Hi everyone, thank you for your kind reviews. I've wrestled far too long on the structure of this chapter. I'm still not sure it's exactly what I had in mind, but here it is anyway. -T.
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They were en route to the Aurel sector. The third moon of Tintian IV was named precisely that: "Third Moon."
Luke was sitting in the cockpit, watching hyperspace flicker past, the way one might watch the hypnotic lapping tongues of fire or the restless push of ocean waves. How long he'd been there, he couldn't say. What he was even thinking about, he couldn't say either.
He'd noticed immediately on departing from Dagobah the slow creep, the steady pressure of Darth Vader's questing presence. There had been something on the planet, then, whether it had been Yoda himself or something else, that had shielded Luke from his father.
There. He said it. In his mind, at least. Darth Vader was his father.
Luke knew now what he didn't know before his training - how to build up shields around his mind, protect his thoughts and guard his location from the dark lord. He was able to sleep marginally better - save for the recurring vision of Leia in Vader's clutches - without the Sith lord calling to him. Still, it took conscious effort to maintain, and Vader's continual bombardment of his shields left him with a dull, unrelenting headache.
As they neared Third Moon, that pressure that was Vader seemed to build behind his eyes, grow in intensity, so that, by the time they emerged from hyperspace - the planet all blues and greens, no Rebel or Imperial ships in sight or registering on the scopes - Luke knew that Vader was already here, his trap already set.
He said as much to Han.
"What are you talking about, kid?" the Correllian muttered, his eyes scanning the readouts. "There's no one here."
Luke didn't bother to argue. They would go ahead with the plan as it had been set out. Leia had sent instructions for them to meet on the main continent, near a mountainous region. The city, Y'tickarp, was a resort town for the lavishly wealthy, but with a quaint old section of buildings in the center that had been purposefully preserved for their supposed charm.
Luke could not be certain, but he felt that this city had been the scene from his vision. He would know soon enough when they arrived.
Naturally, perhaps knowing that an old, junky-looking freighter like the Falcon would never make it past the affluent city's space traffic control without appearing suspicious, Leia had left instructions for their landing in a nearby spaceport, more of a shipping facility, where the ship would blend in. Presumably the Alliance ship had taken similar precautions in a separate spaceport. The Aurel sector had minimal Imperial presence, too backwater to be of much interest to the Emperor, or to merit a full occupation. But still, it was best to be cautious.
It was decided that Chewie should remain with the ship. He would only attract attention if he accompanied Luke and Han - Third Moon's population was about seventy-five percent human, with most alien species in the service sector, which was perhaps another consequence of early, if largely disinterested, Imperial presence. Besides, someone would need to stay with the ship in case they needed to make a fast getaway. Chewie was not exactly happy with the idea of being left behind again and he let Solo know about it.
The smuggler didn't even spare the Wookiee a moment to argue about it. Luke noticed his friend fairly radiated nervous energy.
Han was not exactly thrilled with Luke's plan.
By the time they had landed, and Solo had returned to the ship, codes to a rented speeder in hand, Luke was ready, lightsaber tucked out of sight under the gray down parka - Third Moon was cold - he'd dug out of the Falcon's seemingly endless store of mismatched and odd-sized collection of clothing. Fortunately the jacket was only a little bit too big on Luke, roomy enough to hide his weapon, but not so bulky he couldn't move quickly if necessary.
"You ready?" Han snatched his gun belt from the holochess table, lifted up the small cross-body satchel over his head.
Luke holstered his own blaster and nodded. "Let's go."
"Chewie, the comlink's set?" Solo asked the Wookiee.
Chewbacca growled. Affirmative.
Solo nodded. "Okay, let's go."
The speeder was a closed-top model, a newer, nondescript luxury brand that would not call attention to their being too extravagant, nor too poor to be visiting a resort town like Y'tickarp. It would be easy to blend in.
Still, Han muttered something along the lines of "cheap Imperial junk" as he guided the speeder out of the spaceport and into the single shipping lane stretching between the towering mountain peaks, jagged and snow-capped. He was more than a little miffed about the slight to the Falcon. "The first thing we tell these Alliance bigwigs of yours is that all this cloak and dagger stuff is a waste of time and energy," he muttered to Luke.
Luke nodded, pursing his lips, distracted enough that it was several minutes before he realized he hadn't answered. He wanted to reach out to Leia, make sure she was okay, still safe, but he didn't dare. Vader's grating presence was a gnawing pressure in his temples, pressing in on his mental shields. Luke knew if he opened himself up to the Force, however briefly, the dark lord would hone in on his location in minutes.
No, they needed to stick with the prearranged plan.
"They've certainly relocated from the Melsinor base by now," he murmured finally. "I suppose they don't want to compromise the new base's location. At least until they're sure they can trust us."
Solo smirked at the rising canyon walls, sheer and slate-gray, matching the iron gray of the sky. The air hung heavy, like a storm was poised to drop, particularly as they gained altitude in the canyon. "It's them I don't trust. Like I said, this smells like a trap."
Luke shifted his own gaze to the viewport. "We just have to make sure Leia is okay. We'll make a decision about...everything else," he grimaced to himself, "after that."
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Leia checked her wrist chrono for the umpteenth time. She was standing in the empty corridor of the warehouse, the coordinates of which she had sent to Han and Luke.
The building was empty. The five blue-uniformed members of her security team had scanned the building for life-forms, explosives, or any other potential threats before she had even arrived in the closed-top speeder. In the building across the way, Rieekan and his small ops team - armed to the teeth, though they were there for backup only, he had repeatedly reassured her - had commandeered a small office space with a line of sight to the warehouse.
The extra security seemed like overkill. In orbit around Third Moon, a luxury yacht, leftover from the Old Republic glory days, posing as the ship of a wealthy vacationer, held two X-wings in its main hold, in case of any unforeseen emergency. Everything was in place.
But she was nervous. Which was strange for her. She never got nervous anymore. Perhaps it was a consequence of staring down Darth Vader aboard the Tantive IV, lying to his face that she had no idea whatsoever about the location of the Death Star Plans, or when she actually stood in the Death Star control room, gazing down at her beloved Alderaan, Tarkin sneering his contempt beside her, and Vader's iron fist gripping her shoulder as the blinding killing shot turned her homeworld into rubble.
After standing on the edge of that abyss, nothing below her feet, nothing to catch her fall, few things frightened her. She had walls built around her emotions in order to continue to function in the face of unimaginable terror and grief - a fortress blocking out fear and worry and sadness.
And yes, blocking out happiness too. That was the unintended casualty of shielding oneself from emotion. The mind did not discriminate between the good and bad: it simply blocked out all feeling and presented a sort of gray numbness.
So now that she was within an hour of seeing Luke again - her best friend, one of the few she had left - she thought she would feel light-hearted, relieved. It had been far too long. The past three months had been tense. She had fought tooth and nail for this meeting - this chance for Luke to meet with her and Rieekan and discuss the situation calmly in a neutral place, away from the threat of being arrested by jumpy Alliance security, worried Luke had betrayed them all to Vader, away from Mon Mothma's and Madine's - the new general, deflected from the Empire - allusions to a "solution" that would broker them peace and bring Vader to his knees, namely, by using Luke Skywalker as collateral against his father to negotiate the kind of armistice they wanted, which they claimed could end the war. The pressure had been immense, especially once they'd realized she was the one who'd tipped Luke off to their plans, that she may have had a way of contacting Luke, that she was the most likely person to have bankrolled their escape.
Emotions had run high. The only reason Leia was not sitting in a detention cell at the moment was because of who her father was - Bail Organa was a figurehead; his martyrdom had only strengthened that position - because of her Alderaanian heritage and the fact that she had proven her loyalty to the Alliance's cause a thousand times over during her imprisonment on the Death Star. And because she still controlled the vast funds of the House of Organa, the Alliance's fourth largest financial backer.
It had bought her immunity long enough to make a case for Luke's return to the Alliance. They needed Luke on their side, not against them. They were going to alienate him to the point that they drove him straight into Vader's arms.
That could not happen.
Han had been careful not to go into any sort of detail that might betray their tenuous safety, but he had implied Luke was training with a Jedi. Leia didn't know what that meant exactly, or how that was possible - she'd thought all the Jedi knights were dead - but she hoped Luke was gaining the skills he needed to protect himself.
Now she was about to see him, but instead of hopeful anticipation, she felt a strange sensation of intense dread curdling in her stomach.
I have a bad feeling about this. Han's words, in the garbage compactor aboard the Death Star.
Leia turned her gaze to the large window, eyes automatically sweeping the ground in search of the speeder Han would be flying. The cloudy skies hung gray and heavy over the adjacent buildings. The wind blew in eddies, sweeping trash and organic matter littering the ground into restless circles. A storm was blowing in. She'd read about the impressive blizzards in Y'tickarp, the record snowfall that could ground ships and isolate the city from virtually the rest of the planet. Fortunately, the high season for such storms was not for several months. There was only a light dusting of snow on the tops of the buildings now, and none on the ground.
She could see the flat-roofed building across the way, where Rieekan and his team waited, the narrow black durasteel stairs bolted zig-zag against the drab brown duracrete.
Her comlink buzzed. "Everything is in place, Princess," Rieekan's tinny voice reported.
Leia glanced down at her comlink, smiled tightly, her eyes darting to the five blue-uniformed Alliance security officers, standing at ease, but alert, in the corridor. "Everything is in place here too."
Now they just had to wait.
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Rieekan signed off, pulled his parka closer against the bone-cold chill of the unheated building, reaching up to the window he faced and rubbed a gloved finger against the grimy transparisteel.
"Sir, all four snipers are in place," a voice reported in clipped tones behind him.
Rieekan turned, grimaced to himself. Four sharpshooters were stationed within sight of the building only in the event that something went wrong - in case Skywalker were to go rogue and they needed to get the Princess out in a hurry.
The duplicity that gnawed at him, of course, was the fact that the Princess didn't know they were there. Rieekan, one of the few people she clearly felt she could trust, had himself not been completely honest with her. That bothered him. But he had known, as Mon Mothma and Madine had, that she was far too trusting of Skywalker for her own good. And even Rieekan, who thought highly of the young man, allowed for the distinct possibility that Luke Skywalker was no longer the man - the Alliance hero - they had known, in which case, they had to be prepared for eventualities.
He rubbed a bit more of the grime from the window, holstered his blaster, nodded wordlessly to the officer, and settled in to wait.
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Vance Daesz sat on the roof, behind a boxy ventilator unit, within sight of the entrance to the building where the princess was garrisoned. He was carefully disassembling his long-range sniper rifle, calibrating the scope, fine tuning the laser.
Rieekan didn't know it - thought he was a backup in case Skywalker went rogue on the princess and tried to kidnap her - but Vance was part of Madine's special ops team and had been tasked by Madine himself to get Skywalker in his sights and shoot to kill. With luck, Skywalker wouldn't even step foot in the building.
Vance was very good at what he did. As he snapped the components of his rifle back into place, the wind ruffling his dark hair, he tucked the rifle protectively under his parka, peered up at the iron-gray sky and the smattering of snow starting to fall. War often left little room for questions of ethics. He'd learned long ago that following orders without entertaining thoughts of the rightness or wrongness of a situation was the best way to be able to sleep at night.
That, and to never look a target in the eye.
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Rieekan's first instinct that something was wrong was a dull bang against the lower level transparisteel door. He and the three other members of his team jumped in surprise, one of the men jerking his rifle up point at the entrance.
There was silence for a moment, heavy, expectant, then the distant ricochet of blaster fire. The general jerked to his feet, comlink in hand, pinging the two men stationed on the floor below.
"Lo'Dur," he snapped. "What's your status? Come in!"
Static answered.
Another burst of blaster fire sounded down below. Rieekan exchanged glances with his team. "Derl?" he nodded to his lead.
Derl nodded to the younger cadet at his side. The two drew their weapons and stepped noiselessly from the room.
With a dubious glance toward the empty warehouse across the way - Skywalker still nowhere in sight - Rieekan raised his comlink again to call the Princess.
Another burst of static. Jamming. Someone was jamming them. Was it Skywalker and Solo? Doubtful.
Which left one distinct possibility: The Empire knew they were here.
Rieekan lurched to his feet, motioning for the remaining private - Tel Danlin, a twenty-four-year-old mechanic from DuTeil with ash blond hair and a long scar across his right eye - to follow him.
They would get to the princess themselves.
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Leia was standing, fidgeting, at the window, eyes on the road below, when the whoomph explosion of a compression grenade - she would know that sound anywhere - lurched them all to their feet in a sudden haze of smoke and confusion, ears singing a single tone against the deafening pop of the explosion.
The source of the sound came from behind the closed durasteel door at the end of the corridor, the bright flash burning a spot in her vision in the gloom of the low light.
Her blaster was instantly in her hand, heart pounding as smoke poured into the corridor. She looked around wildly, saw her security guards snap into action, faces simultaneously surprised and grim.
As Leia ducked - almost in slow motion it seemed - into the paltry shelter of a recessed cove in the wall, her mind wildly searching for who would do this?, her free hand fumbling for her comlink, she registered belatedly the green flash of blaster fire ricocheting dangerously down the corridor.
"Rieekan, come in!" She shouted over the din.
Distantly, she saw one of her guards take a hit squarely in the chest, the force of the blow hurling him backwards. She screamed his name, but she couldn't cross the corridor to get to him without jumping into the path of the raining blaster fire herself. She got off three more shots to keep their heads down, twisted her head back to catch sight of their only escape route - the door at the opposite end of the corridor - if they could make it there without getting shot.
The space was filling with acrid smoke, erasing visibility, which could be to her benefit, providing visual cover, if she could move quickly. Ahead and to the left, her guards were inching forward, firing, firing…
Another man went down in a heap of blue uniform. Then another. The two remaining actually fell back to cover her, somehow avoiding the raining hail of deadly green laser bolts.
Suddenly out of the thick choking smoke emerged one familiar shape, then another, and another, white helmet and black eyepieces reflecting the flashes of green.
Stormtroopers.
Leia swore in a very un-ladylike fashion, got off a volley of four more shots - felling one trooper - before the guard to her left jerked and collapsed back against the wall.
Suddenly the blaster fire from the Imperials stopped, the silence deafening.
The remaining guard got off two more shots, and in response four stormtroopers opened fire. Leia cringed as the man crumpled against the wall and slid to the floor at her feet.
"Drop your weapon!" a mechanical voice snapped, distant to Leia's shock-stunned ears.
She was the only one left.
She thought she could hear the mechanical rasp of someone's breathing, even as she raised her arms away from her body and her blaster clattered to the duracrete floor.
A black shape rose from the thick haze, familiar because she had seen it in her nightmares nearly every night for a year, complicated because somehow it was now tied up with the fate of her closest friend, claiming to be his father; terrifying, this close in the gloom and the smoke, coming toward her where she stood, weaponless, the only one on her team left alive.
A stunshot rang out, volleyed to her.
Even as Leia collapsed back into darkness, she was paralyzed with the realization that she had unwittingly led Luke straight into a trap.
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The collection of identical drab brown buildings - remnants of a factory/industrial town before entrepreneurial cold-weather enthusiasts had rebranded the sleepy village into a luxury resort - rose up on the horizon. The buildings were an incongruent stain against the treeline - stick-straight conifers in small clusters - and the jagged peaks that rose up sharply on both sides.
From the vantage point of the shipping lane, Luke could see glimpses of rooftops, inconspicuous dwellings against the cliffsides. It was unclear how one was able to reach those buildings from where they were at the bottom of the canyon. But then, he realized, perhaps that was the point.
The buildings matched those he saw in his vision on Dagobah.
"There we are," Han muttered, nodding toward the viewport. "Keep your eyes sharp for Imperials."
Luke let his gaze drift momentarily to the gray sky. The wind was blowing, buffeting the speeder lightly. Snowflakes stirred restlessly side to side, as if the wind had simply dredged them up from the ground. Visibility was going to be more of a problem as the clouds sunk lower and lower.
He shook his head. "There's nothing to see."
Han glanced quickly sidelong. "But you're sure Vader's here? You're nuts, kid, you know that?"
Luke didn't answer.
After a moment, expelling a noisy sigh, Solo resettled in his seat. "Okay, then. We'll park the speeder a ways away, find a back door…"
Luke reached behind the seat and hefted the small sack of thermal detonators they had brought. Though there were only two of them, and presumably many more Imperials, they weren't completely without resources. "We can create a diversion with a couple of these - "
He broke off suddenly as his vision bloomed into a drab corridor, green flashes and smoke, fear, the hissing breathing of Darth Vader, the white glint of a stormtrooper helmet, the sound of someone crying out.
Suddenly, he couldn't breathe. He arched forward, sucking in a gasp of air, cold sweat on his forehead, tears stinging his eyes.
The speeder jerked, and he was back, pressed into the plastene seat, gasping for breath, aware that Han's voice, distant, was calling his name in alarm.
Leia. Vader had Leia. Just like his vision on Dagobah.
He was too late.
The speeder weaved precariously again, Han's hand on his shoulder. Luke took a gasping breath, forcing air into his lungs, slamming down his mental shields before Vader detected his presence, the echo of that scream still ringing in his ears.
"Vader has her," he forced out. "We're too late."
"What?" Solo demanded, eyes ahead again as he stabilized the speeder. "How can you be sure? What just happened?"
Luke felt nauseous. He needed some air. He didn't answer as he fumbled blindly for the viewport controls, cracked open a window. A slice of bitter cold air roared through, a slap of reality against the sudden heat of the small cockpit. "Just go faster," he hissed.
Han did go faster. Luke shut the window, leaning forward, tense with anticipation, eyes fixed on the approaching buildings. There were no visible Imperial ships. Some speeder traffic, but it was sparse. Solo circled. "Can you raise anyone on Alliance frequencies?" He asked. "It would be great to have some backup."
Luke tried. Only static answered. "They're jamming us."
Han cursed, glaring at the viewport. "That means they know we're coming."
Luke grimaced. It didn't change what they needed to do, but it certainly would make their task harder. Underneath it all was the calm realization that all this was an elaborate trap, set for him. And he was willingly walking into it. "I know," he answered quietly.
But he had a plan.
They passed a small landing pad, empty. Up ahead, was the building that matched the coordinates Leia had sent. Han went past it, turned abruptly up a small alleyway between two more buildings. "Okay, kid, if this is going to work…." he hadn't even pulled up to a stop before Luke had opened the hatch, the roll of dirty brown tarpaulin bundled in his arms, flinging the material over the bulk of the speeder. It would not be noticed from the entrance of the alleyway, unless someone looked carefully, which they hopefully wouldn't.
Han was right behind him, the satchel of explosives in hand.
Luke scanned the wall of the building to the left for any stairs or entrances. There was a boarded up doorway a few feet farther up the alley past the speeder. He nodded to it.
"Come on."