Shadows of the Empire (37 page)

There was a moment of silence. Then a crunching noise. “I saw it, you blithering ash can! If you hadn’t distracted me I would have turned in time.”

“Threepio, what is going on?”

Luke heard Artoo whistling frantically in the background.

“Shut up, you twit! It was
not
my fault!”

“Threepio?”

The droid said, “What? Where?
Oh, no!
”

There came a sound like breaking glass.

“
Threepio!
”

“I’m sorry, Master Luke. Thanks to Artoo’s woefully inadequate instructions, we’ve accidentally destroyed an advertising billboard and a broadcasting tower. No, I don’t think we hit that hover van, we just brushed it. Yes, it was
too
your fault! If you hadn’t been jabbering at me like an overheated
teakettle
, I would have—”

“Threepio, stop talking to Artoo and tell me what is going on.”

“We are flying somewhat low to the ground because Artoo said we should, but I do think we should climb a bit higher. No, I don’t care how much astronavigation
you know, I am flying the ship now. Just give me the directions.”

“All right. Listen. Bring the
Falcon
to the coordinates I told you. Hurry. And gain enough altitude so you don’t hit anything.”

“You see? I
told
you we were too low, but no, no one can tell
you
anything,
you
know it all—”

“Threepio!”

“Yes, Master Luke. We are on the way. No, I don’t think we should go that way, that building is much too tall, we should go this way, oh,
look out
!”

Luke had to break the connection then. There was a door just ahead of them, a heavy fireproof door, and it was locked.

Lando leveled his blaster at it, but Luke stopped him. “Don’t. It’s magnetically shielded. That will bounce off and maybe hit one of us.”

“How are we supposed to get through it, then?”

“Stand back. Let’s see if it will stop a lightsaber.”

He lit the blade.

The door would not stop a lightsaber.

They went through and continued to climb.

G
uri burst into Xizor’s strong room. He blinked at her. “What?”

“She got away. She was waiting when I got there. She struck me from behind. I am undamaged but it gave her enough time to slip out.”

“Blast!” Xizor could not control his outburst. This was not good. This was his castle, and things were getting out of control. Had he underestimated Skywalker? Apparently so. Time to correct that.

He moved to a desk, opened a sliding panel. Removed from the hidden compartment a sleek and high-powered blaster.

“All right. Let’s go find her. And whoever is causing these problems.”

“H
old up a second,” Lando said.

“What? Why?”

Lando pointed at a junction box inset into the wall. “This is a security breaker.”

“So?”

“Move to that side.”

Everybody did. Lando fired a blaster bolt into the simple lock mechanism, swung the thin plate open. “The surveillance holocams and sensors are routed through these fiber-optic cables.” He waved his blaster at several finger-thick translucent white wires.

“How do you know that?”

“Trust me. I have some experience with such things.” With that, he blasted the cables. Smoke and sparks spewed from the wall, made a short-lived fountain of yellow and orange before it shorted out. The acrid stink of burned plastic filled the corridor.

“Now they won’t be able to see us, at least on this level. If we take out all of these we find, they’ll go blind.”

Chewie yelled something. Luke turned. More guards, and they weren’t blind, although they shot as if they were. Good thing, too.

“This way!” Luke yelled.

Firing behind them, the four of them ran, blaster bolts stabbing after them.

They rounded another corner, zigzagged through a side corridor, and sprinted toward a door at the end of the hall. Heard somebody pounding toward the other side, saw the door start to slide back. Dash and Lando brought their guns up—

“No!” Luke yelled. “Don’t shoot!”

The door opened wide to reveal—

“Leia!”

Luke grinned, and she returned it. He ran to her. They embraced.

“Took you long enough,” she said. She looked closer at them, wrinkled her nose. “Gah, what have you been swimming in? You smell like that stuff Lando tried to feed us. And you look like it, too.”

“The ship broke down,” Luke said. “So we had to take a shortcut through the sewer.”

Both of them glanced at Lando.

“It was not my fault about the ship,” Lando said. “It was Han’s modification!”

“Never mind. Let’s get out of here.”

Now five, they ran.

“Master Luke?”

“What is it now, Threepio?”

“We appear to have caught the attention of a robotic police vessel. It seems to be following us.”

“Well, lose it.”

“How, Master Luke?”

“Fly like Han does.”

As she ran next to him, Leia’s eyes went wide. “You’re letting the
droids
fly the ship? Are you crazy?”

“They’re doing all right. Just a few jitters, that’s all. They’re really doing quite well.”

“No, shut up, Artoo!” Threepio said. “You heard what Master Luke said. I’ll just loop around, whoa—yaahh!”

Artoo’s whistles and squeals sounded even more frantic.

“Master Luke! Help! Help!”

“Threepio, what are you doing?”

Artoo’s whistles sounded like a recording played at ultrahigh speed.

“I’m
trying
to turn it right side up! Be quiet. Ahh!”

“Sounds as if they are upside down,” Lando said.

“ ‘Doing all right,’ you said,” Leia said. “I can’t believe you let them fly the ship.”

“Threepio, do what Artoo tells you! Artoo, show him how to pull out of the loop!”

There came another exchange of squeals and nervous chatter over the comlink.

“Ah, that’s better. We seem to have lost the pursuer, Master Luke. I believe it smashed into that walkway we flew under while we were upside down.”

“I can’t believe you let the droids fly the—”

Luke glared at her. “Will you stop saying that?” He looked back at the comlink. “All right, you two, get to the coordinates like I said. And be more careful.”

“We’re doing quite well now, Master Luke. Don’t worry.”

Luke stared up at the ceiling and sighed.

“I
’ll sound the general alarm—” Guri said.

“
No!
How would that look? The head of Black Sun allows his security to be breached? Tell the perimeter guards to watch their backs—whoever got in had better not get out.”

Guri nodded and spoke into her comlink.

They hurried down the corridor past the room from which Leia had escaped. There was a surveillance nexus, a substation not far ahead, where they could access the feed and see holograms of the holocam input. They would stop there and spot the intruders, who were inside the camnet once they ascended from the basement.

They arrived at the node. Guri tapped commands into an old-fashioned keypad. An image of Xizor’s personal logo appeared in the air. She tapped in her security ID code, changed the reader from pad to vox access. “Display level fifteen, anybody not wearing an employee uniform.”

The image broke into a million tiny dots, swirled like water going down a drain, then went blank.

Xizor frowned. Tapped his forehead with the blaster he held.

“Where is the image?” Guri asked the computer.

“Holocam and sensor feed on level fifteen are currently nonoperational.”

“Display level sixteen.”

Again, the image stayed blank.

“Display level seventeen.”

The same.

“Display level eighteen.”

The air swirled, and a multiple scan of empty hallways and rooms blinked into ghostly images.

“They are on seventeen,” Xizor said.

Guri looked at him.

He waved the blaster at the images. “They’re blowing out the breakers so we won’t see them. If they’d gotten to eighteen yet, that floor would also be gone. Come on.”

“We don’t know how many of them there are,” Guri said. “We’ve lost at least a dozen guards. It is too dangerous for you to go there.”

“I will be the judge of what is too dangerous,” he said. “And since we know it is Skywalker, this is where it ends. I will dispatch him
personally
!”

He would
not
be embarrassed in his own castle.

“S
o what … is … the plan?” Leia said, breathless.

“We get out of here,” Luke said. “Get to the
Falcon
and get offworld as fast as we can.” As if to head off her much-repeated amazement, he said, “Threepio and Artoo can do it.”

She shook her head.

Chewie said something, and Leia guessed that the
Wookiee wasn’t too pleased with their new pilots, either.

“Listen,” Lando said, “if we don’t get out of here, it doesn’t matter who is flying what. Come on.”

Leia nodded. Lando had a good grasp of the situation.

Dash said, “The man is right.”

Luke said, “Nobody will think we’re stupid enough to go up. They’ll look for us to try and leave at ground level.”

Lando laughed. “Yeah, that’s the problem with our opposition—they keep thinking nobody could possibly be as stupid as we are. Fools ’em every time.”

Leia shook her head again. She now carried a blaster somebody had taken from one of the fallen guards along the way, and that made her feel a little better. Not much better, but a little. She’d seen enough of Xizor to realize that if they couldn’t escape, it would be better if he didn’t take them alive. Beneath that charming facade lurked a monster, and she had no intention of falling into his hands again.

X
izor and Guri stepped into the turbolift. “Level twenty,” Xizor ordered. “We’ll wait for them there.”

The turbolift dropped, gave him a moment of free fall that fluttered in his belly like a trapped bird trying to escape. Despite the anger he felt at being invaded, there was a sense of excitement about all this. It wasn’t very often he got to dispatch people with his own hands. He was certain that the castle-breakers included Luke Skywalker. For daring to get this far, he would take particular pleasure in killing the boy.

He took a deep breath, exhaled part of it, fought for control. It was not seemly to allow his emotions such free play. Then again, there was no one here but Guri and his staff. He didn’t care what she thought, and his guards were going to be replaced to a man after this
was over. Failure of one was, as far as Xizor was concerned, failure of all. And those other than foot soldiers—the supervisors—would find their dismissals particularly painful.

The turbolift slowed. His weight seemed to increase as the floor of the lift pressed harder against the soles of his boots.

“Level twenty,” the turbolift announced.

The door slid wide.

Xizor raised the blaster to point at the ceiling next to his right ear in a ready-carry position. He spent a few hours a week practicing at his personal firing range. He was an excellent shot.

Guri bore no weapon; though she also excelled at marksmanship, she seldom needed to use a blaster.

They stepped out into the corridor.

“L
evel twenty,” Dash said. “Stairs end here, we’ll have to zip in and find another set.”

“How many levels are in this place?”

“As I recall, a hundred and two aboveground.”

“Oh, man,” Lando said. “And we have to go all the way to the roof?”

“No, there’s a landing pad extending out from level fifty,” Luke said.

“That’s nothing. Another thirty flights, we won’t even be breathing hard,” Dash said.

“I can barely breathe now,” Lando said.

“You’re getting old, Calrissian.”

“Yeah, and I’d like to get a lot
older,
too.”

“There should be another set of stairs across the hall and down about sixty meters,” Luke said. “Let’s move.”

They moved.

X
izor saw them first because Guri was opening a side door looking to see if they were already here and hiding. Five of them, Leia included. The Wookiee was there—he should have expected him to come back for her—and three men. One of them was dark-skinned; that would be the gambler. Another one was not somebody he recognized, and the third was Skywalker.

The Dark Prince smiled. Turned sideways, lowered his blaster, and extended it one-handed, his free hand on his opposite hip, just as if he were shooting targets in a sanctioned competition. Lined his sights up on Skywalker’s left eye, let out half his breath, held it, squeezed the trigger gently …

L
uke spotted the tall alien just as he brought his blaster to bear.

Uh-oh. Looked like the guy had spent a lot of time at the range.

He jerked his lightsaber from his belt, flicked it on, and let the Force claim him—

The deadly lance of energy rocketed at Luke—

His lightsaber came across, an inward move, and stopped as if by its own volition in front of his face, blocking the view from his left eye—

He felt the impact as the energy of his blade deflected the energy of the incoming bolt. It would have hit him right in the eye—

The alien fired again—

Again the lightsaber moved, directed by the Force. Another beam splashed harmlessly against the handmade Jedi weapon and bounced back and down, hit the floor, and burned through—

X
izor frowned. How could he
do
that? He couldn’t be that fast!

He fired again—

Guri leaped out into the corridor. She held a chair, a heavy metal thing with casters on the bottom. She hurled it down the hallway as if it weighed no more than a pebble—

“L
ook out!” Luke yelled.

A chair pinwheeled at him. He couldn’t use his saber to cut it down, and risk another bolt from the shooter—

Chewie stepped forward, level with Luke, brought his bowcaster up, fired—

The chair exploded into shrapnel and sprayed them with a prickly hail—

L
eia saw Xizor and Guri in front of them. She snapped her borrowed blaster up and fired. Saw immediately that she was too high, tried to lower her sights—