Balance Point (34 page)

“We admire your creature-servants,” she said cautiously. “We are deeply impressed by your biotechnology. May I suggest that you, too, have much to learn from us?”

“We are learning,” he said somberly. “We have seen that you deny the all-transcendent reality. Instead of learning the most worthy way to meet it, you forestall it, or pretend it does not ultimately own you … forever.”

“We have also developed creature-servants capable of healing,” she said, rising to the argument. “We call them bacta. Other creature-servants help us make food, and—”

“And still you mock death and try to evade its servant, pain. Death, Leia Organa Solo, is the highest truth of the universe.”

“No,” she said. “Life is the highest truth.”

“Death ends life.”

“There can be no death where there has been no life. Life binds the galaxy together. Life—”

“Silence, blasphemer!”

The force of his shout drove her back half a step, but Leia was in her element now. “Sir,” she said, determined to try angle after angle until she forced his vision open a hair, just a hair. “You and I can speak because we are alive. Your gods—” Yes, he’d definitely mentioned gods, plural. “Your gods can only be served by the living, not the dead.”

“You know nothing.”

He turned slightly aside and said something in a strange, guttural language. Behind her, one of her guards laughed horribly, and she realized she must’ve said something that seemed unutterably stupid from their point of view.

“What is it you want, here at Duro?” she asked. “You,” he said, “who mock death, will meet it very soon. Then, for Yun-Yammka—the true master of war—
we will purify this world of the abominable machines in their orbits.”

The Duros’ cities, she realized with a sinking sensation. Millions of lives.

“We will preserve the people you call refugees, though. Their labor is needed for the task of cleansing this world.” He nodded at Nom Anor. “Finally, Duro will become our platform to take other worlds. The ones you call the Core.”

Leia’s head felt light, as if it were floating over her shoulders. They meant to take everything—and she no longer doubted that they could.

“Sir,” she said, “even the gods can’t want you to remove all other life from the—”

“You do not speak for the gods! But soon, you will speak
to
them. Tell my master, Yun-Yammka, that more of your kind—more
Jeedai
, our most powerful enemies in this galaxy—will crawl into his presence. Give him that message when you meet him, Ambassador.”

One of Leia’s captors stalked closer, brandishing a creature with a tiny body and long, outward-curving claws. Did they mean to sacrifice her here and now? Leia backstepped.

“Wait,” she exclaimed. “I want to know more about these gods of yours.”

The warmaster’s laugh was a horrible bass rumble. “That is wisdom speaking. There will be time.”

The other alien seized her left arm. The creature he held took her wrist between one pair of claws, then grabbed her other arm, holding her as effectively as a pair of stun cuffs.

The warmaster said something in that other language, and one of her guards grasped her left elbow. The last she saw of the warmaster, he was delicately pulling the long worm back out of his ear.

Her guards took her to a storeroom, shoved her in, then spun her around. One took hold of the creature that held her hands together and plucked it off. Then he gave her another shove and shut her into darkness.

She let herself stand motionless, unthinking, for one moment. She couldn’t escape the sensation that she’d evaded death by micrometers.

Then something moved in the shadows to her left. Something huge.

She shrank away.

“It’s only myself,” a blubbering voice rumbled. “Your fellow prisoner.”

“Randa?” she demanded. “I suppose you went to them, offering to ship prisoners—and they threw you back.”

“No, no, I swear by my kajidic! I tried to reach your mining laser. I meant to sacrifice myself, and kill as many of these despicable creatures as I could.”

“Oh, certainly,” Leia said. She’d known too many Hutts to believe this. “You meant to sacrifice yourself.”

“But it is true,” he moaned. “I deserve nothing better. My repentance is sincere, my mortification utter and complete. I—”

“Mortification?” Leia tried giving the door a shove. Nothing happened. “Where’s Basbakhan?”

“They took him,” Randa moaned.

“He’s dead, then.”

“No, no.”

They took a Noghri alive? She’d thought that couldn’t be done. She wiped a sheen of sweat off her forehead.

“What were you doing with that villip? Answer me, answer honestly, and maybe I’ll believe you. Maybe.”

He gave a low moan. Then he mumbled, “I tried to bargain. I tried to get them to promise my people a safe world. Would you not try to do the same?”

Was there anything, she wondered, that might buy a world’s safety? “In exchange for what?” she asked curtly.

Her eyes were adjusting. Now she could see a long, bulbous tan-colored shape, pressing up against the storage closet’s other corner. She couldn’t tell if he’d been hurt, and she didn’t much care.

He licked his lips with his fat, pointed tongue. “They
want Jedi,” he said. “They know nothing about the Force. They want to find out what makes you powerful.”

“So you tried to sell me to them? Is that what you’re telling me?” How utterly appropriate, then, that they’d locked him up with her.

He flattened himself on the floor. She’d never even imagined what a Hutt might look like in abject misery.

“No,” he said. “Not you. Jacen.”

Her son? This … Hutt … had offered her son to the enemy? Her hands flexed, her spine straightened. She would’ve crossed the closet and tried to take him with her bare hands, but it’d taken a chain to kill Jabba and a lightsaber to finish Beldorian.

Randa probably didn’t know about Beldorian, but it was common knowledge she’d killed Jabba. “How dare you,” she said through clenched teeth.

He pulled himself even farther away. “Now you understand,” he said, “why I tried to sacrifice myself. Not that you believe me.” His voice fell dismally into the bass range. “Not that you ever trusted me, or you will ever believe me again. I wish, oh, I wish I could convince you how sincere my repentance—”

“No,” she said, “I don’t, and I won’t, and you can’t.” On the other hand, she had seen tracks that looked as if Randa had been dragged out of the laser’s storeroom. “But go ahead, tell me another lie to pass the time. How did they catch you?”

“I was bending over the laser, trying to activate the repulsor sled—”

“Which you couldn’t do,” she interrupted. “I coded it to my voiceprint.”

“Ah-h.” He made it a long, sobbing sigh. “I am glad,” he said, “to have been able to tell you this. If no one else ever knows, and we go to our death together, at least I—”

“Oh, shut up,” she muttered.

She leaned back against the stone wall. Her left shoulder hit a power-cable conduit, and she shifted to get comfortable.

She couldn’t. The warmaster had told her he would destroy all the Duros’ cities, then drive on to Coruscant. Only one conclusion was possible: he had more forces on the way.

Bburru, and CorDuro Shipping, had consistently cheated the refugees they’d been contracted to aid. Evidently, though, it wasn’t the refugee population in imminent danger of being slaughtered, after all—but the Duros themselves!

She shut her eyes and reached out for her children.

She sensed Jaina’s subtle resonance at some distance. Jacen’s might be farther away, or closer—damped down. In the mines? she wondered. Or still in her secret tunnel?

She scratched her shoulder absently against the power conduit—then spun around, grasping it in one hand. It ran from the closet’s floor to its ceiling. She thought back, imagining the admin building in her mind: which rooms lay above her, which ones below. This conduit ran through the storeroom that opened into her tunnel.

She bent down and swept the floor with both hands.

“Is there some way I might help?” Randa asked.

“I want a pebble,” she snapped. “There are always pebbles falling out of our duracrete. The factory never quite got the formula right—”

“Here, Administrator.”

Something fell almost into her lap. She groped toward the noise it made, found the pebble, and seized it in one hand.

“Thanks,” she murmured.

She tapped out a distress signal in the old Mon Cal blink code. Naturally, no one answered.

She stood up, flattened her palms against the closet door, and gave it another push. It still didn’t budge.

“I tried that, too,” Randa offered. “But if you think my weight, added to yours, might—”

“No,” she said. Maybe he
was
sincerely repentant. For the moment.

Or just suitably scared of her.

She sat down again.

She had only one thing left to try, but she hesitated. If she called Jaina or Jacen back through the Force, they might endanger themselves.

Oh, right
, her inner voice mocked.
As if Luke doesn’t already know I’m in trouble
. She’d sent Jacen and Jaina away, though—insisting they save themselves—and she’d meant it.

But if Luke already knew …

She sat down and relaxed deeply.
Luke
, she cried silently to her own twin.
Luke, hear me …

She sensed no answer. Maybe he was in hiding, too.

Curled up on
Jade Shadow
’s pilot’s chair, Luke felt a tendril of energy brush against him. Alert for scanners from off-ship, he ducked down into the Force and let the probe pass over. As it faded, he touched it cautiously to confirm its electronic, impersonal nature.

Instead, he caught the faint sense of Leia, and danger, and warning.

Chagrined, he reached toward her. He instantly recognized the sensation of being trapped—and this time, she was in urgent peril. She wanted to make him understand even more, but the rest of it came through garbled. Battles—a warmaster—a threat to Coruscant.

He jumped off the chair and strode aft, toward his X-wing.

Halfway to the hold, he halted. Save his sister? Or stay on station, for the sake of his wife and child? Mara had told him to take off, if he had to.

He tried to get some guidance from the Force. Surprisingly, his clearest impression was that this wasn’t Leia’s moment at all. Her destiny was established, but within the next hour, Jacen must stand firm … or fall utterly.

Drawing down deep into the Force, Luke stretched out toward Jacen, and then to Leia. Was she doomed? He couldn’t tell. Jacen remained closed off to him, walled inside his own barricades. Luke’s shoulders slumped.

Jaina responded instantly, though. He even felt the assurance that Jaina was already returning to try to help her mother. Linked with her, now, circumventing the irritation Jaina usually showed toward Leia, Luke sensed her love for the woman who was so much like herself. Her first friend, her role model.

Maybe Jaina could get through to Jacen, too.

He reached for Leia again. If she were deliberately opening herself to him, he might be able to catch some memory, some image, that he might relay to Jaina. He had to save her, and Jacen.

The only clear image in her mind showed her tapping against a conduit with a pebble, and a location. He sent that to Jaina—

Then he caught a whistle from
Shadow
’s comm board. He hustled back to the pilot’s chair.

“Skywalker,” he answered.

“Luke, it’s Hamner. I’m sorry, but it isn’t good news.”

“No reinforcements?”

“None. Sounds like you’d better evacuate, if you can.”

“Good try, Kenth.”

Luke sensed a shipyard crew approaching in the
corridor outside. He pulled back into hiding, closing his hand on his comlink. He had to get Hamner’s word to Mara.

Wasn’t there some way to help Jacen and Leia?

Jacen pulled himself into the smallest possible shape and waited for heavy footsteps to pass by in the stairwell. Five minutes ago, sick of slinking and wondering, he’d reentered the admin building. He’d found the smashed bits of a U2C1 housekeeping droid, plastic legs and shredded tubing scattered in the stairwell. Then this empty cubicle, exactly large enough to hold such a droid. Something nibbled at the back of his mind. Once again, something enormous was trying to break through, something out of the infinite. A warring urge tempted him to simply spring out of the cubicle and have done with all his struggles.

Wait
. The sensation came through plainly.

Anguished—almost angry, now—he dug his fingernails into his ankles.
Wait for what?
he screamed back.

Han leaned against a stone wall. Returning toward the underground gathering place from Gateway’s last hidden hauler, he’d found Leia’s GOCU antenna. He promptly patched in his comlink. He got no answer from Leia or Jaina, but C-3PO picked up.

“No sign of ’em, Threepio?”

In his mind he saw the protocol droid, perched in the
Falcon
’s offset cockpit, standing watch out on that bluff.

“No more of the alien ships have appeared, Captain Solo—”

“Check the sensors. What’s on approach?”

Brief pause. Behind him, Han heard the soft shuffling of hundreds of feet, refugees making their way past him, up the tunnel toward Droma.

“Nothing, Captain. For the moment, it still appears as if the enemy has deployed only the small task force—”

“Good enough, Goldenrod. Be ready to fire it up the second I get there.”

He tried Leia once more, then flicked off the comlink and stuck it deep in a pocket. He didn’t like her silence.

One of the shaved-down Ryn paused alongside him. “Get through?” Han recognized Romany’s voice.

“Yeah. Doing all right?” Han murmured.

Romany’s blue jumpsuit sagged on his arms. He brandished his own comlink. “R’vanna says the last ones have gotten down into the tunnel.”

“Good enough.”

“Where are your children?”

“Probably with their mother.”
I hope
. Han peered ahead. Just beyond this point, they were entering the most dangerous section, where the ancient mining tunnel joined Leia’s scientists’ recent dig, connecting their lab with the marshes. Here, if anywhere, there could be a trap—