Chapter 9 (and so so happy to be back - thank you!)
Leia's heart beat a sharp staccato against her ribcage and her almost-healed shoulder throbbed in time. She was nearly in the clear, she could feel it, so she pumped her legs faster and concentrated on breathing.
Once she hit the crowd outside the docking bay, she adopted a casual gait, took off her jacket, shoved it into her satchel and pulled on a mechanic's cap she'd stolen from Han. Feeling at least a little less conspicuous, she glanced behind her, saw nothing amiss and turned back, swallowed by the flow of pedestrian traffic down the walkways of Candobar's spaceport.
It took her heart a little while to settle down. Adrenaline, she thought, but a part of her also recognized a fading thrill. She hadn't felt it in years.
There was nothing like a (mostly) successful mission.
She smiled as she looped back to the hotel.
Han had always hated waiting for Leia to emerge from a dangerous situation.
Always.
All those missions during the Rebellion when she'd been so reckless, risking her life for payouts that weren't worth the price she'd pay if things went wrong … he'd hated waiting around for her. In a lot of ways she had been the most versatile agent on their docket. And he still couldn't get rid of the instinct to hover, to make sure she got out safe.
She'd once confronted him about his overprotectiveness, in the height of her wild fervor for all things dangerous. At the time, he'd suspected she was either an adrenaline junkie or slightly suicidal. He'd said something to that effect, ostensibly for her own safety but wrapped tightly in sarcasm. She'd called him, and this he remembered with absolute clarity, an Imperial-grade misogynist. He also remembered that he'd asked her flippantly if that was a new class of Star Destroyer.
She hadn't been too impressed with him that day.
She probably wouldn't be too impressed with him today, either.
He understood he couldn't go into the docking bay again, not after he'd run out of there not two days before. And he understood Chewie was holed up in the Falcon analyzing data packages and guarding their escape route. Leia was the only one who could pull the data from the droid without a lot of hassle.
None of that seemed to matter. He kept flashing back to four days ago, when he'd pulled her from the speeder, unconscious, pale, with a credit-sized blaster burn in her shoulder.
His hands were sweating as he sat at the table of their new hotel room, a slightly nicer one with better defensive structures. The room was larger and the bed was further away from the one recessed window, so they didn't need to worry about snipers. The room also had two entrances, the front door and a smaller, mostly-hidden doorway that Leia claimed was a service entrance for cleaning droids.
The hotel was also less than fifteen minutes away from docking bay 342 by foot.
He sighed and scrubbed a hand over his face. Leia would kill him if he left this room. He'd promised her he'd give her an hour before he came charging in.
He knew he was being ridiculous.
It didn't stop him from blowing out his breath in a rush when the door keyed open twenty minutes later and a perfectly intact princess walked through the door.
Not one to demonstrate much fear, even – and sometimes particularly – to Leia, he leaned back in the chair and laced his fingers behind his head. "Any luck?"
She dropped her satchel onto the table with a clank and a grimace. "Somewhat," she said, and fished around inside the satchel. When she looked up again, she was holding a datachip. "I managed a partial download but got interrupted."
He frowned. "By who?"
She sat opposite him and waved her hand at the satchel. "By the droid's malfunctioning motivator."
Curious, Han reached in and pulled out what looked like a small gear, notched in eight places and rusty near the central pivot. He looked up at her and raised an eyebrow.
"The droid got stuck near the terminal I was using for the download. I couldn't just leave him there - what would a hauler droid be doing at the scheduling databank?" She took off the cap she was wearing and threw it at him. He caught it easily. "I panicked."
Han wondered if he was the only living being in the galaxy to hear those words from her mouth.
His face must have given away his amusement. She scowled. "I stopped the download, demotivated the droid so it would look like normal operations failure and ran for it before anyone saw me."
"Demotivated," he repeated skeptically, though he heard the opening notes of admiration creep into his voice.
"Upended it with my boot and used my vibroknife to pull out the motivator."
What an image that was. He filed that one away for later inspection when he had the time to properly appreciate it. "You stabbed a droid and pulled it apart," he said, just to clarify the point.
Her lips turned up in imitation of his half-smile. "Only a little." She shook her head. "Where's your datapad? I want to see what's in the download."
Datapad found and chip inserted, Han and Leia watched a holographic display roll through schematics and service notifications on the droid, though none recent enough to indicate the droid had been wiped or reprogrammed. It wasn't conclusive, but it certainly seemed to confirm to Han that the Clawcraft hadn't been a part of some elaborate decoy plan to throw them off the trail of something bigger.
"We still have nothing to prove the presence of a grand admiral here on Sluis Van," Leia said. "It's all circumstantial evidence."
"This isn't a law court. And we have a few solid leads." Han ticked them off his fingers. "One: dead spies. The original reason we were sent here – "
" – You were sent here," Leia corrected.
He ignored her; this was becoming a bad habit of hers. "Two: there are Imperials planetside. You chatted up the one at the bar."
She looked a little nauseous. Han found it hilarious that she helped integrate Imperials into the New Republic daily, but couldn't stand talking to one in a bar.
"Three: we saw a Chiss. And were immediately shot at."
Leia rubbed at her shoulder unconsciously. "Grant confirmed that Palpatine appointed a Chiss grand admiral."
"There's an awful lot of durasteel being delivered to a decommissioned docking bay here on Candobar." Han got up from the table, walked to the bed and fell into it with a huff. "And there's a goddamn Clawcraft hidden in there, too."
Leia's voice was muffled, her face hidden behind the datapad. "Are you angrier that it's there or that you can't fly it?"
"Both," he murmured. "My biggest question at this point is where the durasteel is going after it's been delivered to the docking bay."
"The khedive," she said, nonchalantly. "Well, a little south of the khedive residence."
Han sat up and stared at her in shock.
She tapped her temple sagely. "Jedi."
He continued to stare at her, not quite certain how Leia's fledgling magic tricks helped her come up with so precise a location.
After a few moments, she rolled her eyes. "Han. There's a forwarding address on the download."
"Huh." Of course there is, he thought. The Jedi angle was still a little bizarre to him. He moved on. "South of the residence?"
"Yes," she confirmed. "Is there anything there?"
"Well," he sat back against the headboard, thinking back. "Not really. I was there the first day we were on-planet."
"When you fell off a rock, yes, I remember."
"Real cute."
She smiled. "Did you see anything interesting before you decided to test the gravity?"
She was all sorts of feisty today. "I wasn't facing south, I was watching the khedive from the south. But as far as I know there wasn't anything out there. Just a lot of rock and dust. How far out is the address from the khedive?"
Leia looked down at the datapad and frowned. "I'm not sure. I think my calculations are incorrect."
She stood and brought the datapad to him, kneeling on the bed. Han took the datapad, looked at the address and thought through the distance scales he'd memorized on the quick descent here. He frowned, too, and called up a map on the holographic display.
Leia shifted her eyes from Han to the map, then settled on him again. "This doesn't make any sense."
It didn't. The address should have directed any delivery transport about a half klick south of the residence, but when he looked at the distance scales, the addresses appeared to be nearly identical. It was like looking at a three dimensional display from above and then again to the side. The perspective changed the whole shape of the image.
"It has to be a mistake," Leia said.
Han shook his head. "I don't think so. Lando told me about this shady scheme he was involved with once. Trafficking spice in Coronet City, of all places." He waited for her to pull the disgusted face she always did when he talked about his life in the spice trade. "Local kingpin had hacked into the city directory, made a giant headache out of all the addresses and tagged the entry so that if anyone opened it, it would trigger an alarm sent right to his personal comm."
"Why would someone do that?"
"Confuses anyone looking to find the warehouse. Lando said it ran the hell out of anyone trying to shut them down." He grinned to himself. "Especially CorSec."
Leia rolled onto her stomach, leaned her head onto her open palm. "You take way too much joy out of CorSec failures."
"You spend some time out there and you'll feel the same way." He tossed the datapad onto the bed and turned towards her. "We have another problem, though."
"What's that?"
"Either someone is smart enough to hack into Candobar's central database and change the records or there's someone with legitimate access to the files who is purposely changing them."
Leia pulled a face. "That's not good." She uncrossed and recrossed her feet and Han was momentarily distracted by the young, girlish image she presented. "So what do we do?"
"Well," he said, still looking at her legs. "I think we better go check out the address."
Han would have preferred the view of Leia's legs over this endless dustbowl any day.
There was nothing out here. Absolutely nothing. He'd been staring at this vast wash of nothing for the past hour and had yet to discern anything worth the sweat that ran down his back. No ships, no warehouse, no people.
Nothing.
"I'm about ready to call it," he said into his comm, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. "We may be out of luck."
Leia's voice crackled; the connection wasn't ideal this far out of the spaceport. "You're never out of luck, General."
Easy for her to say, sitting nice and cool in the hotel room. "Today I am. Even the lizards here are boring."
He glanced at the nearby outcropping where another one of those ridiculously large reptiles was laying on its back. If Han hadn't seen its chest rise and fall he'd think it was dead and baking in the afternoon sun. As he watched, the thing's legs jerked up to the sky and it flipped onto its belly, impressively quick for such a large animal.
"Okay," Leia said. "Come back. We'll reevaluate."
He started walking back towards the outcropping, more than ready to leave this uneventful hour behind him. "Eat. Eat and reevaluate." He took one last look at the lizard, then turned away. "I do my best reevaluating with food."
Han trudged back towards the khedive, the public markets and then further down to the hotel, never noticing the very slight tremor that shook the dust from the rock beneath his feet.
Though she'd had great intentions of going out to dinner, they ended up with a small cache of edibles consumed in their hotel room as they pored over the download a third time. She didn't particularly mind. Long ago Leia had abandoned her clothing in favor of one of Han's shirts, and was currently sitting with her feet in his lap. Han was fiddling with the droid motivator she'd stolen this morning and scouring the local newsfeeds for any pertinent information.
"Her hair is ridiculous," Leia said, catching the firestorm of short orange tufts sticking out of an intricate fold of fabric sitting precariously on top of the female newscaster's head.
"She probably would think yours is ridiculous, too," Han thoughtfully chimed in.
"Probably. There is nothing here," she said, gesturing to the datapad on her lap and the piles of flimsy haphazardly strewn across the table in front of them. "This is a nightmare."
"You're obsessing," Han said, and ran a hand up and down her calf. "Let's enjoy the fact that no one is trying to kill us."
"At this particular moment," she said, leaning her temple on the back of the couch. "That fact has been disproven in the larger scheme of things."
"I think you could probably claim that a lot of people want to kill us in the larger scheme of things."
Leia hummed, closing her eyes. His hands felt wonderful and the headache she had been developing all afternoon was fading away. It was peaceful, sitting here with Han with no deadline to their time together. Usually there was a meeting, or a launch, interrupting them. Random beings trying to kill them seemed ridiculously non-important to her at the moment.
Leia had settled into a nice half-doze, feeling lazy and heavy and warm, when Han's legs shifted under her. A second later the newsfeed was louder and she came into full alert when she heard him mutter a sharp fuck.
She sat up and turned towards the newsfeed, blinking her eyes to get them to focus on the holo. When the images finally clarified, she found herself staring at a recording of a battle over what she suspected was Coruscant's atmosphere.
" – no casualties. Three unidentifiable capital ships were destroyed. New Republic Provisional Council issued a statement today defending the order, claiming no life forms were aboard at the time – "
"They want to look decisive," Leia murmured. "The Council, I mean. Why are you upset?"
He paused the footage of the ships, little replicas of the ones she had stared at in the war room on Coruscant. They hung in the space above the table littered with flimsies, and Leia caught sight of the craft that had dealt the deathblow.
She threw a shocked look at Han when the magnifier got in close enough to identify the signifier on the hull. She would know it anywhere.
The Rebel Dream.
"How is that possible? She was captured at Storinal ..."
Han had already fished his comm out of his pocket and was opening a channel to Chewbacca. "Hey, pal. Have you been keeping tabs on the holonet? News from Coruscant?"
Chewie's growl was plaintive and accusatory.
"Okay, okay!" Han looked at Leia. "I'm sorry you're stuck doing all the datawork."
Han's voice sounded less than apologetic. Chewie's acceptance wasn't completely genuine, either, Leia could tell. She wondered peripherally if the Wookiee was, like Han, keen to take a spin in a certain Chiss Clawcraft.
Did we recapture her? Maybe the damage wasn't all that bad, if they got her back out to Coruscant so quickly –
To Coruscant.
"Han," she interrupted, staring at the wall next to him. "If they recaptured the Dream, they wouldn't have sent her back to Coruscant. They would have sent her to one of the driveyards for repairs."
She saw Han look at her sharply, his head turning fast enough to throw the hair into his eyes. "Chewie, have you heard anything on the holonet about the Rebel Dream?"
Chewie growled a sarcastic comment about the ludicrousness of the whereabouts of a military ship being broadcasted through the holonet.
"We damn well just saw her on the local feed," Han said.
Chewie made a low comment that Leia couldn't interpret; she suspected it was a curse in Shyriiwook.
"Our feelings exactly," Han said. "Can you do some digging?"
Chewie made a quick affirmative reply, then rumbled a soft assurance to Leia.
"Thank you, Chewie," she said, genuinely grateful for the Wookiee's innate ability to sense when to tread carefully.
Han signed off, then looked at her carefully, as if he doubted his own ability to calm her down. "Do you know what's going on?" he finally asked.
She shook her head.
"She looks like she's in top shape," he said, glancing back at the paused newsfeed. "Not a scratch on her."
"How fast could repairs be made to a blown hull, Han?"
He pressed his lips together. "Not that fast. And you have to factor in re-seizing her in the first place. Did we ever see footage of the capture in the first place?"
She shook her head. "Surveillance went down five minutes before her frequency changed." She leaned forward and rested her forehead on her bent knees, her feet still in Han's lap. "Does any of this make sense to you?"
"No," he said, pulling her closer so that she was sitting in his lap, his arms wrapped tightly around her. "Even if their communications array blew, they would have sent a shuttle down to Storinal to report in."
That had already occurred to her, too. "There is too much here that doesn't make sense," she murmured. "The dead spies, the interdiction over Coruscant, and now Rebel Dream appearing out of nowhere?"
Han kissed her forehead. "I suspect you're a little glad to see her hull intact."
She was. That particular nightmarish image – of imploded bodies thrust from a breached hull – had been haunting her for a month now. "But it just adds more crazy to the already long list of crazy."
"Well," he said, running his nose along her hair. "I hear we are a little infamous when it comes to crazy."
She closed her eyes and laughed."You make it sound like a virtue."
"Are you kidding?" She opened her eyes to see the mischievous glint in his. "I didn't know I had a virtue."
"You don't," she tilted her head up to kiss him, grateful and confused and just a little bit high on the unpredictable nature of their situation here. Her lips were initially soft, just a glance against his, then she slid her hand up the nape of his neck and into his hair. Breaking away for a split moment, she whispered, "Not a single one."
Laying on his back later that night, his hand gliding up and down Leia's spine as she slept, her hair a riotous mess all over his chest, Han had a brief flicker of a thought. A wisp of something suspicious. It struck him less like lightning and more like the extinguishing of a candle.
He fell asleep just after the thought formed, but it didn't dissipate. It held on and colored his sleep. It settled uncomfortably in his subconscious, nestled in tight like a parasite, and before Han even realized it, was taking root like a plant in fertile soil.
How far would Cracken go to pull us into the NRI?
