Star Wars, page 31
Han turned slowly to the Nautolan. “No,” he said flatly.
“He’s a genius. I’ve been talking with him, and—”
“He tried to kidnap my wife.”
“Unsuccessfully!”
“That does not support your ‘genius’ argument.”
“Just—hear me out,” Zalma said. “His specialty is tractor beams, remember? Gravitational manipulation. Like with repulsorlifts. He could help, Han.”
Han glared at him, but he didn’t see the man. He saw scrawny, sniveling Kelad, the academic-turned-mercenary, but only for a night, when the opportunity arose.
“He worked for the Empire before.”
Zalma glared. “So have I. I didn’t want to. I also didn’t want to die.”
Han released a breath through his nose. He didn’t want to go down that line of thought again. He didn’t want to think about what he had done for the Empire to survive. And he definitely didn’t want to consider the men and women aboard the Imperial station right now who might be killed tomorrow, who were only doing a job with no concept of what that job entailed. They have to know by now, Han thought. The Death Star destroyed, the Empire’s darkest secrets being exposed. If they still haven’t bothered to look at what they’re doing…
He shook his head. No. He couldn’t think about that. Not when an entire moon full of people and life stood in the balance.
“He kept talking about his theories. It was the only reason he stowed away on the Halcyon in the first place,” Zalma continued. “Kelad knows gravity manipulators, which includes repulsorlifts, and that’s exactly the experience we need right now.”
If Han was willing to give him a chance.
“Fine,” he said. “Get him down here, too.”
CHAPTER 52
LEIA
AS LEIA DESCENDED THE STEPS, she sent a comm to Mon Mothma, requesting evacuation ships for the people of Madurs and fighters for the Empire. Mon confirmed that aid was coming, but it would take a day or more to reach the moon.
Leia had just turned off the comlink when an explosion lit up the night, a thundering boom echoed by loud thuds and the eerie pinging noise of splintering ice. Chaos immediately erupted as the cliff dwellers burst from their rooms, rushing for the stairs, evacuating the cliffs in case the ice quake reached them.
But Leia recognized those sounds.
That had not been an ice quake.
Rather than push her way down the steps with the flow of the crowd, Leia raced up, back to the top of the cliffs where she’d last seen Han. He and Zalma stood near the edge, watching smoke and steam cloud the starry night sky.
“What was that?” Leia asked, panting.
Han pointed. “The spaceport.”
From this high up, the source of the explosion was evident. Someone had blown up the ice that supported the spaceport. Leia had no doubt that the culprit was Senior Commander Beck. The docking bays and all the ships and shuttles they had held were sinking into the cold depths of the sea that covered Madurs.
“Why would the Empire do that?” Zalma asked incredulously. “This entire world is covered in smooth ice thick enough for shuttles to land on. We don’t need a spaceport to get the shuttles from Halcyon here. We can still evacuate everyone.”
Leia met Han’s eyes, horror dawning on her. “Wait,” she said. Her comlink was still in her hand. Leia opened an encrypted holo to Riyola.
“How can I help?” the Pantoran woman said immediately.
“Do you already have shuttles coming to Madurs?” Leia asked urgently.
Riyola’s brow furrowed. “Zalma told us to send down the stowaway. I have him on Captain Dicto’s personal shuttle, waiting for departure.”
“Get him off,” Leia ordered. “Right now. The shuttle doesn’t need to be crewed to fly, correct?”
“You want me to send an empty shuttle to Madurs?” Riyola asked, clearly confused.
“Yes. Immediately.”
Riyola nodded firmly. “Consider it done.”
Han, Leia, and Zalma looked up at the stars. The Halcyon was barely a speck in the dark sky, and it was impossible to see Captain Dicto’s personal shuttle zoom away from it, empty. But soon enough, Leia spotted the craft, a bright dot swooping closer. It burned through Madurs’s atmosphere, close enough for her to see the sleek, curving lines of the vessel.
And then a laser blast fired from the Imperial station, incinerating the shuttle.
Below, Leia could hear the screams of horror from the people gathered at the base of the cliffside as they witnessed another explosive blast, although they didn’t know what had been targeted.
Leia’s communicator beeped, and she brought up Riyola’s holo. The woman looked grave. “The shuttle was destroyed,” she said.
“We saw.”
Riyola’s jaw tightened, and then she said, “Are we to assume that any shuttle that enters or leaves Madurs will also be destroyed?”
“Looks like it,” Han answered for Leia.
“The Empire is making sure no one escapes,” Leia said.
“Why?” Zalma was clearly rattled by both the initial attack on the spaceport and Kelad’s last-minute escape from the shuttle. “The Empire has destroyed this moon, why do they care if people leave? So there are no witnesses?”
Han shook his head sorrowfully. Leia knew what he was thinking.
It was them.
Beck was willing to let the entire world crack apart and trap every single person on it just to be sure that she killed Leia and Han. That was why she hadn’t hunted them down. Rather than try to locate Han and Leia, Beck had laid explosives under the spaceport and prepared to target any additional shuttles that came down. Her meaning was clear: They were trapped. All of them, on a dying moon. Beck was ensuring that not a single person on the moon who wasn’t Imperial could escape.
“Maybe we can negotiate with her,” Leia told Han. “She might let the others go if we…”
“She doesn’t work like that,” Han growled. “I know her. She doesn’t mind killing everyone on this moon if it means…”
If it meant Han and Leia died.
CHAPTER 53
HAN
THE NEXT MORNING, HAN WATCHED Leia pull up a fur-lined hood over her head, tugging it low around her scarf-covered face. The one good thing about an icy moon was that disguises were a little easier. All the anglers and net fishers wore layers of warm clothes rather than thermal disks. The anglers needed to stay flexible when a salna fish bit their line, and the tight chest harness restricted them too much. The underwater net fishers wore their own suits that had heat generators attached to the back, alongside breathing apparatuses.
Han, Leia, and Zalma stuck tight with the group that would be heading down in the floating dock to the submersibles, intermingling with the regulars in a way that they all hoped would keep them hidden from the droids obviously stationed around the fishing area. Yens had been right—the Imperial station was definitely operating with a thinned-out crew. The fact that there were only half a dozen probe droids circling the perimeter of the bubble dock spoke volumes on how little Beck had to work with.
Han shuddered as he thought of Beck’s cold, imperious gaze boring into him from both her biological and her cybernetic eye. He was surprised to have found her here, on such a remote world. But Han had been to worlds poorer and more repressed than Madurs, and they had been plagued with far more troops. Leia might have the right theory: The Empire was willing to mine this world dry, but it had directed its military force elsewhere. And that was a problem they were going to have to solve.
Inside the dock, two stormtroopers stood on either side of the door, scanning faces. Han ducked into a group of fishers, holding a heavy bunch of netting in his arms, obscuring his face. As practiced, the group veered, shifting around to keep Han hidden within the crowd. Simultaneously, one of the younger fishers purposefully tripped on his netting, crashing into the closest trooper. It wasn’t much of a disturbance, but it was enough for Han to slip through. Once inside, he dared a look behind him, watching as Leia made it past the checkpoint in a similar way.
Too easy. It made Han sick to his stomach, wondering what was coming. Beck was using the moon’s destruction to kill them all just so she could take out Han and Leia, but Han knew she would have more plans in place, not trusting their deaths if she did not personally touch their cold bodies.
Inside the dock, Beck’s damage was clear. Carbon scoring streaked the walls, and the hatch she’d damaged was still sealed by a locked metal door. Even the broken crate and the spent harpoon were on the floor where Leia had left them.
While anglers stayed at the top, on the ice, the net fishers worked underwater. Most of them went in the bubble-domed submersibles that Han and Leia had experienced, but the many elite and experienced fishers were upgraded to harpooners, suiting up and diving solo into the water.
These were the men and women chosen to be the strike force against the station, Han, Leia, and Zalma among them. The three stuck close to the harpooners as they veered to the dive corridor and the other fishers made a point of flapping their nets over the surveillance cams in the corners. Once in the narrow hallway that ended in the dive hatch, they all stripped off their layers of outerwear and stepped into the synthprene underwater suits. Designed to stretch and fit a variety of sizes, the full-body suits weren’t exactly comfortable, but Han would rather wear one than step inside another bubble-domed submersible.
“Wasn’t sure you three were actually going to be on the front lines,” Balangawa said as she helped Han shrug into the shoulder harness and plug in the cords that would enable him to breathe and stay warm in the icy depths.
“Then you don’t know us,” Han said. He staggered under the weight of the unit Balangawa strapped to his back.
“Don’t worry; it’s lighter in the water,” she told him.
Han hoped so. Balangawa showed him how to read the gauges—not just oxygen and heat, but also the power of the underwater jet propulsion unit that would enable him to shoot through the water quickly. She checked his communicator piece as he stepped into the oversized flippers and adjusted his gloves. After her approval, Han got in the dive line between Zalma and Leia.
Harpooners were more underwater hunters than passive fishers. The anglers waited on the ice, dropping hooked lines in the water. The net fishers gathered mindless schools of fish. The harpooners tracked their prey, hid and waited, attacking the biggest sea creatures directly, darting out to face down sawkills and krackles, stab them, and pull the bodies back to the floating dock. Sawkills were used both for food and leather; the krackle was harvested for trade—its oil was used as a natural preservative in an array of industries, and it was second only to Madurs’s export of art for the colony’s income.
All fifteen harpooners for the day’s shift—all of whom were going to attack the station rather than any sawkill or krackle—walked through the first pressurized hatch. With their suits on, it was hard to tell one from another, but Han knew Leia, and not just because she was the shortest harpooner in the hatch. He stepped closer to her as the metal floor shifted and water started rising from the base.
It was a strange sensation, letting the water rise higher and higher in the enclosed hatch. He knew, logically, that this would prevent them from getting pressurization sickness and ease their transition into the cold sea, but he had to fight his body’s natural inclination to resist drowning as the water reached his chest, his neck, his chin, over his head. He breathed heavily, and oxygen flowed freely from the filter tank at his back through the tube in his nose.
“You okay?” Leia asked, her voice oddly tinny in his earpiece. He shot her a thumbs-up, but she knew him too well. He hated this. It was different from the carbonite freezing, but the suit didn’t insulate him entirely, and that same feeling of being trapped raced down his spine.
There was no time for panic.
The hatch door opened, and the harpooners were swept into the sea. Only Zalma was really distinguishable now, big eyes and tentacles open in the sea as he swam without a breather. They turned on their jet propulsions and shot through a stream of bubbles in different directions in groups of two or three, spreading out but all heading in the same direction. The bubble-domed submersibles tailed the group, straight toward the Imperial station.
Now that they’d made it to the water, there was little point in hiding their goal. Senior Commander Beck would be expecting an attack, and they were going to give her one. The first wave of fishers—the majority of them—were sabotaging the sewer pipes and vents, a repeat of the failed attack that had happened last time, just on a larger scale. They all knew it would fail to take down the ship, but that wasn’t the point. The point was to cause distraction and chaos while a dozen harpooners, including Leia and Han, attacked the repulsorlifts.
“It’s not an exact science,” Zalma had told the strike team the night before, showing them how to operate the hyperbaric welders. There were six repulsorlifts circling the lower half of the station. Teams of two would attack each one—one to cut into the arm holding the repulsorlift, one to serve as backup and cover their partner in case the battle got heavy. “Just cut deep as you can, then stick the damn thing up the unit,” Zalma had told them. “That’ll fry ’em out.”
Simple and efficient. A plan Han could get behind.
The strike team had lingered behind the others, and by the time they arrived, it was clear the goal of chaos had been met. The water was already churning with submersibles actively clogging up every pipe and vent they could while the spare harpooners took down each droid sent out. Just as the strike team arrived, a hatch opened up on the station, and troopers in underwater armor shot into the water, blasters already firing.
“Let’s go,” Zalma ordered.
The Nautolan hung back—not only would he be an obvious target, given his tentacles, but he was the one with the most experience disabling repulsorlifts, there to guide any of the harpooners who couldn’t manage their unit or to help if something went wrong. The rest of the strike team each took one of the six repulsorlifts in the station in pairs. Even through the chaos of droids and troopers blasting at harpooners and submersibles, each of the dozen fighters went straight to their station.
Han and Leia zoomed to their repulsorlift. Han pulled out the hyperbaric welder, angling it at the base, attacking the arm’s weak spot as Zalma had suggested.
It would take roughly ten minutes to completely disable the repulsorlift, with the longest time spent breaking through the metal housing that protected the circuitry. Han didn’t even glance at Leia as she got into position to cover him, blaster at the ready. He knew he could trust her to protect him.
Ten minutes. That was all they needed.
All around them, the water churned, a frothing sea of blasterfire, bubbles, blood, and broken droids.
Nine and a half minutes.
The station started to rumble, the vibrations throwing Han’s aim off balance, the beam of the hyperbaric welder sliding off the line he’d made.
They only had to survive for nine minutes more.
But from the red glow at the tip of the core blaster, it was clear that the station was charging to fire.
CHAPTER 54
LEIA
BLASTS SIZZLED THROUGH THE WATER as one of the bubble-domed submersibles retreated, listing heavily portside. Harpooners jetted about, using their own propulsors to zigzag through the water and avoid the stormtroopers blasting at them. It was utter chaos, but at least their team had clear directives.
“Watch out!” Zalma called over the networked communicators. “You all have been spotted.”
“What do we do when the core blaster fires?” Leia said.
There was a crackling pause in her earpiece before Zalma answered. “Hold on.”
Han cursed, but he didn’t take his eyes from the hyperbaric welder as he cut into the repulsorlift’s base. Leia spared a glance to know that hardly enough time had passed for him to cause any real damage.
Leia kept her eyes sharp and her blaster ready. More Imperial harvester droids had been released—the same ones they’d seen gathering the carnium when they saw the first core blast. Those were harmless, but they clogged her sight line, enabling the attack droids to get closer. Leia pulled the trigger on her blaster, an attack droid exploding so close that bits of it slammed against the metal station wall, ricocheting hard enough to make Han curse again.
“Team down!” Zalma shouted. “Can anyone go to the one under Bay Four?”
Leia felt a pang, but she pushed the friendly faces of the pair who’d been assigned that repulsorlift out of her mind. They were down, but perhaps just injured. She could let herself believe that for the next ten minutes.
“Trade with me,” Han told Leia, holding out the hyperbolic welder. She passed him her blaster. He’d gotten enough of the metal casing off that he could aim the blaster directly into the sensitive electronics inside. It wouldn’t be as efficient, but taking out two repulsorlifts slowly was better than only taking out one.
Now without a weapon, Leia shot off around the edge of the station, aiming for the repulsorlift that had been abandoned. She grabbed a hold bar, her momentum still pushing her through the water as she reached her destination.
No vibrations.
Leia had the hyperbaric welder on and driving into the repulsorlift’s arm by the time the thought formed in her mind. Where had the core blaster’s vibrations gone? She risked a glance down—the red tip of the plasma beam still glowed, but it hadn’t fired.
It didn’t vibrate like that before.
When she and Han had seen the core blaster at first, it had rumbled, but not that sharply. The chaos of the fighting had distracted her from this logic, but now—
