Heir to the Empire

C H A P T E R 17

In front of Luke, the scopes and displays glowed softly as the diagnostic messages, most of them bordered in red, scrolled past. Beyond the displays, through the canopy, he could see the X-wing’s nose, lit faintly by the sheen of distant starlight. Beyond that were the stars themselves, blazing all around him with cold brilliance.

And that was all. No sun, no planets, no asteroids, no cometary bodies. No warships, transports, satellites, or probes. Nothing. He and Artoo were stranded, very literally, in the middle of nowhere.

The computer’s diagnostic package came to an end. “Artoo?” he called. “What’ve you got?”

From behind him came a distinctly mournful electronic moan, and the droid’s reply appeared on the computer scope. “That bad, huh?”

Artoo moaned again, and the computer’s summary was replaced by the droid’s own assessment of their situation.

It wasn’t good. Luke’s reverse-triggering of the acceleration compensator had caused an unanticipated feedback surge into both hyperdrive motivators—not enough to fry them on the spot, but scorching them badly enough to cause sudden failure ten minutes into their escape. At the Point Four the ship had been doing at the time, that translated into approximately half a light-year of distance. Just for good measure, the same power surge had also completely crystallized the subspace radio antenna.

“In other words,” Luke said, “we can’t leave, we aren’t likely to be found, and we can’t call for help. Does that about sum it up?”

Artoo beeped an addition. “Right.” Luke sighed. “And we can’t stay here. Not for long, anyway.”

Luke rubbed a hand across his chin, forcing back the sense of dread gnawing at him. Giving in to fear would only rob him of the ability to think, and that was the last thing he could afford to lose at this point. “All right,” he said slowly. “Try this. We take the hyperdrive motivators off both engines and see if we can salvage enough components to put together a single functional one. If we can, we remount it somewhere in the middle of the aft fuselage where it can handle both engines. Maybe where the S-Foil servo actuator¹ is now—we don’t need that to get home. Possible?”

Artoo whistled thoughtfully. “I’m not asking if it’ll be easy,” Luke said patiently as the droid’s response came up. “Just if it would be possible.”

Another whistle, another pessimistic message. “Well, let’s give it a try anyway,” Luke told him, unstrapping his restraints and trying to wriggle around in the cramped confines of the cockpit. If he pulled off the back of the ejection seat, he would be able to get into the cargo compartment and the tools stored there.

Artoo warbled something else. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to get stuck,” Luke assured him, changing his mind and reaching for the in-cockpit pouches instead. The gloves and helmet seals for his flight suit were stored there; it’d be just as easy at this point to gear himself for vacuum and then get into the cargo compartment through its underside hatch. “If you want to be helpful, you might pull up the maintenance specs and find out exactly how I go about getting one of those motivators out. And cheer up, will you? You’re starting to sound like Threepio.”

Artoo was still jabbering indignantly over that characterization when the last of Luke’s helmet seals cut off the sound. But he did sound less frightened.

It took nearly two hours for Luke to get past all the other cables and tubing in the way and remove the port engine hyperdrive motivator from its socket.

It took less than a minute more to discover that Artoo’s earlier pessimism had been justified.

“It’s riddled with cracks,” Luke told the droid grimly, turning the bulky box over in his hands. “The whole shield casing. Just hairlines, really—you can barely see some of them. But they run most of the length of the sides.”

Artoo gave a soft gurgle, a comment which required no translation. Luke hadn’t done a lot of X-wing maintenance, but he knew enough to recognize that without an intact superconducting shield, a hyperdrive motivator was little more than a box of interconnected spare parts. “Let’s not give up yet,” he reminded Artoo. “If the other motivator’s casing is all right we may still be in business.”

Collecting his tool kit, feeling inordinately clumsy in zero-gee freefall, he made his way under the X-wing’s fuselage to the starboard engine. It took only a few minutes to remove the proper access cover and tie back some of the interfering cables. Then, trying to get both his faceplate and his glow rod together in the opening without blinding himself, he peered inside.

A careful look at the motivator casing showed that there was no need to continue the operation.

For a long moment he just hung there, one knee bumping gently against the power surge vent, wondering what in the name of the Force they were going to do now. His X-wing, so sturdy and secure in even the thick of combat, seemed now to be little more than a terribly fragile thread by which his life was hanging.

He looked around him—looked at the emptiness and the distant stars—and as he did so, the vague sense of falling that always accompanied zero-gee came flooding back in on him. A memory flashed: hanging from the underside of Cloud City, weak from fear and the shock of losing his right hand, wondering how long he would have the strength to hang on. Leia, he called silently, putting all the power of his new Jedi skill into the effort. Leia, hear me. Answer me.

There was no answer except for the echoing of the call through Luke’s own mind. But then, he hadn’t expected one. Leia was long gone, safe on Kashyyyk by now, under the protection of Chewbacca and a whole planet of Wookiees.

He wondered if she’d ever find out what had happened to him.

For the Jedi, there is no emotion; there is peace. Luke took a deep breath, forcing back the black thoughts. No, he would not give up. And if the hyperdrive couldn’t be fixed … well, perhaps there was something else they could try. “I’m coming in, Artoo,” he announced, replacing the access panel and again collecting his tools. “While you’re waiting, I want you to pull everything we’ve got on the subspace radio antenna.”

Artoo had the data assembled by the time Luke got the cockpit canopy sealed over him again. Like the hyperdrive data, it wasn’t especially encouraging. Made of ten kilometers of ultrathin superconducting wire wound tightly around a U-shaped core, a subspace radio antenna wasn’t something that was supposed to be field-repairable.

But then, Luke wasn’t the average X-wing pilot, either.

“All right, here’s what we’re going to do,” he told the droid slowly. “The antenna’s outer wiring is useless, but it doesn’t look like the core itself was damaged. If we can find ten kilometers of superconducting wire somewhere else on the ship, we should be able to make ourselves a new one. Right?”

Artoo thought about that, gurgled an answer. “Oh, come on now,” Luke admonished him. “You mean to tell me you can’t do what some nonintelligent wire-wrapping machine does all day?”

The droid’s beeping response sounded decidedly indignant. The translation that scrolled across the computer scope was even more so. “Well, then, there’s no problem,” Luke said, suppressing a smile. “I’d guess either the repulsorlift drive or else the sensor jammer will have all the wire we need. Check on that, will you?”

There was a pause, and Artoo quietly whistled something. “Yes, I know what the life support’s limitations are,” Luke agreed. “That’s why you’ll be the one doing all the wiring. I’m going to have to spend most of the time back in hibernation trance.”

Another series of whistles. “Don’t worry about it,” Luke assured him. “As long as I come up every few days for food and water, hibernation is perfectly safe. You’ve seen me do it a dozen times, remember? Now get busy and run those checks.”

Neither of the two components had quite the length of wiring they needed, but after poking around a little in the more esoteric sections of his technical memory, Artoo came to the conclusion that the eight kilometers available in the sensor jammer should be adequate to create at least a low-efficiency antenna. He conceded, however, that there was no way to know for sure until they actually tried it.

It was another hour’s work for Luke to get the jammer and antenna out of the ship, strip the ruined wire off the core of the latter, and move everything to the upper aft fuselage where Artoo’s two graspers could reach it. Jury-rigging a framework to feed the wire and protect it from snagging took another hour, and he took a half hour more to watch the operation from inside to make sure it was going smoothly.

At which point there was nothing left for him to do.

“Now, don’t forget,” he warned the droid as he settled himself as comfortably into the cockpit seat as possible. “If anything goes wrong—or you even think something’s about to go wrong—you go ahead and wake me up. Got that?”

Artoo whistled his assurances. “All right,” Luke said, more to himself than to the droid. “I guess this is it, then.”²

He took a deep breath, letting his gaze sweep one last time across the starry sky. If this didn’t work … But there was no point in worrying about that now. He’d done all he could for the moment. It was time now for him to draw upon inner peace, and to entrust his fate to Artoo.

To Artoo … and to the Force.

He took another deep breath. Leia, he called, uselessly, one last time. Then, turning his mind and thoughts inward, he began to slow his heart.

The last thing he remembered before the darkness took him was the odd sense that someone, somewhere, had in fact heard that final call.…

Leia …

Leia jerked awake. “Luke?” she called, propping herself up on one elbow and peering into the dimness surrounding her. She could have sworn she’d heard his voice. His voice, or perhaps the touch of his mind.

But there was no one. Nothing but the cramped space of the Lady Luck’s main cabin and the pounding of her own heart and the familiar background sounds of a ship in flight. And, a dozen meters away in the cockpit, the unmistakable sense of Chewbacca’s presence. And as she woke further, she remembered that Luke was hundreds of light-years away.

It must have been a dream.

With a sigh, she lay back down. But even as she did so, she heard the subtle change in sound and vibration pattern as the main sublight drive shut down and the repulsorlift kicked in. Listening closer, she could hear the faint sound of air rushing past the hull.

Slightly ahead of schedule, they were coming in to Kashyyyk.

She got out of bed and found her clothes, feeling her quiet misgivings gnawing with renewed force as she got dressed. Han and Chewbacca could make all the reassuring noises they wanted, but she’d read the diplomatic reports, and she knew full well how strong the undercurrent of resentment was that the Wookiees still harbored toward humans. Whether her status as a member of the New Republic hierarchy would make up for that was, in her view, entirely problematical.

Especially given her chronic difficulty in understanding their language.

The thought made her wince, and not for the first time since leaving Nkllon, she wished she’d had Lando use some other droid for his little voice-matching trick. Having Threepio and his seven-million-language translator along would have made this whole thing so much less awkward.

The Lady Luck was already deep into the atmosphere by the time she arrived in the cockpit, skimming low over a surprisingly flat layer of clouds and making smooth curves around the treetops that were occasionally visible poking through them. She remembered when she’d first come across a reference to the size of Kashyyyk’s trees; she’d had a full-blown argument with the Senate librarian at the time about how the government could not afford to have its records data shot through with such clearly absurd errors. Even now, with them right in front of her, she found the things hard to believe. “Is that size typical for wroshyr trees?” she asked Chewbacca as she slipped into the seat beside him.

Chewbacca growled a negative: the ones visible above the clouds were probably half a kilometer taller than the average. “They’re the ones you put nursery rings on, then.” Leia nodded.

He looked at her, and even with her limited ability to read Wookiee faces his surprise was quite evident. “Don’t look so shocked,” she admonished him with a smile. “Some of us humans know a little about Wookiee culture. We aren’t all ignorant savages, you know.”

For a moment he just stared at her. Then, with an urf-urf-urf of laughter, he turned back to the controls.

Ahead and to the right, a tighter group of the extra-tall wroshyr trees had come into view. Chewbacca turned the Lady Luck toward it, and within a few minutes they were close enough for Leia to see the network of cables or thin branches linking them together just above cloud height. Chewbacca circled the ship partway around, bringing it within the perimeter; and then, with just a growl of warning, dropped sharply down into the clouds.

Leia grimaced. She’d never really liked flying blind, especially in an area crowded with obstacles the size of wroshyr trees. But almost before the Lady Luck was completely enveloped by the thick white fog they were clear of it again. Immediately below them was another cloud layer. Chewbacca dropped them into that one, too, and drove through it to clear air again—

Leia inhaled sharply. Filling the entire gap between the group of massive trees, apparently hanging suspended in midair, was a city.

Not just a collection of primitive huts and fires like the Ewok tree villages on Endor. This was a real, genuine city, stretching out over a square kilometer or more of space. Even from this distance she could see that the buildings were large and complex, some of them two or three stories high, and that the avenues between them were straight and carefully laid out. The huge boles of the trees poked up around and, in some places, through the city, giving the illusion of giant brown columns supporting a rooftop of clouds. Surrounding the city on all sides, strangely colored searchlight beams lanced outward.³

Beside her, Chewbacca rumbled a question. “No, I’ve never even seen holos of a Wookiee village,” she breathed. “My loss, obviously.” They were getting closer now; close enough for her to see that the Cloud City–type unipod she’d expected was nowhere to be seen.

For that matter, there was no support of any kind visible. Was the whole city being held up by repulsorlifts?

The Lady Luck banked slightly to the left. Directly ahead of them now, at one edge of the city and a little above it, was a circular platform rimmed with landing lights. The platform seemed to be sticking straight out from one of the trees, and it took a few seconds for her to realize that the whole thing was nothing more or less than the remnant of a huge limb that had been horizontally cut off near the trunk.

A not insignificant engineering feat. Dimly, she wondered how they’d disposed of the rest of the limb.

The platform didn’t look nearly big enough to accommodate a ship the size of the Lady Luck, but a quick glance back at the city itself showed that the apparent smallness was merely a trick of the tree’s deceptive scale.⁴ By the time Chewbacca put them down on the fire-blackened wood, in fact, it was clear that the platform could not only easily handle the Lady Luck, but probably full-sized passenger liners, as well.

Or, for that matter, Imperial Strike Cruisers. Perhaps, Leia decided, she shouldn’t inquire too deeply into the circumstances of the platform’s construction.

She had half expected the Wookiees to send a delegation out to meet her, and she turned out to have been half right. Two of the giant aliens were waiting beside the Lady Luck as Chewbacca lowered the entry ramp, indistinguishable to her untrained eye except for their slightly different heights and the noticeably different designs of the wide baldrics curving from shoulder to waist across their brown fur. The taller of the two, his baldric composed of gold-threaded tan, took a step forward as Leia headed down the ramp. She continued toward him, using all the calming Jedi techniques she knew, praying that this wouldn’t be as awkward as she was very much afraid it would be. Chewbacca was hard enough for her to understand, and he’d been living out among humans for decades. A native Wookiee, speaking a native dialect, was likely to be totally incomprehensible.

The tall Wookiee bowed his head slightly and opened his mouth. Leia braced herself—

[I to you, Leiaorganasolo, bring greetings,] he roared. [I to Rwookrrorro welcome you.]⁵

Leia felt her jaw drop in astonishment. “Ah … thank you,” she managed. “I’m—ah—honored to be here.”

[As we by yourr presence arre honored,] he growled politely. [I am Ralrracheen. You may find it easierr to call me Ralrra.]⁶

“I’m honored to meet you,” Leia nodded, still feeling a little dazed by it all. Apart from the odd extended growling of his final r sounds, Ralrra’s Wookiee speech was perfectly understandable. Listening to him, in fact, it was as if all the static she’d always had to plow through had suddenly cleared away. She could feel her face warming, and hoped her surprise didn’t show.

Apparently, it did. Beside her, Chewbacca was urf-urf-urfing quietly again. “Let me guess,” she suggested dryly, looking up at him. “You’ve had a speech impediment all these years and never thought to mention it to me?”

Chewbacca laughed even louder. [Chewbacca speaks most excellently,] Ralrra told her. [It is I who has a speech impediment. Strangely, it is the kind of trouble that humans find easierr to understand.]⁷

“I see,” Leia said, though she didn’t entirely. “Were you an ambassador, then?”

Abruptly, the air around her seemed to grow chilly. [I was a slave to the Empirre,] Ralrra growled softly. [As was Chewbacca also, beforre Hansolo freed him. My captorrs found me useful, to speak with the otherr Wookiee slaves.]

Leia shivered. “I’m sorry,” was all she could think of to say.

[You must not be,] he insisted. [My role gave me much information about the Empirre’s forces. Information that proved useful when yourr Alliance freed us.]

Abruptly, Leia realized that Chewbacca was no longer standing at her side. To her shock, she saw that he was locked in a death grip with the other Wookiee, his bowcaster trapped uselessly against his shoulder by the other’s massive arm. “Chewie!” she snapped, hand dropping to the blaster belted at her side.

She’d barely gotten hold of it, though, before Ralrra’s shaggy hand landed in an iron grip on top of hers. [Do not disturb them,] the Wookiee told her firmly. [Chewbacca and Salporin have been friends since childhood, and have not seen each otherr in many yearrs. Theirr greeting must not be interrupted.]

“Sorry,” Leia murmured, dropping her hand to her side and feeling like an idiot.⁸

[Chewbacca said in his message that you requirre sanctuary,] Ralrra continued, perhaps recognizing her embarrassment. [Come. I will show you the preparations we have made.]

Leia’s eyes flicked to Chewbacca and Salporin, still clinging to each other. “Perhaps we should wait for the others,” she suggested, a little uncertainly.

[Therre will be no dangerr.] Ralrra drew himself up to his full height. [Leiaorganasolo, you must understand. Without you and yourr people many of us would still be slaves to the Empirre. Slaves, orr dead at theirr hand. To you and yourr Republic we owe a life debt.]

“Thank you,” Leia said, feeling the last bit of residual tension draining away. There was a great deal about Wookiee culture and psychology that was still opaque to her; but the life debt, at least, she understood very well. Ralrra had formally committed himself to her safety now, that commitment backed up by Wookiee honor, tenacity, and raw strength.

[Come,] Ralrra growled, gesturing toward what looked like an open-cage liftcar at the edge of the platform. [We will go to the village.]

“Certainly,” Leia said. “That reminds me—I was going to ask how you keep the village in place. Do you use repulsorlifts?”

[Come,] Ralrra said. [I will show you.]

The village was not, in fact, being held up by repulsorlifts. Nor with unipods, tractor anchorlines, or any other clever scheme of modern technology. Which made it all the more sobering for Leia to realize that the Wookiees’ method was, in its own way, more sophisticated than any of them.

The village was held up by branches.

[It was a great task, a village of this size to build,] Ralrra told her, waving a massive hand upward at the latticework above them. [Many of the branches at the level desired werre removed. Those which remained then grew strongerr and fasterr.]

“It looks almost like a giant spiderweb,” Leia commented, peering from the liftcar at the underside of the village and trying not to think about the kilometers of empty space directly beneath them. “How did you mesh them together like that?”

[We did not. Through theirr own growth they arre a unity.]

Leia blinked. “Excuse me?”

[They have grown togetherr,] Ralrra explained. [When two wroshyr branches meet, they grow into one. Togetherr then they sprout new branches in all directions.]

He growled something under his breath, a word or phrase for which Leia had no translation. [It is a living reminderr of the unity and strength of the Wookiee people,] he added, almost to himself.

Leia nodded silently. It was also, she realized, a strong indication that all the wroshyr trees in this bunch were a single giant plant, with a unified or at least an intermixed root system. Did the Wookiees realize that? Or had their obvious reverence for the trees forbidden such thinking and research?

Not that curiosity would help them all that much in this case. Dropping her gaze, she peered down into the hazy dimness beneath the liftcar. Somewhere down there were the shorter wroshyrs and hundreds of other types of trees that made up the vast jungles of Kashyyyk. Several different arboreal ecosystems were reputed to exist in the jungle, arranged in roughly horizontal layers descending toward the ground, each layer more deadly than the one above. She didn’t know whether the Wookiees had ever even made it all the way down to the surface; it was for sure that no one who had would have taken the time for leisurely botanical studies.

[They arre called kroyies,]⁹ Ralrra said.

Leia blinked at the odd non sequitur. But even as she opened her mouth to ask what he was talking about, she spotted the double wedge of birds flying swiftly through the sky beneath them. “Those birds?” she asked.

[Yes. Once they werre a prize food to the Wookiee people. Now even the poorr may eat them.] He pointed toward the edge of the village above them, to the haze of light coming from the searchlights she’d seen during their approach. [Kroyies will come to those lights,] he explained. [Hunterrs therre await them.]

Leia nodded understanding; she’d seen visual lures of varying degrees of sophistication used to attract food animals on other worlds. “Don’t all those clouds interfere with their effectiveness, though?”

[Through the clouds they work best,] Ralrra said. [The clouds spread the light. A kroyie will see it from great distances and come.]

As he spoke, the double wedge of birds banked sharply, climbing toward the clouds overhead and the lights playing against them. [Even so, you see. Tonight we shall perhaps dine on one of them.]

“I’d like that,” she said. “I remember Chewie saying once that they were delicious.”

[Then we must return to the village,] Ralrra said, touching the liftcar’s control. With a creak of the cable, it started upward. [We had hoped to shelterr you in one of the morre luxurious homes,] he commented as they started upward. [But Chewbacca would not allow it.]

He gestured, and for the first time Leia noticed the homes built directly into the tree beside them. Some of them were multistoried and quite elaborate; all of them seemed to open up directly onto empty space. “Chewbacca understands my preferences,” she told Ralrra, suppressing a shiver. “I was wondering why the liftcar went this far down past the village proper.”

[The liftcarr is used mainly forr cargo transportation orr the ill,] Ralrra said. [Most Wookiees preferr to climb the trees naturally.]

He held out a hand to her, palm up; and as the muscles under the skin and fur flexed, a set of wickedly curved claws slid into sight from hidden fingertip sheaths.¹⁰

Leia swallowed hard. “I didn’t realize Wookiees had claws like those,” she said. “Though I suppose I should have. You are arboreal, after all.”

[To live among trees without them would be impossible,] Ralrra agreed. The claws retracted again, and the Wookiee waved the hand upward. [Even vine travel would be difficult without them.]

“Vines?” Leia echoed, frowning up through the liftcar’s transparent roof. She hadn’t noticed any vines on the trees earlier, and didn’t really see any now. Her eyes fell on the cable running from the liftcar up into the leaves and branches above …

The dark green cable.

“That cable?” she asked carefully, nodding toward it. “That’s a vine?”

[It a kshyy vine is,] he assured her. [Do not worry about its strength. It is strongerr than composite cable material, and cannot even by blasterrs be cut. Too, it is self-repairing.]

“I see,” Leia said, staring at the vine and fighting hard against the sudden sense of panic. She’d flown all around the galaxy in hundreds of different types of airspeeders and spaceships without the slightest twinge of acrophobia, but this hanging out on the edge of nowhere without a solid powered cockpit around her was something else entirely.¹¹ The warm sense of security she’d been feeling at being on Kashyyyk was starting to evaporate. “Have the vines ever broken?” she asked, trying to sound casual.

[In the past, it sometimes happened,] Ralrra said. [Various parasites and fungi, if unchecked, can erode them. Now, we employ safeguards which ourr ancestorrs did not have. Liftcarrs such as this one contain emergency repulsorlift systems.]

“Ah,” Leia said, the momentary discomfort easing as she once again found herself feeling like a raw and not very bright diplomatic beginner. It was easy to forget that, despite their somewhat quaint-looking arboreal villages and their own animalistic appearance, Wookiees generally were quite at home with high technology.

The liftcar rose above the level of the village floor. Chewbacca and Salporin were standing there waiting for them, the former fingering his bowcaster and giving the little twitches that Leia had learned to associate with impatience. Ralrra brought them to a stop at the level of the wide exit ramp and opened the door, Salporin stepping forward as he did so to offer Leia his hand in assistance.

[We have made arrangements forr you and Chewbacca to stay at Salporin’s home,] Ralrra said as they stepped out onto relatively solid ground again. [It is not farr. Therre arre transports available, if you wish.]

Leia looked out across the nearest parts of the village. She wanted very much to walk, to get out among the people and start getting the feel of the place. But after all the effort they’d put into sneaking her onto Kashyyyk in the first place, parading herself in front of the whole population would probably not be the smartest thing to do. “A transport would probably be best,” she told Ralrra.

Chewbacca growled something as they came up to him. [She wished to see the village’s structurre,] Ralrra told him. [We arre now ready to go.]

Chewbacca gave another growl of displeasure, but returned his bowcaster to his shoulder and strode off without further comment toward a repulsor sled parked at the side of the road perhaps twenty meters away. Ralrra and Leia followed, with Salporin bringing up the rear. The houses and other buildings began right at the edge of the matted branches, Leia had already noted, without anything more substantial than a few twisted kshyy vines between them and empty space. Ralrra had implied that the homes clinging to the trees themselves were the more prestigious ones; perhaps those here at the edge belonged to the upper middle class. Idly, she looked at the nearest of them, glancing into the windows as they passed. A face moved into view in the shadows behind one of them, catching her eye—

“Chewie!” she gasped. Even as her hand darted for her blaster the face vanished. But there was no mistaking those bulging eyes and protruding jaw and steel-gray skin.

Chewbacca was at her side in an instant, bowcaster in hand. “One of those creatures who attacked us on Bimmisaari is in there,” she told him, reaching out with all the Jedi sense she could muster. Nothing. “At that window,” she added, pointing with her blaster. “He was right there.”

Chewbacca barked an order, sliding his massive bulk between Leia and the house and easing her slowly backward, his bowcaster weaving back and forth across the structure in a covering pattern. Ralrra and Salporin were already at the house, each carrying a pair of wicked-looking knives they’d pulled from somewhere. They took up flanking positions beside the front door; and with a brilliant flash from his bowcaster, Chewbacca shot the door in.

From somewhere in toward the center of the village someone roared—a long, ululating Wookiee howl of anger or alarm that seemed to echo from the buildings and massive trees. Even before Ralrra and Salporin had disappeared into the house the howl was being taken up by other voices, rising in number and volume until it seemed as if half the village had joined in. Leia found herself pressing against Chewbacca’s hairy back, wincing at the sheer ferocity in that call and flashing back to the Bimmisaari marketplace reacting to her jewelry theft.

Except that these weren’t funny little yellow-clad Bimms. They were giant, violently strong Wookiees.

A large crowd had begun to form by the time Ralrra and Salporin emerged from the house—a crowd that Chewbacca paid no more attention to than he had the howling as he kept his eyes and bowcaster trained on the house. The other two Wookiees also ignored the crowd, disappearing around opposite sides of the house. They reappeared seconds later, their manner that of hunters who’d come up dry.

“He was there,” Leia insisted as they returned to where she and Chewbacca stood. “I saw him.”

[That may be true,] Ralrra said, slipping his knives back into hidden sheaths behind his baldric. Salporin, his attention still back on the house, kept his own knives ready. [But we found no trace of anyone.]

Leia bit at her lip, eyes flicking across the area. There were no other houses near enough for the alien to have crossed to without her and Chewbacca seeing him. No cover of any sort, for that matter, on this side of the house. On the other side, there was nothing but the edge of the village.

“He went over the edge,” she realized suddenly. “He must have. Either worked his way under the village with climbing gear or else met a craft hovering down below.”

[That is unlikely,] Ralrra said, starting past her. [But possible. I will go down the liftcarr, to try and discoverr him.]

Chewbacca reached a hand out to stop him, growling a negative. [You arre right,] Ralrra conceded, though clearly reluctantly. [Yourr safety, Leiaorganasolo, is the most important thing at this point. We will take you to safety first, and then make inquiries about this alien.]

To safety. Leia gazed at the house, a shiver running up her back. And wondered if there would ever again be such a thing for her as safety.