Corellian Trilogy_ Assault At Selonia Part 16

"He dropped the handlight and broke it," Mara said, clearly irritated with the dead man, as if he had broken the light on purpose.

"We could have used that. The fool didn't even have a blaster."

"That's all you've got to say?"

"That's all there's time for, if we want to live through this,"

Mara said. "If it helps, I was going to try and knock him out, not shoot him, until he claimed to have a gun."

"It doesn't help much," leia said, staring at the dead man. He was their enemy. If he had managed to raise the alarm, or caught them himself, or if he had had a blaster, things would look very bad. But telling herself those things didn't make him any less dead. And there was no time. "We have to move," she said, coming out of it. "If there was one of them sleeping here, there might be more. And someone might have heardr this one might have called it in before he came out for a look."

"Right," said Mara. "Back to the foyer and down.

Unless you want to try another three floors on a homemade rope."

"No, thank you," leia said. There were risks in heading down the inside of the building, but nothing like those involved in another run down the outside. "Let's go.".

It was time to move fast. leia led the way back to the foyer, stumbling in the darkness once or twice. She had been in the emergency stairs once before, just after the attack on Corona House, but even knowing her way, it was almost impossible to navigate in virtually complete darkness through the heaps of junk that seemed to be strewn about everywhere.

"Step back from me," she said to Mara, "and shield your eyes for a second. I'm going to switch on my lightsaber.

leia shut her own eyes as she unclipped the lightsaber from her belt and activated it. The weapon came alive with the familiar low thrum of power. Even through her closed eyelids, the light from the blade seemed remarkably bright after the gloom and darkness. She gave her eyes a moment to adjust, and then opened them cautiously, being careful not to look at the lightblade itself. She held the blade vertically and looked around the foyer, now lit by the ruby-red glow of the lightsaber.

"First time I've ever seen one of those used for a handlamp," Mara said.

"You work with what you've got," leia said. "There's the door to the stairs. Let's go."

They picked their way through the broken furniture and heaps of discarded loot and made their way to the stairs. The door to the stairs was slightly ajar, and leia prodded it with her toe. It swung open a bit but stopped before the opening was wide enough to go through.

leia shoved a little harder with her foot, then with her hip, forcing the opening wider.

Lightsaber at guard, she stepped onto the landing and forced herself to repress the impulse to jump back when she saw what had blocked the doorway.

It was a body, the dead body of a young man, wearing the uniform of the Governor-General's tech staff. The corpse was lying on its back, and had a neat hole between its open eyes. The shifting red shadows cast by the lightblade made the dead man seem a strange and alien thing. leia recognized him, though she did not know his name.

He had been the one who told her about the interdiction field, just after Han had vanished.

How long ago was that? Just a few days? Half a lifetime? He had seemed a nice young man. Now here he -. --, -'. - Iji was, shot dead and left to rot in a stairwell for some trivial and unknown offense. The Human League made itself awfully easy to hate.

She gestured for Mara to follow her and stepped over the body, down the stairs. Mara came after. leia made her way down the darkened stairs in a moving pool of dim red light cast by the lightsaber. The emergency staircase was a cold, harsh place, its plain unfinished stresscrete walls looming up hard and gray, every flaw in their surfaces wildly exaggerated by the elongated shadows. Even here, the looting troopers had discarded whatever they could not use. A broken desk lamp, a flurry of papers scattered about, a vase, a hat, a comlink rendered useless by the jamming the Human League had imposed.

She could imagine the League troopers tromping down these stairs a day or so ago, arms full of whatever they had grabbed, not much caring if a woman's shoe fell out of the heap, deciding that the heavy iron Frozian statue wasn't worth carrying. Somehow the crime of theft, the act of looting, was made worse when it was this wasteful, this pointless, this mindless.

"Psst."

leia turned and saw Mara holding a finger to her lips, signaling for silence. She pointed to her ear. Listen.

leia could hear a distant, low booming, and the wind moaning through the building. Rain, she mouthed, and pantomimed rain falling.

Mara shook her head, pointed at the lightsaber, and put a finger to her lips again.

leia shut off the lightsaber for a moment to silence its hum.

They stood in the darkness and listened. The sounds of the rain came through far more clearly with the lightsaber off, but clearly that was not the sound Mara was worried about.

Then leia heard it, very faint, coming from up above.

Voices, rough male voices, speaking in harsh, urgent tones, and the clatter and shuffle of men hurrying about in the background. It was impossible to make out the words, but equally impossible to mistake the cadences of the voice. It was clearly one man giving orders to others.

Their escape had been discovered. Maybe someone had spotted the rope. Maybe the dead trooper in leia's apartment had managed to call in before his death. How didn't matter. leia switched the lightsaber back on, and the two of them hurried faster down the stairs, past the fourteenth, past the thirteenth floor.

When they reached the twelfth, Mara's floor back before the world turned upside down, leia grabbed the door handle and pulled hard. It didn't budge. She pulled again. Nothing. Had it been welded shut by the League?

Had the explosions jammed the doors shut? No way to tell, and no time to examine the door for clues. Not when the League troops were going to start searching for them any second now.

leia swung the lightsaber down hard, in a carefullyaimed vertical cut down the latch side of the door. She gave the door a good solid kick and it bounced back against the doorframe and swung out toward them. leia and Mara stepped through it, and Mara pulled the door shut behind them.

The lightsaber cuts on the door would provide a clue that even a Human Leaguer could read, but maybe, just maybe, no one would think to look.

leia turned to Mara. "All right," she said in a loud whisper, "twelfth fioo Where to now?"

Mara shook her head. "It's a little hard to say." leia looked around, and saw Mara's point. They were in the twelfth-floor foyer, and if the equivalent s.p.a.ce on the fifteenth had been a mess, this foyer was barely there anymore. There had been a major explosion here that - had cracked open the floor and left boulder-sized chunks of stresscrete wall and floor lying everywhere.

The handsome wood paneling had been splintered into ruin and half the doors leading to the private rooms were blown clear open. One wall of the foyer had been completely flattened, doors and all, so that the rooms beyond the wall were exposed to view. Most of the remaining doors had been wrenched partly or completely off their hinges.

Virtually every window was shattered, and the wind was blowing in everywhere. leia could hear the splattering rush of rain pouring down.

The smell of cold rain seemed to grab at her, speak to her of wet, miserable nights and the trouble yet to come. But there was another, and a worse, smell the sickly-sweet odor of rotting flesh. People had died here when that rocket hit, died and been smashed as flat as the walls.

The dead were buried here, somewhere in the dark, under the debris that had killed them.

But if the ghastly scene was affecting Mara, she did not show it.

"My room is this way," she said.

"If it's still anywhere at all," leia said, following close behind.

Mara led her almost to the end of the hallway, far enough away from the blast that the doors were still on their hinges, and one or two were still closed and latched.

Not so the door Mara stopped in front of. It was bent backward at a crazy angle, held in place by just the upper hinge, blocking the entrance rather effectively.

"Allow me," leia said, and slashed the lightsaber down on the offending hinge. The door dropped to the floor with a resounding crash, and the women walked over it to the interior of Mara's quarters.

It was a smaller apartment than leia's, but then, leia was the Chief of State and Mara was just a Master Trader. The apartment was really no more than a bedroom, a refresher, and an autokitchen set into one wall, but the furnishings were opulent and handsome. At least they had been.

Here the wreckage was caused not by looting, but by the violence of the rocket attack. A big chunk of the stresscrete ceiling had fallen in onto the bed, crushing the frame. leia looked up and saw the hole it had left.

The rest of the room was in no better shape. The paintings and other decorations had come off the wall, the chairs and table were overturned, and broken gla.s.s was everywhere. She looked toward the window and saw that the rain was coming down in earnest now, a real storm. The rain flared and pulsed in a dull throb of light as a bolt of lightning flashed somewhere nearby. The rumble of thunder rolled in the window as the sodden drapery flapped in the wind.

Mara wasted no time looking around, but went immediately to the closet and wrenched the door open. The contents spilled out onto the floor, and she knelt down and dug through them until she found a small satchel with a long strap. She stood up, put the strap over her shoulder, and opened the satchel, digging through it until she came up with a handlight. She switched it on, and instantly the weird shadows cast by the lightsaber vanished. After the bloodred glow of the saber, it was an amazing relief to see by the warm yellow light of the handlamp. Suddenly even the room full of wreckage seemed like a normal, understandable place, instead of a den of looming shadows.

leia shut off the lightsaber, but did not clip it to her belt.

The League troopers could still show up any moment. "So where's the slave controller?" leia asked.

Mara set a side table upright, put the handlamp on it and pointed it at the bed. "Under there. The good news is it's obvious no one else could have gotten to it. The bad news is that I'm not sure it'll much matter if we can."

"You think it might have been crushed?" The largest hunk of stresscrete was about half a meter long and twice as wide, and about eight centimeters thick.

I4 1g SICCI, -- A-fl "One way to find out," Mara said. "Give me a hand clearing the bed off."

"Stand back and let me get the problem down to size first," leia said. She swung the lightsaber down and it slashed through the hunk of stresscrete again and again, chopping it up into smaller pieces. leia was careful to keep the lightsaber under tight control so as not to slice into the bed beneath it. Needing both hands free, she shut off the lightsaber and clipped it to her belt. "Here," she said, "grab the other end. And stay away from the cut edges-they're going to be plenty hot."

The two women heaved the chunks of stresscrete off the bed, working together on the biggest ones. "That ought to b, good enough," Mara said.

"Help me flip the bed over.

They stood next to each other, got their hands under the broken frame, and heaved up on it. The broken bed came up, and a minor avalanche of debris clattered down onto the floor. The bed wobbled back and forth a bit, but stayed balanced on its side. "Well, we've made enough noise to bring in every Leaguer in the building," Mara said, "but I don't know how we could have done this quietly."

"Let's just hope the rainstorm shields the noise," said leia "Except that rain isn't doing us any favors. There's no way we can get line of sight on the J['de's Fire through that. We'll just have to wait until it clears up."

"No chance of using the comlink frequencies and getting through the jamming?" leia asked.

Mara shrugged. "No harm in trying, but I can't see how it could possibly work. a.s.suming the controller hasn't been smashed flat.

Bring that handlight around here and let's see what we've got."

leia retrieved the light and held it for Mara. There it was, a neat, flat little metal package taped to the center of the bed frame's underside. No one could ever have found it without upending the bed.

Even then, they might have missed it. Either by chance or design, it was exactly the same dark brown color as the underside of the frame.

Mara peeled the package off the frame and turned it up on its end.

The package was a bit crumpled in one corner, but it looked to be more or less in one piece.

Mara opened it up and pulled out a small, jet-black device, liberally festooned with b.u.t.tons and switches.

She pushed in the power b.u.t.ton and all the other b.u.t.tons lit up.

"That's something, anyway," she said. "At least it thinks it's working."

leia was about to make some sort of encouraging reply when they heard a bang and a thud, and m.u.f.fled voices. leia immediately shut off the handlight, and both women ducked behind the upturned bed.

They knelt there, staring at each other in the dim light cast by the slave controller, listening. They heard the clatter and rattle of bits of debris falling down, and the sound of heavy boots tromping on the rubble. The voices and footsteps came nearer, became more distinct.

leia unclipped her lightsaber once again, her thumb on the power b.u.t.ton. Mara shut off the slave controller to extinguish the lights on its control panel, shoved it in the satchel that still hung over her shoulder, pulled Han's blaster out, and held it at the ready. Then she slipped her hand into the satchel again, and pulled out a smaller blaster from there.

Suddenly one set of footsteps sounded so loud leia thought the walker was going to step on her. A handlight beam flared into the darkened room and swooped around, casting huge, distorted shadows everywhere.

"You check the next one over," the trooper shouted out into the hall. "I got this one."

They could hear the mangled door creaking a bit as the trooper stepped on it, the crunch of his boots on the broken gla.s.s, his breathing as he stepped fully mt0 the room, the sounds mixing with the steady low roar of the storm outside. leia could hardly believe the trooper could not hear her heart pounding against her ribs.

He stepped around the bed and looked into the corners of the room, his back to leia and Mara.

Mara had her pocket blaster aimed straight at the man's heart as he finished his cursory check. He turned back the way he had come, little realizing that he was staying alive by keeping his back to the upended bed.

The trooper headed back out into the hallway, and the two women relaxed, if only a trifle. Neither needed to tell the other that the trooper or his friends could be back at any moment. leia tapped Mara on the shoulder and pointed to the smashed-out window. Mara frowned and nodded reluctantly. Neither of them could work up much enthusiasm for standing on the narrow ledge in the middle of a rainstorm, but they were running out of hiding places.

leia clipped her lightsaber back on her belt and climbed up onto the windowsill one-handed, carrying the handlight with her. She immediately found she had to be careful of her footing. The gla.s.s in this window had not come out anywhere near as cleanly as it had on the floors above. Jagged shards still hung in all the window frames, and broken bits of it were all about. But with a little care, she managed to get clear of it all.

The trouble started the moment she stepped out onto the rain-swept ledge and moved toward the right side of the window, trying to get out of sight. The rain instantly soaked her to the bone, and the wind was deafeningly strong. Moving on the rain-slicked stone was like walking on wet ice. leia put her back to the wall, grabbed onto one of the sodden drapes flapping the window, and hung on for dear life. Knowing it was a bad idea, she glanced downward, down toward the ground twelve flights below, made invisible in the driving rain. So easy to put a foot wrong and1) But then Mara was coming out onto the ledge, and leia had other things to worry about. Mara was moving a bit faster than she should have.

She slipped, and leia caught her just barely in time.

Mara twisted awkwardly and managed to recover, catching her left calf on a jagged piece of gla.s.s in the process. Mara grabbed at leia and hung on for dear life. It took her a moment to compose herself, and then she clambered over leia to get past her on the ledge. leia let her pa.s.s, and then, still holding on to the drape, edged out of view of the window.

She put her back to the building's Outer wall and braced herself there, with her eyes shut, able to do nothing more than concentrate on the need to keep breathing.

They were here, they were alive, and that was about the best that could be said. Sooner or later the Leaguers would search again, and someone with more brains than yesterday's rancid gumbah pudding would notice the telltale marks of a lightsaber on the door of Mara's room, or on the neatly sliced strips of stresscrete, and then, perhaps, even think of looking out the window. Or else the wind would shift, and simply blow them clean off this ledge. Or they would drown like hive rats in the rain.

Or else Mara could get that blasted slave controller working, and her ship would come and rescue them.

leia opened her eyes and looked over to Mara. She already had the controller out, trying to work it in the driving rain. leia glanced toward the open window and decided that the odds were very low they could see a light through all the rain, so long as she was careful.

She adjusted the handlight so it put out a tight beam and pointed it down at the controller.

Mara glanced up at her and nodded her thanks, and tried the unit again. Then she shook her head. "No good," she shouted into leia's ear, struggling to be heard over the pouring rain. "Comlink mode is jammed MUMULI AT WflM 159 for sure, and there's not a chance in the Galaxy of a laser punching through all this. We'll just have to wait out the rain."

leia nodded. Mara turned off the slave controller and shoved it into her satchel. leia turned off the handlight and tucked it inside her blouse.

"Wait," she said to herself, in a voice so low that Mara could not possibly hear. She knew as well as Mara that they could not wait for long. She told herself that she should look on the bright side. If this rain had come out while they were on the rope, they would never have made it. At least they had gotten this far. Besides, these rainstorms never lasted long. The faster they came up, the faster they blew themselves out. "Just wait," she said, "and hope to the stars that slave controller is really working-" Suddenly the wall of rain in front of her bloomed with light, light coming from inside the building, from the room they had come from. Someone was back in there, looking around. leia gave Mara a very gentle nudge to get her attention and nodded toward the light.

Mara's eyes widened, and she nodded back.

But what could she do?

They were trapped, but leia was not interested in going down without a fight. She mouthed the words "pocket blaster" to Mara. The trader nodded, pulled the blaster out of her satchel, and handed it over.

leia took it in her right hand. Her left hand was still holding onto the drapery, and she let go of it and moved the blaster to that hand. She unclipped her lightsaber and held it at the ready in her right hand.

Anyone who came out that window was going to pay dearly for doing so.

But then the light from the inside went away. Another reprieve.

leia realized she had been holding her breath, and forced herself to exhale. Maybe it was going to be all right.

At that moment the wind shifted, and suddenly the rain was fading away, the line of squalls pa.s.sing over Coronet and moving on to other business elsewhere on the coast.