Tatooine Ghost Read online

  Han’s jaw fell, but he managed to collect himself after a moment and say, “That’s not so bad. They’ll hesitate. That’s all the advantage we need.”

  Chewbacca groaned and nodded.

  A new image appeared on the datapad, this one of a stock YT-1300 freighter similar to the Falcon. “Chimaera Intelligence believes they are traveling on the Millennium Falcon, a Corellian Engineering Corporation stock light freighter similar to this, possibly traveling under Regina Galas, Sweet Surprise, Longshot, Sunlight Franchise, or another false transponder code. Said ship is believed to be somewhere in the area of Mos Espa. Any trooper reporting the location of this ship to Chimaera Intelligence will be promoted two ranks and have all previous fines and punishments canceled.”

  “That’s bad,” Han said. “If someone tells them about that smuggler’s cave, we’re in big trouble.”

  Chewbacca rowled a question.

  Leia checked the date stamp on the directive. “Two days ago.”

  “We’re in big trouble,” Han said.

  After the message ended, Leia scanned the directory, looking for more directives that might prove informative. She found a message from the previous day, referencing Killik Twilight.

  The display showed an image of the painting. A different communications officer’s voice explained what Wald had already told them in Mos Espa, namely that their effort to destroy Killik Twilight had alerted the Imperials to its importance.

  “Under no circumstances is this painting to be destroyed,” the voice instructed. “Any trooper responsible for the painting’s destruction will be tried and executed as a traitor. Any unit allowing the Rebels to escape with or destroy the painting will forfeit pay and liberty for the remainder of their service.”

  “Now we know what the Imperials are doing to cut labor costs,” Leia observed.

  She started to shut off the message, but Han reached over to freeze the image. Leia thought he had seen something she had not, but found him lost in thought, just staring at the image and trying to recall what it looked like in person. Killik Twilight had that effect on people.

  “Mistress Leia, would you like to know now?”

  “Know?” Leia had almost forgotten the droid had something to tell them. “Yes, now would be good.”

  C-3PO pointed along the edge of the Dune Sea, his finger indicating a group of stars just above the horizon. “I believe there may be a flight of TIEs over there.”

  “TIEs?” Han dropped Herat roughly in the speeder and grabbed the electrobinoculars. “Where?”

  With the electrobinoculars’ reduced field of vision, it took Han longer to find the circle of moving stars than it did Leia. There were six of them, winking in and out in a steady pattern as they wheeled out over the dunes and then back over the rugged crags of the Jundland Wastes.

  “Got ’em. Twin drives. Definitely TIEs, about fifteen kilometers away.” Without lowering the electrobinoculars, Han asked, “Herat, would that ghost oasis be over there?”

  “Bzabzabert, uqiqu! Chichichi!”

  “She wants to know why she should tell you anything, you cheater,” C-3PO said. “That is strictly a translation, of course. She says her leg is throbbing.”

  Chewbacca snatched Herat out of the hoverscout and held her over his head. Leia thought he was probably only trying to help her see the TIEs. Really.

  “Yuyu.”

  “That’s what I thought.” Han turned to Leia. “We’d have come in right under them. Good thing I trusted that feeling you had.”

  “Good thing,” Leia said.

  She hoped her feeling would not cost Kitster Banai his life—or the New Republic the Shadowcast code key. But they would not have saved either by riding into an Imperial trap. Better to think of some way to defang the ambush, then go in.

  That was why she had felt so uneasy about going straight to the ghost oasis, Leia was sure. After her vision in the cave, she had followed the Force and declined Borno’s offer to take them to safety. Then, as they had traveled across the plateau, the Force had acted on her again, guiding her away from danger.

  Now all Leia had to do was figure out why the Force had been drawing her toward Obi-Wan’s—why simply thinking of his home had filled her with such a powerful sensation of security and comfort. And she had to do it quickly.

  “Let’s have a look around,” she said.

  Han passed the electrobinoculars to Chewbacca and motioned him back into the blaster turret, then entered the house with his weapon drawn. When no fire broke out, Leia grabbed the glow rod out of their utility satchel and followed.

  A small dwelling with whitewashed walls and clean curving lines, it was basically a single large room divided into sections by square pillars. Since Leia’s last visit, the place had clearly been ransacked many times and played host to dozens of creatures both sentient and otherwise. The footing for a primitive stove, some plumbing cavities in the walls, and a ventilation hole in the ceiling indicated where someone had stripped the kitchen of its appliances. In a niche at the back, next to the window overlooking the rear approach, stood a dusty workbench with no tools. Across from the bench lay a shredded mattress that looked as though it had most recently served as the bed of a womp rat sow. None of this did anything to diminish the aura of stark comfort and spiritual serenity in the home’s simple design.

  Leia walked through the different areas, allowing the glow rod to roam at random over the walls and debris, doing her best to let the Force guide her hand where it wished. The last entry in Shmi’s journal had finally convinced her that it was the Force drawing her to Obi-Wan’s, and that she would be wise to trust it. We don’t own the farm, Cliegg had said, it owns us. She believed that to be the message of the voice in her vision. Mine. Luke and Han and everything that Leia counted as hers, they all belonged to the Force. She belonged to the Force. Mine. Like life on Tatooine, one could not fight the Force. One could only surrender to it and find a way to use what it offered. Mine.

  “Anything?” Han asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “Maybe there isn’t anything,” Han said. “Maybe you were only feeling the danger at the oasis.”

  “Maybe.” Leia shrugged and tried not to think about the little spiny thing that her glow rod had just sent scurrying through a window. “But I still feel the need to be here.”

  “What do you mean, feel? Like Luke feels?”

  “How do I know what Luke feels?” Leia retorted. “I’m no Jedi. But I do think it’s the Force. It’s too strong to be anything else.”

  Han took the glow rod and began to run the beam around the house. “I’m just saying it would help if we knew what we were looking for.”

  “Maybe,” Leia said. “And maybe not.”

  Leia and Han spent the next few minutes searching the house, peering into dusty crannies and rearranging the debris that mysteriously accumulates in any abandoned dwelling. They found little of interest and nothing to justify the sensation Leia had been experiencing. Finally, Han took the glow rod and swept the light over the kitchen a few times, lingering on the power outlets and the empty areas in the corners and under the cabinets.

  “What’s missing?” he asked.

  “His recipe box?”

  Han shined the glow rod on her shoulder. “Funny.” He turned and started for the back of the house. “The cistern. The power generator.”

  Leia took him to a trapdoor hidden beneath the workbench and descended into a large cellar. A dozen of the black spiny things she had noticed earlier scurried into the corner together to make a single big spiny thing, and a few ten-legged arachnids began to hiss and vibrate in webs on the ceiling.

  Anything of any value had long ago been taken by Jawas or broken by Tuskens. The generator was among the former, the cistern the latter, its lid lying in the bottom in three pieces.

  “Nothing,” Leia said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Not so fast.”

  Han dropped into the cistern and stooped out of sight, leav
ing Leia in the dark with arachnid webs rustling above her head.

  “Han, I mean it. Let’s get—”

  “You’d think a Jedi would be more original.”

  The broken lid pieces landed beside Leia and sent half a dozen spiny things chittering back into the dark.

  “Han, give me that blasted—”

  “Hold this.”

  Han passed Leia the glow rod, which she promptly swept across the floor and ceiling.

  “I mean on the plug, Leia.”

  “Plug?” Leia shined the glow rod into the cistern and found Han squatting again, probing at something between his feet. A pair of clicks sounded, then he pulled a thick plastoid lid off the bottom and set it aside. “What did you find?”

  “The oldest smuggling trick in the book.” Han peered into the dark hole beneath the cistern. “A submerged compartment.” He withdrew a bag about as large as his torso and passed it up to Leia. “That what you’re looking for?”

  Leia opened it, found an ancient datapad and a star chart inside, and felt no change in her experience of the Force. Not that she would have. Just because she had decided to trust the Force did not mean she could expect to tell a premonition from a shiver. She would have to talk to Luke about giving her some guidance.

  “I have no idea,” she said.

  When Han found nothing else, they took the datapad and retreated back outside. Chewbacca had noticed some TIEs flying what looked like a reconnaissance grid and moved the hoverscout down among some boulders where it would prove difficult to detect. Otherwise the Imperials seemed no closer to discovering their presence.

  Leia activated the datapad and found herself looking at Obi-Wan Kenobi’s gray-bearded face.

  “I am waiting, my friend.”

  “Waiting for what?” Leia asked.

  “The watchword.”

  “This has to be it!” Han whispered.

  “This has to be it is not the watchword,” Obi-Wan’s image said.

  “May the Force be with you,” Leia said.

  Obi-Wan smiled patiently. “And with you, too, my friend.” The image returned to its previous state. “May the Force be with you is not the watchword.”

  Leia placed her thumb over the microphone slot and turned to C-3PO. “You talk to it.”

  “Me? But I don’t know the password. Just because we share a common chip—”

  “See if you can reason with it,” Leia said. “If I try again, I’m liable to trigger a security wipe.”

  “I see. I will certainly do my best.”

  Leia removed her thumb. C-3PO and the datapad exchanged electronic garble for less than a second before the display went dark. Chewbacca let out a derisive groan.

  C-3PO turned and cocked his body to look up at the Wookiee. “I see no need for name calling, Chewbacca. It was quite cooperative, for a datapad.”

  “If that’s cooperative, I’d hate to see rude,” Han said.

  “Let’s hear what it said.” Leia turned to C-3PO. “Is there anything helpful in there?”

  “Not at the current time, I’m afraid,” C-3PO said. “The datapad was kind enough to tell me it was being used to store research on hyperspace lanes entering the Unknown Regions. Master Kenobi may have been thinking of leading a mission to search for something called the Outbound Flight Project.”

  “What’s that?” Leia asked.

  “I’m afraid that’s all the datapad would tell me,” C-3PO said. “When I asked for an explanation, it suggested that Obi-Wan’s real friends would know what it was and shut itself down.”

  Leia turned to Han and Chewbacca. “Does Outbound Flight mean anything to you?”

  “Nothing.” Han looked toward the oasis. “And especially nothing that will help us get past those Imperials.”

  Chewbacca shook his head as well.

  “Oh, and the datapad needs a charge,” C-3PO added. “It hasn’t had fresh power in years.”

  Leia plugged the datapad into the hoverscout’s recharger—warning Herat that it was spoken for—then turned back to Han and Chewbacca.

  “I’m sorry.” Leia was running out of ideas. “I just don’t know why I made you come up here.”

  “I must say, I’m very glad you did,” C-3PO said. “Otherwise, I’m quite sure we would be racing down some narrow, winding canyon exchanging blasterfire with a whole squadron of TIEs by now.”

  “For once, the droid has a point.” Han put his arm around Leia’s shoulder. “Let’s give ourselves half an hour to think. Maybe we can come up with a good way out of this mess.”

  “And maybe we can’t.” Leia put her hand on Han’s. “But what can we do? This is Tatooine.”

  Toward morning, they were still thinking—thinking that the situation just kept growing more hopeless. Five minutes after Leia and the others had sat down to think the night before, a pair of assault shuttles had landed near the oasis and debarked two companies of stormtroopers, one into the Jundland Wastes and one into the Dune Sea. An hour later, there had been a few blaster flashes, not enough for a real battle, and the TIEs and the shuttles had departed together. Han was betting that stormtroopers were taking hidden positions around the ghost oasis, surrounding the Tuskens and waiting for the Solos to arrive.

  Leia was betting that he was right.

  She was sitting at the edge of the bluff with Han, her shoulder throbbing dully, but feeling good enough that she insisted on taking her turn with the electrobinoculars. If there were any TIEs above the oasis now, they were too high to see even at a magnification of several hundred times. Behind them, Chewbacca was cursing repeatedly and loudly as he struggled to remove the transponder from the hoverscout’s holomap without triggering a tamper signal. They still had no idea how they were going to sneak past two companies of stormtroopers, rescue Kitster Banai, recover Killik Twilight, and survive long enough to inform Mon Mothma of their success. But they did know they would need a working holomap, and that meant the transponder had to be removed before they went anywhere.

  “How many moss-paintings did Ob Khaddor grow?” Han had “borrowed” the Imperial datapad from Herat’s salvage heap and was again transfixed by Killik Twilight. “How did he do it?”

  “If you’re going to become a Khaddor devotee, you should probably know that the proper term is design, not grow,” Leia said. “And I’ll never tell how it’s done. No good Alderaanian would.”

  “Not even to your husband?”

  Leia softened her voice. “To my husband, maybe.” She glanced over from behind the electrobinoculars. “But to one of the fastest smugglers in the galaxy? I don’t think so.”

  “That’s the fastest,” Han said. “And it’s criminal to let a whole art form die off like that. I can’t believe that’s what Alderaanians want.”

  “Careful, Han. Your sensitive side is showing.” Leia would never have guessed Han Solo to be the moss-art type… but then again, Khaddor’s work was not just any moss-art. “And letting it die is the whole point. It underscores the plight of Alderaanian culture. It’s also one of the favorite themes of one of the planet’s best-known painters.”

  “Khaddor said that?”

  “Not in so many words,” Leia replied. “But he never passed on the refinements that allowed him to design such deep colors. And it’s inherent in the work. You only have to look at it.”

  Han was silent a long time, and Leia looked over to see him studying the image in the datapad. Finally, he shook his head.

  “I am looking at it,” he said. “And I don’t see that.”

  “It’s a warning about the cost of surrendering to darkness.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Han, everybody agrees. The finest critics in the galaxy—”

  “I don’t care,” Han said. “Everybody’s wrong.”

  Leia sighed in exasperation, then gave the electro-binoculars to Han and took the datapad. “It’s probably the colors in the display. You can’t expect an electronic version—”

  “It’s not the colors.�
� Han raised the electrobinoculars and began to watch the oasis. “I thought the same thing when I saw it at Mawbo’s.”

  Leia studied the image. The colors were hardly as rich as the real thing, but the tones were true. And with its stormy sky sweeping in over the Killik city and the insectoid figures peering over their shoulders at the approaching darkness, it was still beautiful, and it still had the same profound effect.

  “You don’t see the Killiks fleeing the storm?” Leia asked. “You don’t see how they’re going to vanish because they’ve turned their backs to the darkness?”

  “Nope.”

  Han’s voice had assumed that stony tone it did when he had not only made up his mind, but also concluded that anyone who disagreed with him had the brains of a rock worrt.

  Nothing bothered Leia more.

  “Then what do you see?” Usually, she had to consciously inject the impatience into her voice; this time it came naturally. “Perhaps you’d care to enlighten me?”

  “I would.” Han lowered the electrobinoculars and tapped the datapad down near the bottom of the display. “What are the Killiks doing there?”

  “They’re glancing back at what they’re about to lose,” Leia said. “Also, Khaddor didn’t want to show their faces. Nobody knows what the Killiks really looked like, so it was his way of not presuming.”

  “He said that?”

  “Not in so many words,” Leia replied, trying to remember what critic had made the point. “But it’s obvious.”

  “Not to me,” Han said. “They aren’t looking. They’re turning. Look at the way their bodies are twisting at the waist.”

  “This is a datapad. You can’t be sure—”

  “I can’t, but you can. You saw that painting every morning for how many years? And you’re telling me you can’t close your eyes and remember whether their bodies were twisting?”

  Leia did not need to close her eyes. The twist was there, subtly and only in the leaders, but it was there. Most critics considered it an uncharacteristic awkwardness of form and attributed it to a design problem in the growth medium.