Author's Note: Sorry about the long wait, everybody…hopefully this chapter will help make up, it's nice and long and things start happening. :P Not quite rip-roaring action yet, but we're almost there, I promise! Tell me what you think…
…
They were gone.
Impossible.
Such a thing was beyond conception. His support system's audio suite was clearly malfunctioning. Perhaps he had inadvertently slipped into meditation and was simply imagining this entire conversation.
The shock of it numbed him for a few seconds and let his reason continue to function. By that tenuous thread of rationality alone, Captain Landre clung to life when Vader's anger finally surged past the shock, so cold it burned and so burning it froze.
For such an apocalyptic, unequalled, eternally unforgivable failure as this, the thread of logic told him, his anger must wait until its object was physically within his reach. No Rebel that had ever fallen into his merciless hands had been made to wish for death so fervently as would Landre before the end. Strangulation from a distance was far, far too good for the man. He would wait, and he would enjoy this.
In the hologram, Landre finally spoke. "My lord?"
Vader stared at his captain's image in raging silence. He should have killed the man the day Han Solo contrived to break into the castle.
"My lord, is the audio coming through?"
"I hear you, Captain," he hissed, "unfortunately for your sake. Consider this your final failure as commander of my security forces."
Landre's expression grew even more resigned. "I will continue the investigation of the incident until you arrive, my lord."
"The investigation would meet with better success if you assigned it to droid," Vader suggested acidly. "They, at least, may be depended upon to fulfill their duties."
Landre took it silently, without flinching. As well he should. Not that his penitence would avail him anything.
"Continue," Vader finally snapped after several seconds of dead silence.
"We have not been able to ascertain the number of intruders," Landre continued shakily. "At a minimum, there were two. As I said, we have one of them in custody. At least one unauthorized ship departed under a cloaking shield from the restricted zone planetside. I strongly suspect that there were two ships. I'm afraid this is where it becomes incomprehensible, my lord."
He waited in stony silence.
"We would not have known any ships were departing, but one opened fire."
That was indeed incomprehensible. Despite his black rage Vader mused. What would have possessed a safely cloaked ship to fire and reveal its presence?
"The ship did not open fire on Imperial craft, my lord. It appeared to be targeting another cloaked craft. Our craft opened fire on the intruder and was able to destroy its cloaking shield. It was a YV-series freighter, I believe, although heavily modified. Our TIE squadrons moved in as soon as the target was visible, but the freighter jumped into hyperspace. We believe it was on a vector for the Corellian Trade Route. I have transmitted an alert to our forces in that region."
Landre paused. "My staff has suggested that there may have been two separate intruding parties with the same target, possibly bounty hunters. In that case, my lord, I would be forced to assume that the missing persons were not on the ship that was seen."
"And what have you learned from the prisoner?" Vader demanded coldly.
"I have only had the chance for a preliminary interrogation thus far. I only recently received the background checks from my intelligence staff. Whoever he is, my lord, he is not the Alderaanian Jax Andru, as he claims. We're running a full-scale database search at the moment. We only have image and genetic data, so I'm afraid the parameters are very wide."
"Show me the image," Vader ordered him tersely.
Luckily, Landre did not keep him waiting. Vader was not sure he could have refrained from slaughtering the man then and there if the officer had not been prompt. "Transmission commencing."
In another moment the image of a wiry, haggard man hanging in a stasis field appeared on a second holoprojector. Vader was instantly struck by the sensation that he had seen him before—but it was not until the image had nearly rotated the entire way around that he saw the damning lock of blond hair laid out starkly against the dark.
In a split second, his raw, brutal rage alighted from the doom-countenanced Landre and dug its savage claws into the man in the hologram—and beyond, to a certain blue-tinged, ethereal memory.
"Kenobi," he snarled.
"My lord?"
"That man is Ferus Olin." Vader stood slowly, gaze never leaving the rotating hologram of the man in the stasis field. "You will find him listed in the database of Jedi remaining at large."
Landre jerked. "A Jedi."
"Captain," Vader said slowly, "make very sure that he does not escape."
"What methods do you suggest, my lord?"
"Call in the interrogators."
Landre stiffened.
"Make sure they paralyze his larynx beforehand," Vader added coldly. "I do not wish our conversations to be delayed in waiting for his voice to heal from excessive screaming."
"As you wish, my lord," the captain said quickly.
…
Somewhere on the outskirts of a city whose name nobody was allowed to know, there towered an abandoned skyscraper, which nobody cared about, and with good reason. It was an ancient structure, an unappetizing leftover from earlier times. The power, though surprisingly still functional, was primitive and inefficient. The windows, pre-transparisteel contrivances, were all either cracked or completely blown out, rendering the crude climate control systems utterly useless. All the rooms inside, offices and apartments alike, had been plundered by scavengers so thoroughly that only frayed edges of carpet and worthless debris remained behind.
It was unequivocally the last place one would expect to find an expansive, well-lit office filled to the brim with military-grade computers and communications suites, sealed behind a security system that could have repelled an orbital bombing assault. But with his computers humming around him and his holographic displays hard at work, the agent Baranne appeared completely oblivious to the unexpectedness of it all.
The center of the room boasted a vast display that would have done a military briefing room proud, and Baranne was hard at work over it, analyzing his latest collection of images. Yet another media holo was under the scrutiny of his sharp gray eyes—a generic shot of the Senate in session, taken some time before the start of the Clone Wars. The agent currently had it magnified and was working his way down the forty-sixth row from the bottom of the chamber, checking every face as he went.
Recognizing Senator Chem Tastree from Chandrila, he quickly scrolled the magnified image up to the fifty-ninth row. The Naboo delegation's box, as he knew very well by now, was located nearly on the opposite side of the chamber from Chandrila, and would not be in the image. However, as Baranne also knew, the Alderaanian delegation was to the upper right of Chandrila—and he couldn't count the number of times he'd hit the jackpot looking there.
This, however, was not one of those times. Neither Padmé Amidala nor Bail Organa was to be seen in Alderaan's box. Baranne calmly removed the image from his collection and went on to the next one, which was nearly identical. Before he could do much scanning along that forty-sixth row, however, the com suite chimed and lit up.
He strode quickly over, brushing past stacks of flimsies and datapads, and punched in his passcode. Lord Vader's ominous hulk immediately appeared.
"My lord," he acknowledged quickly. His mind spun furiously. It was very rare for Vader to call him here at his work station. What could Vader want?
"Place your current work on hold," the dark lord ordered tersely. "I require your services elsewhere."
"Certainly, my lord."
"Proceed to the Corellian Trade Route and begin searching for a YV-series freighter," Vader continued.
Baranne smiled wryly at the faint sense of déjà vu. Hadn't it been just yesterday he'd been scouring the galaxy for a similar freighter?
Then a second holo suddenly flicked on, sent from Vader, and Baranne's smile froze as he recognized the person shown.
Blond. Blue-eyed. Somewhat on the short side. There was no mistaking him—it was the self-same Jedi boy that Baranne had spent nine months chasing down in the wake of the debacle on Corellia.
The boy was still alive?
"Find him," Vader said. "Quietly. Return him to me unharmed, along with anyone accompanying him, regardless of age, species, or gender."
"I'm on my way, my lord."
…
For all that he applied his mind to the puzzle, Ferus had yet to devise a way of getting himself out of the stasis field. Without knowing where the generator was, he had no hope of switching it off via the Force. He could, of course, use the Force to rid himself of the magnetic cuffs—but if anything, they'd turned the stasis field power up since that officer had visited. The cuffs were nothing more than a backup measure; slipping out of them would not help him get out of the field. So he left them, the better to allay suspicion that he was anything more extraordinary than a bounty hunter. There had been no mention of his lightsaber thus far; hopefully either Leia or Luke Solo had taken it.
Had he been capable of moving enough, Ferus would have sighed. Of course, hard evidence was not the only thing that might convict him. He knew perfectly well that although any of his aliases would stand up to the usual superficial check and perhaps even a little farther, they would quickly collapse under determined investigation. That officer was going to be back sooner or later, waving damning documentation under his nose. Unless he could find some ingenious way to weasel out of it, something very unpleasant would be in store for him.
Clearly, they weren't going to buy another alias, and there was no excuse he could give, so Ferus would have to resort to mind-wiping the man. He didn't like it. The officer was not some run-of-the-mill, brainwashed stormtrooper. He was a commander, and a sharp one—not the sort that was susceptible to mental persuasion. It would take every ounce of effort and concentration Ferus could muster. And even if he managed it, Vader was going to show up sooner or later and realize what had been done to his officer. Whether Ferus was gone by then or not, Vader would still be on the scent of a Jedi, as implacable as a krakana that had scented blood.
Ferus stared blankly through the wall ahead of him at the moment. Maybe it would be better to simply accept his fate here. Vader was unrelenting, tireless. Ferus had watched from the sidelines as dozens of Jedi exhausted themselves in running from him, only to find themselves at a literal dead end. Why should it be any different for him?
No! You can't just give up like this!
He set his jaw grimly, thrust the defeatist thoughts from his mind. He would accept death when it came to him, but simply rolling over at the first impasse was not the Jedi way. He was going to do whatever he could to get himself out of this. He had the princess to live for—
The door hissed open at his back, and when the field had finished rotating Ferus found himself face to face with the steel-eyed officer. Resolved, Ferus began marshaling all the strength he had, summoning the Force to his aid—
"Good day, Ferus Olin."
In a single instant, his concentration was shattered.
How had they found out so quickly? A database search took longer than that! Besides, he shouldn't even have been in the Imperial database!
"Surprised?" the captain observed with satisfaction. "Apparently, Jedi, your face is quite well known to Lord Vader."
Vader…then it was now or never. Fiercely Ferus rallied his thoughts back—he had to do this quickly, decisively, before—
The door slid open, disrupting his concentration once more as two more Imperials entered. He glanced for a moment at them, but his attention was quickly drawn to the black sphere hovering behind them, emitting a low, ominous hum.
"Gentlemen," the captain said with dangerous pleasantry. "Would you be so kind as to make Lord Vader's guest at home?"
The foremost officer turned to Ferus with a cold smile. "Our pleasure, captain."
The black spherical droid began to slowly wade towards him through the air as the captain murmured something to the officer, drawing inexorably closer to Ferus' immobilized form. The door ground shut behind the captain's back.
Serenity, he repeated to himself shakily. There is no passion…there is serenity…there is no passion… He tried to take his mind back beyond the years and hear Master Siri, slowly chanting to him the words of the Code. But her voice was so dim, so far away…
The field suddenly rotated him down, until he was stretched out on his back. The first of the black-uniformed officers stepped up with a long needle gripped in his hand like a knife, reaching towards his neck. The droid eased up next to his ear, the humming deafening. Fear exploded in the back of his mind.
The nine hells there wasn't passion.
In Coronet City…
Sure, Hangar 1138 was the most rundown of all the docks on the Strip. And in this section of the Strip, that was saying something. He didn't care. In fact, he preferred it that way. Meant less bother. Less shooting. Less of a trail that he had to handle. Usually trails weren't much of a problem for a bounty hunter, but this was a special case.
He made a quick stop by the med cabin of the shuttle on his way out, took a moment to check the cryo chamber's readouts. It wouldn't be good for his bank account if something happened to the merchandise; and considering who was interested in the merchandise, probably not beneficial for his health either. The readouts were satisfactory, both in his estimation and that of the med droid he'd activated to keep tabs on the merchandise.
He suited up and continued down the ramp without stopping to check the crew cabin, where he'd locked up the bonuses. The spare med droid was on duty in there, they weren't getting out anytime soon, and they were expendable anyway. He fitted his helmet on, checked the charge and stats on his arm blaster, marched out, sealed and locked the ramp of the shuttle, and continued out of the hangar with a purposeful, military stride.
His pace did not abate for a whole fifty blocks, nor did he take one of the public transports. He barreled down the Strip, and what crowd there was parted before him all along his path between Hangar 1138 and the much more prestigious and secure Hangar 1188.
The guard at the entrance swallowed and stepped out of his way. As did everyone else in the hangar, although the proprietor attempted to approach him and had to be waved away with the credit chip containing his payment for the use of the hangar. This accomplished he wasted no further time boarding the oddly constructed ship that occupied the center of the hangar, surrounded by a bastion of security sensors that would have cooked anyone else without a second thought.
A relief to be back aboard. No matter how you modified a lambda shuttle, it was still a lambda. The best star pilot in the galaxy couldn't make one of the wretched things fly worth a bucket of Hutt slime in combat. This, on the other hand, was a ship. He ran a fond hand over one bulkhead on his way to the cockpit. In everything else, he was the consummate bounty hunter, objective and relentlessly amoral…but he wouldn't care to lose this ship, and not just because it would be a colossal inconvenience.
He went to the cockpit and checked his systems. Everything in perfect working order. Everything on his ship was always in perfect working order; any other state of affairs was asking for trouble. He made trouble for other people. Not himself.
Now. Logistics. The lockups in the cargo bay would be just fine for holding the bonuses once he got them moved over, but the merchandise itself would require some special treatment, as his ship didn't have a cryo chamber. At any other time, he'd simply use stun or drug treatment and keep it in another lockup, but according to what he'd heard this merchandise was uniquely enabled. He was hardly ignorant about the sorts of talents such beings might have, but there was no telling which of them this particular specimen might have in his arsenal, and he didn't fancy his knowledge to be exhaustive in any case.
The cryo chamber had been an excellent restraint technique thus far. Best to stick with what you knew worked. He'd talk to his contacts and have them install the necessary equipment. No—wait. Special case. Best to avoid the usual contacts. If memory served him—which it did, like everything else at his disposal—there was a cantina near Treasure Ship Row that had some lesser-known information brokers working out of it, including someone with connections in Nar Shaddaa, according to the latest rumors. The Lucky Saber. He'd start there.
…
From within the safety of the shadows, and even though it was a most un-princess-like thing to do, Leia scowled at the rowdy bar patrons. She didn't like this place. It was low, it was filthy, everybody was rude, everybody was hauling weapons and glaring suspiciously at everybody else. She would rather have been back in the palace garden on Alderaan talking to Darth Vader. She would even rather have been in that teensy little mud hut in the middle of the swamp.
With Ferus.
Leia suppressed another pang of guilt when she thought about Ferus. She hoped he was all right. She hoped he'd gotten away.
But the logical part of her mind knew he probably wasn't and hadn't.
She glared a little at Luke to take out her frustration. He was studying a datapad and didn't see her. He seemed to be right at home here. Maybe he was. He talked like he'd been here before. What did she know?
Nothing. That was what she hated most. She was in a whole new universe and all of a sudden, Leia didn't know anything at all.
Had Han felt this way in the palace on Alderaan?
Luke glanced sideways at her. "We can go back to the room if you want."
Startled, and a bit unnerved, she shook her head. She had yet to get used to Luke's habit of answering her thoughts; it always reminded her of Vader. He'd done that to her once too.
Well. Considering that Luke was Vader's son, maybe she shouldn't be all that surprised.
She still hadn't gotten over that.
Luke glared back at her from his datapad. "Like it's my fault," he muttered.
Leia slumped over the table with a sigh, resting her chin on her elbow and studying the way the light reflected through her water bottle. She wished she dared eat something in this cantina. So far they'd only eaten old Imperial ration cartons up in Lando's room, or standard rations back on the ship. Leia was starting to miss real food. Dimly she wondered what time it was back on Alderaan, and whether her parents would be having dinner, and whether they were thinking about her, and whether they had any idea where she was.
She didn't think they would be too happy if they knew. A big, scar-faced man wearing a motley conglomeration of stormtrooper and bounty hunter armor came in the main entrance, toting a particularly lethal-looking blaster on one arm. They really wouldn't be happy. Leia watched him despondently, warily, until a shadow crossed their table.
It was Lando, and he was grinning ear to ear. Luke dropped the datapad and sat up straighter. "You found it?"
Wordlessly, Lando handed him a datachip. "You're in luck. The Strip, Hangar 1138."
Luke grinned brightly, and so did Leia. Maybe it was all almost over. Maybe they would find Han and Luke's little sisters and everything would go back to the way it used to be.
Neither of them saw the man with the scars and arm blaster stiffen where he sat at the bar.
"Lando, you're the best," Luke told him.
Lando flashed them a charming smile. Leia was not impressed.
"What about Master Yoda?" she demanded. "What did you find out?"
Lando frowned, dropped his voice to a whisper. "Did you two know he was a Jedi Master?"
Leia nodded impatiently for both of them.
He threw up his hands. "Sweetheart, if the Emperor can't find him, I guarantee you I can't. All I could find out was that he's on the top of the list of Jedi at large and the Empire's been trying to hunt him down ever since Order 66."
Leia felt her stomach sink a little. Nobody, it seemed, had any idea where Yoda could have gone. Not even Ferus. "Well," she pressed, "what about the troll?"
Lando perked up. "Now, that is the interesting thing. Check out this image of Yoda, I got it off a wanted poster."
Luke and Leia leaned forward over the datapad he extended—Luke suddenly gasped and grabbed the pad from Lando, staring at it with his mouth wide open. "No way!"
"No way what?" Leia demanded. She saw nothing remarkable about the picture.
"That looks just like the green troll!"
Leia stared at the picture with renewed interest. "Maybe they're the same."
Luke shook his head furiously. "They must just be the same species."
"Look, maybe you're wrong—"
"That troll tried to kill me," Luke hissed under his breath. Leia saw his point and sat back, dropping the issue. Obviously, no Jedi would have tried to kill Luke.
Still…some subversive part of her refused to chalk this up to coincidence. There must be a connection between the two!
"Well," Lando shrugged, "other than that, nothing on the green troll. I did track down a couple of species that I thought might fit your description, but none of them looked like that picture, and according to the records I could find nobody knows what species Yoda is."
"That's okay," Luke said firmly. "C'mon, let's go." He grabbed Leia's hand and pulled her out of the booth towards to door.
"You two stay out of trouble, huh?" Lando called after them.
Leia scowled at him just before Luke towed her out of the cantina and into the streets. But just outside the cantina, Luke suddenly froze and stared back at the door.
"What is it?" she demanded. "We need to get to—"
"Shh!" Luke leaned against the wall of the cantina, staring into the distance straight through it. Leia couldn't hear a thing except the usual uproar. But finally Luke stepped back away, though he still cast a funny glance at the cantina.
"Thought I sensed something," he muttered.
Leia resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She hoped that if someone ever started teaching her about the Force, she didn't wind up being this weird.
…
Lando settled back in the booth, casting a lingering glance at the door. He didn't like to admit it, but he was a bit worried about those two, running around the undersides of Coronet by themselves. They seemed awfully young to him…but, he reminded himself, Luke was used to this sort of thing, kid seemed to thrive on it, and that girl seemed to be a pretty tough sort herself. Ah, they'd probably be just fine. If Vader didn't faze Luke, probably nothing short of the Emperor could. He should just be glad he'd tracked down that shuttle without sticking his own neck out far enough to be noticed. Too bad about Han, but the kid seemed to have things under control, and in any case, Han had been the one who'd made him jump off the Falcon's landing ramp from five meters, so he would just forget about and get back to considering his pyrolanium mine proposition—that Bothan wanted an answer by the end of the day.
He slipped the datapad back in his pocket, dumped some change on the table for a tip, deciding to go see the Bothan right now and get a few more questions answered before he made up his mind—he was pretty sure he wanted to go ahead with it—but a heavy hand suddenly forced him back down in his seat.
Lando swallowed as he looked up and saw an imposing human scowling down at him. The man was decked out in motley armor, some stolen from stormtroopers and some from who knew where, sporting a heavy-duty arm blaster and a nasty collection of scars across a face that looked oddly familiar. "You're not going anywhere," the man informed him pleasantly.
Lando forced a smile. Maybe this was the guy's idea of politely asking to do business. Oh, suuuure, Calrissian, two chances of that…slim and none, and we all know what happened to slim… "Sure," he said, pouring on the charm, or at least as much of it as he could muster. "I take it you're interested in some information. My specialty."
"So I've heard," said the other, his smile humorless. He sat down on the other side of the booth.
"Can I get you something to drink?" Lando asked, starting up out of the booth—
He sat down very quickly as the blaster was leveled at him.
"Not thirsty," said his uninvited guest.
"Right," Lando agreed. He spotted the girl's abandoned water bottle and grabbed it, hoping to ease some of the dryness in his throat. "So," he said after several swallows, "what might you be interested in?"
"You're going to tell me all about that little conversation you just had with your little friends," the other said, grinning cheerfully.
"I, uh, I don't know what you're talking about—"
"Let's start with Hangar 1138." He reached out with his other hand and shifted the setting on his blaster to "kill."
Lando got the point very quickly, and just as quickly decided that his conscience could be assuaged by pleading duress. "They're, they're looking for some ship," he said quickly. "I said I'd find it for them, that's it, I don't know whose ship it is!"
"And who might 'they' be?"
Lando couldn't place the guy's accent to save his life. "I, I don't know"—the guy lurched across the table and hauled him up by the collar—"Luke, the kid's name is Luke! I don't know anything else, man!"
He stared into what must be the eyes of death for what felt like roughly forever before the guy let him go. "And they're looking for this ship because?"
"He said his friend got kidnapped," Lando said hoarsely, grabbing the water bottle again.
The guy settled back and eyed him while he drank. Lando thought he was going to start sweating bullets if that stare didn't move somewhere else in the near future. He wiped his mouth off shakily. "You got any more questions?" he demanded, half furious, half terrified.
"Sure," the other said pleasantly. "Any idea where I can get a cryo chamber on short notice?"