplomatic mission of her life.

As it turned out, she didn't learn much about the Noghri culture during the trip. Khabarakh kept largely to himself, splitting his time between the sealed cockpit and his cabin. Occasionally he would come by to talk to Leia, but the conversations were short and invariably left her with the uncomfortable feeling that he was still very ambivalent about his decision to bring her to his home. When they'd set up this meeting back on the Wookiee world of Kashyyyk, she had suggested that he discuss the question with friends or confidants; but as they neared the end of the voyage and his dark nervousness grew, she began to pick up little hints that he had not, in fact, done so. The decision had been made entirely on his own.

It was not, to her way of thinking, a very auspicious beginning.

It implied either a lack of trust in his friends or else a desire to absolve them from responsibility should the whole thing go sour.

Either way, not exactly the sort of situation that filled her with confidence.

With their host generally keeping to himself, she and Chewbacca were forced to come up with their own entertainment. For Chewbacca, with his innate mechanical interests, such entertainment consisted mainly of wandering through the ship and poking his nose into every room, access hatch, and crawlway he could find-studying the ship, as he ominously put it, in case they needed at some point to fly it themselves. Leia, for her part, spent most of the trip in her cabin with Threepio, trying to deduce a possible derivation of Mal'ary'ush, the only Noghri word she knew, with the hope of at least getting some idea of where in the galaxy they might be going. Unfortunately, with six million languages to draw on, Threepio could come up with any number of possible etymologies for the word, ranging from reasonable to tenuous to absurd and right back again. It was an interesting exercise in applied linguistics, but ultimately more frustrating than useful.

In the middle of the fourth day, they reached the Noghri world : and it was even worse than she'd expected.

"It's incredible," she breathed, a hard knot forming in her throat as she pressed close to Chewbacca to stare through the ship's only passenger viewport at the world they were rapidly approaching. Beneath the mottling of white clouds the planetary surface seemed to be a uniform brown, relieved only by the occasional deep blue of lakes and small oceans. No greens or yellows, no light purples or blues-none of the colors, in fact, that usually signified plant life. For all she could tell, the entire planet might have been dead.

Chewbacca growled a reminder. "Yes, I know Khabarakh said it had been devastated in the war," she agreed soberly. "But I didn't realize he really meant the whole planet had been hit." She shook her head, feeling sick at heart. Wondering which side had been most responsible for this disaster.

Most responsible. She swallowed hard at the reflexively defensive words. There was no most responsible here, and she knew it. Khabarakh's world had been destroyed during a battle in space : and there had been only two sides to the war. Whatever had happened to turn this world into a desert, the Rebel Alliance could not avoid its share of the guilt. "No wonder the Emperor and Vader were able to turn them against us," she murmured. "We have to find some way to help them."

Chewbacca growled again, gestured out the viewport. The terminator line was coming up over the horizon now, a fuzzy strip of twilight between day and night; and there, fading through to the darkness beyond was what looked like an irregular patch of pale green. "I see it," Leia nodded. "You suppose that's all that's left?"

The Wookiee shrugged, offered the obvious suggestion. "Yes, I suppose that would be the simplest way to find out," Leia agreed. "I really don't know if I want to ask him, though. Let's wait until we're closer and can see more of-"

She felt Chewbacca go stiff beside her a split second before his bellow split the air and left her ears ringing. "What-?"

And then she saw it, and her stomach knotted abruptly with shock.

There, just coming over the curve of the planet, was an Imperial Star Destroyer.

They'd been betrayed.

"No," she breathed, staring out at the huge arrowhead shape. No mistake-it was a Star Destroyer, all right. "No. I can't believe Khabaralth would do this.

The last words were spoken to empty air; and with a second shock, she realized that Chewbacca was no longer beside her. Spinning around, she saw a flash of brown as he vanished down the corridor leading to the cockpit.

"No!" she shouted, pushing away from the bulkhead and taking off after him as fast as she could run. "Chewie, no!"

The order was a waste of air, and she knew it. The Wookiee had murder in his heart, and he would get to Khabarakh even if he had to tear down the cockpit door with his bare hands.

The first clang sounded as she was halfway down the corridor; the second came as she rounded the slight curve and came within sight of the door. Chewbacca was raising his massive fists for a third blow-

When to Leia's amazement, the door slid open.

Chewbacca seemed surprised, too, but he didn't dwell on it long.

He was through the door before it was completely open, charging into the cockpit with a ululating Wookiee battle yell. "Chewie!" Leia shouted again, diving through herself.

Just in time to see Khabakakh, seated at the pilot's station, throw up his right arm and somehow send Chewbacca spinning past him to crash with a roar into the underside of the control board.

Leia skidded to a halt, not quite believing what she'd just seen.

"Khabarakh-"

"I did not call them," the Noghri said, half turning to face her. "I did not betray my word of honor."

Chewbacca thundered his disbelief as he fought to scramble to his feet in the cramped space. "You must stop him," Khabarakh shouted over the Wookiee's roar. "Must keep him quiet. I must give the recognition signal or all will be lost."

Leia looked past him at the distant Star Destroyer, her teeth clenched hard together. Betrayal:but if Thabaraich had planned a betrayal, why had he let Chewbacca come along? Whatever that fighting technique was he'd used to deflect Chewbacca's first mad rush, it wasn't likely to work a second time.