Shadows of the Empire (39 page)

It stunned her.

Luke pulled his lightsaber, ignited it. This droid was deadly, too dangerous to remain in existence. He lifted the blade.

Lying on her back, stunned, she managed to smile. “You won fairly,” she said. “Go ahead.”

She would have finished you
.

Time stalled again, stretched like plastic melting in a hot fire …

Luke lowered the blade. Shut it off. “Come with us. We can have you reprogrammed.”

She sat up. “No. If they can find a way around my brainblock, if somehow my memory is downloaded, it will be fatal for me—and my master. We have much to answer for. Better to kill me now.”

“It’s not your fault,” he said. “You didn’t program yourself.”

“I am what I am, Jedi. I don’t think there can be any salvation for me.”

“Luke! Come on!”

He shook his head. “There’s been enough killing,” he said. “I’m not adding to it today.” He nodded at her once, turned and ran.

L
eia watched Luke click his lightsaber off, say something to the downed Guri, then turn and jog toward them.

She had lost track of the time, but it had to be getting close.

The five of them made it outside to the landing pad.

There was no sign of the
Millennium Falcon
.

X
izor’s personal ship, the
Virago
, was on the top level. Since it was always kept fueled and ready to go, it
needed no preparation. He reached the ship. With the sounds of the emergency warning system braying over and over, he was somewhat surprised to see the ship guards still in place, albeit they were very nervous.

“The building is going to blow up,” he said, as if talking about the weather. “Take one of the airspeeders and get away. You have two minutes to get clear.”

The guards bowed and hurried away. Perhaps the failure of one was not the failure of all. These two guards would keep their jobs when this was done, maybe even get promoted. So rare to find loyalty these days.

He hurried onto the
Virago
and closed the hatch. It would take a minute to bring all the systems online. Thirty seconds later he would be five kilometers away—the
Virago
was one of the fastest ships on the planet.

He settled into the control seat, waved his hand over the computer sensors, and watched the screens light up. He would fly to his skyhook. He had his own navy stationed in and around the space station, several corvettes, a few frigates, hundreds of rebuilt surplus fighters. He assumed those responsible for destroying his castle had a ship standing by to rescue them.

By the time that ship made it into orbit, his navy would be waiting.

“All systems go,” the
Virago’s
computer said.

Good. He reached for the lift controls. More than a minute left.

He paused for a second, looked through the view-screen at his castle. It was too bad about its destruction. He had spent many good years here, and he would miss it. But he would rebuild, a bigger, better, more majestic place.

Until he could take over the Emperor’s castle.

He touched the lift controls. The
Virago
rose smoothly from the pad and away into the bright sunshine.

He was a few hundred meters away, clear enough to
be safe, when he saw a beat-up Corellian freighter coming at him. The ship seemed to be out of control; it corkscrewed on its horizontal axis, pitched and yawed.

Xizor cursed, hit his emergency boosters, and turned. The
Virago
jagged to port, then jumped as if kicked by a giant boot.

The incoming ship barely missed him.

What kind of idiot was in control of that vessel?

It didn’t matter. He was safe. For a moment, he wondered what had happened to Guri. Another loss.

Well. Life was difficult at times. The trick was to survive—and once again, the Dark Prince had done so. Survive, then make your enemies regret that you did.

D
ash saw it first. “Mother of Madness!” he yelled, pointing.

Luke looked up and saw the
Millennium Falcon
coming in.

Coming in too fast and spinning like a demented toy gyroscope.

As they watched, the wobbly ship straightened; at least it stopped twirling, but it was still coming in too fast—

“Duck!” Lando hollered.

The five of them dropped flat.

The ship almost did a touch-and-go. It pulled up no more than a meter from the pad’s deck and veered to starboard. The wind of its passage tugged at them.

Luke glanced up in the backwash just as the
Falcon
’s port edge hit a Doppler sensor array and shattered it, spraying pieces every which way.

“Threepio, I’m gonna kill you!” Lando roared.

Luke came up with the others and watched the ship circle around. He pulled his comlink. “Threepio, cut your drives! Bring it on the repulsors only! And hurry!”

“I’m trying, Master Luke. The controls are somewhat sensitive.”

The ship hopped upward a hundred meters as if hurled from a sling.

Artoo was going to blow a circuit, he was whistling so fast and so loud.

The
Falcon
lurched, canted sideways, and fell. Righted itself just before it would have plowed into the roof, bounced upward on an invisible column of air.

Finally the ship lost speed. Seemed to float like a falling leaf on a gentle breeze, then stopped and hovered in place fifty meters above them.

Luke glanced around. Fifty meters, five thousand meters, it was too far away. They had less than a minute left.

“Bring it down, you fool droid!” Lando yelled.

“Too bad Leebo isn’t at the controls,” Dash said. “He’s a pretty good pilot.”

“While you’re wishing, wish that
we
were at the controls,” Leia said.

Standing next to the exit were what looked like two sets of folded wings. Abruptly Luke realized what they were: paragliders. Slip a set of those on and you could sail down to a shorter building’s top, or kilometers away to the street. If the ship didn’t get here in the next few seconds, he was going to strap Leia into one of those and throw her off the building. The other paraglider would have four passengers, one of them a Wookiee. They’d be way too heavy, but there was a chance it might work—he’d learned while fighting the walkers on Hoth that he could slow a fall considerably using the Force, and Master Yoda had taught him more—

“Here she comes!” Dash said.

The
Falcon
drifted down toward them. They backed up. The ship hovered over the landing pad two meters up, then dropped like a stone. The landing struts groaned but held. The belly hatch’s ramp yawned wide.

“Go, go, go!” Luke yelled.

Chewie grabbed Leia, picked her up, and ran. Dash and Lando were right behind, and Luke followed.

By the time Luke made it into the ship, the ramp was already closing.

Luke followed the others toward the cockpit.

They had maybe thirty seconds left …

Dash got to the cockpit first, Lando and Luke right behind him.

“Move!” Dash yelled at Threepio.

“I’m moving, I’m moving!”

Dash shoved Threepio and slid into the seat. His hands danced over the controls.

Threepio fell into a heap against the copilot’s seat. Artoo whistled frantically.

“You don’t need to be so rude, Master Dash—”

There came a deep rumble from underneath them. The
Falcon
shook.

“Come on, Dash!” Lando yelled.

Luke looked through the screen, and even though they were in grave danger, he noticed something:

One of the sets of paragliders was gone.

The ship lurched, tilted, started to slide …

 … lifted …

“Go, go!”

The
Millennium Falcon
spun away. As it did, Luke saw the building shake and the landing pad fall away, then drop straight down, like a tower of sand with the base kicked out. Smoke rose; a terrible screech like a giant nail being pulled from wet wood came with the smoke. Blasts of fire erupted skyward. Giant electrical conduits sprayed multicolored sparks. Things exploded and hurled shrapnel at them. The ship rocked under the impacts—

Dash hit the thrusters, and the
Falcon
leaped upward—

Below, the castle of Xizor, Underlord of Black Sun, collapsed into a heap of flaming, smoking ruin.

For once, even Lando didn’t have a funny remark.

Leia joined the others in the crowded cockpit.

“Let’s get out of here,” Luke said. “Nothing fancy, just run as fast as we can.”

“I hear you,” Dash said.

Threepio got up from where he had fallen. “I thought I flew rather well,” he said.

Everybody turned to stare at the droid.

“But I don’t think I would like to do it again anytime soon,” he hurried to add.

Luke shook his head, smiled, and started to chuckle.

It was an unstoppable release of nervous tension. In a few seconds, they were all laughing except Threepio and Artoo.

“What is so funny?” Threepio asked, indignant.

That set them off again. They’d made it. They were safe.

Well, almost. But at least the hard part should be over.

X
izor was angry and, save for the death of his family, could not recall ever having been more so. His castle was gone, his valuables, much of his massive information base, all destroyed in an instant. Artifacts and records that could not be replaced because they had no duplicates anywhere else. Blackmail files, personal projects, the most central secrets of Black Sun since he had taken over, gone—just like that. It would take years to recover, and should something happen to him, his successor would never know much of what was missing because he would never know it had ever
existed
. He wouldn’t even know who had been responsible—all of the files on Skywalker and the princess had been in his personal computer, and it and its backups were slag.

Whatever anger he felt, it was no longer in his voice as Xizor called ahead to his skyhook. He had figured out that the small Corellian freighter that had nearly smashed into him as he leaped away from his castle was the same one his people had been searching for.

The same one that had come to rescue Skywalker and Leia and their friends.

Perhaps it had failed in that mission. Given the way things had been going of late, likely that was not so. Best to be sure.

Being the head of a shipping concern had some advantages when it came to describing ships: “There is a dilemma-saucer-style Corellian freighter leaving the planet shortly,” he told the commander of his navy over the comm. “It is a YT-Thirteen Hundred, a little over twenty-five meters long, a hundred-ton capacity. Locate it and destroy it. If you can disable it and capture the crew and passengers, that would also be acceptable.

“If, however, it gets past, you and anybody else I consider responsible will be fertilizer before the next sunrise—are we perfectly clear on that?”

“Clear, my prince.”

“Good.” He reached for the comm switch to shut off the transmission. “I’ve got you now, Skywalker.”

“I beg your pardon, Highness.”

“What? Nothing. Never mind.”

He flipped the switch and killed the transmission. Probably should not have mentioned Skywalker’s name that way, but it didn’t matter. The opchan was scrambled. It did not matter. He was so close to finishing this now.

He looked at the console’s timer. He should be at the skyhook shortly.

“M
y lord Vader, you asked to see anything regarding this name,” the officer said.

Vader stared at the man. Took the printout flimsy from him and scanned it.

“Where did this originate?”

“An encoded transmission from the ship
Virago
, my
lord, en route to the skyhook
Falleen’s Fist
in high orbit. The ship is registered to—”

“I know who it is registered to,” Vader said. He crumpled the thin plastic hardcopy sheet in his hand.

And though the attending officer could not see it, Darth Vader smiled, ignoring the pain it caused.

“Prepare my shuttle,” he said.

He had warned Xizor to stay away from Luke. The criminal had chosen to ignore that order.

That was a grievous error.

As much as it was possible, Vader was delighted. They had played Xizor’s game long enough. Now they would play his.

D
ash said, “Take over, would you, Luke?”

“Sure.” Luke, already in the copilot’s seat, took the controls. “Where are you going?”

“Nowhere. I just need to whistle up my steed.”

“What?”

Dash pulled a small black rectangular box from his belt. “Long-range shielded single-channel comlink. Time to have Leebo lift and put my ship into orbit. We can rendezvous; I can borrow one of your suits—this bucket still has vac-suits, doesn’t it?—and get back to a real ship instead of this rickety crate.”

Luke smiled. “I guess we can do that.”

“After that, you go your way, I’ll go mine. I figure the cleanup bill for that building down there ought to go a long way to balancing my account with the Empire.”

“You really ought to consider signing on with the Alliance,” Luke said. “You’re a good man and we could use you.”

“Thanks, Luke, but I don’t think so. I’m not much of a joiner.”

He tapped the command button on his specialized
comlink. “Hey, Leebo, you rust bucket, get your gears meshing and meet me at the following coordinates.”

“My master is not in at the moment. Who is calling, please?”

“Very funny,” Dash said. He looked at Luke. “Never buy a droid programmed by a failed comedian.”

X
izor’s landing at the skyhook was uneventful. His navy had already deployed. Since they had all the proper clearances, the Imperial Navy didn’t bother them.

Xizor strode to his command center, a deck surrounded by transparisteel plate that allowed him an almost 360-degree unimpeded view of space around the skyhook.

He had the comm to his commander opened. A holoproj of the man appeared. “Yes, my prince?”

“Have you deployed your vessels, Commander?”

“Yes, Highness. Our sensors have been set to detect any ship matching the criteria you gave me. If it comes this way, we will spot it.”