Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [48]
“He’ll have his own ship for the search. We have to keep this small—we’ll probably never know who originally blabbed, among the crews of the Borealis and the Adamantine. Any objections to Mara Jade knowing? She knows how to quarter a sector.”
Mothma nodded. “Anyone else?”
“Kyp Durron, from the Academy. Wedge Antilles, if he can be spared. Kyp’ll need a ship. Nothing that’ll get noticed, but it has to be fast.”
“It’s done,” said Mon Mothma. She held out to him a red plast cube. “These are the final reports from Leia, Commander Zoalin, and Captain Ioa, and the sensor readings on Ashgad’s ship and on all the surrounding five parsecs. You’ll also find the coordinates for the jump point where they disappeared.”
“Doesn’t matter where they went in,” said Han. “If someone found a way to alter the jump, they could have come out anywhere from here to the backside of last week.” He stood up, and helped her to her feet. It was an indication of her ease with him—her trust in him—that she had brought her canes with her. She took them from him with a smile, and Han felt curiously honored. For her to let him see her walking with the canes meant that she regarded him as her friend.
“How long can you hold off the Council?”
“A few days,” she said. “Maybe a week.” The house was equipped with NL-6 courtesy droids, but Han escorted Mon Mothma to the vestibule himself. “We’re still trying to get a medical support team out to Durren, or escorts to take teams in from the Medical Research Facility on Nim Drovis. As I said, the reports are fragmentary, but it doesn’t sound good.”
“Unknown?” said Han, looking across at her in the reflected fire glow.
She hesitated, and in her eyes he saw that it was known. She just didn’t want to admit what it might be.
The vestibule doors slid open before them. Mon Mothma’s courtesy guard-cum-footman got to his feet, a gloomy looking, sandy-haired young man whose expression never seemed to alter no matter what was done or said around him.
“You be careful.”
Han gave her a grin. “Your Excellency, the day I start being careful is the day I buy myself a foot warmer and a rocking chair. I’ll find her.”
But when the door closed behind her and her bodyguard, Han stood for a long time in the vestibule, the little red hunk of plast closed in his fist, staring at nothing. Thinking about hyperspace. Thinking about interstellar space.
Thinking about Leia.
Five years since they’d married. Thirteen since they’d met, in the Death Star’s corridors with blaster fire zapping around them. If he couldn’t find her …
There was no conclusion to that sentence. No conclusion to the thought. Only a darkness as deep as the nightmare of disorientation in realtime space, with no starcharts, no navicomputer, no spectroscope, no clue as to which of those tiny, infinitely distant lights to aim for.
His hand tightened around the datacube, and he turned back toward the firelight of the parlor, to tell Chewie to get the Falcon into preflight. They would head out just before dawn.
7
“Sir, I must protest!” The bridge doors of the Pure Sabacc slid open before Threepio’s determined advance—a considerable improvement over those of the storage hold in which he had been incarcerated for the past 2.6 hours while the vessel jolted into hyperspace—and the protocol droid marched through to behold Captain Bortrek ensconced at the main console, picking his teeth with a laser extractor. “Artoo-Detoo and I are duly registered to Her Excellency Leia Organa Solo, and misappropriation of any duly registered droid is contrary to Sections Seven, Twelve, and Two Hundred and Forty-Three A of the New Republic Universal Galactic … Artoo-Detoo!” Threepio exclaimed in astonishment, as he cleared the doorway and got a better view of the bridge.
The astromech droid made a sorry little sound.
As well he might, See-Threepio reflected. All of his access hatches had been bodily removed, some to admit sinewy snakes of data cables, some to accommodate blocky add-on patches of machinery, which themselves connected into at least three of the bridge stations.