Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [4]
In the shadows of the Meeting Hall’s columned porch, Leia could just glimpse the others who’d come with them to the diplomatic reception: Chewbacca the Wookiee, Han’s copilot, mechanic, and closest friend from his smuggling days, two meters plus of reddish fur well brushed for the occasion; the golden gleam of the protocol droid C-3PO; and the smaller, chunkier shape of his astromech counterpart, R2-D2.
All those battles, thought Leia, turning back to the Ithorian delegation. All those stars and planets, whose names, sometimes, she could scarcely recall, though in nightmares she felt again the ice and heat and terror.… And yet, after all the danger and fear, the Republic was alive. Growing in spite of the warlords of the fragmented Empire, the satraps of the old regime, the planets that tasted liberty and wanted total independence from all federation. Here in the clear glory of the sunlight, the utter peace of this alien world, it was impossible to feel that they would not succeed.
She saw Luke move, swing around as if at some sound, scanning the two-level arcades that flanked the Meeting Hall, and she felt at the same moment the terrible sense of danger …
“Solo!”
The voice was a raw scream.
“Solo!”
The man sprang from the arcade’s upper balcony with the unthinking speed of an animal, landed halfway up the steps, and raced toward them, arms outstretched. Ithorians staggered, taken by surprise, as he shoved his way between them; then they fell back from him in shock and fear. Leia had an impression of eyes rolling in madness, flecks of spittle flying from his dirty beard, even as she thought, He isn’t armed, and realized in the next second that this was one to whom that fact meant nothing.
The Ithorian herd leaders closed on the man, but their reflexes were the reflexes of a thousand generations of herbivores. The attacker was within a foot of Han as Luke stepped forward, with no appearance of haste or effort, and caught the claw-fingered hand, flipping the man in a neat circle and laying him without violence on the pavement. Han, who’d stepped back a pace to give Luke room to throw, now moved back in, helping to pin the attacker to the ground.
It was like trying to hold down a frenzied rancor. There was something hideously animal in the way the man bucked and heaved, throwing the combined strength of Han and Luke nearly off him, screaming like a mad thing as Chewbacca and the Ithorians closed in.
“Kill you! Kill you!” The man’s broken, filthy hands flailed, grabbing at Han as the Wookiee and Ithorians dragged him from the ground. “Going to kill you all! Solo! Solo!”
His voice scaled up into a hideous scream as one of the herd’s physicians, loping from the Meeting Hall in a billow of purple robes, slapped the man on the side of the neck with an infuser. The man gasped, mouth gaping, sucking air, eyes staring in lunatic pain. Then he sagged back unconscious into a dozen restraining arms.
Leia’s first reaction was to reach Han—the intervening two meters of platform were suddenly a virtual stockade of towering, gesticulating Ithorians, chattering like some impossibly beautiful orchestra whose players have all suddenly been dosed with brain-jagger or yarrock. Umwaw Moolis was in her way. “Your Excellency, never in the history of this herd, of this world, have we been subjected to such an attack …”
It was all she could do not to push her aside.
Luke, she was interested to note, had gone straight for the arcade from which the man had come, springing from platform to balcony and scanning the colonnade and the square beyond.
The children!
Leia forced her way through the crowd to the doorway.
Winter was gone. See-Threepio toddled forth from the shadows with his slightly awkward mechanical walk