Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [11]
“I’ll keep an eye out,” he said. He climbed back down to her, and zipped up the light, tough fabric of his suit. “Being incognito should help.” He glanced across at the brig, its pilot still in conversation with the guards. The dispatch of an escort vessel would rouse very little curiosity, given the proximity of Pedducis Chorios.
“Just the fact that Callista would send that message, would come out of hiding to send it, means there’s something going on. The fact that she didn’t think it could go subspace means it’s serious.”
Leia shook her head, the gold finials and cabochon gems of her hairpins flashing. “It could be.… That’s something else I wanted to ask you.” She leaned her shoulder against the airfoil, which rocked just slightly in its antigrav cradle, and lowered her voice. “It isn’t generally known, Luke, but there’s some kind of leak in the Council. Information’s getting out to Admiral Pellaeon and to the Imperial Moffs like Getelles and Shargael over in I-sector. Minister of State Rieekan thinks it may be through someone in the Rationalist Party—maybe even Q-Varx himself, though I think the man’s honest. They have adherents both in the Republic and in nearly every piece of the Empire still big enough to field a fleet.”
She hesitated a moment, her mouth wry and her brown eyes suddenly older than her years. Luke saw in her eyes the years of bitter wrangling, the betrayals: Mon Mothma poisoned, the Council split by factions, Admiral Ackbar betrayed, discredited, hounded …
“Myself,” she said softly, “I think it could be almost anyone. But Callista knows something about it.”
“I’ll keep my ear to the ground.” He checked the seals on his flightsuit and the helmet tubes of the emergency systems—not that any system would save anyone’s life in a true emergency in vacuum. “Leia …” He reached out a hand for hers, not entirely certain what it was he wanted to say.
Her eyes met his. He understood the look in them. Before she was twenty she had seen her family, her world, everything she knew, casually wiped out as a demonstration of the Empire’s might. Before he had ever met her, she had lost some essential part of herself.
But that weary hardness in her eyes, that look of steeling herself so as never to be surprised by even the worst …
And she knew it. She felt what she was becoming.
He said, not knowing that he was going to say it, “Keep up with your lightsaber practice. Kyp or Tionne should be able to help you. They’re the best, the most centered in the Force. You need it. I’m speaking as your teacher now, Leia.”
Surprise wiped the defensiveness from her eyes, but she looked quickly away. When she looked back it was with a quick grin, to cover her uneasiness. “To hear is to obey, Master.” Turning his seriousness aside.
But in the meeting of their eyes he saw in hers, Please understand. Although he knew she didn’t understand herself the false note in her voice or the intention, momentarily seen and as quickly buried, to let the turmoil in the Grand Council, the massive investigation of Loronar Corporation’s abuses in the Gantho system, the Galactic Court trial of Tervig Bandie-slavers, the education of her children—anything and everything—divert her from the Jedi training she knew in her heart that she needed.
He didn’t press her. “You kiss the kids for me.” He drew her close for a quick, warm kiss on the cheek, awkward around the helmet, tubes, wires. “Tell the guys at the Academy I’ll be back.”
“I wish you could take at least Artoo with you.”
He climbed a few rungs of the ladder up the airfoil. “So do I. But even if I took him apart and tucked the pieces into every corner and under the seat of this thing,