Star Wars the Truce at Bakura - Kathy Tyers [84]
Captison smiled sidelong and thumbed a steering rod to turn right. He seemed to be circling just inside city limits. “Lovely Leia, this isn’t the time. We have Ssi-ruuk on our minds. We’re hoping that the Empire will save us, not subdue us.”
“But it is time,” Leia insisted over the background music. “The Ssi-ruuk have united your people. They’re ready to follow a leader to freedom.”
“Actually,” said Belden, “three years of the Empire have united our people. Nowadays they know what they lost when they lay down too quickly, and that they’ll have to cooperate to get it back and keep it.”
“They believe in you, Prime Minister,” Leia urged him.
Captison stared ahead. “And you, Princess Leia? What is your true goal here?”
“To bring Bakura into the Alliance, of course.”
“Not to defend us against the Ssi-ruuk?”
“That’s Luke’s goal.”
Captison smiled slightly. “Ah. The mission’s defined objective depends on who defines it. The Alliance begins to mature.”
One more round for division of labor. “Prime Minister, how much power do you and the senate truly have?” Captison shook his head.
“If you could choose freely and without risk to your people,” she pressed, “which side would you wish Bakura to support?”
“The Alliance,” he admitted. “We are displeased with Imperial taxation, with offworld rule and sending our young men and women into Imperial service. But we are afraid. Belden’s right: We’ve learned to appreciate each other, now that we’ve seen what it’s like to be subjugated—to lose our identity because we couldn’t stand together.”
“Isn’t that worth fighting for? Isn’t it worth spending the lives of free persons? Prime Minister, I don’t expect to see … fifty,” she said, guessing at his age. “But I would rather lay down my life for others’ freedom than die quietly in slavery.”
Captison sighed. “You’re exceptional.”
“All free people are exceptional. Let me talk to your cell leaders, Senator Belden. Give your people a chance to fight for their freedom, and they’ll—” Out of long habit, Leia glanced over her shoulder. A double-podded local patrol craft followed ten lengths back. “Those are Imperials behind us, I think,” she said quietly.
Captison checked a sensor screen and pushed his throttle forward.
Leia searched the instrument panel for communications equipment. Han would be on his way to the Falcon by now, en route and unreachable. “They’re still on us. Head for the spaceport.”
“One more, coming up from below. I can’t turn south from this lane.”
“Looks like an escort,” Leia observed. Captison swung the speeder northwest in a long arc. Then the escorts let him straighten out again. “Where are they herding us?”
“Back across town.” Captison frowned. “Complex, I think.”
“Are either of you armed?” she asked quietly.
Captison slid one hand under his jacket, showed her a hold-out blaster, then concealed it again. “But that’s going to be useless if we’re outnumbered. Belden, can you lose the generator?”
“Under a seat, maybe.” Belden’s voice came muffled.
Leia thought quickly. “It might be safer to wrap it in … here, in my shawl … and drop it, rather than be caught with it.”
“No,” Belden said stiffly. “It’s too delicate. Too fragile. People are used to seeing me carry a voice amplifier. I’ll keep it in my pocket.”
The modal percussion pounded on.
Cloistered in a bare, tiny windowless room lined with recording banks and communication setups, Threepio expelled a dramatic sigh. “Every time I feel certain they’ve come up with one last way of making us suffer, they invent another. They’re so difficult to fathom.”
Artoo-Detoo squalled disdainfully.
“I am not stalling, you mismated collection of crosswired nanochips. There was nothing in that last recording that was not in any of the others. Six million forms of communication, and they find a new one. Nonmechanicals are quite impossible.”
Artoo stretched a manipulator arm toward the playback machine.
“I’ll do it,” blustered Threepio. “You can’t reach high enough.”
Artoo thbb’d like a seven-year-old human with his tongue out.
Threepio removed one recording rod and inserted