Tatooine Ghost Page 17

  C-3PO was the last to take his position, deactivating the compartment’s interior lights and plunging it into total darkness. He shut himself down and clunked up against the access door. A few minutes later, the market skiff came to a stop. Over the intercom—now muffled by the matte painting—Leia heard a stormtrooper speaking to Jula.

  “Anchorhead Volunteers?”

  That was the magnetic sign clamped to the side of the skiff.

  “Search and rescue,” Jula explained. The howl of the wind—and the patter of sand grains against plastoid armor—could be heard over his voice in the background. “You have noticed the storm, right?”

  “Of course,” the stormtrooper said. “State your business.”

  “Just did,” Jula said, sounding sincerely angry. “Look at the side of the wagon. Search and rescue. We’re looking for survivors.”

  “You won’t find any here,” the stormtrooper said.

  “What about that big swoop?” Jula demanded. “Someone must’ve driven that thing out here.”

  “The swoop is not your concern,” the stormtrooper said. “How many survivors have you found?”

  “Same as usual,” Jula answered nonchalantly. “None.”

  “None?”

  “We do it for the salvage,” Silya said, her voice sweet and brittle. “Rescue’s just a euphemism.”

  “A what?” the stormtrooper demanded. “Never mind. Open your skiff for inspection.”

  The intercom went silent. Leia cursed under her breath, then pushed her hand through the zipper and popped one of the odor capsules moisture farmers used to empty profogg warrens when the pesky creatures started to burrow near their hydroponics chambers. The reek didn’t smell all that much like a human corpse, but it was awful enough to discourage a close inspection of the compartment. She closed the bodybag again and held her breath. She wished she could hold it forever.

  The compartment door hissed open, and C-3PO fell into the stormtrooper. The man cursed through his voice filter, and the droid thunked down across the doorway—as planned. Leia’s bodybag immediately began to warm as the hot desert air rolled into the compartment.

  “Sorry,” Jula said. “Load must have shifted. We’re still getting some pretty good gusts.”

  “That smell.” No helmet-mounted air scrubber was powerful enough to completely eliminate the stench in the compartment, and the Imperial sounded like he was making a sour face. “What is it?”

  “What do you think?” Jula countered. “We found a few folks… They were pretty far gone.”

  “I thought you were looking for salvage.”

  “We are—and we find a lot of bodies,” Silya said. “Do you expect us to just leave them where they dropped?”

  “Besides,” Jula added. “Sometimes there’s a reward.”

  The stormtrooper was silent for a moment. Leia had to take a breath and was grateful for the antigagging tonic Silya had spooned into their mouths before departing the moisture farm. It did not make the smell any less vile, but at least she was not fighting her own body to remain quiet.

  “Any humans?” the stormtrooper asked.

  “A few,” Jula said. “If you’re looking for someone in particular, feel free to climb in—”

  “That won’t be necessary,” the stormtrooper said quickly. “We’re looking for a man named Kitster Banai. Here’s a holo—”

  “Don’t need it,” Jula said. “I know Kitster. What makes you think you’ll find him out here? He’s not the type to—”

  “I’ll ask the questions,” the stormtrooper said.

  “Sure, if that’s the way you want it.” Jula launched into his next question without pause. “What about the fella who was flying that rocket swoop over there?”

  Leia’s pulse started to pound so ferociously she nearly missed the start of Jula’s next question.

  “… take him off your hands? A body starts to stink awfully fast in this heat.”

  Body! Leia had to remind herself not to sit up. If the Imperials were still looking for Banai and there was a body, it could only be… she could not even bring herself to think it. But if it was, she was not leaving here without it. She would not leave her dead husband in the hands of a squad of—

  “There isn’t a body,” the stormtrooper said. “Did you find any of these corpses around here?”

  “Not close enough to be your swoop pilot,” Jula said.

  Leia started to breathe again. There was still hope. Han was on foot in the Tatooine desert with a wing of TIEs and company of stormtroopers looking for him, but those weren’t bad odds. Not for Han Solo.

  Outside the skiff, Jula continued, “These all came from up near the main speeder corridor. So… you have any plans for that swoop wreck?”

  “The Empire’s plans are not your concern, farmer. What about Squibs?”

  Jula’s voice turned resentful. “What about ’em?”

  “Did you pick up any?”

  “Squibs? Bloah, no—they never bring a reward.”

  The stormtrooper was silent for a moment, then asked, “You’re sure you don’t have Squibs?”

  “I know what a Squib looks like,” Jula said. “You don’t believe me, climb in and have a look. Nobody back there’s going to mind.”

  The stormtrooper’s voice grew muffled as he turned and started to crunch across the ground toward the rear of the market skiff. “What’s in the rear compartment?”

  “Salvage.” Leaving the skiff door open, Jula started after him. “How many Squibs did you say there were?”

  “I didn’t.” The voices continued to fade. “Why?”

  “Because I did find a swoop you might be interested in,” Jula said. “It had three small seats that might have been…”

  The voices grew too muted to understand, and Leia could no longer stand not being able to see outside. She lowered the bodybag seal just far enough to look. Outside the doorway, in the gauzy dust haze of a relatively mild forty-kilometer-per-hour wind, five stormtroopers were standing guard around the rocket swoop Han had been using. The vehicle lay on its side, half buried in a dune, the pilot’s cowling packed with sand.

  The swoop lay on the same side at the same angle as in the image that had appeared to her in the landspeeder. The dune covered the engine housing to the same height. Sand spilled out of the exhaust nacelle in the same fan-shaped pile and covered the pilot’s cowling up to the same edge. The same worn corner was all she could see of the seat. Not close. Exact. There could no longer be any denying it—she had not imagined this, nor hallucinated it. Leia had experienced a Force-vision.

  She was not really surprised. She had long ago come to understand—when Luke told her the truth about their father—that many of the diplomatic gifts she attributed to intuition were really the glimmerings of untrained Jedi potential. Leia thought back to her vision aboard the Falcon. She was touching the Force, just as Luke had said. But was he right about the rest? Was she in just as much danger as Han?

  Jula Darklighter walked back into view, followed by the stormtrooper leader and two escorts, and joined the rest of the squad by the rocket swoop. He circled the derelict twice, then squatted on the windward side and stared at the ground. The leader came over and stood above him, his filtered voice asking some question Leia could not hear.

  Jula shook his head. The stormtrooper demanded an answer. The farmer shrugged, then pointed at the ground and ran his finger out ahead of him, tracing a line into the wind out toward the horizon. The leader summoned five of his troopers and pointed at the ground, then pointed in the same direction. The stormtroopers nodded, then mounted their speeder bikes and fanned out across the desert, traveling for the windward horizon.

  Jula turned and asked something about the swoop, to which the stormtrooper replied with a firm shake of the head. The farmer spread his hands and started back toward the market skiff, the squad leader following close behind.

  “… Empire thanks you for your help, citizen. And you will report any sightings of sandcra
wlers or Jawas.”

  “Sure I will.” Jula’s tone was cynical. “But I’d look a lot harder if you let me salvage that swoop.”

  “I’ve said before that I have orders to hold it for inspection. You have my service number. Contact me after I’ve had a chance to speak with my superiors and tell them how helpful you’ve been. Perhaps they’ll release it to you after they’re done.”

  Jula stopped beside the market skiff and reached for the door pad. “If that’s the only way.”

  “It is. The only way. And my superiors will certainly be inclined to look more favorably on your request if you have helped us locate that sandcrawler.”

  Jula hit the slap pad. “I’ll bet they would.”

  The door hissed shut, and the market skiff resumed its journey. The compartment broke into a rustle as Leia and the others crawled free of the bodybags.

  “What a smell!” Emala gasped. “I wish I was dead.”

  They reactivated the compartment light, and Leia went straight to the intercom.

  “Jula, that was Han’s swoop.”

  “So I figured,” Jula said. “He was doing pretty well when he abandoned it, so don’t you worry.”

  “Sure I won’t,” Leia said, using the same cynical tone Jula had with the stormtrooper. “How would you know?”

  “I know,” Jula said. “There was an Imperial locator beacon next to it, and he was smart enough to leave it in one piece when he left. He didn’t want to be found.”

  “And that means he wasn’t desperate,” Silya answered. “When a man gets really thirsty, he always wants to be found.”

  “Okay,” Leia said. “What did you find on the ground that sent the stormtroopers flying off?”

  “Nothing.”

  Leia waited a moment for more explanation. When none came, she asked, “So where are they going?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “I’m afraid Jula played them a bit,” Silya offered. “He let them think he saw something he didn’t. Then, they began to see it too, and off they went.”

  “They weren’t very bright, even for Imperials,” Emala said.

  “Everyone knows thirsty men never go into the wind,” Sligh added.

  “Actually, I didn’t know that,” Leia said. “But it makes sense. What did you find, Jula?”

  “It’s what I didn’t find,” he reported. “You said Ulda put a vidmap on that swoop?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s gone.”

  Chewbacca, who was helping the Squibs roll the concealment matte back up to the ceiling, growled a concern. C-3PO, still drawling a little as his systems came up, translated.

  “Master Chewbacca doesn’t see how that information is of any use. Unless we know where he intended to go—”

  “My money’s on the Jawa Raceway,” Sligh said.

  “How much?” Jula asked.

  “Jula!” Silya scolded. “Don’t you take advantage. We’re north of there, Grees.”

  Both male Squibs flattened their ears, and Emala chuckled. Grees snarled at Emala, then asked, “Then you’re thinking the Bantha Burrows?”

  “That’s where I’d go,” Jula said. “What do you think?”

  “We find more stuff in the Sarlacc Gardens,” Sligh said.

  “But Han’s not from Mos Espa,” Silya pointed out. “He wouldn’t know about Monk’s Well.”

  Leia looked to Chewbacca, who grunted negatively. Chewbacca had never heard of the place, so Han probably hadn’t either.

  “The Bantha Burrows,” Leia said. “Well or no well, Han’s not going near anything with Sarlacc in the name.”

  The skiff floor seemed to shift forward as they accelerated. “Go ahead and bring up the scanners,” Jula said. “The Imperials know we’re out here looking, so they’re not going to get too curious even if they do detect us, and we might find something that tells us one way or another.”

  Chewbacca and the Squibs set to work. Leia grabbed a set of electrobinoculars, then opened the door far enough to have a clear view. Though the storm was over, the winds continued to stir up a thin dust haze, reducing visibility to a mere hundred meters close to the desert floor. But the sky was clear, so deeply blue it was almost purple. In the distance ahead, the first of the twin suns was already sinking behind a jagged spine of brown mountains, spraying the vista with a fan of golden rays. Leia adjusted her electrobinoculars to maximum view field and, trading Tatooine’s stern splendor for any small chance of spying her husband, began to search the pearly gauze for any darkness or sharp-edged shadow that might be a man or a piece of equipment lying on the ground.

  As Leia watched, she brought Han’s face to mind, hoping the image would change into a Force-vision and provide some hint that would help them find her husband. The only change was that the image kept changing: the insolent but lovable scoundrel trying to rescue her on the Death Star, the smug lover about to be frozen in carbonite, the confused suitor on Endor, offering to step aside so she could be with… her brother.

  Chewbacca came over to sit behind her, staring out over her head, and rested his paws on her shoulders. They were as heavy as a full field pack, but Leia tried not to let that show. As large as they were, they were also a comfort, and she knew the Wookiee had to be as worried as she.

  He groaned a suggestion.

  “I’m trying,” Leia said. “But the Force and I aren’t much use to each other right now.”

  Chewbacca squeezed her shoulders and groaned softly.

  “It’s not all right, Chewie,” Leia said. “I got Han into this. I ought to be able to get him out. I owe him that.”

  Leia raised the electrobinoculars to her eyes again, and they continued across the flats. Finally, the skiff turned, bringing the door around so she was looking directly toward the mountains. The wind died and the dust haze lifted, leaving her to stare across several hundred meters of desert into a shimmering labyrinth of brown canyons and craggy cliffs, pocked with the dark circles of thousands of huge caves.

  “The Bantha Burrows?” Leia asked.

  “You guessed it.” Emala appeared at her side and stood on her tiptoes to push Leia’s electrobinoculars away from the canyon floors. “You look for urusais or skettos circling overhead.”

  “Okay. What are they?”

  “Carrion eaters and bloodsuckers.” Grees made no effort to be subtle. It was probably not a concept Squibs could comprehend. “If you see them in the air, that’s good.”

  “And if I see them on the ground?”

  “You don’t want to,” Sligh said. “That’s why Emala’s watching the ground.”

  They continued along the front of the mountain. Once, a trio of TIEs circled around to take a closer look at the market skiff. Leia mistook them for urusais for an instant, but the craft shrieked over and were gone before she could yell for Jula to stop. The search party spent the next minute wondering if the starfighters were carrying sensor equipment capable of spotting the partially opened door, but the craft never returned, and eventually everyone relaxed.

  It took only five minutes longer for Leia to spy a cloud of leathery-winged creatures circling in front of a cleft in a canyon wall. With huge red eyes, snaggletoothed beaks half hidden beneath folds of greenish gold hide, and fan-shaped combs rising behind their heads, they were the ugliest things she had ever seen in the air. As soon as the creatures noticed the big skiff, they dropped lower and tightened their circle.

  “Stop!” Leia lowered her arms and pointed into the canyon. Without electrobinoculars, the creatures looked like flitnats. “In the canyon.”

  “Urusais,” Emala reported.

  “Got ’em.” Jula turned the skiff toward the canyon. “I’ll swing around and bring the door as close to the cleft as I can.”

  A few moments later, a terrible banging erupted from the roof of the skiff.

  “We’re being bombed!” C-3PO cried. “We’re doomed!”

  “It’s just rocks, chipbrain,” Grees said. “The urusais are defending their clai
m.”

  The Squibs readied their blasters. Leia and Chewbacca exchanged nervous glances and prepared their own weapons. The banging grew to a constant din of thunder, and dents began to appear on the inside of the ceiling. Leia had C-3PO store a reminder to send the Darklighters the credits to purchase a new market skiff.

  Finally, Jula swung the skiff around and pulled it up beside a hundred-meter fleckrock cliff. As vertical and smooth as any Coruscant wall, it was split down the center by the meter-wide cleft that Leia had spotted earlier. Even with the compartment door open only a crack, Leia could feel a breeze pouring out of the fissure—not exactly cool, but not as hot as the surrounding rock. It grew apparent that the cleft was actually a deep, twisting, sand-filled gorge that ran some distance back into the mountains. With the suns already dropping behind the horizon, it was also dark and foreboding.

  The Squibs squeezed in front of Leia and Chewbacca.

  “We’ll take care of this,” Grees said.

  “You keep the urusais off us,” Sligh added.

  Chewbacca growled, and Leia shook her head.

  “No way we’re staying behind,” Leia said. “That’s my husband out there.”

  “We’re thinking of you,” Emala retorted. “The Wookiee will get stuck in three steps, and don’t expect us to wait for you if Han was dragged back there by a baby krayt dragon.”

  “Let the Squibs do it, dear,” Silya said over the intercom. “They’ll be faster—and speed might be important.”

  Reluctantly, Chewbacca growled in agreement—and caught Leia by the arm to make sure she didn’t do anything foolish.

  Grees hit the slap pad, and the Squibs launched themselves into the fissure, scrambling along the sides of the gorge, leaping back and forth between the two walls, sometimes bounding off a boulder rising up from the floor.

  A loud clatter arose as the urusais swooped over, dropping fist-sized stones into the crevice. Leia and Chewbacca opened fire from the door, blasting three of the creatures out of the air in as many seconds, and the bombardment ceased. After that, it was only a matter of firing the occasional bolt when one of the creatures swooped by to see what was happening.