Star Wars_ Shadows Of The Empire Part 16

"Artoo, where is Leia?" Luke asked.

He and Dash had returned to Ben's, each on a swoop. The two swoops were under the camo-tarp with the X-wing now. Dash's ship was in Mos Eisley at the port.

"Gone to Rodia to connect up with Black Sun." Luke nearly dropped the container of cold water he held. "Black Sun! Is she out of her mind?"

Dash smirked. "Oh, you're an expert on them, are you?"

"No, but I talked to Han a lot while we were cooped up on Hoth during the cold, stormy nights. He had dealings with them. He said they were more dangerous than the Empire." He paused a second. "Why would Leia want to contact Black Sun?"

Dash shrugged. "Got me. Maybe they might know who wants you dead. The princess is fond of you, though I can't see why. You gonna hold on to that water until it evaporates?"

Luke glanced at the forgotten container. "Oh, sorry." He handed the water to Dash, who poured himself a large cup, then drank noisily from it.

The idea of Leia fooling around with a vicious underground criminal organization didn't sit well. Still, what was he going to do about it?

She was a big girl; she'd been taking care of herself okay before they'd met. Well, if you didn't count getting captured by Vader. Sure, he and Han and Chewie had rescued her from that, but they hadn't exactly covered themselves with glory doing it. They had covered themselves with a stinking effluvium in that garbage pit...

"So, what's the drill, kid?"

"Huh?"

"We gonna sit around here and wait for them to come back? Or you maybe want to go ask the Hutt why he sent that comedy troupe out to zap you?"

"Jabba's got no reason to be after me."

"Unless somebody put him up to it. That's why I'm here, remember? Since it's nice and quiet, I could teach you how to fly those swoops right."

"Listen, they'd have never caught me in Beggar's Canyon-"

Artoo began whistling and beeping frantically.

"I don't like the sound of that," Luke said.

"What is it?" Dash said.

"Something outside, sounds like. We'd better go see." Artoo beeped again.

Dash pulled his blaster and checked the charge read-ing.

Luke reached down to touch his lightsaber to a.s.sure himself it was still hanging from his belt. Artoo chirped and rolled toward the door. Outside, they saw the fire of a braking rocket high overhead.

"Looks like a message droid," Luke said.

Artoo seemed to affirm that.

Dash blew out a breath and reholstered his blaster.

Message droids weren't something you had drop in on you every day. They were used when fast deliverywas needed and you didn't want to risk the holonet and its relays, but they were expensive and good for only one shot; unless you had a new booster lying around, you couldn't reuse them.

Artoo whistled again.

"That's awfully fast. I hope they shockproofed it,"Luke said. Dash had already started for the door. Outside, the incoming vessel, tiny as it was, was visible as it fell toward the desert floor half a klick away.

"Who knows you're here, kid?"

Luke shook his head. "Leia, Lando, Chewie, Threepio."

"And Jabba," Dash said. "Though I don't think he'dspend the money for a droid when he could make a local com, he wanted to talk to you. Not to mention kill you."

"Maybe it's for you," Luke offered.

"I doubt it. I don't leave forwarding addresses. n.o.body knows I'm here except your friends, and they have no reason to call me."

Luke watched as the little message ship plummeted. It began firing retros and slowing, but it was still coming down pretty fast. The droid must've underestimated the gravity or something.

Maybe it was for Ben. Somebody who had been out of touch for a long time and didn't know he was... gone.

The message carrier hit hard enough to splash sand and make a noise they could hear five hundred meters away.

"Let's go see," Dash said.

Luke ground his teeth. He started to say something about giving orders, but held himself in check. Jedi Knights were supposed to be even-tempered. He'd have to work on that.

They started toward the ship.

In his inner sanctum, Xizor awoke from a light doze to the sound of his personal and private comlink speaking his name softly.

"Incoming call for you, Prince Shheezzorr." Was that his imagination, or did the voxchip slur his name as the chair he'd replaced had done?

Nothing lasted these days. Everything started to break down before it was properly broken in. The Empire was going to entropy in a turbolift.

"Put it through. And do a self-diagnostic on your voxchip."

The small-scale holoproj flowered on his desk. It was one of his local spies.

"Yes?"

"You asked me to inform you when Lord Vader returned to his castle, my prince. He has just arrived." The Dark Prince nodded. "Good. Maintain normal surveillance procedures." The spy nodded and broke the connection.

His image blinked out.

So, Vader had returned from the wars, having unwittingly done Xizor's bidding by hitting Ororo where it hurt the most, in the credit balance.

Along with Guri's little demonstration to the ranking officers, Ororo would be well-behaved, at least in the near future.

Best he not call on Vader just yet. Doubtless the Dark Lord of the Sith needed some time to cool down a bit from the slap on the hand the Emperor had delivered. Vader's main problem was that he allowed his temper to rule him. A legacy of his mammalian heritage - it was that way with many species and detrimental nearly always. Cold allowed precision; heat threw caution aside and plunged in rampantly. Cold was the process of deliberation and planning, heat the result of unbridled pa.s.sion. Pa.s.sion was fine, but only when controlled and channeled properly.

Take Princess Leia, for instance. She attracted him, but he would bring her to him slowly and with care, not in some wild chase in which he cast off his intellectual moorings and sailed out on the sea of l.u.s.t. Ah, no, that was not the Falleen way. The Falleen way was cold.

Cold was better than heat.

Always.

Darth Vader watched the spy via the holocam hidden at the top of a street-cleaning droid. The droid moved down the avenue like a giant mechanical snail, leaving a trail of cleanliness behind it instead of slime, washing the hard road with powerful jets and ablutants that caused the surface to sparkle.

Xizor's spy sat at an outdoor food bar, pretending to read a hard-copy newsfax as he dawdled over a hot drink long gone cold.

Vader sighed and waved the picture off. This was such a convoluted business, all this spying and intrigue. True, he had learned the game; he played it well, as one must to live on this world, but he did not enjoy it. Men like Xizor and the Emperor took pleasure from their manipulations, but Vader always felt... soiled when he mucked around in all this double-dealing and triplecrossing. He was a warrior, and as such, he would prefer to plant himself in the path of an advancing army alone to all this smiling-to-his-face while plotting an enemy's ruin, which was the political core of Imperial Center. Striking a man down with your blade was clean and honorable. Shooting him in the back from the darkness of an alley and hurrying to blame it on another was something else altogether.

He turned away from the monitors. Yes, he could do it, and yes, it was necessary; still, he did not have to like it.

Sooner or later, he would have the evidence he needed against Xizor. The more tangled the web, the more likely it was that the weaver would eventually trap himself in it. Sooner or later the man would make a fatal mistake, and when he did, Vader would strike Xizor down-and explain why to the Emperor afterward.

There was a thought he enjoyed.

The message droid, a compact, rounded box with an antigrav unit that allowed it to hover and move a couple of meters off the ground, was apparently undamaged by the delivery vessel's hard impact on the desert.

The box, half the size of Artoo, floated in front of Luke and Dash now in Ben's house.

It didn't look damaged, but something must have rattled loose inside it.

"I have a message for Princess Leia Organa," it said for the fifth time.

"How many times do I have to tell you she isn't here?" Luke said. "Artoo, can you talk to this thing?"

Artoo moved closer to the droid, whistled and beeped rapidly, and ended by flashing lights from its holoprojector at the thing.

There was a pause as some system adjusted itself inside the droid.

"I am empowered to deliver the message to ah authorized representative of Princess Leia Organa, in her absence," it said.

"Now we're getting somewhere," Luke said. "Tell me. I'm her, uh, authorized representative."

He grinned at Dash, who shook his head.

"Pa.s.sword?" the droid asked.

Pa.s.sword? What would Leia use as a pa.s.sword?

"Uh, Luke Skywalker."

"That pa.s.sword is incorrect."

Dash laughed.

"Uh, Han Solo?"

"That pa.s.sword is incorrect."

"We could be here a real long time while you rattle off all the names you know, Luke."

"Shut up, will you? I'm thinking."

"Ah, well, wouldn't want to interfere with that, would we?"

Luke did think about it. It had to be something simple, he figured, something Leia wouldn't forget. What was the first thing that came to mind when he thought about her?

Forget that.

"Uh, Alderaan?"

"Pa.s.sword correct."

A sliding plate on the droid moved and exposed a holoprojector. After a second a holoproj blinked on.

A short, long-haired, and bearded Bothan stood there, dressed in a forest-green overtunic, pants, andboots, a long military-style blaster strapped to his waist and right leg.

"Greetings, Princess Leia. Koth Melan here, speak-ing to you from my homeworld of Bothawui. Our spynetwork has uncovered information vital to the Alliance, and the nature of these data are of such signifi-cance as to justify sending this messenger droid. You must come to Bothawui immediately. I cannot overemphasize the importance of this information, or the urgency. Time is of the essence. I will be at the Intergalactic Trade Mission for five days. The Alliance must act in that time or the information may be lost."

The projection shut down.

"Well, well," Dash said. "Somebody is in a big hurry. We could just make it to Bothawui before his deadline if I pushed my ship hard. Even that X-wing crate of yours might do it, though I wouldn't bet on it."

"We need to get this information to Leia," Luke said.

"Not a chance, kid. We can't use the holonet 'cause we don't know where she is exactly. We can't just call and ask, now can we? 'Excuse me, can you tell me where one of the Empire's most wanted enemies is, please?' "

"All right, I get it."

"Yeah, well, time we got to Rodia, found her, and she got back to Bothawui, it'd be a standard week atthe least."

Luke stared at the message droid. What were theygoing to do? This sounded big, really big.

"Well," he said. "I guess we'll have to go in herplace, then."

"Why? The message was for her."

"I'm her designated representative. I got the pa.s.sword right. Whatever this Koth Melan has got, he cantell it to me."

"Doesn't sound too bright to me. A Bothan spy-master is just going to roll over and give it up, just like that? And his name doesn't sound right, either. 'Melan'? That's not Bothan."

"n.o.body asked you. You're supposed to be a bodyguard, right? You don't care about the Alliance."

"Not unless they want to hire me, you got that right."

"Fine. I'm going. You do whatever you want."

Dash grinned. "Well. You're worth more to me alive than dead; I'd better protect my fee. I'll take one of the swoops into town and get my ship.