Part 9 (1/2)
Han looked up through the viewscreen at the tall trees. ”Well, this is the place.” He shut down the Falcon.
”Oh, Han,” Leia said. ”Even if we can get parts to fix the Falcon, you've seen all that fried circuitry. How are we going to carry it back here?”
”That's what droids and Wookiees are for,” Han said.
Chewbacca grumbled, shot Han a feral look.
”I quite agree,” Threepio told Chewbacca. ”No one would blame a Wookiee for eating a lazy pilot.”
”Do you think we made it?” Leia asked. ”Are you sure they didn't pick us up on their scanners?”
”I'm not sure of anything,” Han said. ”But if Zsinj's men follow Imperial procedure, they'll come down here to check out that slag heap of a Frigate as soon as it cools. At the very least we'll need to get out and cover our skid marks, hide the Falcon.”
”Pardon me, sir,” Threepio interjected, ”but might I point out that Zsinj's men aren't Imperials, at least not in the strictest sense, not since the Empire has been overthrown.”
”Yeah,” Han grimaced, without stating the obvious fact that most of Zsinj's men had been trained by the Empire, ”but look at it this way: what s.p.a.ce jockey could possibly pa.s.s up the chance to come down and look at a really neat wreck? Believe me, we've got plenty of company coming, and unless you want to throw a picnic for them, we'd better get to work.”
The four of them went down into the hold and got out the camouflage nets.
The nets worked in two stages: A baffle net of thin metallic mesh went over the Falcon to hide its electronics from detection by sensors, and then a second camouflage net went over that to hide the s.h.i.+p from visual inspection.
Then they stepped outside. The air here was warmer than Leia had expected, the stars fiercely bright. The night felt liquid, as if it could melt the knots in the corded muscles of her back and neck. The woods were quiet. They could hear the fire from the wreck burning on the other side of the ridge, but there were no bird calls, no strangled cries of hunted animals. The smell of leaf mold and live sap came rich to her nostrils. All in all, Dathomir did not seem like a bad place.
The four quickly threw down the mesh, then took out the camouflage net.
It was a thirty-five-meter-long piece of photosensitive netting attached to an activating strip. They pulled off the activating strip, then placed the netting over the leafy soil for a minute so that it would take a picture of the ground. Then they flipped the netting right-side up and covered the Falcon. Generally, the chameleonlike quality of the netting would hide the s.h.i.+p from even the closest fly over. There were even cases where searchers had climbed over s.h.i.+ps set in shallow depressions, never realizing that they were standing on top of their target.
When they finished, they raked leaves over the skid marks in the brush, cut out a few of the badly mangled bushes and hid them. By dawn Leia felt weary, stood in the brush by the small lake, looking up at the fiery stars. Steam rose from the lake, a small fog threading its way up through the woods, and a light wind began to rattle the tree leaves up on the hilltops.
She was tired, and Han came up behind her, kneaded her back.
''So, how do you like my planet so far?” Han asked.
”I think . . . I like it better than I like you,” Leia said playfully.
”Then you must love it an awful lot,” Han whispered in her ear.
”That's not what I meant,” Leia said, pulling away. ”I'm not sure whether to be furious with you for bringing me here in the first place, or if I should thank you for getting us down alive.”
”So you're confused. I seem to affect a lot of women that way,” Han said.
”Did you really use that tactic once before?” Leia asked, ”?of cras.h.i.+ng into a larger s.h.i.+p and letting the wreck drop you into a blockaded planet?”
”Well,” Han admitted, ”it didn't quite work as good back then as it did this time.”
”You call this good?”
”It's better than the alternative.” Han nodded up at the sky. ”We'd better get under cover. They're coming.”
Leia looked up. Four stars seemed to be falling in unison out on the horizon. They twisted in the sky and vectored toward them. The little group hid in the Falcon for the rest of the following day, unable to see how large the search party was, whether a band of stormtroopers might be surrounding the Falcon as the fugitives fed on cold rations. Han kept the automatic blaster cannon lowered, just in case. Dozens of times during the early morning they heard fighters flying over, skimming the treetops.
And at mid-morning, a steady barrage of missiles dropped for an hour, decimating the downed Frigate. The Falcon rocked from the explosions, and the whole group sat there stunned, amazed that Zsinj's men would go to so much trouble to demolish a wrecked s.h.i.+p, wondering if some of the missiles might eventually be dropped on them.
Once the bombardment stopped, the s.h.i.+p became quiet. But after half an hour, another group of fighters circled. Threepio ventured, ”They're searching for us!”
Han sat, staring up at the ceiling, listening for the return of the fighters. Some of those craft had sensors that could hear a whisper at a thousand yards. Leia closed her eyes, straining her senses. She could no longer feel the presence of the dark beings she had felt earlier, could feel nothing at all, and she wondered if it had been a hallucination.
Early in the afternoon the fighters apparently gave up the hunt, and Leia wondered at that. If Zsinj's men believed they had made it to the planet, surely they wouldn't give up so easily. Certainly they would never have given up if they'd known that a New Republic general and an amba.s.sador were aboard the s.h.i.+p. So obviously they didn't know the Falcon had landed safely and they didn't know who its pa.s.sengers had been. But then a more troubling thought occurred to her: perhaps Zsinj's men weren't hunting because they didn't believe the group could survive on this wild planet.
There had to be some reason that a planet this beneficent wasn't more settled.
As the sun began to set, Han got up and stretched, put on a flak jacket and helmet, got out a blaster rifle. ”I'm going to go on out and have a look around, make sure that Zsinj's men have left.”
Leia, Threepio, and Chewie waited in the s.h.i.+p. Chewbacca began to get nervous after half an hour. The Wookiee whined plaintively.
Threepio said, ”Chewbacca suggests that we go look for Han.”
”Wait,” Leia said. ”A big Wookiee and a golden droid are too easily spotted. I'll go look for him.”
She pulled on some combat fatigues, threw on a flak jacket and helmet, then went outside, blaster turned to full power. She set off down a trail toward the lake, watching for stormtroopers. At the very least, she expected some kind of patrol on speeder bikes. But she found Han only a hundred meters from the s.h.i.+p, standing by the muddy bank of the lake, watching the sun set in a wash of vibrant reds and yellows with muted purples.
He picked up a rock, tossed it out over the lake and watched it skip five times. Some creature called in the distance, making a whooping sound. It was all very restful.
”What are you doing out there in the open?” Leia asked, mad as h.e.l.l at finding him in such reverie.
”Oh, just looking around.” He glanced down at the mud puddle by his feet, kicked over another flat stone.
”Get back here under cover!”
Han put his hands in his pockets and simply watched the sunset. ”Well, I guess this is the end of our first day on Dathomir,” he said. ”It's been kind of uneventful. Do you love me yet? Are you ready to marry me?”
”Oh, please, get off it, Han! And get back here under cover!”
”It's all right,” Han said. ”I have reason to believe that Zsinj's troops have left already.”
”What could possibly give you that idea?”
Han pointed down at the muddy sh.o.r.e of the lake with his toe. ”They wouldn't hang around after dark with these near.”
Leia stifled a cry?what she had taken to be a mud puddle was in fact a footprint nearly a meter long, something incredibly big, with five toes.
At the dinner table, Isolder sat with his mother and Luke, feeling glum, disappointed. His mother had arrived only this morning on Star Home, and in the course of a few hours she had achieved something that Isolder hadn't been able to do in a week: learn where Han had taken Leia. She had rightly reasoned that the various rewards for Solo?offered both by the New Republic, which wanted him alive, and by various warlords, who wanted him dead?made the offers far too tempting. Rather than settle for a part of the pot by releasing information, everyone with a clue as to Solo's whereabouts would hunt him down themselves. So her spies had concentrated on tracking outbound s.h.i.+ps, following various disreputable pilots. Omogg had accidentally tipped her hand by purchasing a new heavy weapons system for her personal yacht?the kind of system someone would use only for a very dangerous mission.
Now, Isolder was waiting for his mother to revel in her victory, make some seemingly inconsequential but pointed remark designed to show the superiority of the female intellect over that of a male. The women of Hapes had an old saying: Never let a man become so deluded as to believe that he is the intellectual equal of a woman. It only leads him to evil.
And Ta'a Chume would never do anything that might lead her son to evil.