Assault at Selonia Read online

  She swung around and came toward him in the stalking, wide-stepping gait of a wrestler, her arms spread wide, her tail slashing back and forth. The men on either side of the chamber were hooting and cheering and cursing. The air was getting thick, and the lights in the room seemed to have dimmed. Han shook his head again to try to clear it, and instantly regretted it as his dizziness got worse. He was not going to last much longer.

  Finish it. He would have to finish it quick, and go down fighting, satisfy Thrackan that he had gotten a good show. Han knew that Thrackan, at least the Thrackan of old, would only be satisfied if Han were knocked out by a blow from Dracmus. He’d feel cheated if Han simply passed out, collapsed in a heap, but that was going to happen if Han stayed in this thing much longer. And Han did not want Thrackan to be dissatisfied. Not when he had a blaster handy to vent his frustrations and Han available as a convenient target. Han thought that Thrackan wanted him alive, but he wasn’t sure enough to bet his life on it. Besides, a well-aimed blaster bolt could maim him and still leave him perfectly alive.

  Keep fighting. Han staggered to the right, circling around. Dracmus came no closer, but circled as well, watching for her chance. Han yanked once more at his wrist restraints, out of frustration as much as anything else, and was astonished to feel them snap.

  Either the restraints’ locks had been damaged in the fall or, more likely, Thrackan had put him in gimmicked restraints to start with, something that could released by remote control at whatever moment seemed most amusing to the operator. It didn’t matter. He had his hands. He spread his arms wide in a wrestler’s stance and moved in on Dracmus.

  Dracmus was at least as surprised as Han to realize her opponent suddenly had his hands free. She backpedaled a bit, putting a bit more distance between Han and herself. She snarled, a sound full of anger and frustration, and Han felt sure she meant it. She wasn’t acting. She might or might not want to kill Han, but she had every intention of beating him.

  Well, he was going to make her work for it. The advantages were all still with Dracmus, but maybe, now, he had a fighting chance. He feinted to the left, once, twice, and then to the right before diving straight in, grasping his hands together in a pile-driver punch to the gut, to knock the wind out of her. He remembered at the last possible moment to strike higher on her abdomen than he would on a human. He caught the right spot, but just barely. She staggered backward, and Han scrambled to regain his own balance and follow up. She had sagged down enough that Han could try for a punch in the snout, a delicate spot on the Selonian anatomy. He swung and connected cleanly—and then instantly wondered if doing so was such a good idea.

  From the expression on Dracmus’s face, it clearly hurt a lot—but it also got her good and mad. Those sharp jaws swung around and snapped down on thin air a centimeter from Han’s arm, and even before he had stopped dodging, an iron-hard fist hit him square in the chest. If it had hit him in the stomach, he would have doubled over in pain, but Dracmus had placed her blow too high. As it was, Han was thrown onto the floor. He recovered and winced with pain as he got back to his feet. It seemed likely that either the blow or the landing had bruised or cracked a rib.

  Dracmus’s tail was lashing back and forth, and she had her fangs bared—but she did not dive in to get her teeth around his throat, or rake her claws across his eyes. She was still restraining herself, at least somewhat. Han realized that he had to throw this fight immediately, before she lost all control of her anger and moved in for the kill. “Use your tail!” he bellowed to her in Selonian. “Batter me with that!”

  The mad, angry light in her eye seemed to dim for a moment, and she looked at him, as if she were surprised to see him there. Good. Maybe that meant the words were reaching her—though Han could not be altogether sure. She swung toward him and snapped her jaws at him again, and Han dodged back to his left. Even though he had urged her to make the move, he didn’t even realize she was still swinging around, pivoting on one foot to bring her tail around. She had it raised high, and caught Han neatly in the head with it.

  Han staggered one last time, and lurched backward, slumping over until he was facing his cousin on his throne. Han’s vision was going, going black, but he could see Thrackan grinning at him, laughing, that face that was so similar to his own contorted by a cruel, sadistic leer.

  Han was almost glad when the darkness closed over him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Fabric Torn

  The Lady Luck cut her lightspeed engines and dropped into normal space in the Coruscant system. Lando Calrissian checked the navicomputer and nodded in satisfaction. “In the groove,” he said. “We’ve got auto-clearance from Coruscant Control, all the way in.”

  “Good,” Luke said. “The sooner we’re there, the better.”

  “Shouldn’t we try and contact the navy brass from here?” Lando asked. “We don’t want to waste any time.”

  Luke shook his head. “No,” he said. “We’re up against something big and organized. We have to assume that an organization that can seal off the entire Corellian star system is capable of monitoring communications, even on secure links. I think we should play it safe and not say anything until we can talk to our people face-to-face.”

  “You might be right,” Lando said. “At any rate, you’re right that we’re up against something big.” Someone or something had placed an interdiction field around the entire Corellian system, produced by using a gravity-well generator to distort the mass lines of realspace. No hyperdrive could operate inside an interdiction field. No ship inside the field could make the jump to lightspeed, and any craft that passed through the field while in hyperspace would be forced out into normal space. Luke and Lando had discovered the interdiction field when the Lady Luck was abruptly decanted out of hyperspace on the outskirts of the Corellian system, far out enough that the journey in toward the planet of Corellia through realspace would take months at best.

  No one had ever managed to generate an interdiction field a hundredth, a thousandth, as large as the Corellian field. Even if Lando and Luke had no other information beyond that, the mere fact of an interdiction field that size was more than enough to justify raising the alarm.

  But there was more. Leia Organa Solo, Chief of State of the New Republic, was in the Corellian system, and the news out of Corellia had not been good for some time.

  Something would have to be done, that much was clear—but what? The Corellian system was sealed off from the outside universe, and there was no fast way in. Whoever had done this thing would have plenty of time to work whatever mischief they pleased.

  But Lando had other, more personal, worries. Tendra. Lady Tendra Risant of the planet Sacorria. Lando had met her for the first and only time just a few days before, but he already knew that she was someone special, someone who could be important in his life.

  It was more than a trifle ironic that he had set off across the Galaxy in search of a bride with money, only to meet a woman who made him forget all about money. Well, at least made him stop thinking about it for a while.

  What worried him at the moment was that when he had bid her farewell, he had been bound for Corellia, and she had known it. Sooner or later—probably sooner—Sacorria, along with the rest of the Galaxy, would learn that Corellia had cut itself off from the outside universe. Tendra would hear about it, and have every reason to think he was on Corellia. She would worry, and would likely do more than that. Tendra was not the sort of person to sit idly by. She would act. She would do something, though space alone knew what. And knowing that gave Lando plenty to worry about himself.

  But even if she did just sit tight, Tendra had said that things were brewing on her home world of Sacorria. Sacorria was one of the “Outlier” planets, so called because it was on the fringes of the Corellian Sector, in both physical and political terms.

  Sacorria was populated by the same three species as Corellia—human, Drall, and Selonian. It was ruled by the Triad, a mysterious triumvirate made of self-app
ointed representatives from each of the three species. That right there was enough to give Lando some concern. In his experience, oligarchies were not the most rational or stable forms of governments.

  And there had been a very definite clamp-down in progress when Luke and Lando had been on Sacorria; enough of one to get them kicked off the planet.

  Lando checked his system displays one more time, then looked over to Luke in the copilot’s seat. “Luke,” he said, “do you think that the trouble on Sacorria might have something to do with the Corellian interdiction field?”

  Luke looked toward Lando and frowned. “What makes you think that?”

  “Well, one place threw us out, and the other threw up an interdiction field like a wall to keep us out.”

  “Come on,” Luke said. “The whole interdiction field just to keep us out? I knew you had a big ego, Lando, but let’s not get carried away.”

  “I don’t mean that the field was meant to keep us out,” Lando said. “Just you. I’m not that important, but you are. You’re the Jedi Master. That’s why I brought you along on this trip—so you could impress everybody. Well, maybe the Corellians were impressed. There could be plenty of reasons for wanting to keep you out of the way. As a general rule, troublemakers don’t want you around. It wouldn’t be the first time someone went to extremes just to keep you at arm’s length.”

  “Maybe,” Luke said, not entirely convinced. “But it still seems to me like an awful lot of trouble. Besides, not many people knew we were going to Corellia. I didn’t know I was going until the night before we left Coruscant.”

  “The folks who kicked us off Sacorria could have guessed that’s where we were headed, and they could have found out for sure a half-dozen ways.” Lando hooked a thumb toward the wardroom, where R2-D2 and C-3PO were. “All they’d have to do is set Golden Boy back there to talking, and they’d have our life stories in thirty seconds.”

  “I heard that, and I must deny it,” said Threepio, his voice coming from the intercom. “I am always discreet in my dealings with outsiders—”

  “Get off this feed and quit snooping, you blabbermouth collection of spare parts,” Lando said.

  “But I must protest—”

  “There’s no need for you to be listening in, Threepio,” Luke said, cutting him off. “Just tell R2-D2 to get ready for final approach. We’ll be home on Coruscant soon.” He reached over and cut the power to the intercom.

  Lando glared at the intercom. “I think Threepio just made my point for me,” he said. “If the Sacorrians had wanted to find out where we were headed, they could have done it.”

  “No doubt about it,” Luke said. “But that interdiction field is immense! Think how much power, how much planning and organization and engineering it must have taken to get it up and running. It’s not the sort of thing you casually switch on just to keep out one unwanted visitor. There are easier ways to keep a person out of a star system, even a Jedi Knight. The Sacorrians could have simply locked us up, or had us shot, or put a bomb on the Lady Luck.”

  “I suppose,” Lando said. “But even if the Corellian field wasn’t activated just to keep us out of the picture, I still think there might be a connection between the clampdown on Sacorria and whatever has happened in the Corellian system.”

  “You might have something,” Luke said. “But I’ve got a feeling we’re not going to know, one way or the other, for quite a while yet.”

  The Lady Luck flew on.

  * * *

  Luke was more than a little surprised to see the reception committee that was waiting for them on Coruscant as they disembarked from the Lady Luck. The usual landing-bay crew was nowhere to be seen, and instead they were greeted by a distinctly closemouthed security team of two men and one woman in New Republic Intelligence uniforms.

  “This doesn’t exactly feel relaxed,” Lando muttered as the senior NRI officer came forward. “Sort of reminds me of the way the customs agents did things the last time I was arrested for smuggling.”

  “Master Skywalker, Captain Calrissian, good day to you both,” the officer said. He was a young man, a little pale-faced and on the beefy side. He looked as if he hadn’t gotten much sleep in a while. “I am Captain Showolter of New Republic Intelligence,” he said. “The two of you are wanted rather urgently at an important meeting. Would you be so kind as to come with us?”

  “Suppose we wouldn’t be so kind?” Lando asked. Changed circumstances or not, he still had the smuggler’s instinctive distrust of police who told him where to go.

  Showolter sighed and gave Lando a look of tired exasperation. “Then we bundle you up and take you along anyway, to keep you quiet for a while, if nothing else. We could decide later on if we were arresting you or putting you into protective custody. Now will you come along, or do we have to waste time with more nonsense?”

  “What is it about?” Lando asked.

  “I can’t tell you that,” Showolter said. “But I bet you’re smart enough to figure it out.”

  “Corellia,” Luke said.

  Showolter gave them a tired smile. “I have specific orders not to tell you, but I have this feeling you might be good guessers. Now, are you coming or aren’t you?”

  “We’re coming,” Luke said. “Mind if we bring the droids? One of them has some important data stored in him.”

  “The more the merrier,” Showolter said in a deadpan voice.

  “Great,” Lando muttered as they followed Showolter to a waiting hovercar. “I was looking forward to getting away from those two.”

  Luke laughed and slapped his friend on the back. “Looks like you’re stuck with all of us for a while longer.”

  They got into the hovercar and it took off, Showolter riding in the rear compartment with Luke and Lando and the droids while the other two NRI officers rode up front. The windows of the hovercar instantly went opaque. Whether this was meant to conceal the passengers from passersby, or to keep Luke and Lando from knowing where they were going, Luke had no idea. If it was the latter, then the effort was, of course, wasted. A Jedi Master had no need to look out a window to know where he was going. Luke didn’t even have to concentrate in order to know they were headed toward the towers of the palace, albeit by a circuitous route. Well, that was no surprise.

  Luke sat back and took the time to think. It was obvious that at least someone on Coruscant already knew something was up. But Showolter clearly had no intention of telling them what that something was, or where they were being taken. They had not received any sort of invitation to this mysterious meeting until they arrived on planet. That convinced Luke that the leadership on Coruscant was at least as worried as Luke was that the opposition—whoever the opposition was—was capable of tapping secure communications.

  And if they were worried about that back here, then something else must have already have gone wrong.

  The car slowed, and there was a change in the sound of the air rushing past the aircar’s exterior. Luke’s sense of direction told him the same thing that the shift in sound had—the aircar had just flown directly into the palace, through one of the upper-level access ports. Not unheard of, but not the usual thing, either. Clearly, they were taking security seriously.

  The car landed with a gentle bump. The door opened and Luke and Lando stepped out into a wholly anonymous shipping dock. Showolter was right behind them, and escorted them toward a waiting turbolift. The other two NRI officers stayed in the aircar, watching Luke, Lando, Showolter, and the droids cross to the lift doors.

  The turbolift doors shut as soon as they were in, though none of them had activated any control. Much to Luke’s surprise, the car began to descend. He exchanged a glance with Lando and saw that his friend was reading the same thing into the movement downward. Up meant status on Coruscant. Grand ceremonies, important meetings, and opulent receptions could only take place on the upper levels of the great city. Down was the low-status direction, and movers and shakers of Coruscant quite literally looked down at the lower ab
ove-surface levels, while the subterranean levels were beneath their contempt.

  But if down was the unfashionable direction, it was also the high-security one. The lower depths were full of forgotten chambers and hidden places. No one outside could throw a grenade or fire a missile or listen in at a window when you were half a kilometer underground. But Luke knew the rich and powerful of Coruscant—and he also knew just how unsavory parts of the lower depths could be. Things were clearly dire if the powers-that-be were willing to go underground.

  “Where to?” he asked.

  “An NRI safe room,” Showolter said. “And we’re going in by the back door. Protocol requires that each party come by a separate route if at all possible. Makes it harder for the opposition to realize that people are getting together. But the bad news is that the two direct routes into this safe room have already been used.”

  “What would you call a direct route?” Lando asked.

  “Well, one of them is a turbolift that opens out directly into the safe room. The other is a concealed side tunnel from a maintenance tunnel that’s still in active use. But we have to use the back door. And let’s just say this route will never be a tourist attraction.”

  Lando raised his eyebrows, but said no more.

  Luke was trying to judge the descent of the turbolift car. As best he could estimate, they were at least eight hundred meters below their starting point when the turbolift car came to a halt. The door did not open. Instead, Showolter drew his sidearm, a New Republic standard-issue blaster. For a fleeting moment Luke wondered if they had just walked into a trap. But he sensed no malice or deception on Showolter’s part, and the NRI officer’s next words set him at ease. “Captain Calrissian, Master Skywalker, I believe you are both armed. Might I suggest you draw your weapons before we open the door?”

  “Ah, sure,” Lando said as he drew his own blaster. “But mind if I ask why?”