Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Part 21

"See yon on the far side, General. Rogue Leader out."

"But-but General Galrissian..."

"Not now, Threepio!" Lando clenched his jaw. He'd had a feeling all along it might come to this. "Kartill, alert the fleet. We're going atmospheric."

All three of the exec's eyes blinked at once. "Sir?"

"You heard me. Dirtside. Everybody. It's the only way. If we're still in orbit ten minutes from now, those STOEs will cut us to pieces."

"Land? Land where, sir?"

"We'll worry about that after we're out of their fire window, yes?"

"Yes, sir."

"General-General, please!"

"Keep bothering me, Threepio, and I swear I'll hit you so hard you'll think you're a garbage loader."

"But, General, I thought you wanted to find Captain Solo!"

"What?" Lando turned and stared at the skinny protocol droid. "You know something about Han?"

"Possibly. In your brief communication with him..."

"Yeah, that was weird, wasn't it? We can barely reach our own s.h.i.+ps once they're in that atmosphere, but we could pick up Han's comlink, and he said he was in some kind of cave..."

"Yes, General. Yes, that's it precisely. During that communication, I detected a subtle modulation in the carrier wave. Sort of a background noise, one might say."

"What kind of background noise?"

"It appears to be a retrograde ortho-dialect of Surmo-Clarithian electrospeech interspersed with a creole of the Black Dwarf variant of Imperial digital encryption and a Neimoidian trade cipher-fascinating, really, especially in the structural vocabulation..."

"Threepio."

"Oh, yes. Of course. Essentially, something was speaking on the comm wave. Or rather, the comm signal was picking up something's speech."

"Another comm signal?"

"Oh, no no no, nothing so sophisticated. It's simply a language-electrospeech is a type of direct energy modulation used by a variety of life-forms; to date, I believe the total known to science numbers over..."

"Forget that. This electrospeech-you understand it?"

The droid drew himself up proudly. "I am fluent in over six million forms of..."

"I don't need a list. What'd it say?"

"Well-translated as best I can, you understand, their accent is perfectly barbarous-they were about to take a pair of humans captive, and will deliver them to the crypt chamber."

Lando shook his head. "What crypt chamber? And who's taking who captive?"

"I'm sure I cannot say who the captors might be; the language-would be appropriate for any number of energy-based life-forms."

"Then why are you wasting my time with this?"

"Oh, well, it's because these two captives were apparently accompanied by a Wookiee."

"A Wookiee?"

"It does seem an unlikely coincidence. And they also mention a droid-hmm, parsing... half human size, round as a pillar spine, rotating dome-Artoo! Oh, General Calrissian, we must do something! They have Artoo!"

"All right, all right, slow down." If whoever this was had R2-D2, they might even have Luke-or at least know what happened to him. That's what Lando told himself, anyway; somehow it made him feel better to have at least a theoretically valid argument of military necessity for the rescue mission he was already pretty sure he was going to order anyway. "How did that signal punch through in the first place?"

"That's exactly the point, General. I suspect that the natural frequency of this particular energy-based life-form confines it to a certain variety of electromagnetically active rock-this would be this life-form's natural environment, as it were-and while this rock may very well interfere with an ordinary comm signal, its conductive properties should actually enable it to resonate with and reinforce a properly modulated..."

"I get it. Can you reproduce this modulation? Can you run it through the s.h.i.+p's comm?"

"Well in all modesty, perhaps Artoo would be more-Lando gritted his teeth against an almost overpowering urge to twist C-3P0's head off. "Can you do it?"

"I am fluent in over..."

"Don't tell me." Lando pointed at the comm board. "Tell the s.h.i.+p."

Luke scrambled through the deep cinders with Nick close behind. Taspan had sunk below the horizon; the only light came from the burning wreckage scattered across the floor of the crater, and from the occasional flashes and flares of the battle that raged above. The cinder crunched and gave way almost like fine sand beneath every step, making the going slow and hard. The crater was also littered with bigger chunks-ma.s.ses of hardened lava and rocky ejecta, most of which were a featureless, nonreflective black, which made them very hard to see; even Luke only discovered the medium-sized ones by painfully whacking one with his s.h.i.+ns. He would have gone more cautiously, but the first time an ion panel blown off a TIE came whistling down and shattered into shrapnel a couple of dozen meters away, he gave up the idea of slow and careful.

They ran hard. At least when Luke caught his foot on a chunk and fell, he could use the Force to flip himself in the air and hit the ground running. Nick didn't have that option, but somehow he managed to reach the relative shelter beneath the slant of the Falcon's hull only a few steps behind Luke, even though he was limping, both hands were bleeding, and he had a nasty-looking sc.r.a.pe on his forehead.

The Falcon loomed over them, blacking out the stars. Its att.i.tude thrusters flared and sprayed jets of gas in a seemingly random sequence-trying to rock itself free-and the whine of its repulsorlifts scaled up from merely annoying to a shriek that was making Luke's teeth ache.

Nick scowled up at the s.h.i.+p's dark silhouette. "What do we do, knock?"

"No comlink." Luke held one hand pressed against his ear. "We have to get their attention somehow."

"Where's the hatch?"

"Up there." Luke gestured vaguely overhead; the belly hatch was high up the underside, out of reach. "Maybe we can climb."

"No problem. I grew up in a jungle. I can climb anything."

"Not yet. Something's wrong."

"Other than their landing? Shee, in the holoshows, Solo's supposed to be such a hot pilot..."

Luke frowned. "I feel.. . fear and anger. Aggression. Danger. Han's my best friend-why would his s.h.i.+p feel hostile'?"

"Dunno." Nick looked around and spotted a slow swing of motion in the darkness above. "Think it might be because that quad turret's tracking on us?"

The Force stabbed Luke with an instant overpowering Move-or-die; in less than an eyeflick his foot lashed out to slam Nick back deeper under the hull and he sprang into the air, back-flipping away. The night ripped open with the choomchoomchoomchoom of high-cyclic cannon fire, burning the air into long streaks of brilliant yellow that lit up the cinder pit like noon on Tatooine, and blowing gouts of white-molten rock in all directions.

The turret tracked Luke, chopping red-hot craters toward him like the footprints of an invisible fire G.o.d. He landed and sprang again on a different vector, and by the time the turret followed that leap he was off again on another that took him behind a boulder the size of an adolescent bantha. He pressed his back against it while the turret blasted away at its other side, and from the amount of smoke going up and debris raining down, he was pretty sure that turret's gunner, whoever he was, figured the easiest way to get him would be to just blast the rock to pieces.

He rolled across to the opposite edge and risked a quick glance. Looked like Nick wasn't kidding about being able to climb anything; he was clambering up the overhanging slant of the hull faster than a hungry mynock. "Nick! Get off of there!"

Nick reached the gimbal cowling of the quad turret. With Nick hanging half across the transparisteel viewport, the gunner quit blasting; Luke could see him inside, shouting Get your fraggin' gra.s.s off my turret, or something along those lines.

"Nuts to that," Nick called back. "He can't shoot me here! Toss me your lightsaber and I'll shut this ruskakk down with one swipe!"

'Wo, Nick! Jump! The Falcon's equipped with a..."

A burst of blue-white energy crackled over the freighter's hull; the discharge threw Nick tumbling from the turret to the ground, where he landed on his back with an authoritative whump.

"...antipersonnel field projector," Luke finished belatedly.

The gunner opened up again. Luke extended his hand and summoned the Force; a sharp shove sent Nick skidding, and Luke decided he'd had just about enough of being shot at for one night. He took a deep breath and sent his mind into the Force.

The Falcon loomed large in his perception, as did the thirty or so desperate people he now felt were inside. He shut them out of his consciousness and focused on the s.h.i.+p itself. There-he felt the circuit he was looking for... and he even felt the echo of Leia's hand upon it! She had touched this only hours earlier. Maybe even less...

But this was a distraction-even more distracting than the shuddering of the boulder as cannon blasts chewed away at its opposite side. The mere awareness of Leia's recent presence was enough to flood his mind with all manner of fears and hopes that dimmed his perception until he could banish them and focus once more. A few more deep breaths tuned his mind like a targeting laser, and he recovered his hold on the circuit. A slight nudge in the Force, and he felt the circuit trip.

The quad turret went dark, and its guns fell silent. The turret autorotated to face forward between the freighter's mandibles.

Luke could feel the gunner's confusion and rising panic; he figured he had at least five seconds before the gunner figured out that the turret drivers had been reset and locked into their forward-fire default position.

Five seconds was more than he needed.

He stood up and raised his hand. High up the underside of the s.h.i.+p's slant, the belly hatch fell open, spilling light in a stretching rectangle up the night-shadowed hull. One Force-powered leap carried him over the smoking boulder to Nick's side.

"I'm all right..." Nick wheezed weakly. "Just need a minute to... catch my breath. Or maybe a week. Or two."

Luke knotted his left fist in the front of Nick's Shadowsp.a.w.n robe, gathered the Force around them both, and leapt straight up, over the edge of the freighter's belly ramp-which, due to the angle at which the s.h.i.+p was stuck, was more like a slide-and skidded down it into the Falcon's main cargo hold.

Which was full of men and women in curiously constructed armor that looked like it had been made out of lava, nearly all of whom were pointing blaster rifles at him.

For an instant, the only sound was the rattle and snap of rifle stocks being snugged against armored shoulders; in the next instant, the only sound was the lethal hum of a green lightsaber blade held forward at guard.

"Don't shoot," Luke said softly. "I've killed too many people already today."

"Weapons down!" The speaker was a hard-looking woman with red hair, sporting a swelling bruise around her left eye. She stood with her left thumb hooked behind her blaster belt while her right hand dangled free and loose near the b.u.t.t of a slim blaster in a quick-draw rig. "It's the Jedi! He's here to help!"

"Yes," Luke said. "I am the Jedi. And I hope I can help." That was true on enough different levels to make his stomach hurt-but on the other hand, this was the second time in a row that someone had decided not to mess with him based on who they a.s.sumed he was, which was a trend he hoped to encourage. "Where's Han?"

"Han who?" Her right hand came up, but it came up empty. "Listen, we need you-we need your help. Shadowsp.a.w.n's got my..."

"No he doesn't," Nick wheezed from behind Luke. "Nick?" Her eyes sparked and her voice had gone soft and breathless, and Luke could only wonder how he'd thought she was hard-looking; when she gazed past him at Nick, she looked like a Tatooine teenager on the way to her own star-seventeen dance at the Anchor-head community center. She brushed past Luke as if he weren't even there and threw her arms around him. "Nick! I can't believe it!"

"Hey, kid. Did you miss me?"

"Did I miss you?" She pulled his face down to hers and planted a kiss on his lips that would have opened the eyes of a dead man. Luke cleared his throat. "I take it you two know each other?"

"Nick..." Her eyes were still s.h.i.+ning when she came up for air, and her cheeks were wet, too. "You're all right? How did you escape? What are you doing running around with a Jedi?"

"All right? Mostly." Nick rubbed at the dried blood that crusted his shaven scalp and grimaced. "The running-with-Jedi business, well, we sort of rescued each other. As for escaping... urn, you have noticed that the s.h.i.+p we're on is stuck nose-first in the ground in the middle of a giant pitched battle, haven't you?"

"Doesn't matter," she said, stroking his face. "We've got you-that's all that matters."

Nick lifted his own hand to tenderly touch her black eye. "Still haven't learned to duck, huh?"

"You oughta see the other-uh, guy." She grinned at him. "Now all we have to do is find a place to hole up until the flares subside, and we can shake this rockball's dust off our boots forever."

"Urn..." Luke said quiedy. "No."

She looked at him. "What?"

"We're going back for Han."

"Again: Han who?"

"Don't." Luke nodded generally around at the scorch marks and blaster scars that marred the hold's interior walls, floor, and ceiling. "Are you going to tell me this is all from a slight weapons malfunction?"

Nick turned. "She's not a pirate."

"Is there another word for it?"

"Hey, this tub was abandoned when we found it..." the woman said.

"Try to remember who you're lying to." Luke sighed. "I know you didn't kill them. That's why I haven't hurt any of you yet. But this has been a really, really hard day for me, and my patience is wearing thin."

"Hey, c'mon, Skywalker, take it easy," Nick said. "I'm sure there's a perfectly innocent explanation."

"And I'll be happy to hear it. Just as soon as we get Han and Chewie and Leia back on board this s.h.i.+p.

"Skywalker?" one of the others chimed in. "Any relation to the guy from The Jedi's Revenge?"

"No," Luke said with maybe a touch more emphasis than was absolutely necessary. "No relation at all."

He looked back at the redhead. "Where did you leave them?" She opened her mouth, but before she could speak Luke raised a hand. "Think before you talk," he said. "I won't ask you again."

She closed her mouth. She looked up at Nick, then back at Luke. "Uhh, okay," she said slowly. "Look, can we make a deal?"

"Sure," Luke said. "This deal: You tell me everything I want to know, and do exactly as I say. In exchange, I'll try to forget that you stole my best friend's s.h.i.+p and abandoned him and my sister to die."

"Your sister? Your sister is Princess Kissy-Face?"

"My sister is a princess. Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan," Luke said evenly. "And if you called her Princess Kissy-Face in person, I can guess who gave you that s.h.i.+ner."

Nick rubbed his eyes. "Aeona... you didn't really pirate this s.h.i.+p, did you?"