Crucible: Star Wars Read online

  So the question was exactly as Savara had framed it. If Dena came forward and explained that she had expected only a few deaths, or a few hundred at most, would Lando and his Jedi friend forgive her? Would they help her?

  Dena simply did not have the background to know. Her makers had loaded her memory with a plausible family history, and they had given her more knowledge than a mining executive of her station would ever need. They had even imprinted her with a personality specifically engineered to make her a key employee at the Sarnus Refinery.

  But there was no substitute for experience. Despite all of her neuro-programming and the accelerated learning and synaptic stimulation, Dena had been living among humans for less than a year. She simply had not accumulated enough behavioral data to project their likely response to an emotionally charged situation like this. Would Lando and his friend be so grateful for her help that they would overlook her own small role in the atrocity? Or would they take vengeance on her, too?

  The only real data available to Dena was the irony in her tormentor’s voice, and it was easy enough to interpret that. Savara Raine would not have suggested putting a blaster bolt into her own head if she had believed that to be a wise course of action. Quite the opposite. The challenge had been issued to drive home the point that Dena had no other allies. No matter how much she hated her makers and their teenage pet—no matter how desperately she might want the help of Lando and his Jedi friend—she needed the Qrephs.

  They had designed her that way.

  The thought had barely crossed Dena’s mind before Savara pushed the holdout blaster aside. With her other hand, she grabbed Dena by the throat and shoved her against the storage litter, so hard that it almost toppled.

  “If you ever point a weapon at me again, you die,” Savara said. “Are we clear on that?”

  Dena considered trying to bring the blaster to bear again, not because she believed she was strong enough to kill the girl, but because, at the moment, dying did not seem so terrible—not with Tharston’s scorched corpse on a shelf behind her and a future ahead of her that promised only more of the same despair.

  But the Qrephs had designed her to resist such temptation. As hopeless as she felt, her survival instinct remained primary. Her hand opened of its own accord, and the blaster clattered to the floor.

  The hand on her throat tightened. “I asked if we were clear.”

  Dena managed only a nod and a garbled croak, but Savara seemed to understand.

  “Good.” The hand relaxed, and the teenage terror retreated two steps, then held out her hand expectantly. “I believe you have something for me?”

  Dena nodded. “I do.”

  It hurt her throat to talk, but she tried not to show her pain. She reached into her pocket and withdrew a pair of clear steriplas bags. Each contained a bandage soaked with still-damp blood. Dena checked the labels, then passed them over, one at a time.

  “The first is from Captain Solo, and the second is from Princess Leia,” she said. “I collected them right after the shock wave hit, while I was tending their wounds.”

  Savara inspected the bags, then nodded her approval. “Well done.” She tucked both into an empty thigh pocket. “But your makers would have been happier if you had let the Solos die.”

  “Then someone should have told me that,” Dena replied, more surprised by the suggestion than she should have been. “Besides, it wasn’t an option. Lando was conscious and trying to help, too. It was all I could do to collect the blood samples before he closed their faceplates.”

  Savara’s eyes remained cold. “And you couldn’t have taken him out, too? He’s practically an old man.”

  A cold lump of anger began to form inside Dena’s stomach. “Again, I had no orders to—”

  “It’s fine. It’s hardly your fault if your makers went too light on your sense of initiative.” Savara’s eyes were twinkling with amusement, and Dena realized the girl had been toying with her. “But perhaps it’s not too late. How likely are our patients to survive?”

  “How would I know?” Dena asked icily. “I wasn’t loaded with medical expertise, either.”

  “No, but the infirmary director does report to you,” Savara said. “Surely, Chief Calrissian has asked you to inquire about the Solos’ condition?”

  Dena reluctantly nodded. “He has. They’ve been unconscious since they arrived, so the medicos are having a hard time evaluating how much brain damage the concussions may have caused. Captain Solo was in a coma—”

  “Was?” Savara asked. “Does that mean he’s awake?”

  “By now, probably. There have been clear signs that he’s coming around,” Dena said. “He was still unconscious when I left Lando’s command center to come down here, but he was removed from the bacta tank a few hours ago.”

  “And Princess Leia?”

  “She’s still in her tank,” Dena said. “She won’t wake up, but she’s not in a coma. The medical droid doesn’t understand why she remains unconscious.”

  Savara’s face grew unhappy. “Jedi healing trance,” she said. “Any other injuries?”

  “She suffered a fractured skull and had one arm broken in several places, but those have already mended. The surgical droids have no explanation—”

  “Healing trance,” Savara repeated, her tone darker than ever. “What else?”

  “Their eyes have been repaired and should function well,” Dena said. “But one of Captain Solo’s eyes is from a donor. We lost the original at the crash site.”

  “A donor?” Savara scowled in distaste. “A prosthetic wouldn’t work?”

  “We’re running short on prosthetics right now,” Dena said, biting back her anger. “Perhaps they’ll replace it when he returns to the Hapes Consortium.”

  “I don’t think returning to the Consortium is going to be in his future,” Savara said. “At least, it better not be. Do I make myself clear?”

  Dena felt her eyes widen. “You want me to kill the Solos?” she gasped. “Both of them?”

  Savara studied her, then finally shook her head. “I suppose not. You’d only get caught, and your makers don’t want your biology exposed. Not yet.”

  Dena exhaled in relief. “That’s probably wise,” she said. “I doubt I would be able to withstand a Jedi interrogation.”

  Savara’s eyes narrowed. “Is that a threat?”

  Dena paused, taking time to evaluate what the girl had just revealed about the Qrephs’ fear of her exposure. Perhaps she had more leverage than she realized.

  After a moment, Dena said, “No, it’s a fact. But you can take it however you like.”

  That actually drew a smile from the girl. “I see I’ve made a mistake, letting you know how important you are.” She reached into one of her thigh pockets and withdrew a black pouch about the size of her palm. “Perhaps I should just give you what you need and leave before I do any more damage.”

  “That might be for the best.”

  Dena knew she should mention the arrival of Luke Skywalker, but he and Lando had been going to great lengths to keep Skywalker’s presence here a secret—and the fact that Savara hadn’t asked about the Grand Master suggested they were succeeding. Reasoning that it might be best to keep at least one of her bargaining chips hidden, Dena extended a hand to accept the pouch.

  Instead of passing it over, Savara suddenly frowned and drew it back. She opened the top, then withdrew three vials about half the length of her little finger and held them up to the light, pretending to study the clear oil within.

  “What are you doing?” Dena gasped.

  “Checking the contents, of course,” Savara said, watching as the oil grew cloudy and gray. “I wouldn’t dare short you—not now, when you realize how valuable you are to us.”

  “Please, don’t!” Dena lunged for the vials, but Savara anticipated her and quickly retreated out of range. “They mustn’t be exposed to light.”

  “Is that so?” Savara continued to study the vials, watching them turn from gray
to silver. “And I suppose they’re no good to you after that?”

  “They’ll be poison!” Dena lunged again. “They’ll kill me faster than no enzyme at all!”

  Savara waited until Dena’s hand was almost on hers, then jerked her arm aside—and let one of the vials go flying. It broke with a distant tinkle, and Dena could not help letting out a cry of despair. There were still two more in Savara’s grasp, and there would be seven more inside the pouch. But each vial contained only a single day’s dose, and deliveries were always ten days apart.

  “Please—don’t.” She motioned at the two vials remaining in Savara’s grasp. “Put them back before the color comes. I need it all to make it until next time.”

  “Come now, we both know that’s not quite true,” Savara said. “You might look a little wan and lose some hair, but if you stretch the interval, you’ll survive.”

  She let another vial slip from her grasp. Dena tried to catch it, only to have Savara block the attempt with a well-placed foot-tap. The second vial shattered, and Dena watched in horror as the enzyme—the enzyme she needed to metabolize her food, the enzyme that the Qrephs had engineered her to need—spread across the duracrete floor in a darkening stain.

  Dena looked up. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Because I don’t like being lied to.”

  “But I’m not lying!” Dena objected. “I’ve told you the truth.”

  “As far as it goes.”

  Savara let the third vial drop and did not try to stop Dena from catching it, but the oil was quickly turning pink. Injecting it now would be painful and deadly. Dena looked back to her tormentor, who was already reaching back into the pouch.

  Savara smiled, then said, “Is there something you neglected to tell me?”

  Dena closed her eyes, then reluctantly nodded. “Luke Skywalker.”

  She did not understand why the revelation made her feel like such a traitor, but it did. Perhaps it was because if anyone in the galaxy was capable of freeing her from the control of the Qrephs, it would be the Grand Master of the Jedi Order.

  And Dena desperately wanted to be free.

  “Luke Skywalker?” Savara’s voice sounded brittle and alarmed. “What about him?”

  When Dena opened her eyes again, Savara had withdrawn her hand from the pouch, empty. The girl’s face was pale and her eyes were large and round. She almost looked afraid.

  “Upstairs with Lando,” Dena said. Suddenly she felt so powerful she had to fight not to smile. “Luke Skywalker is here.”

  Savara allowed her fear to show only in the way her nostrils flared, but it was enough to confirm what Dena had already guessed—that the Skywalker name was the one thing capable of rocking the girl onto her heels. Dena extended her hand, reaching out to take the enzyme pouch … only to have Savara snatch the bag away again.

  “You weren’t going to tell me,” she said. “You think Skywalker can help you.”

  “Nobody can help me,” Dena said. “I know that.”

  “But you have dreams,” Savara insisted. “You have hopes.”

  “What do dreams and hopes matter? Skywalker can’t formulate my enzymes.” Dena paused, then gave a resigned shrug. “Besides, he wouldn’t help me even if he could. He doesn’t trust me.”

  “Why not?”

  “I tried to establish an emotional connection with him,” Dena said. “I don’t understand why it failed. I used the voice you taught me, I teased, and I touched. Your system didn’t work.”

  Instead of anger, the accusation elicited a laugh—a cruel one, but genuine.

  “You tried to seduce Luke Skywalker—with his sister and brother-in-law lying half dead in the infirmary?” Savara shook her head, laughing harder than ever. “You biots are such vac-heads.”

  “If you failed to teach me properly, whose fault is that?” Dena asked. “But the damage is done, and I don’t see how it can be undone.”

  Savara finally stopped chuckling. “That’s because you have no imagination.” She thought for a moment, then asked, “You said in a status report that Tharston had a weakness for sabacc, correct?”

  “Yes,” Dena said. “He went to the casinos on Valnoos every month, whenever he had a recreation break.”

  “Good.” Savara thrust the enzyme pouch into Dena’s hand, then withdrew the datachip from her pocket and passed that over, too. “Take the datachip to Calrissian.”

  Dena stared at the datachip in confusion. “But this has my access number and a copy of the control code. Lando will know in an hour that it was used to sabotage the beam generators at Pit One.”

  “Exactly,” Savara said. “You’ll say you found the chip in Tharston’s locker.”

  “Tharston’s? Why?”

  A sly grin came to Savara’s lips. “Because you’re going to confess to Calrissian and Skywalker,” she said. “You’re going to tell them all about Tharston being your lover and how he often visited your quarters.”

  Dena began to feel queasy inside. “You want me to blame Tharston?”

  Savara rolled her eyes. “No, I want you to answer their questions,” she said. “Let them blame Tharston.”

  Eight

  Leia’s dream began as it ended, with a gauze pad dragging across her torn face. The distant shriek of decompression sang in her ears, and the biting cold of thin air chewed at her nose and cheeks. Her head was spinning, her lungs aching, and she felt herself dropping into hypoxic oblivion. But she could not reach up to close her faceplate. Someone was kneeling on her arms, holding her motionless while the gauze drank up her blood.

  Not yet, Jedi Solo, a woman’s voice was saying. I need more. Just a little more.

  Then Leia awoke as she always did, floating in the blue liquid warmth of a bacta tank, with her pulse pounding in her ears and angry knots slithering in her stomach. An outdated FX-4 medical droid stood at the monitoring station next to the tank, but there was no one else in the room. Not even Han.

  The droid rotated its mushroom-shaped dome in her direction. There was a momentary delay as a central monitoring computer translated the FX’s query from droidspeak into Basic, then a stilted gender-neutral voice rippled through the auditory buds sealed into Leia’s ears.

  “Good afternoon, Jedi Solo. Do you know where you are?”

  Before answering, Leia took a second to calm herself, trying to sort out how much of the dream had been memory and how much had been misinterpretation—or even pure fabrication. Clearly, her subconscious mind was trying to warn her about something, to make her understand that she had been betrayed. But dreams should seldom be taken literally—and, really, what would anyone want with her blood? The warning had to be about something else, something that could be symbolized by blood.

  “Jedi Solo, can you answer me?” the droid asked. “Do you know where you are?”

  Leia sighed at the droid’s insistence, then swirled her hand through the green fluid in which she was floating. “I’m in a bacta tank.” She spoke directly into her breath mask, which had an integrated microphone that would relay her words to a speaker on the tank exterior. “In a hospital somewhere.”

  “An infirmary,” the droid corrected. “Sarnus has no true hospitals.”

  Sarnus. Of course. The planet was deep in the Chiloon Rift, the location of Lando’s refinery. She remembered that much.

  “You are in the Recovery and Close-monitoring Unit,” the droid continued. “Room Ten, Floor Five.”

  “What happened to me?”

  “You arrived with facial trauma, multiple fractures in your left arm, and a concussion,” the droid informed her. “But your recovery is well under way. Your arm has mended incredibly fast. Both of your eyes have been repaired and are completely functional. Your nose has been reconstructed according to visual references obtained from the infirmary’s historical library. Your facial lacerations have been closed—”

  “—and are expected to heal without visible scarring,” Leia finished. “I have a feeling I’ve heard this before.
”

  “Excellent,” the droid replied. “The symptoms of your concussion seem to be receding. What else do you recall?”

  Leia thought for a moment, fighting to retrieve any memory associated with Sarnus. “I recall being in an office with Lando and … Han.”

  As she spoke her husband’s name, Leia’s heart climbed into her throat, and she found herself close to panic. Could that be what her dream was about? Could Han be the blood that was taken from her? She had no memory of what had happened to him after the astrolith impact—but that was no comfort, as she could not recall what had happened to her, either.

  “What else do you remember about the meeting?” the droid asked. “Who else was there?”

  Leia did not even try to recall. “Stop trying to diagnose me,” she ordered. “Just tell me where my husband is.”

  “Captain Solo is on his way—”

  “Then he’s okay?” Leia asked. “He’s not hurt?”

  “He no longer requires bacta immersion to continue healing,” the droid said carefully. “And since there is a shortage of tanks, he has been in the staff lounge, waiting for you to awaken. Chairman Calrissian and two other gentlemen are with him. Your protocol droid asked to be alerted as soon as you were available. Are you not available?”

  “They’re here?” Leia was more relieved than disquieted, of course, but she was disquieted. Bacta-tank wraps were not exactly modest. “In the hospital?”

  “Yes, coming down the corridor,” the droid confirmed. “Though we are an infirmary, not a hospital. I am concerned that you have forgotten that so soon. Do you recall what we were talking about a moment ago?”

  “That Han is on his way with three other men. Please raise the privacy shield.” Leia reached out in the Force and felt not only Han’s familiar presence but that of the young miner who had accompanied them from Brink Station and—much to her surprise—that of her brother, Luke. “This tank does have a privacy shield, doesn’t it?”