Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [81]
After a very long time, the door opened, again that narrow crack, again that labored, dragging motion, as if against the strength of the Will.
Luke listened, breathed, sending his senses out. Far off he could still smell the stench of the dead Affytechans, but no whiff of the Sand People. Aching, he limped toward the door, lightsaber still in hand.
Movement caught his eye. He startled, swinging around, but it was only his own reflection in the dark mirror of the nearest monitor screen. It stared back at him, scarred face, fair hair, the stained gray coverall of a Star Fleet mechanic.
And beside it, behind it, just past his shoulder, he saw another face. A woman’s face, young, framed in a cloud of smoky brown hair like a thick-leaved tree in summer, the gray eyes looking into his.
He swung around sharply, but of course there was no one there.
Chapter 12
“What? Who is it?”
Leia prodded her husband’s shoulder. “I told you you should have waited for her to call back.” She turned back to the holo image of the woman in the field, fiery hair tousled, green eyes blinking into the dim glow of the lights on her end of the transmission. She wore a gold chain around her neck and a shirt Leia recognized as belonging to Lando Calrissian. “Mara, I’m sorry …”
“No, it’s all right.” Mara Jade rubbed her eyes with a quick gesture, and that seemed to take care of any residual sleepiness, as if she’d clicked off a switch. “I must look like one of the Nightsisters of Dathomir. What time is it where you are? What’s up? Is there a problem?”
“We don’t know, exactly,” said Han. He shoved back the towel from his still damp hair. “We know we got a problem but we’re not sure what it means. What can you tell us about Belsavis?”
“Ah.” Mara settled back in the white leather of her chair, which shifted around her like a flower, drew up her long legs, and folded her hands around her knees. Her eyes narrowed, as if she watched something scrolling past on some inner readout screen: thought, memory, surmise. “Belsavis,” she said thoughtfully. “You find out what was there that the Empire thought was so important?”
“You mean the children of the Jedi?” asked Leia.
“Is that what it was?” Her dark brows lifted, then she thought about it, and a corner of her lip curved down, wry and speculative. “Makes sense. The file on it was closed when I started working for the Emperor, you see. Closed and sealed behind six kinds of security locks.”
She shrugged. “Well, closed files always have the same effect on me. But in this case even when I broke into it I couldn’t find out anything except that at the end of the Clone Wars there’d been some kind of secret mission whose target was one of the rift valleys on Belsavis. Security was so heavy that even the people who worked on it didn’t know what was going on. If it was a move against the Jedi—against their families and children—I can see why they did it that way.”
She was silent a moment, a small upright line between her brows as she called back to mind the old data. Beyond the metal shutters that blocked the orchard lights from the bedroom, Leia heard the sleepy trilling of pellata birds and manolliums among the trees, making one final stakeout of their territories before nestling down for the night. Chewie, smelling as only a damp Wookiee can smell, paused in brushing out his fur and growled softly.
“A fighter wing was sent to Belsavis, interceptors mostly, fast but light,” said Mara after a time. “And a whole chain of remote-trigger relay stations was set up, mostly on satellites, or hidden ground stations; completely automated, but what it was they were supposed to activate or signal I never could find out. The mission file was cut to paper dolls. I gathered there was supposed to be a linkup with something that never arrived, something heavy. But later I got copies of some of the Emperor’s private invoices, and there were millions paid out about that date to an engineer named Ohran Keldor …”