Scarlet stopped and turned around, her face lighting up when she saw the fragile-looking creature. “Oh, would you look at that!”
“Kill it, kill it now,” Han repeated, still keeping his voice level and light.
Scarlet frowned at him, but to her credit she started to slowly pull the knife off her belt. “Are you sure? It doesn’t seem—”
While she was speaking, Sunnim reached up and touched one of the delicate wings. “Pretty” was all he had time to say before the long, curling tail snapped out and struck him in the throat. Scarlet yanked out her knife, but Han already had his blaster in his hand and in one shot blew the creature off the Bothan’s shoulder in a shower of flaming bug parts.
Sunnim stood rigid, the color of his skin darkening all around the angry, red wound the stinger had left. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but only a stuttering gasp came out, followed by a spray of foamy saliva. Scarlet and Baasen rushed to him, helping to lay him gently to the ground. The Bothan continued to choke out an increasing spray of white foam, his body stiff and trembling.
Scarlet pulled the medpac off her waist, but by the time she’d opened it, the Bothan’s struggle was over. Sunnim lay stiff, staring up at the sky through sightless eyes.
“Sorry, my boy,” Baasen said, his hand under Sunnim’s head, the stump of his other arm on the dead man’s chest.
Scarlet slowly put her medical supplies away, shaking her head. “Great. The things that look like monsters aren’t, but one of the most beautiful creatures I’ve ever seen can kill in seconds with one sting? What kind of world is this?”
“When something hangs out in an environment as dangerous as this in bright, eye-catching colors, it’s because it’s the meanest thing in the jungle. The brightness a warning, not an invitation,” Han told her.
Leia put a hand on Baasen’s shoulder. “I’m sorry about your friend.”
“My thanks to you,” Baasen said, standing up and brushing the mud from the knees of his pants. “Not that the cheap little bastard was a friend, but I appreciate the courtesy.”
“Maybe I should walk up front,” Han said. He took the lead with Scarlet when they started moving again. The poor Bothan’s rotten cabbage smell didn’t seem offensive anymore, only sort of sad. The last of the scent quickly faded behind them, replaced by the jungle’s sour dirt stink.
“What makes you such an expert on alien life?” Scarlet asked after a few minutes.
“I’ve been all over the galaxy. Seen a lot of stuff,” Han said, panting with exertion. “Plus, I have common sense.” The ground level had started to angle up, and the steep climb only made walking in the mud that much harder.
“Lot of deadly butterflies?” Scarlet asked, half teasing. Han was gratified to hear she was puffing, too.
“There’s a million variations of the same things, but they’re the things you see over and over,” Han said. “The eyes go near the mouth. Dangerous things get warning colors. We’ve all got eyes and legs, because eyes and legs are useful things to have no matter where you come from.”
“Fascinating.”
“You asked, sweetheart.”
After a few more minutes of climbing they reached the top of a rocky hill. The trees thinned out, and they could see sky again. There were still brightly colored streamers of energy spreading across the blue, and columns of smoke showed where pieces of the Star Destroyer had fallen through the atmosphere.
Off in the distance, in the direction they’d been traveling, a massive construction of cut stone poked up through the jungle canopy.
“Looks like you’ve got us heading the right way,” Han said, pointing out the massive temple to Scarlet.
“Good work,” Leia said, coming up to stand beside them. “I’d hate to get lost in this.”
“You and me both,” Han replied.
“’Bout an hour, you think?” Baasen asked, pulling out his datapad and trying to bounce a rangefinder off the top of the temple.
“Sure,” Scarlet said with a shrug. “If we don’t fall in a sinkhole, or get eaten by bog monsters or stung to death by bugs, or run into some new horror we haven’t seen yet. I believe someone mentioned snakes earlier.”
Baasen laughed and put a companionable arm around Scarlet’s shoulder. “I like you, girl. You’ve got spunk.”
Scarlet laughed back. “I don’t like you. You’re about to lose another hand.”
Baasen kept his smile, but he removed his arm from her shoulder.
Half an hour later, they finally found a snake. A massive creature, twice as big around as Han’s waist, with bright scales like burnished copper and brass. It lay motionless across their path like a fallen log, the head and tail so far away they weren’t visible in the dim light and underbrush.
“Do we shoot it?” Baasen wondered aloud.
“It’s not moving,” Han said. “It seems perfectly happy. Look.” He jumped over the thick body of the snake. “Just leave it alone.”
Scarlet hopped over the thick, scaly body, then held out her hand to Leia. The Princess was shorter than the rest of them, and leaping over the snake wasn’t as easy for her, but with Scarlet’s help she made it. Baasen backed up, gave Han a skeptical look, and then ran at the snake. When he pushed off to leap, his leg shot out from under him in the wet mud and he slammed into the snake’s side at full speed, bouncing across its back and into the mud on the other side.
While Baasen was sputtering and cursing and trying to get the mud off his face and clothes, Han held his breath, waiting for the giant snake to react.
The reaction, when it came, was just a ripple of muscle under the scales, and then the snake shot away into the underbrush with surprising speed.
“I think you scared it,” Han said.
Baasen was still brushing mud out of his hair. “If I’d known that was all it took, I’d have kicked the blasted thing in the ribs and saved myself some embarrassment.”
“Maybe we should leave before it realizes its mistake,” Scarlet said, already moving off down the path at a jog.
Finally, they reached the edge of a clearing and, peering past the thick, fernlike undergrowth, spotted the massive stone slabs of the temple just a few hundred meters away. A large opening yawned in the side of the structure, twice the height of a human man and four times as wide. It looked big enough to drive a pair of landspeeders into side by side. Not even a door blocked the entrance.
But between them and that opening, Han counted at least a hundred stormtroopers, several vehicle-mounted rapid-fire anti-aircraft cannons, and five AT-ST scout transport walkers.
“Huh,” Scarlet said.
“Yeah. I really didn’t have a plan for this,” Han replied. “We should have had a plan for this.”
“When did we start planning?” Leia asked. “Haven’t we been making this up as we go?”
“Think they’re afraid of snakes?” Baasen said. “Maybe we could send that big fellow into the camp, create a disturbance.”
“Well,” Han said with a sigh, “we’ve gone from no-plan to stupid-plan. That’s progress of a sort.”
“Red Wave,” Leia said. She was talking into her comlink. “Red Wave, are you out there? This is Pointer.”
“Red Wave Two, here,” Luke said. “Everything okay?”
“No, Red Wave, we’re going to need a favor.”
“Tell me what we can do to help.”
Twenty-Seven
Half a dozen X-wing fighters screamed out of the sky, laser cannons blazing.
Han and Leia crouched behind the largest rock they could find, watching the carnage unfold. Baasen and Scarlet were several meters away, taking cover behind a rotted log as big around as Chewbacca was tall.
“First the Star Destroyer, now this. Farmboy went and got himself useful,” Han said. “When did that happen?”
“There’s more to him than you give him credit for,” Leia replied, but most of her words were drowned out by a series of explosions.
The X-wings cut across
the stormtrooper encampment at high speed. The strafing run’s goal was maximum confusion, not accuracy. Even so, when the X-wings peeled off and streaked back up into the sky, one AT-ST and two of the anti-aircraft cannons were flaming ruins. The haze of smoke mixed with the mist from the swamp.
The stormtroopers had scattered, some running into the temple, more running into the jungle. A few brave souls held their ground, firing their blaster rifles into the sky. It made a pretty light show, but there was little chance the handheld weapons could pierce a T-65’s robust shields.
“Give it another pass,” Han whispered in Leia’s ear. “Then we go.” He waved at Scarlet to get her attention, and when she nodded back, he mimed running with his fingers and pointed at himself. She nodded again and got into a crouch, ready to go, braced like a sprinter waiting for the starting gun.
The high, throaty roar of X-wing engines returned, followed by another barrage of fire. This time the X-wings had split up, each strafing one of the high-value targets. All of the remaining walkers and vehicle-mounted weapons exploded as the X-wings rocketed past, the ground around them detonating with high-energy laser shots that hurled mud and steam into the air. The remaining stormtroopers dived for cover as the ground heaved under the onslaught. Black smoke poured out of the destroyed equipment, clouding the field.
“Now!” Han shouted, and broke from cover at a dead run. Leia ran beside him, head down, legs pumping, blaster in hand. Han risked a glance behind and saw Scarlet and Baasen a few steps back. If anyone noticed them in the confusion and carnage the X-wing attack had brought, they kept it to themselves. No new shouts or alarms rang out, and in seconds all four of them had reached the dark opening into the temple.
Four stormtroopers were huddled just inside the entrance, looking up at the sky, waiting for the deadly X-wings to return. One of them glanced at Han, cocking his helmeted head to the side in confusion.
“Hey, you can’t—”
Baasen shot him, then shot two more while they fumbled with their weapons. The fourth got his blaster out and pointed it at Baasen’s face, but Scarlet dropped low to the ground and kicked out, sweeping the trooper’s legs out from under him. He fell on the stone floor with a loud crack and went still.
Han poked Baasen in the chest. “Avoid shooting if you can. There could be a lot more of them in here.”
“In where, boyo?” Baasen asked.
It was a good question. The antechamber they’d entered was a square space about the same size as the entrance. The walls were of the same cut stone as the exterior, though in the cool dark of the interior, a profusion of slimy molds and mushrooms grew from the rock. Some of it glowed with its own luminescence. A confusion of tunnels branched off from the entryway, heading in every direction. Except for the four cowering inside the doorway, there were no more troopers in sight.
“You have a map of this?” Han asked.
“Not yet.” While the rest of the group moved into a dark corner to hide, Scarlet reached into one of the many pouches on her belt and pulled out half a dozen metal balls the size of human eyeballs. She held them in the palm of her hand, and they uncurled into metallic insect shapes, with translucent wings and glowing red eyes. She tossed them into the air, and they raced off down the various passages.
“The rebels pay for all those nifty toys, do they?” Baasen asked.
Scarlet grunted noncommittally. Han was pretty sure Scarlet’s tools had been paid for by the people she’d stolen them from, but he kept the opinion to himself. She pulled out her datapad and fidgeted with the controls, and soon a glowing holographic map of the interior of the temple began to fill in. The corridors appeared as yellow tubes of light, with larger rooms shifting to orange, and occasional red dots scattered through them. Outside, the scream of X-wing engines started to ramp up again.
To Han’s eye it was an impossible maze, but with deft gestures Scarlet rotated the map this way and that, nodding and talking to herself under her breath. She rushed into one of the smaller passages, gesturing impatiently for everyone to follow. They did, and moments later a squad of stormtroopers stepped into the antechamber.
Scarlet backed away down the hallway, watching them, then moved everyone into another branching passage, this one quite dark, so that the only light came from the glowing map. She fiddled with the controls, and the image dimmed until it was barely visible and cast no light on the walls.
“Looks like the alarm went out,” Scarlet whispered. “There will be a lot of troopers in the central corridor.” She pointed at a thick, yellow line on her map, filled with red dots. The dots were moving, and Han realized they must be marking the location of people that Scarlet’s bugs had spotted.
“Do you know where we’re going?” he asked.
She pointed at a large, glowing orange central room with a very small corridor coming off it and dead-ending. “This, at a guess. Lots of bodies in here, the most in the structure. And that’s the only dead end on the map. A door, I’m guessing. And this temple doesn’t seem to have any other ways out.”
Leia made a quiet noise of agreement, then whispered, “But that’s off the central corridor. Stormtroopers everywhere.”
“All respect, miss, I see at least two other ways to get there, including this here corridor we’re in,” Baasen said, pointing at the map. As soon as he did, it was obvious. Han saw the path leading from where they were through a variety of twists and turns and ending up right next to the short dead-end corridor at the center of the temple.
“No troopers in this corridor at all,” he pointed out.
“That worries me,” Scarlet said.
Han’s eyes had begun to adapt to the dark, and the faint glow of the mushrooms on the walls gave him a dim gray-scale view of the hallway around him.
“Any reason we should be waiting here?” Baasen asked. He was rocking on the balls of his feet, his grin so faint it might just have been Han’s imagination.
“Stay behind me,” Scarlet said, poking Baasen hard in the biceps.
“Aye, love.”
Scarlet turned off her map and headed down the corridor. The stone beneath their feet felt wet and slimy, though at the creeping pace Scarlet set it was easy to keep their footing. The air smelled of rot and decay, and a faint hint of something hot and metallic. After she’d gone a few dozen meters, Scarlet pulled a small light off her belt and turned it on, twisting the control until it gave off only the dimmest illumination.
A few meters later, they reached a partial blockage of the corridor. A stone cube a meter and a half on a side blocked the hallway from wall to wall, leaving only a one-meter gap above it.
“We can climb over,” Scarlet started, but Han touched her arm and pointed at the ceiling above. “Oh.” The block looked to have fallen out of a hole exactly its size.
“Temple falling apart, is it?” Baasen asked.
“No,” Leia said, pointing at the ground next to the block. A single foot poked out from under the stone, wearing a white stormtrooper’s boot. “It was a trap.”
Scarlet turned up her light. The hall brightened. The hole above the stone had a complex mechanism for releasing the block onto the corridor below. A printed foil notice had been pasted to the wall: warning: do not use this corridor, it has not been cleared.
“I’d say,” Baasen said, poking the doomed stormtrooper’s foot with his toe. “Though this fellow cleared the first trap for us, eh?”
Han put a hand on the stone block. It didn’t budge. It must have weighed thousands of kilograms. At least it would have been quick. But something itched at the back of his brain.
“Can we go?” Scarlet asked, trying to get around him to climb on top of the stone cube.
“This doesn’t make any sense to me,” Han said, thinking through the puzzle as he spoke. “We came here to find this super-high-tech thing that kills hyperspace, and it’s in a temple made out of rock? The traps are deadfalls? Unless this hyperspace blocker is made of granite and powered by a waterwheel, I don’t t
hink these people built it.”
“Ever seen a Ternin tree sling?” Baasen asked. “Don’t look down on the damage a low-tech solution can achieve.”
“But hyperspace blocking?”
“The K’kybak died out millennia ago,” Scarlet said. “Another more primitive species may have followed them.”
“And built all of this,” Leia added, “to honor the gods that vanished from their world. It’s not uncommon to find this sort of layering of civilizations on older worlds.”
“I am not going to like it,” Han said, then paused to boost Scarlet up onto the stone block, “if I get killed by a bunch of primitives.”
Scarlet lay flat on the block and reached down to help pull Leia up. When Baasen moved forward, reaching for Leia’s hindquarters, Han thumped him in the chest. “Hands off.”
Baasen had the gall to look wounded. “Was just trying to give the lady a boost.”
Leia clambered up the stone with ease. “The lady is fine, thanks. Let’s move.”
Having now seen the first of the ancient builder’s deadly traps, Scarlet slowed her pace through the temple, keeping her light turned up. At several points, she had them avoid specific stones set into the floor.
“Pressure plates?” Han had asked at the first.
“Weird looking, and do we want to test?” she’d replied.
Han didn’t argue the point, just avoided anything Scarlet told him to avoid and tried not to touch the slime and mushrooms on the walls.
They reached a junction with two other corridors and Scarlet signaled for them to stop, then pulled out her map. “Almost there,” she said, pointing at the room nearby. It was still filled with red dots. “We’ll need a plan to get past those guards.”
“What’ve you got in mind?” Han asked.
“My first thought was to send you and Baasen into the room, guns blazing, and then have Leia and me sneak past while the troopers loot your corpses.”
“You see?” Han said. “That’s a terrible plan. This is why we don’t use plans. We’re really bad at them.”
“Well,” Scarlet said, putting her map away, “let’s keep moving, we can figure it out wh—”