Fate of the Jedi: Backlash (7 page)

Yliri, stretched out on a blanket on the broad hood of the cargo speeder, laughed. “She’s trying to draw him off, and he’s not having any of it.”

Sha nodded. “You are a tracker?”

“Not like you. But I’ve done some hunting.” Yliri rolled onto her side, facing the others. “So what is she trying to draw them toward?”

Sha shook her head. “Away from. Another set of tracks. An entire clan at least, and many rancors. Heading toward Redgill Pass.”

“Huh.” That was Dyon, who had been working diligently at their small campfire, situated on bare spongy ground between the two landed speeders, warming caf and packaged meals. “Wait a second.” From one of his vest pockets he drew a datapad and spent a few moments tapping in commands. Finally, he turned his screen around so the others could see it; on it was displayed a simple, colorful two-dimensional map. Most of the map was green, with some irregular black dots indicating mountains and bluish lines and blobs indicating bodies of water.

He pointed at a lake situated between two mountain peaks. “Redgill Lake. Also Redgill Pass. It’s a choke point for northward passage. The valley beyond has another pass farther north, meaning it’s easy for clans to defend.”

Tarth’s face fell. “So there could be a battle coming. One clan fortifies itself up there to fight another one.”

Dyon nodded.

Han made a derisive noise. “And this woman, one of the scouts for a clan about to go to war, deals with two dangerous Force-using pursuers by trying to lead them astray? Does she belong to Clan Nice? No, it’s something else.”

Leia looked up through the trees, their branches meeting more sparsely above this clearing, and at the sky beyond. Sunlight slanted in at a steep angle, suggesting the lateness of the hour. “We’re not going to catch up to them tonight, I take it.”

Sha shook her head. She moved to the campfire and sat cross-legged beside it. Dyon handed her a cup and poured caf into it from the pot resting on a folding metal grill set up over one low portion of the fire.

“Then let’s sleep.” His wrist no longer stinging, Han moved over
to get his own cup refilled. “We’ll start at first light and see how long it takes us to catch up to them. Two-hour watch shifts: me, then Leia, Dyon, Sha, Tarth. Carrack and Yliri, you’ll pull last shift together; I want twice as many eyes open and Carrack’s weapons ready in the last shift before dawn.”

Carrack nodded approval, but Yliri laughed. “I knew you were famous, but I didn’t know you were so bossy.”

“Corellians are natural leaders, sister. You should know that.” Leia rolled her eyes, but her smile took the sting out of it.

C-3PO hovered, as was his nature, at the entrance to the cockpit while Allana had her encrypted comm conversation. She might, after all, need reassurance or a glass of milk at any moment.

The golden droid could hear the little girl’s side of the conversation, with Queen Mother Tenel Ka’s voice reaching him as a series of buzzes. Voices across the comm speakers had to be easy to understand by those in the pilot’s seats, but the speakers had recently drifted out of register, as they did from time to time. C-3PO suppressed a sniff—or, rather, a synthesized sound identical to a sniff in both characteristics and meaning.
His
speakers never became misaligned, and if they did, he’d see to their repair immediately. It was no wonder the
Falcon
was constantly breaking down. Such shoddy maintenance …

Allana’s conversation was winding up. “I will … I won’t … Don’t worry, I have Anji … I’m not bored.” Even the droid could sense the lie in the girl’s words. “I love you, too.
Falcon
out.” There was pride in the last two words; clearly, she felt very adult in remembering to add them.

The little girl rose from the pilot’s seat and turned back to face C-3PO, her red hair so like her mother’s, her serious expression so like her grandmother Leia’s. She gave the droid an unfriendly look. “You don’t have to listen to me all the time.”

“To do my job effectively, young mistress, I do. And I am very, very good at my job.”

“Most of the time, I guess.”

She sighed, clearly upset about something, then stepped over to Anji, who was curled up on the copilot’s seat. She sighed again, then began to stroke the nexu’s fur. Anji responded with a welcoming purr, but Allana did not seem to notice. She merely stared out the cockpit canopy, shaking her head at some little-girl sadness that C-3PO could only guess at.

“Come now, you mustn’t worry about your physical welfare,” C-3PO said. “Artoo and I are quite capable of keeping you tidy and well fed.”

Allana whirled on him. “I’m not a
kid
, Threepio!” she said. “I can keep myself tidy, and I
know
how to use the food synthesizer as well as you do.”

Anji raised her head and cast a wary eye on C-3PO, obviously appraising whether she needed to test the effectiveness of her bite restrainers on him. C-3PO did his best to ignore the ungrateful feline and kept his attention focused on Allana.

“Well, then, I’m afraid you’ll just have to tell me what’s wrong,” he said. “I certainly can’t fix it if you make me guess.”

“
You
can’t fix it at all,” Allana complained. “They forgot.”

“Oh, come now. Perhaps Captain Solo
is
prone to forgetfulness, but that’s not the case with Princess Leia,” C-3PO replied. “Whatever it is, I’m sure she left instructions for me to arrange it on her behalf.”

Allana’s eyes lit up. “Really?”

“Of course,” C-3PO said. “What is it that you’re thinking of? Her offer to teach you how to play dejarik?”

Allana stepped over to him. “The rancor!” she said. “Grandma promised me that the next time we were on Dathomir, I could ride a rancor!”

A surge of static shot through C-3PO’s central processing unit. “Oh dear, perhaps they
did
forget,” he sniffed. “I’m afraid no one said anything to me about
that
.”

Allana scowled at him. “I thought droids couldn’t lie.”

“I didn’t
lie,”
C-3PO replied, suppressing an electronic sniff. “I was merely …
mistaken.”

“About Grandma never forgetting?” Allana demanded. “Or the part about leaving instructions to take me rancor riding?”

This time C-3PO did not suppress the sniff. “Clearly, you need some alone time. I will go about other duties. Please call if you need me, mistress.”

C-3PO moved aft, his microservos whining as he walked. He suspected that the girl’s question was not actually a verbal jab, probably just a child’s inquisitiveness, but considering the other strong Solo traits the girl possessed, he couldn’t be sure.

As he traveled the curving passageway that gave access to the
Falcon
’s main deck, the droid reached the passageway to the starboard-side loading port and saw that the boarding ramp was down. But R2-D2, his astromech ally of so many years—he couldn’t even remember their first meeting, so it had to have been prior to a memory wipe—was rolling up the ramp, and the ramp was rising into place, keeping the nighttime spaceport at bay. “Well, what have you been up to?”

R2-D2 wheetled at him, in the musical, very data-dense code of astromechs.

“Exploring? What’s to explore? It’s a patch of mud spattered with permacrete habitations. I’ve seen more promising sites on the underside of a shoe.”

The astromech wheetled again.

C-3PO stopped where he was to stare at his comrade. “Ah. So at a spaceport, a place where ships come and go all the time, you have seen … a ship. How observant.”

Wheetle
.

“So what if the mechanic hurried to close the hangar door when he saw you watching? Humans can be very self-conscious, you know. Thank the Maker that we don’t suffer from such ailments.”

Wheetle
.

C-3PO offered up a synthesized sigh. “The tail end of a SoroSuub yacht. Might I point out that there are about as many SoroSuub yachts out there as there are piranha-beetles on Yavin Four?”

The astromech’s tweetling took on an irritable tone.

“No, I won’t investigate with you. We’re not to leave the young mistress alone.” C-3PO shook his head in worry. “Frankly, Artoo, I don’t know what our Masters were thinking, leaving that poor child here alone with no one but us to protect her. We’re on Dathomir—
don’t they realize what happens to Force-sensitive girls on this planet?”

R2-D2 answered with a long, low buzz.

“I most certainly
do
have something to worry about!” C-3PO replied. “Sometimes I think you have all the sensibility of a rolling dustbin and could be replaced by one. In fact, I insist that you stay here with me. I may need you to defend the ship.”

Tweetle-blatt
.

“No, the best defense is not a strong offense. The best defense is a strong
defense
. And that means staying put, protecting Mistress Allana, and not letting her get into trouble, which is her genetic predisposition. As it would be yours, if you had genes.” C-3PO shook his head sadly and continued heading aft, secure that he had, in fact, sorted R2-D2 out for once.

Fifty meters down the narrow black-walled lane, the gleaming silver droid went from stillness to an athlete’s run in an instant, hurtling toward Chief of State Daala.

Daala, dressed in baggy, comfortable exercise wear in blue, drew her blaster pistol from a shoulder holster and aimed in a single, practiced motion. By the time she put her sights on the droid, it had covered half the distance between them. She took an extra moment to aim, allowing the droid to close to ten meters, a distance at which the grin on its skull-like facial features was evident, and then she squeezed the trigger.

Her shot took the droid in the chest—upper right pectoral, had it been a human. The shot turned that section of silver skin black. The droid spun, its beautiful running gait interrupted, and Daala fired again, a snap shot that took the droid in the left side, blackening its hide there.

The droid spun down to the glossy black floor and slid to within three meters. As it did, Daala aimed one last time, carefully, and put a bolt into the thing’s temple.

The indicator screen built into the lane wall beside Daala flashed with the word
KILL
. Below it appeared more words:

Instead of issuing one of those commands, Daala stepped aside and nodded for her companion to take the firing position.

General Merratt Jaxton, Chief of Starfighter Command, dressed like Daala for this practice, stepped up and adjusted his orange-toned goggles. A human male of average height, gray-haired and dark-eyed, he had the sort of squarish build and facial features that the civilian population expected and found reassuring in its military leaders. Like most of the current generation of high-ranking officers, he had come to his position in the power vacuum that had resulted from the end of the Second Galactic Civil War. The change in GA government had left innumerable careers like the droid before them—blackened, prostrate, and failed—and people like Jaxton, efficient war-hawks with spotless records, had stepped up and assumed power.

He looked down at the fallen droid. His voice was a touch rough, lightly flavored with the accent of long-lost Alderaan: “You let it get too close.”

Daala shrugged. “You go for the center of mass first. Put them down,
then
put them out. If you go for the kill shot right away, you, well, die.”

“Nonsense.” Jaxton turned to the control board. “Change parameters. Red Rage addict, enhanced to ten. Reset.”

The droid leapt to its feet and trotted back to the fifty-meter distance spot. As it reached the spot, vents protruding from the walls blew out a quantity of white fog, engulfing the droid. The fog dissipated almost immediately, and with it disappeared the three black marks on the droid’s skin.

The droid turned back toward Daala and Jaxton, then became still.

Jaxton grinned. “Go.”

The droid moved toward them.

Jaxton drew the blaster pistol on his right hip. As the barrel came up into line, he fired.

The bolt took the droid in the center of the forehead. The droid’s head snapped back, then its body fell.

It had taken two steps. It slid forward another two meters, then lay still.

“Impressive.” Daala wasn’t really impressed. She had known too many ex-starfighter-pilots who were far too proud of their shooting skills. In the field, show-off tactics like Jaxton’s would get a soldier killed. But she managed to keep the boredom out of her voice. “You must practice all the time, day and night.”

Jaxton paused, doubtless wondering if her statement was a jab at his recently divorced state. “Not
that
much.” He stepped aside.

“Reset.” Daala stepped up.

The droid rose, returned, was engulfed in fog, and stood gleaming and ready.

Daala did not set it into motion immediately. “I’ve been hearing things. About, well, restlessness.”

“Are we on the record?”

“No.”

“Natasi, I’m your wingman. Always. You know that.”

“Certainly.” Actually, she didn’t; she had never been close to Jaxton, had barely known him before he became a military chief. But he could be telling the truth.

“But, yes, there are mutterings. About you.”

“So, what’s going on—”

At the syllable
“go,”
the droid charged Daala.

Grimacing at both her mistake and the inconvenience of the interruption, Daala raised her pistol and fired. At forty meters, the bolt took the droid in the crotch. The droid curled into a ball as it fell and lay still.

Daala blinked. It really had been her usual center-of-mass shot, but she’d squeezed the trigger just a trifle prematurely as she raised the pistol, and the results looked much more effective than her shooting skills usually warranted.