“Good, that works like it looked like it did,” Han said, not reassuringly. “Andevid, get up here and show me that tunnel.”
Leia stepped back to make room, and the Aqualish squeezed past her to stab a clawed finger toward the holoimage of the cavern. “There, down and under the control center,” he said.
“Right.” Han didn’t sound thrilled, and Leia could see why. Yes, right below the control center—which is in the process of pulling free from the rock and sliding down into the cavern. It was doing it slowly, because of the low gravity, but it was still doing it.
Han rolled the borer around again and dropped it down until it was pointed toward the rock face below the control center. “This looks like it,” he said as the holo displayed a blue-lined round opening among the red streaks depicting the folds in the rock.
Loud bangs echoed through the compartment, though the hull didn’t vibrate. Leia thought it was debris falling onto them, then remembered the low gravity. “The pirates are firing on us.” Unless they had brought up something bigger than hand blasters, she didn’t think they had a chance of getting through the hull, but if they were able to damage the engines …
“Can we shoot back?” Kifar asked.
Han said, “Yeah, let’s open the hatch, and you can stick your head out—”
Andevid snorted.
Leia set her jaw. “Han. Just drive.”
“Yes, Your Worship.” Han took the borer forward into the tunnel. Leia winced away from the scraping sound as the hull vibrated. Swearing under his breath, Han corrected their course slightly and increased the power to the repulsors. “Gravity kicked back in—it threw us off a little.”
They moved forward slowly, leaving the cavern behind. Leia started to breathe easier. There was no way anyone with any sense was going to follow them down here. They would all be trying to loot or seize control of Viest’s headquarters.
The tunnel borer rumbled around a curve, and suddenly the display showed a solid wall of red.
“What happened?” Han demanded.
“Oh.” Andevid stared at the holomap. “Maybe it wasn’t this tunnel.”
“Maybe?” Leia stared at him. The others watched in a combination of concern and incredulity.
“It’s not like Viest took me for rides in this thing,” Andevid said, studying the map. “Wait, wait, here it is. It was lower down, and to the right.”
Han twisted around to give Andevid a dark look. Leia was pretty certain it matched the one on her face. Andevid said, “Sorry, but I’m sure this time.”
“Can we back out?” Leia asked, thinking, The pirates must be almost at the control center by now.
“No, we’ll do it this way,” Han said, and hit a control on the panel. A high-powered hum traveled through the deck, and another holodisplay appeared.
Leia recognized the disk shapes. “The laser cutters? Are you—”
Crazy, she meant to finish, but Han pushed the control yoke down and the rumble turned into a roar. Leia grabbed the safety handle and watched, fascinated, as the rock on the holodisplay dissolved.
“This is kind of fun,” Andevid commented.
“You’ve got to get out more, buddy,” Han told him.
“That’s true,” Andevid agreed.
Leia told herself the machine had been designed for this. The machine was also who-knew-how-old, probably poorly maintained, had been used as an impromptu means of destroying starships, and was being driven by Han Solo. She was in the process of developing claustrophobia when the last of the rock fell away and they came out into a tunnel. This one was barely bigger than the borer; it had probably been dug by it at some point.
Behind her, Leia heard Sian swear with relief. She glanced back to see Kifar holding on to a handle so tightly that his knuckles had gone dark orange, and Terae looked ill. Leia took out her comlink to call the Aegis, but all she got was static. She looked at Terae and Sian. “Can you get anything?”
Both checked, and both shook their heads. “This thing’s hull must be heavily shielded,” Terae said. “Signals just aren’t getting through.”
Leia looked around for anything that resembled a comm but couldn’t find one. “Han, how close can you get us to the Aegis?”
Cool and vaguely preoccupied, as if he did this every day, Han steered the machine down the tunnel. “Check the map; look for a good route.”
Leia traced the tunnels, finding the docking ring immediately. The borer’s guidance system had marked all the old exploratory tunnels used to find ore veins in the bulk of the asteroid, some distance below the cavern. But the new tunnels toward the docking bays were flagged with warning symbols. Clearly, Viest had been overriding the machine’s safety features to make them. It was a good thing there were nearly a hundred bays along the length of the docking ring, since Viest had destroyed twenty of them over the years. The closest one to the Aegis was six bays down, at the end of the ring, where it split to head toward the larger loading area that Han had said the pirates used to store and trade cargoes.
Leia leaned closer suddenly. And the slave pen. She pulled out her comlink and checked the time to Anakaret’s transmission. She smiled. “I have an idea.”
In the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon, in orbit above the asteroid, Luke said, “Wait, ask him—”
Chewbacca flung his arms in the air in frustration as Han signed off.
“Blast it! He didn’t even say if Leia was with him!” Luke exclaimed.
Luke tried to raise Han again but got no answer. “Nothing,” he told Chewie. Either the comlink was turned off, or they were cut off by some kind of interference.
Chewie shook his head and rumbled something that sounded unhappy.
From behind them, C-3PO translated, “He says that Captain Solo said to wait. He was very rude. Captain Solo, I mean, not Chewbacca. Not that time, anyway.”
Chewbacca scrubbed his forehead and moaned in frustration.
“Wait, fine,” Luke muttered. At least they knew Han and Leia were here, and alive. Or at least that Han was alive. But surely Han would have sounded worse if things had gone so badly.
He tapped his fingers on the console and stopped when Chewie glanced at him in irritation. Luke didn’t think he could wait anymore without losing his mind.
They had spent the trip here trying not to talk about how worried they were. Chewbacca had sat in the cockpit disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling his bowcaster over and over again, with nervous precision. With nothing else to do but watch him, Luke was now fully prepared for a life-or-death situation where he had to assemble a bowcaster blindfolded. All the questions like what if they aren’t here, what if we can’t find them, what if we never see them again had hung in the air between them.
Now at least those questions were answered. Before Han’s call, Chewie had been going through the ships’ IDs that had shown up in the comm system and trying to find the Aegis, while Luke searched the sensor data for any ship that matched its description. If that hadn’t turned up anything, they had been planning to call the asteroid’s controller and try to talk their way into a landing berth.
So far the Falcon hadn’t drawn any unwanted attention, mostly because there were dozens of other small, battered freighters in the vicinity, and Luke thought they were doing a good job of blending in. They had had to identify themselves when they arrived, but the controller hadn’t seemed interested. Good thing Han and Chewie hadn’t been out this way in a long while, he thought wryly.
Luke couldn’t just sit here. “We could try finding the Aegis and contacting it.”
Chewbacca gave him a look with lowered brows. Luke knew enough about Wookiee facial expressions to realize it meant Is there something wrong with you? He said, “Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s probably not a good idea until we know what the situation is.”
Then the comm system signaled a transmission coming in on the asteroid’s all-ship frequency. Luke listened to the beginning and blew out his breath. “Chewie, listen to this.”
> Chewie stabbed a blunt-clawed finger at the board, gesturing for Luke to turn up the volume. They listened as a female voice repeated a warning of Imperial ships entering the system and then played a fragment of the transmission her ship had picked up.
Chewbacca growled in frustration. The sensors showed ships already accelerating out of their orbits, scattering like startled womp rats. Luke shook his head, bit his lip in thought.
“Wait, wait, there’s something funny about this.” At Chewie’s interrogatory growl, he added, “I don’t know … Hold on.”
The system had automatically recorded the transmission, and Luke played it again as Chewie listened intently.
“It’s chopped up a lot,” Luke said. “That’s odd. Like her ship didn’t receive the whole message.” He ran it through the comm system, trying to match it to a type of Imperial ship. The Falcon’s database had been augmented by the Alliance’s, so if this was a known class of ship, it should be in there. In another moment, the system signaled a match. Luke checked the result and thought, Huh? He sent it to Chewie’s display. “This doesn’t make any sense.”
Chewie growled and waved his hands. C-3PO said, “He says that it can’t be the Death Star, as you might recall the memorable occasion when it blew up. I think he’s right about that, Master Luke. He says it has to be some kind of strange error in the transmission itself.”
Luke listened to it again. He noted that the source never called itself the Death Star; the call signals were all clearly Imperial, but he bet the Falcon, the only ship here that had actually been in comm contact with the real Death Star, would be the only one to recognize that particular identifier in the signal. “It’s funny how it’s real clear in the part where it identifies itself as Imperial, but all chopped up when it gives the position and system information. This has to be a fake.” He turned to Chewie. “Who do we know who might think of using an old copy of a Death Star transmission for this?”
Chewie sat up straight, hooted with delight, and gave Luke a shove to the head. Luke was glad he knew that was a gesture of approval. He turned back to the console. This had to be a plan concocted by Leia or Han or both.
Luke just wished he knew what the plan was, and how well it was going.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LEIA STOOD BY THE HATCHWAY, blaster drawn, braced to hit the door release. The others gathered behind her, with Han still in the cockpit and Andevid working the map utility. Han asked her, “Ready?”
The borer was buried in solid rock some fifty or so meters below what Leia sincerely hoped was the guard station for the living quarters the pirates had converted into a slave pen.
“If this thing doesn’t come apart,” Kifar said worriedly.
At this point, Leia was more concerned about the asteroid coming apart than the tunnel borer, considering how riddled the rock was with tunnels and pockets that weren’t on the map. She told Han, “Ready.”
Han leaned on the controls and the hull shook as the borer leapt upward, the laser disk slicing through the rock. Warning lights blinked in the cockpit. Leia held on to the overhead handrail and exchanged a grim look with Sian. They had agreed the borer would need to move as fast as possible so no one in the chamber above realized it was coming, but it felt like Han had apparently found a way to push the machine past its already generous safety limits.
Their comlinks still weren’t picking up any signals, but if Anakaret had kept her promise, she had sent her transmission just a few moments earlier. The docking ring and the ships in orbit should have just gotten the message warning of an Imperial force moving into range of the asteroid.
Leia very much hoped that Anakaret had kept her promise.
The borer rumbled and shuddered, then the deck swayed and bucked underfoot and the borer stopped abruptly, angled upward. All the warning lights flashed and the engines made an ominous clunking noise. But Han said, “We’re there. Go!”
Leia hit the hatch release and Kifar jumped out. He could have looked first, Leia thought, exasperated. But Kifar obviously thought he had something to prove. He fired twice, then yelled, “We’re clear!”
Sian and Terae surged out after him. As Leia started to follow, Han scrambled out of the borer’s cockpit behind her. “Sweetheart, this thing is dead,” he told her. “One of the power cells went out when we broke through the shielding on this floor.”
Leia hesitated. “But we won’t need it to get out of here.”
Han shrugged. “Probably not.”
Leia groaned under her breath and jumped out of the hatch into a chamber that looked as if it had been hit by an ion cannon. Lumas clustered near the high ceiling, pushed there by the tunnel borer’s shields. They shone down on a jumble of stone rubble and torn metal floor plates. The hatch that must have secured a large archway lay in the next chamber, twisted and mangled. Two armed pirates lay sprawled near it, unconscious or dead. Leia lifted her comlink, already tuned to the asteroid’s emergency frequency, and heard a babble of voices in Basic and other languages. Some were warning comrades of an Imperial attack, others demanding to know the heading the Imperials were coming in on; all were panicked. Good, Leia thought with relief. Thank you, Anakaret.
In the far wall was a security blast door, clearly jury-rigged into a wider space that had to be the entrance to the slave pen. Leia half climbed, half stumbled across the ruined floor to the door. It had an access panel to one side, with a pad to enter a code lock; the manual emergency release was blocked by a plate welded into place. As Andevid climbed warily out of the borer, Leia gestured with her blaster toward the door. “You don’t have the code for this lock, do you?”
He shook his head. “Only Mekerel, who was in charge of guarding the slaves for Viest, had it.” He glanced back at the borer and did a double take. There was blood splashed on the rubble below the cutter disk, and what looked like fragments of leather and metal. “Maybe that’s him.”
Leia wasn’t concerned with Mekerel’s fate. As a slaver, he had probably deserved a great deal worse. But it meant the code was unavailable, and they would just have to get in the hard way. “Terae, if you would,” Leia said.
Terae stepped forward and pulled a fusioncutter out of her tool satchel. She switched it on, crouched beside the door, and started to cut through the armor over the door’s manual release. “Shouldn’t take long.”
“Good, because we don’t have long.” Leia looked toward the archway, where Han, Kifar, and Sian had taken up guard positions. She could hear confused yelling somewhere ahead, and the distant rumble of ships’ engines. After a moment Han slipped out and vanished down the passage. Sian followed him.
They were checking the escape route, making sure it was clear. Once away from the borer, with nothing to show they weren’t just another crew of pirates, they could all walk out of here. Theoretically.
“Got it,” Terae said. The panel fell away and she pulled the manual release. The door started to slide upward.
Leia stepped back, in case the prisoners had to be persuaded that they were actually being rescued. Terae moved to the side, drawing her blaster.
But the door opened to a small secure guard booth, protected by the flicker of a containment field. Beyond it, Leia could see a large bare room, with metal walls and floor, filled with battered, weary people staring warily at her.
“Hello,” she said, as Terae stepped into the guard booth to examine the control panel. “I’m Leia Durane. We’re here to rescue you.” She didn’t get to do this kind of thing very often and she meant to enjoy it, even knowing they might all be killed trying to get off the asteroid.
There were gasps, and a gold-skinned Videllan man pushed forward, asking, “You are with Captain Solo?”
“Yes. Are you Kearn-sa’Davit? I believe Han Solo told you we might be coming by.”
The Videllan turned to face the others and declared, “We are saved!”
Terae glanced at Leia and nodded, indicating that she could drop the containment field. Leia told the prisoners
, “We’re going to take you to a ship now, and then we’ll make a run for Arnot Station. You have to stay together, stay quiet, and follow us, is that clear?”
Davit consulted the others with a look, then assured Leia, “We are prepared, Leia Durane.”
Leia signaled to Terae to drop the containment field. “All right, let’s go.”
Han and Sian found a wide, arched hatch that opened into the loading dock. They had seen this area from the end of the docking ring corridor, but then it had been filled with bickering pirates. Han had been hoping to find it empty, with everybody sensibly scrambling to get back to their ships, but the blasterfire that echoed through it told him that this particular hope was in vain.
He reached the hatch first, put his back to the wall, and took a careful look around the edge of the seal. Sian took the opposite side.
Bodies, blasted droids, and broken pressure crates lay strewn across the big loading bay. Just above it, where the ramp curved up to the docking bays, there was a blaster battle raging. One group had taken cover behind an old ore cart and a broken cargo lifter and were firing up at a second group, which held the entrance to the docking ring. Han couldn’t tell how many were up there; they were hiding behind piles of broken droids and consoles on both sides of the entrance. A third group, which seemed to be shooting at both the other groups, was stationed out along the gallery just below the row of docking bay entrances that overlooked the loading area, firing from the cover of a mound of crates and storage barrels. The cargo that had apparently sparked the battle—little lumps of varicolored metal, spilled out of a scattering of broken security crates—was strewn across the far end of the loading area.
“Oh, you have to be kidding,” Sian muttered. “Why don’t they just run?”