Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [165]
This time Irek did cut the catwalk. Leia dropped the blaster and grabbed hard and tight as the chain ladder plunged sickeningly down. The lurch, the jerk of it reaching the bottom of its arc was terrifying, jolting her belly and freezing her heart. The ladder jerked and swung and it took all her courage to release her deathgrip enough to begin climbing, but she knew she was a sitting target. A bolt burned the ends of the vines to her left.
“I’ve got her!” she heard Keldor yell again. Leia dragged herself over the edge of the steel cage and fell into the fusty-smelling masses of the vines. She tore up one of the heavy vine-stakes, knowing it would be almost useless against either lightsaber or blaster, but it was the only weapon to hand. At the same moment the bed lurched and began to move, rumbling along its track on the ceiling, swaying with the momentum of its speed. Leia flattened, digging her hands hard into the vines as the bed lurched and jerked against the other catwalks that connected it to the beds around it, then swayed sickeningly as the thin steel ladders broke off.
Don’t look down, she told herself grimly, but, looking up, saw where the tracks crossed …
Another bed swept down the crossing track out of nowhere, vines trailing, whizzing along like an out-of-control freighter. Leia crushed herself flat again, and the gondola slashed by half a meter over her head, cables whining as the whole bed dipped toward her in an attempt to sweep her off. Then the bed she was on was moving faster and faster, swaying wildly as it swooped around corners, raising and lowering—
Another searing whine of the blaster, as a whipping turn brought her clear of the pouring fog and into what Keldor considered his range.
“Here! Over here!”
The moving bed lurched, stopped, and reversed its direction.
She could see Irek standing up on another bed, slightly above her, backlit in the swirling fog, lightsaber burning like amber flame in his hands.
Fog was everywhere, spewing streams of it mixed with snow as the cold air poured down through the crack in the dome. Another silk bed swept toward her on a collision course; Leia gauged the possibility of a jump to that one but lost her nerve, ducked flat, and clung as it slammed heavily into the side of her bed, nearly hurling her out, then swept away as it had come. One instant she was swaying over a sickening view of trees and clouds and tiny lights below, the next lost in dark swirls of mist through which the lights on her bed glowed like jewels.
Something huge and dark loomed out of the mist above her and she felt the jolt of someone landing on the bed. A heavy rustle of feet in the vines, then: “Don’t move, Princess. I’m not very good with this but at this range I’m not going to miss again.”
The silk bed lurched out of the fog. Ohran Keldor, blaster in hand, stood at the other end.
The bed slowed, but continued a constant, even course back to the bed where Irek stood like a slender black god.
In a sudden squeal of cables another garden rose from below them, missing them by less than a meter, and from its rim Han Solo launched himself into the vines at Keldor’s side. At the same moment both that bed and the one Han had ridden over to them swung in another direction, heading along the track toward the vine-festooned supply station on the rift wall, where Leia could see Jevax and Chewbacca, standing at the controls.
Irek yelled, “No!” and Han, who had twisted the blaster out of the astonished Keldor’s fist, shouted, “Run for it, Leia!”—instead she strode over through the vines and delivered a smashing blow with the vine-stake to the back of Keldor’s head as he struggled with Han on the edge of the bed.
Keldor staggered, reeling. Han jerked him back from the edge and thrust him toward the leading end of the bed, which was now closing in on the supply station. Jevax waded through