Honor Among Thieves: Star Wars (Empire and Rebellion) (29 page)

“First the Star Destroyer, now this. Farmboy went and got himself useful,” Han said. “When did that happen?”

“There's more to him than you give him credit for,” Leia replied, but most of her words were drowned out by a series of explosions.

The X-wings cut across the stormtrooper encampment at high speed. The strafing run's goal was maximum confusion, not accuracy. Even so, when the X-wings peeled off and streaked back up into the sky, one AT-ST and two of the anti-aircraft cannons were flaming ruins. The haze of smoke mixed with the mist from the swamp.

The stormtroopers had scattered, some running into the temple, more running into the jungle. A few brave souls held their ground, firing their blaster rifles into the sky. It made a pretty light show, but there was little chance the handheld weapons could pierce a T-65's robust shields.

“Give it another pass,” Han whispered in Leia's ear. “Then we go.” He waved at Scarlet to get her attention, and when she nodded back, he mimed running with his fingers and pointed at himself. She nodded again and got into a crouch, ready to go, braced like a sprinter waiting for the starting gun.

The high, throaty roar of X-wing engines returned, followed by another barrage of fire. This time the X-wings had split up, each strafing one of the high-value targets. All of the remaining walkers and vehicle-mounted weapons exploded as the X-wings rocketed past, the ground around them detonating with high-energy laser shots that hurled mud and steam into the air. The remaining stormtroopers dived for cover as the ground heaved under the onslaught. Black smoke poured out of the destroyed equipment, clouding the field.

“Now!” Han shouted, and broke from cover at a dead run. Leia ran beside him, head down, legs pumping, blaster in hand. Han risked a glance behind and saw Scarlet and Baasen a few steps back. If anyone noticed them in the confusion and carnage the X-wing attack had brought, they kept it to themselves. No new shouts or alarms rang out, and in seconds all four of them had reached the dark opening into the temple.

Four stormtroopers were huddled just inside the entrance, looking up at the sky, waiting for the deadly X-wings to return. One of them glanced at Han, cocking his helmeted head to the side in confusion.

“Hey, you can't—”

Baasen shot him, then shot two more while they fumbled with their weapons. The fourth got his blaster out and pointed it at Baasen's face, but Scarlet dropped low to the ground and kicked out, sweeping the trooper's legs out from under him. He fell on the stone floor with a loud crack and went still.

Han poked Baasen in the chest. “Avoid shooting if you can. There could be a lot more of them in here.”

“In
where,
boyo?” Baasen asked.

It was a good question. The antechamber they'd entered was a square space about the same size as the entrance. The walls were of the same cut stone as the exterior, though in the cool dark of the interior, a profusion of slimy molds and mushrooms grew from the rock. Some of it glowed with its own luminescence. A confusion of tunnels branched off from the entryway, heading in every direction. Except for the four cowering inside the doorway, there were no more troopers in sight.

“You have a map of this?” Han asked.

“Not yet.” While the rest of the group moved into a dark corner to hide, Scarlet reached into one of the many pouches on her belt and pulled out half a dozen metal balls the size of human eyeballs. She held them in the palm of her hand, and they uncurled into metallic insect shapes, with translucent wings and glowing red eyes. She tossed them into the air, and they raced off down the various passages.

“The rebels pay for all those nifty toys, do they?” Baasen asked.

Scarlet grunted noncommittally. Han was pretty sure Scarlet's tools had been paid for by the people she'd stolen them from, but he kept the opinion to himself. She pulled out her datapad and fidgeted with the controls, and soon a glowing holographic map of the interior of the temple began to fill in. The corridors appeared as yellow tubes of light, with larger rooms shifting to orange, and occasional red dots scattered through them. Outside, the scream of X-wing engines started to ramp up again.

To Han's eye it was an impossible maze, but with deft gestures Scarlet rotated the map this way and that, nodding and talking to herself under her breath. She rushed into one of the smaller passages, gesturing impatiently for everyone to follow. They did, and moments later a squad of stormtroopers stepped into the antechamber.

Scarlet backed away down the hallway, watching them, then moved everyone into another branching passage, this one quite dark, so that the only light came from the glowing map. She fiddled with the controls, and the image dimmed until it was barely visible and cast no light on the walls.

“Looks like the alarm went out,” Scarlet whispered. “There will be a lot of troopers in the central corridor.” She pointed at a thick, yellow line on her map, filled with red dots. The dots were moving, and Han realized they must be marking the location of people that Scarlet's bugs had spotted.

“Do you know where we're going?” he asked.

She pointed at a large, glowing orange central room with a very small corridor coming off it and dead-ending. “This, at a guess. Lots of bodies in here, the most in the structure. And that's the only dead end on the map. A door, I'm guessing. And this temple doesn't seem to have any other ways out.”

Leia made a quiet noise of agreement, then whispered, “But that's off the central corridor. Stormtroopers everywhere.”

“All respect, miss, I see at least two other ways to get there, including this here corridor we're in,” Baasen said, pointing at the map. As soon as he did, it was obvious. Han saw the path leading from where they were through a variety of twists and turns and ending up right next to the short dead-end corridor at the center of the temple.

“No troopers in this corridor at all,” he pointed out.

“That worries me,” Scarlet said.

Han's eyes had begun to adapt to the dark, and the faint glow of the mushrooms on the walls gave him a dim gray-scale view of the hallway around him.

“Any reason we should be waiting here?” Baasen asked. He was rocking on the balls of his feet, his grin so faint it might just have been Han's imagination.

“Stay behind me,” Scarlet said, poking Baasen hard in the biceps.

“Aye, love.”

Scarlet turned off her map and headed down the corridor. The stone beneath their feet felt wet and slimy, though at the creeping pace Scarlet set it was easy to keep their footing. The air smelled of rot and decay, and a faint hint of something hot and metallic. After she'd gone a few dozen meters, Scarlet pulled a small light off her belt and turned it on, twisting the control until it gave off only the dimmest illumination.

A few meters later, they reached a partial blockage of the corridor. A stone cube a meter and a half on a side blocked the hallway from wall to wall, leaving only a one-meter gap above it.

“We can climb over,” Scarlet started, but Han touched her arm and pointed at the ceiling above. “Oh.” The block looked to have fallen out of a hole exactly its size.

“Temple falling apart, is it?” Baasen asked.

“No,” Leia said, pointing at the ground next to the block. A single foot poked out from under the stone, wearing a white stormtrooper's boot. “It was a trap.”

Scarlet turned up her light. The hall brightened. The hole above the stone had a complex mechanism for releasing the block onto the corridor below. A printed foil notice had been pasted to the wall: warning: do not use this corridor, it has not been cleared.

“I'd say,” Baasen said, poking the doomed stormtrooper's foot with his toe. “Though this fellow cleared the first trap for us, eh?”

Han put a hand on the stone block. It didn't budge. It must have weighed thousands of kilograms. At least it would have been quick. But something itched at the back of his brain.

“Can we go?” Scarlet asked, trying to get around him to climb on top of the stone cube.

“This doesn't make any sense to me,” Han said, thinking through the puzzle as he spoke. “We came here to find this super-high-tech thing that kills hyperspace, and it's in a temple made out of rock? The traps are deadfalls? Unless this hyperspace blocker is made of granite and powered by a waterwheel, I don't think these people built it.”

“Ever seen a Ternin tree sling?” Baasen asked. “Don't look down on the damage a low-tech solution can achieve.”

“But hyperspace blocking?”

“The K'kybak died out millennia ago,” Scarlet said. “Another more primitive species may have followed them.”

“And built all of this,” Leia added, “to honor the gods that vanished from their world. It's not uncommon to find this sort of layering of civilizations on older worlds.”

“I am not going to like it,” Han said, then paused to boost Scarlet up onto the stone block, “if I get killed by a bunch of primitives.”

Scarlet lay flat on the block and reached down to help pull Leia up. When Baasen moved forward, reaching for Leia's hindquarters, Han thumped him in the chest. “Hands off.”

Baasen had the gall to look wounded. “Was just trying to give the lady a boost.”

Leia clambered up the stone with ease. “The lady is fine, thanks. Let's move.”

Having now seen the first of the ancient builder's deadly traps, Scarlet slowed her pace through the temple, keeping her light turned up. At several points, she had them avoid specific stones set into the floor.

“Pressure plates?” Han had asked at the first.

“Weird looking, and do we want to test?” she'd replied.

Han didn't argue the point, just avoided anything Scarlet told him to avoid and tried not to touch the slime and mushrooms on the walls.

They reached a junction with two other corridors and Scarlet signaled for them to stop, then pulled out her map. “Almost there,” she said, pointing at the room nearby. It was still filled with red dots. “We'll need a plan to get past those guards.”

“What've you got in mind?” Han asked.

“My first thought was to send you and Baasen into the room, guns blazing, and then have Leia and me sneak past while the troopers loot your corpses.”

“You see?” Han said. “That's a terrible plan. This is why we don't use plans. We're really bad at them.”

“Well,” Scarlet said, putting her map away, “let's keep moving, we can figure it out wh—”

Her foot came down on the large stone at the corridor's junction point, and it fell away as if it had never been there. A yawning pit gaped below it, opening into darkness. Scarlet paused for one eternal heartbeat, arms pinwheeling as she tried to keep her balance, one leg still on the ledge while the other hung out over nothing, then she fell forward.

Han's arm snapped out with a gunfighter's speed, the tips of two fingers just barely managing to catch a loose fold of her shirt. But it stopped her fall long enough that Baasen and Leia could dart forward and catch her arms. They pulled her back, hard, and she fell on her rump with a grunt.

“Thank you,” she gasped as she fought to catch her breath.

“You'll want to watch your step in here, miss,” Baasen said. “Traps and whatnot.”

Leia crouched by the spy's side. “Are you all right?” She pulled the canteen off her belt and handed it to Scarlet, who nodded and took a sip.

When her breathing had slowed, the spy stood up and ran a hand through her dark hair. “So, let's not do that again,” she said.

A few twists and turns later, they crouched in the darkness of the side passage looking out into the large room beyond. At the far side of the room, what had appeared to be a short corridor on Scarlet's map actually turned out to be a steep ramp down. From their position, they couldn't see what lay at the bottom. A dozen or more Imperial troops were stationed in the room. About half wore the armor of stormtroopers; the rest were in technician's uniforms. They were looking at the main corridor as though expecting an attack from that direction. They were all armed.

“Only about four each,” Baasen whispered. “I've faced worse.”

Before Han could object, Scarlet said, “Let me give us some help.”

Han pulled his blaster and noted that Leia had done the same. She smiled at him, though it was a sad smile. Han tried out a carefree grin and a wink. It felt false and ridiculous, but he tried not to let it show.

Scarlet was doing something with her map. Han heard a faint buzzing, and one of her six bugs flew past his ear into the room. It joined with the other five already there, and each one landed on a different stormtrooper. A second later, they detonated, knocking the six troopers to the ground. The other six spun around, looking for the attackers, but with Han, Baasen, and Leia firing from cover, all six were down before they could fire a shot.

“That was loud,” Han said. “So we should go fast now.”

He jumped up and ran across the room, hoping the other three were following but not slowing to check. He ran down the ramp, nearly slipping on the slimy wet stone, and flew face-first into a massive metal door.

“Don't touch it,” Leia snapped at him.

“Too late,” Han replied, probing his nose gingerly with one finger. It didn't seem to be broken.

The hatch was made of gleaming alloy, almost seeming to glow with its own internal light. A complex-looking locking device was mounted in the center of the door, though it had been disassembled by the Imperial technicians. They'd hung a simple red button from it.

“Wait,” Leia said, but Baasen was already reaching out. He pressed the button and the shiny metal hatch slid open, revealing a corridor below, sinking down into the crust of the planet. Baasen bounced on his toes and looked back to Leia.

“Sorry, miss. You said something?”

Twenty-Eight

Past the glowing hatch, the corridors changed completely. It was like stepping from one world into another without traveling the space between them. After a steeply descending ramp covered with thin, toothlike silver projections that snagged their toes and seemed to shift as they moved, the passage opened to a tall but almost impossibly thin network of corridors. Han thought the walls seemed to shift whenever he wasn't looking directly at them. The geometry of the corridors was wrong in a way he couldn't quite understand, the floors seeming to tilt in opposite directions at once. He had the eerie and inexplicable sense that the air was tasting him.