Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [111]
“Give him coordinates, information, everything. Don’t stay to defend me. All right?”
The droid beeped and trailed her onto the lift.
The smuggler tunnel would surface somewhere in Plawal, she knew. But from Han’s description of the lava caves and the well in its circle of standing stones—from the fact that Roganda Ismaren had spent a part of her childhood here—she guessed they connected with the crypts under Plett’s House as well. What she was concealing there, and how she had managed to thwart sensor probes after people started disappearing, Leia couldn’t imagine, but it was clear to her now what had become of Drub McKumb and Nubbyk the Slyte … and who knew how many more besides?
Vader … and Palpatine, Mara had said.
And, evidently, Palpatine’s concubine … though the woman hadn’t struck Leia as particularly strong in the Force. Certainly not imbued with that aura of eerie strength, that silence that even as a cocky teenage Senator she had felt emanating from the Emperor.
What, then?
Leia slung her weaponry straps over her shoulders, and stepped out warily into the dark.
For a long distance the smuggler tunnel was simply raw stone, chewed out of the bedrock of the planet under five thousand years’ worth of glacier, which ran occasionally through the widened beds of what had once been underground streams. The floor had been smoothed to permit the passage of cargo droids: ramps built, roofs heightened, crevasses bridged. It was easy to follow; all she had to do was move as silently as she could.
Later, when the way branched, or cross-tunnels were cut in the rock, or when they passed through caves stifling with fumes and smotheringly hot from sullen craters of steaming mud, she listened, stretching out her senses, feeling in the Force for the touch, the essence of the five people who led her on. Painted Door Street—the narrow lane on which Roganda had said she lived—backed onto the vine-curtained bench on which Plett’s House stood. Before the dome was built, the rift had been periodically subject to storms. Of course the Mluki would tunnel … and of course the smugglers would find at least some of the tunnels in the foundations of those ancient houses.
Not all the dwellings on Painted Door Street were built over the older dwellings, of course … but Leia was willing to bet Roganda’s was.
She had lived here. She had known this place. And she had come back, when Palpatine died in the seething heart of his second attempt to cow the galaxy by terror.
Why?
Leia sensed the swift scramble of claws, the snuffling pant of animal breath, even before Artoo whistled his nearly soundless warning. They were far off but coming close fast, their direction almost impossible to determine in the maze of cross-tunnels, caves, carved-out rooms, ramps and stairways ascending and descending.
“They’re probably tracking us by scent,” she said softly. “So let’s have some light, Artoo.”
The droid barely had time to brighten all his panel lights when the things were on them.
Rodian, human, and two Mluki—or what had been those races once. Leia identified them even as she cut with the forcepike—not as clean or as strong as a lightsaber, but in trained hands potentially deadly. It had the advantage of keeping more than one at bay at a time, without danger of ricochets, and as they fell screaming on her, Leia struck at her attackers, cold, scared, and furious. She slashed a Mluki halfway through the neck and swung immediately to the Rodian, whose broken metal club gashed open her sleeve and the flesh of her arm. The weight of them nearly overpowered her. There was nothing in them she could warn to keep back, nothing that realized they were in danger. When one of the humans ripped the forcepike away from her she barely brought the flamethrower up in time, searing at them, blasting them, and they attacked