Shadows of the Empire (36 page)

“Not far now,” the engineer said.

“Good,” Lando, Luke, and Dash all said together. Chewie said something, too, and Luke didn’t need a translator to figure out he was in agreement. Better to face Xizor’s guards than endure this guck much longer.

“There,” Vidkun whispered. “There is the entrance to the building. It leads into the recycler in the sub-subbasement. There won’t be any guards inside the recycler itself, but there will probably be some in the adjoining flow chamber. Here’s the key to the rat-grate.” He handed a plastic card to Lando. “See you.”

He turned to leave.

Dash stepped in front of him. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Hey, I’m done. I got you to the building, I got you the floor plans for the place, that was the deal.”

“Well, I guess you have us there,” Dash said. “That was the deal, all right. But see, there’s been a little change in our itinerary.”

Vidkun looked alarmed.

“Easy, we aren’t going to blast you or anything. We’d just like you to come along until we get to a place where you can safely … wait for us.”

Vidkun wasn’t having any of it. “No offense or anything, but what if you get killed? I might be waiting a long time!”

“I guess you’ll have to take that chance,” Lando said. “It’s not that we don’t trust you. It’s just that we don’t trust you. Besides, it’ll be a lot nicer inside.” He waved at the gurgling black flow.

“I don’t mind the runoff,” Vidkun said. “I’m in it all the time.”

“Nevertheless, we insist,” Lando said. He patted his blaster.

Vidkun shrugged. “Well. Okay. Since you put it that way …”

And before anybody could react, he pulled a small
blaster of his own from his coverall and started shooting wildly.

Luke hadn’t seen it coming. The guy didn’t seem to be the type. As a result, Luke was slow to clear his lightsaber.

The first shot seared past, a clean miss.

The second shot hit Dash; Luke heard him grunt.
Move,
Luke!

The engineer didn’t get off a third shot because Dash snapped his blaster up and put a bolt right between the man’s eyes.

Vidkun went down with a gooey splash that sprayed black onto the tunnel walls. He slid a little way down the gentle slope on his back, turned slightly, then stopped.

A wisp of smoke rose from the ragged hole in his forehead.

“Dash?”

“I’m okay. Just scorched me a little.”

He turned and showed the burn along his left hip. The bolt had sliced a clean line of Dash’s coverall away and raised a large blister. It wasn’t even bleeding.

“Don’t get any of this crud on you,” Lando said, waving at the sewage. “Probably wouldn’t do you any good.”

“Where’d he get the blaster?” Luke said, replacing his lightsaber.

“Must have had it all along,” Lando said. “What I’m wondering is, why’d he do it? We weren’t going to hurt him.”

“Guy like that, he figures he sold out, why shouldn’t we?” Dash said.

Luke opened the first aid kit he’d brought and offered Dash a surgical dressing. Dash slapped the patch on over his hip, pressed the seal, and relaxed a little as the topical painkiller in the bandage coated the wound. He moved to look down at Vidkun. “I stand corrected,”
he said. “I guess we
were
going to blast you. But it wasn’t our idea.”

“Let’s hope the guards didn’t hear the shooting,” Lando said.

“Yeah.” Luke looked around, took a deep breath. “Ready?”

They were.

“U
h-oh,” Luke whispered.

Crouched behind him in the recycler, Lando also whispered, “I do
not
need to hear that.” A beat. “What?”

Even a whisper seemed loud in the chamber. More of the foul, murky fluid pooled around their ankles. A converter inset into the circular walls hummed and made yet more of the sewage, trickling it down an open drain.

“Guards,” Luke said.

“So?”

“There are six of them.”

“Six? To guard a sewage plant?”

Dash added his whisper: “So what? That’s only one and a half each. How long does it take for you to pull a trigger, Calrissian?”

“Listen, pal, don’t worry about how long I—”

“Shhh!” Luke said. He peered through the half-fogged cover plate on the recycler’s door again. True,
there were six men only a few meters away; then again, four of them sat at a table, playing cards, blast rifles stacked against the wall. Two others stood near the cardplayers, watching and apparently offering advice, but they had their weapons slung over their shoulders. Dash was right. If they moved fast, they could cover the guards before they had a chance to unship their rifles; they could disarm them, tie them up, and be on their way with nobody the wiser. The trick was to do it before one of the guards got his comlink out to call for help.

Luke moved away from the cover plate and crouched in the mire with the others. “Okay, here’s the deal. Dash, you pop the hatch; I’ll go first; Chewie is behind me, then Lando. You come last.”

“Whoa, why that order?” Dash whispered. “And who put you in charge?”

“I can stop a bolt with my lightsaber if one of the guards is some kind of quick-draw expert. Chewie is pretty impressive with his bowcaster; they’ll pay more attention to him than you or Lando. Plus he’s a better shot if it comes to that.”

“Not a better shot than I am. And it’d be a lot easier just to jump out and mow ’em all down,” Dash said. “We hit ’em fast and hard, they’re history.”

“That’s the difference between us and the Empire,” Luke said. “They wouldn’t hesitate to do it that way. We don’t shoot unless we have to.”

“Fine. Get us all killed being a nice guy.”

Luke shook his head. A Jedi had to know how to be active if the situation required it, but a Jedi was also supposed to avoid violence whenever he could possibly do so. “Warrior” and “killer” did not mean the same thing.

“Okay. Ready?” Luke held the lightsaber down low so the glow wouldn’t give them away and clicked it on. He took a couple of deep breaths.

“On three. One … two … 
three
!”

Dash shoved the hatch open—

Luke leaped out, brought his lightsaber up into a ready stance—

“Nobody move!” he yelled—

Chewie jumped out behind him—

—the Wookiee’s wet feet slid on the floor as if he were wearing ice skates, and he fell flat on his back—

Lando tried to leap over Chewie but tripped on the fallen Wookiee and sprawled facedown—

The startled guards leaped up and went for their weapons—

Oh,
man
!

L
eia was sitting on the bed, when all of a sudden she felt a hot jolt of fear.

What—?

T
hey might be stuck in a lousy assignment, but the guards weren’t slow. The two standing unslung their blast rifles and swung them up, fired—

Luke blocked the first bolt, shifted in the Force, blocked the second—

Dash dived over Lando and Chewie, shoulder-rolled once, stretched out prone, fired once, twice, three times—

The two standing guards went down, but another one spun away from the wall, blast rifle spewing—

Chewie sat up, and the bowcaster spoke—

The third guard went down, but the fourth one shot at them—

Luke barely blocked a beam that vibrated his hands and arms hard, but the reflected bolt hit one of the overhead lamps and shattered it; the room went dimmer—

Dash’s blaster spat hard light again and again; Chewie’s bowcaster thrummed—

The guards were all down now, save one, but he didn’t have a gun, he was yelling—

Yelling into a
comlink—

Lando shot the last guard and he dropped; the comlink flew from his hand and rolled to a stop next to Luke’s boots.

From the comlink came a tinny voice: “Thix? What is going on down there? Thix? Come in, sector one-one-three-eight, come in—”

Chewie came to his feet. The Wookiee shrugged and looked embarrassed.

Luke shook his head. Stomped down on the squawking comlink with his boot heel and smashed it.

“So much for sneaking in quietly,” Lando said.

X
izor was paying the cultural minister his monthly bribe when Guri stepped into the room. The Dark Prince made polite noises and dismissed the minister.

When the man was gone, he said, “What?”

“A problem in the sub-subbasement.”

“What kind of problem?”

She shrugged. “We don’t know. That area is still not wired for surveillance and the guards are not answering.”

“Another communication failure,” he said. That happened a lot down where the pipes and conduits and heavy durasteel beams were thick, some kind of com wave interference the engineers had not been able to resolve. Dead spots, they called them. “It’s either a com glitch—or Skywalker is faster and smarter than we thought. Have the drain sensors picked up any armies marching in under the building?”

“No.”

“Good. If it is Skywalker, he’s probably alone, or perhaps the Wookiee is with him. Send a unit to check it out.”

“Two squads are already on the way,” she said.

“Good. Send in the Moff on your way out. There is nothing to worry about.”

There really wasn’t anything to be worried about, he told himself. One
boy
wasn’t going to get past his security, no matter how lucky he was.

L
uke and the others ran. So far, the floor plan they’d memorized was accurate, but it was too big to have learned it all, and there was a chance they might blunder into a dead end if they weren’t careful. Still, speed was the most important thing now; the place was alerted. They’d have to risk it—they couldn’t afford to take the guided tour.

Chewie knew where Leia was, and he was in the lead.

The quartet came around a sharp corner in a wide corridor and nearly ran into four more guards.

Everybody who had a blaster started shooting.

From the comlink on Luke’s belt, Threepio’s strident and excited voice suddenly began calling: “Master Luke, Master Luke!”

Luke blocked an incoming blaster beam. He yelled at the comlink but left it on his belt: “We’re busy here, Threepio!”

“But Master Luke, there are men coming toward the ship! Men with guns!”

Great
. Just what he needed.

Luke deflected another beam, leaped forward, and found himself within reach of the man who’d shot at him. He whipped the lightsaber down, and the hand holding the blaster dropped to the floor. Luke spun and thrust a side kick at the guard, hit him squarely on the nose, and knocked him flat.

The other guards were all down as well. Luke pointed the way the guards had just come. “That way—it ought to be clear!”

As they ran, he pulled his comlink from his belt. “Threepio?”

“Oh, dear, oh, dear!”

“Threepio!”

“Master Luke. Oh, what shall we do?”

“Take the ship out of there, now! Just like we talked about. Artoo knows the systems; you can operate the controls. Call me back when you’re in the air. Keep it suborbital and under the stratospheric security scanners, you got that?”

“Yes, Master Luke!”

“Go!”

L
eia felt something in the air. A sense of impending … 
something
she couldn’t quite touch. Luke.

Luke was here.

She began to gather the parts of her disguise.

“W
e’ve lost contact with the second unit of guards,” Guri told Xizor.

“Same area?”

“No. Four levels up.”

Hmm. That was well above the normal area of com problems in the castle. And an unlikely coincidence.

“Put security on full alert.”

“Already done,” she said.

Could it be Skywalker? Had he somehow gotten into the castle without being detected? Or was it someone else?

“Cancel my appointments. Go and fetch Princess Leia. Bring her to my strong room.”

C
hewie led them up another eight or ten floors before they ran into another group of guards. The exchange of blaster fire was fast, the air full of crackling
energy, yelling men, the smell of burned wall and ozone.

Dash was right about one thing: He could shoot. He nailed three guards with three shots—
zap, zap, zap!—
as fast as anybody Luke had ever seen. Luke himself deflected or blocked the bolts that came his way, the ricochets adding to the general confusion. Chewie and Lando pounded away with their weapons. The guards were not bad, but they weren’t desperate. They were shooting for pay; Luke and his friends were shooting for their lives. The last guard standing turned and ran. Chewie spiked him and he did a belly flop onto the floor and skidded two meters before veering into a side wall and thumping to a halt.

“Go, go, go!”

L
eia felt somebody approaching her room. Intuition, she guessed, but she trusted it. She grabbed one of the chairs and slid it next to the door. Stood on the back of it, balanced carefully against the wall, the heavy bounty hunter’s helmet clutched tightly in her hands.

The door opened, and Guri stepped into the room. She was fast, but Leia had already started moving. Before Guri could turn, Leia hammered the back of her head with the helmet. It was a powerful blow and would have knocked a human woman unconscious. As it was, the impact was enough to off-balance the droid, and she stumbled forward.

That was enough for Leia to leap from the chair and scoot out of the room into the hall. She slapped the door control—

Guri recovered and was on the way back, when the door shut. Leia jammed the lock mechanism closed—

The door shook from Guri’s impact.

The next hit splintered the heavy plastic, spider-webbed
it with tiny cracks. It wasn’t going to hold her long, Leia knew.

She turned and ran.

C
hewie led them up a stairwell a dozen levels above where they’d entered the castle.

“Master Luke? We have successfully left the building.”

Threepio.

Luke pulled his comlink so he wouldn’t have to yell at it. “Where are you?”

“Somewhere in the sky, Master Luke, I—what? Oh, be quiet, I’m flying it correctly, it—ah! Ahh!”

“Threepio?”