Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [107]
To her utter relief—despite the sound of the lift, for many years with the Rebel Alliance had turned Leia into a confirmed pessimist about things that could go wrong—the small lobby in the bunker was empty. She touched the summoning switch and looked swiftly around her.
A small metal door proved to be a locker, filled with gray mechanics’ coveralls. She picked the smallest human-fit she could find, dug around in the pockets of the others until she located a billed cap, which she crammed on her head, shoving her hair up underneath.
Is it far out? If Elegin was asking, then Keldor knew … which meant Keldor had been here longer.
How much longer? And Elegin—meeting someone? Someone else who’d “gone on vacation” with wife and children and then dropped them off at a fashionable resort in order to take a fast ship elsewhere?
The lift doors opened. Leia stepped in, keyed to the hangar, the only possible destination. While the lift was ascending she flipped open Artoo’s front hatch. Usually the droid was kept spotless, but Chewbacca’s rough-and-ready engineering had resulted in a great deal of soot and grease, which she smeared on her face. After a moment’s thought she transferred her blaster from her belt to the coverall’s copious pocket. She hoped she could carry off the impersonation of an inconspicuous mechanic when she reached the hangar, but if she couldn’t …
Elegin and Keldor, as she feared they might be, were just pulling on protective thermal suits preparatory to climbing into the smallest of the available ice walkers, a low-slung vehicle built along much the same lines of a tree feeder, whose dozen long legs were capable of both climbing over the rugged glacial terrain and spreading out to anchor in the face of the brutal winds. They’d heard the lift ascending and were watching as Leia came out, but the sight of the slight, shuffling figure in an unbelted gray coverall trailed by an astromech droid was apparently a reassuring one, because they climbed into the ice walker and slammed shut the cowl.
A moment later the bay doors cranked open. Leia shuffled over to the crew lockers at the far end of the hangar and pretended to canvass her pockets for keys until the walker moved into the bay.
The moment the doors shut behind it she pulled a pair of wires out of her inner pocket and flipped open Artoo’s hatch again, hooking the bare ends in as Han had showed her once. “Okay, Artoo,” she said grimly. “Let’s see how good a burglar you’d make.”
They opened four lockers before they found a t-suit that fit her; the gloves in its pocket were clearly intended for a Bith. She reset the oxygen and temperature controls for human levels and checked the seals as she pulled it on. There were a couple of Ikas-Adno speederbikes of various models in the hangar but Leia regretfully passed them up. Antigrav vehicles moved fast, but in a high-wind environment like the glacier they were worse than useless. Instead she chose a very old Mobquet Crawler, mostly for its low profile and small engine, which would probably fail to register on a detector if Keldor was watching his trail. She dragged a couple of oil-stained planks over to make a ramp for Artoo, up the back between the high trapezoids of the treads.
“You set back there?” She climbed in, shot the canopy into place, and hit the latches. The inner bay door creaked open, warm air swirling the powder snow and ice crystals that still strewed the dirty concrete floor.
Artoo tweeped an affirmative.
“So let’s see what’s actually going on on this ball of ice.”
The outer door opened. Bleak winds howled across the wilderness of rock and ice: bitter, vile, toothbreakingly cold, a Hell-winter that had already lasted for five thousand years.
Leia set homing coordinates, glanced back to make sure Artoo had hooked himself into the guidance computer, and set out across the frozen landscape in the distant ice walker’s wake.
Chapter 16
In a way, you, Princess, are responsible for our choice of target …
She could see him still. A tall man,