Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [85]
She pulled his arms more closely around her, closing her eyes and drifting in the scents of soap, and his flesh, and the thick, slightly sulfurous murk of the night. Had it been only that afternoon they’d stood on the tower? Seen the children of the Jedi playing around the grille that covered Plett’s Well? Felt the lost peace, the stillness of those other days, rising around them like the warmth of a long-forgotten sun?
Very low, she said, “I have dreams, Han; dreams where I’m hunting through all those rooms on the Death Star, running through corridors, opening doors, looking behind hatches, searching all the lockers, because there’s something somewhere, some key, that will turn off the destructor beams. I dream that I’m running down the hallways with—with whatever it is—clutched in my hand, and if I can just make it to the Ignition Chamber in time, just do the right thing, I’ll save them. I’ll switch off the beam and be able to go home.”
His grip tightened around her, holding her fast against his body. He knew she had dreams. He’d waked her up from them, and held her against his chest while she cried, too many times to count. She felt the breath of his lips move the hair at the crown of her head. “There was nothing you could have done.”
“I know. But at least once a day I think: I couldn’t save them, but I can make those who did it pay.” She turned in his arms, looking up at him in the misty apricot light. “Would you do it?”
Han grinned down at her. “Like a shot. But I’m not the Chief of State.”
“Would you do it to please me?”
He laid his hand along her cheek, leaned down to kiss her lips. He said softly, “No. Not even if you asked.”
He led her inside. As he stopped to close the shutters behind them, Leia paused by the room’s small table, where a half dozen shallow cakes of colored wax floated in a great glass bowl of water. She flicked the switch on the long stem of the lighter, touched in turn each wick. The drifting lights painted wavery circles of amber and daffodil on the ceiling and walls. Her eyes met Han’s over the floating candle flames; she let slip the shawl she’d worn over her shoulders, and held out to him her hand.
They wouldn’t let her sleep.
They kept coming into the steel-walled cell, asking her questions, threatening her—telling her this person had told them this, that person had told them that. That she had been betrayed, that everything was known, that her father had been working for the Empire all along, that those she trusted had sold her out … that she would be lobotomized and taken to one of the barracks pleasure houses … tortured … killed. She’d tried to keep her mind on the Death Star plans, on the threat to the Senate, on the danger to hundreds of planets rather than on her own terror …
No, Leia whispered, trying to surface from the drowning, breathless horror of the dream. No …
Then the door of the detention cell had slipped open with its evil hissing sound, and Vader had been standing there, Vader huge and black and terrible, surrounded by stormtroopers. And behind him, darker, shinier, more evil still, the black smooth floating bulk of the Torturer …
“No!”
She tried to scream but could manage no more than a gasp. Nevertheless it woke her, to darkness, and the faint, sinister whirring of a droid’s engine, and the moving glint of red lights in the dark.
There was another noise, thin and steady, a half-familiar whining …
The overload alarm on a blaster?
“Artoo?”
Leia sat up in bed, confused and panicky and wondering if it was a dream, if the terrible sense of evil was something left over from her nightmare. Across the room a faint, hissing zap sounded, and the white light of Artoo-Detoo’s electric cutting beam illuminated the round, blocky form of the little droid visible beyond the foot of the bed. A second alarm began to sound. It was unnaturally dark in the room; Leia hadn’t even begun to sort out why when Han flinched and turned beside her, and she heard the door of the small wall cupboard slide shut.
The sound of the blaster overload alarms