A storm gust rocked the landspeeder up on edge, scouring the floater pads with sand and pushing it sideways across the desert floor. Leia leaned toward the high side, but the automatic equalizers activated, and the vehicle was level even before she realized what she was doing. Chewbacca grunted and brought them back to their original heading. If not for the heading arrow on the vidmap, it would have been impossible to tell the nose had drifted. The storm had closed in again, and two meters beyond the viewport the only thing visible was a yellow sand cloud roaring across the flat-as-a-table Great Chott salt flat. Even the twin suns made their presence felt only in a soft ambient glow that came from every direction at once.
Leia activated her comlink, tried to raise Han, and heard only white noise. Again. She had been trying to contact him since the night before, to tell him that they would be a little late to the rendezvous in Anchorhead. There were too many TIEs around to risk retrieving the Falcon from the smuggler’s cave, so they would be coming via landspeeder. So far, she had been unable to reach him. She was starting to get worried. Very worried.
“I’m quite certain it’s only the storm, Princess Leia,” C-3PO said. “The static discharge has been playing havoc with my circuits all morning.”
“But I’ve been trying to reach Han since last night.”
“Oh my,” C-3PO replied. “I was unaware of that. It might still be the storm.”
Chewbacca growled a suggestion.
“Good idea,” Leia said.
She tried to open a channel to Tamora, who had remained behind with her children in Mos Espa. The only reply was more white noise.
“You see?” C-3PO said cheerfully. “It is the storm.”
Only the impossibility of twisting around in the tight confines to reach the seat behind her kept Leia from switching the droid off. “We weren’t in the storm last night.”
“Of course not,” C-3PO said, missing the point. “We were in Mos Espa.”
“And we couldn’t raise Han.”
C-3PO fell silent for a moment, then said, “Oh dear. Do you think Captain Solo could have been caught in the storm?”
Chewbacca growled darkly—not saying anything, just growling. They continued through the storm at a crawl, navigating by vidmap alone, eyes flicking between the instruments and the yellow blur outside, Leia trying to raise Han on the comlink every ten minutes. She timed the intervals carefully, not because she needed to conserve power, but because trying any more frequently would have meant she really believed Han was in trouble, and she didn’t believe that. She refused to believe that. However Han Solo went, it would not be in a sandstorm. It would take more than that—a lot more.
Finally, a trio of small vaporator symbols appeared at the top of the vidmap, two in one corner and one in the other. They were still a long way from Anchorhead, but at least they were starting to pass the outlying moisture farms.
Pass might have been an overstatement. The storm gusts started to come more frequently and more powerfully, and visibility frequently fell to nothing. The landspeeder rocked and bucked, and there were times when the strain of keeping it level made the equalizers scream like an incoming TIE. An hour later, the same three vaporator symbols remained on the vidmap, still ahead of their position and accompanied by only one additional symbol. Leia felt fairly certain she could have walked faster—save that the instant she stepped outside, the storm would have swept her into the most unnamed of Tatooine’s unnamed wastes.
Leia thought of Han out there struggling through the storm on an overpowered swoop. Immediately, she tried to replace the image with another: Han sitting in an Anchorhead tapcaf, drumming a single finger on the table-top while he waited for her to arrive. It was not a picture she could hold. Before she knew it, she was seeing the swoop lying on its side, half buried in a dune, the pilot’s cowling packed with sand.
But this picture Leia was not imagining. She was actually seeing it, there inside the landspeeder, hanging in front of her with the same apparent reality as Vader’s mask in her dream aboard the Falcon. It looked like a hologram, but even more solid, more tangible. She reached out to touch it, expecting it to dispel as soon as she did. Instead, her hand sank into the image and vanished from sight.
Leia would not let herself believe this was a vision. It was just another waking dream, or a hallucination caused by worry and fatigue. Anything but a vision. Anything but the future.
The image melted back into Leia’s mind where it belonged. She quickly chased it away completely by trying to raise Han on the comlink—and never mind that it had only been four minutes since her last attempt.
The reply was the same as always. White noise.
Leia sat, shaken, trying to remember what her brother had said Yoda told him about the future, but recalling instead only what Luke had told her last night, that the Force was with her, that her fear and anger would make her what she despised.
But not this way. Please, not by taking Han.
The storm lifted the landspeeder on edge and held it there. The equalizers began to wail again, the pitch rising toward the inaudible as they strained against the power of the wind. Chewbacca threw himself toward the high side, leaning across the center console to smash Leia against the compartment wall.
“We’re going to roll!” C-3PO cried. “We’ll be smashed to—”
“Threepio!” Leia gasped.
“Yes, Princess?”
“Lean!”
A dull clunk sounded against the compartment wall behind her, and the rising wail of the equalizers finally stabilized and began to drop. Chewbacca eased their nose ever so gently into the wind, and the landspeeder slammed down so hard the floor vibrated beneath Leia’s feet as the floater pad struck ground. The Wookiee groaned in relief. He shunted extra power to the rear repulsors to keep the nose down, then continued forward into the teeth of the storm.
The vidmap error alarm began to beep, and Leia looked down to see they had been blown considerably off course. Now there were only two moisture farms on the display, one in the upper left corner, and one at the top of the screen. At the bottom—which meant directly behind them—was a jagged line of mountains labeled THE NEEDLES. The destination arrow was pointed toward the upper right corner, flashing red to indicate they had drifted. Chewbacca reached down, used the back of a furry finger to thump the alarm override, and continued toward the nearest moisture farm.
It was the smart thing to do. Even if the storm didn’t send them tumbling across the salt flat to smash into The Needles, it would take another day to reach Anchorhead at the rate they were traveling. They might as well sit it out in safety and continue the journey when the weather cleared.
Leia would have been happy to do just that, except for one thing. “What about Han?”
Chewbacca urrharrrled that he was probably on his second Gizer ale by now.
“You don’t believe that any more than I do,” Leia said. “Han didn’t make Anchorhead. I know it.”
Chewbacca glanced over, his dark Wookiee nose twitching in thoughtfulness. Finally, he asked how she knew.
Leia shrugged. “I feel it—but not like it was with Luke at Bespin,” she said. “The sensation’s not that strong.”
Chewbacca nodded and remained silent, waiting for Leia to continue in her own time. That was one of the things she cherished most about the Wookiee, how he never doubted or pressured a friend, how he simply trusted. Leia focused her thoughts on Han again, trying to imagine him in Anchorhead drinking a second Gizer ale. Again, she could not hold the image, but this time it was not replaced by anything. Even when she tried to see a half-buried swoop, all that came to mind was blowing sand. Who was she kidding? Even if she could be sure the first image had been something other than her own worst fear made manifest, there had been nothing in it to help her find Han.
Chewbacca let out an inquiring grunt.
Leia shook her head. “I have no idea which way to search. If we happen across any sand dunes, let’s stop and take a look. That’s the best I can do.”
Chewbacca groaned that it was probably just as well. If they tried to go any direction but forward, they would just end up getting flipped anyway. Leia appreciated the kind words, but they weren’t much comfort. She felt like she was letting Han down. Had she worked harder at developing her Force potential, she might at least be able to find him.
But developing her potential would have meant facing the dark side of her heritage, and even before her dream aboard the Falcon and Luke’s warning, that thought had frightened her as much as having children.
Leia queried the vidmap for information about the moisture farms on the display. A line appeared beneath their destination, reading, NADON FARMS, FRESH PRODUCE ALWAYS AVAILABLE, WARNING: AUTOMATED SECURITY SYSTEMS. Beneath the other farm, the line read, RODOMON FAMILY FARM, CONTRACT SALES ONLY, WARNING: SECURITY SYSTEMS AUTOMATIC AND NONSENTIENT ANIMATE, NO VISITORS. This last statement was blinking in red.
The third farm returned to the corner of the display, and an information line automatically appeared beneath it: DARKLIGHTER FARM, FRESH PRODUCE AND GOOD CONVERSATION, STOP BY AND SEE US. Leia pointed at the symbol. “That one, Chewie. Let’s wait out the storm there.”
Chewbacca glanced down and grunted an objection.
“That’s the farm where Luke grew up,” Leia said. “Gavin Darklighter’s parents own it now.”
Chewbacca growled that the middle of a storm was no time for social calls. Knowing that his gruffness was no doubt out of concern for her safety, Leia smiled and nodded in agreement.
“It’s a little farther, but the Darklighters’ farm will be more secure.” She was already resetting their destination. “Even if I wanted to, wearing a raised sand hood inside someone’s home would raise suspicions. And with you and Threepio along, it wouldn’t take our hosts long to figure out who I am anyway. I’d rather go someplace friendly from the start.”
Chewbacca considered this, then nodded and turned the landspeeder onto the new course. The bearing was not as directly into the wind as the previous one, and Leia’s corner kept trying to come up. The Wookiee adjusted the repulsors again, lowering the nose almost to the ground, then continued blindly into the storm.
None of the millions of scientific geniuses who lived in the galaxy had ever found a way to eliminate a human body’s need for water. They could make suits that conserved every drop, they could build chem-reactors that synthesized it out of any breathable atmosphere, they had even discovered how to pressurize it to the point that a being could carry a week’s supply on his belt in a mass-nulling clip.
But there was no pill or injection that negated the need for water. In a normal environment, a human being typically required two liters a day to stay efficient and alert. In a desert, a human needed ten to fifteen liters a day just resting in the shade, and double that if he was moving. If a man did not drink enough water, he would begin to feel weak and sick to his stomach; if he continued without drinking, he would develop a headache and grow dizzy, and his arms and legs might start to tingle. Next, his vision would dim, his tongue would swell, and his blood would thicken. It would grow hard to breathe, and his heart would stop.
Han was at the dizzy phase. With a pounding head and qualmish stomach, he felt as though he had spent a long night in the Mos Eisley cantina listening to Figrin D’an blasting off-key. Racing swoops were not designed to carry much cargo, and the four liters of water in the utility compartment had lasted only until midmorning. Now, tucked behind the pilot’s cowling of the half-buried swoop, Han was doing everything he could to conserve body moisture: remaining still, breathing only through his nose, keeping his body and head covered, keeping his helmet face mask lowered. Though his limbs felt shaky, they were not tingling, and his vision remained as clear as could be expected when the only thing to see was a veil of blowing yellow. He guessed he would last another ten or twelve hours. If the storm had cleared by then, maybe Leia would be able to reach him. If not … well, Tatooine was an oven planet, and he was baking.
All for a painting—well, for Leia and the spies. And it was a heck of a painting. He had to keep that in mind.
Han continued to monitor his helmet comlink, but he did not broadcast. Even if he could have penetrated the storm static to reach Leia, he did not want her or Chewbacca coming after him. Not in this storm. All night long, the receiver had been crackling and snapping with storm static, but there had never been any voices. Now it had settled into a steady hiss of white noise like nothing Han had ever heard a sandstorm produce. To generate that much random static, this one had to be a monster, even by Tatooine’s standards.
After another hour, a strange whine rose from the comlink speaker. Han turned and began to dig sand out of the pilot’s cowling, trying to find the comm system’s squelch knob—then recognized the whine and realized it was not coming from inside his helmet at all. He rose to his knees and saw a blurry, H-shaped silhouette emerging from the storm ahead. In the yellow haze, it did not seem to be approaching so much as growing larger, but he had seen too many shapes just like it to doubt what he was seeing. A TIE fighter.
The starfighter screeched past overhead and became a shrinking ball of ion efflux, then vanished into the storm.
Han dropped back down behind the cowling, wondering what the chances were that it had missed his swoop. Not very good, he thought. Considering the size of the Tatooine desert and visibility in the storm, the starfighter had to be using some kind of advanced search sensor to locate him at all.
Han had just reached this conclusion when the whine began to build again, this time coming from the opposite direction. A dim H-shaped silhouette emerged from the storm, this time flying so low he was tempted to draw his blaster.
Before he had the chance, the TIE pulled up a dozen meters short and banked away into the storm. A meter-long capsule came flying out of the yellow haze behind it, arcing down toward the swoop. Heart thumping in his ears, Han sprang over the swoop and took off running, hunched forward against the wind with arms flailing, as though trying to swim through the blowing sand.
He was a dozen steps gone, sweating profusely and gasping for breath, before it occurred to him that if the capsule were a bomb, he would already be dead. Feeling foolish and lamenting the precious fluid he had wasted, he returned to the swoop and found the capsule buried to the control fins in the basin floor. A brilliant white strobe was blinking in the tail, and he knew a locator wave would be pulsing from a powerful transmitter somewhere deep inside.
“At least someone’s going to find me.”
Han sank back down behind the cowling and spent the next few minutes staring at the beacon. He had no idea whether the Imperials knew who they were chasing, but they clearly wanted Killik Twilight badly enough to risk much-needed starfighters searching for it. To survive, all he needed to do was wait until a squad of stormtroopers arrived to investigate the disabled swoop. Sure, there would be the humiliation of being captured, followed by a few days of torture, but Han had survived worse. He had escaped worse.
It was the interrogation that worried him. Leia had resisted Imperial interrogation more than once, but that was Leia. She had only to think of her duty to the New Republic, and she could endure anything. Han did not have the strength of her convictions. He doubted he could endure the needles and the hallucinogens and the sleep deprivation and still hold his silence. Eventually, he would start to admit things the Imperials had already figured out for themselves, such as the fact that he was on Tatooine to recover Killik Twilight. Then he would admit something they probably knew, perhaps that there was a code key hidden inside the moss-painting. Next, it would be something they might not know, like the existence of the Shadowcast message network, and then maybe he would be telling them everything they wanted to know.
Worst of all, they might even trick him into saying that Leia was here, on Tatooine, with no protection except C-3PO and Chewbacca.
Han drew his blaster to shoot the beacon, then realized that would only make his capture more likely. When the signal stopped, they would realize someone was still alive and rush to find the swoop again. The beacon would have to stay.
It was Han who would have to go. He removed the vidmap from its mounting, studied his options, then programmed his new destination, stood, and stumbled out into the storm.
At least the wind was at his back.
The vaporator symbol slid over the landspeeder’s position blip. Leia looked up to find herself still completely lost, sand raking the forward viewports more ferociously than ever, the landspeeder rocking like a hawk bat caught in a hover racer’s wake turbulence.
“Slow down, Chewie. We’re there.” Leia pressed her face closer to the transparisteel and could see no farther than the nose of their craft. “I think.”
Chewbacca decelerated to a crawl and continued to ease forward. The words STOP BY AND SEE US appeared under the speeder’s locator blip. The comm receiver crackled sharply, and a garbled noise that was probably a voice came over the speaker.
Leia glanced over to find Chewbacca looking at her with his furry brow raised, clearly hoping she had understood the voice. When Leia shook her head, his knuckle fur bulged so high she thought he would crush the steering yoke. This was one tense Wookiee.
Leia glanced over her shoulder at C-3PO. “Did you make that out?”
“I’m sorry, but the static interference is really quite terrible,” C-3PO said. “All I could understand was ‘come right sixty.’ Sixty what, I don’t know.”
Chewbacca cursed with a growl that made even Leia blanch, then swung the nose right sixty degrees. The storm set the landspeeder up on edge so high that, had Chewbacca not been sitting on the raised side, Leia felt certain they would have flipped.
Another crackle came over the comm speaker.
“I detected no meaningful wave patterns,” C-3PO reported almost before the noise had ended. “I suspect it was sand lightning.”
A faint column of red light appeared a little farther to their right, shining up into the sandstorm. When Leia pointed it out, Chewbacca whoofed in relief—then nearly flipped the landspeeder when he tried to turn. Leia shifted to the high side of her seat and leaned across the console, practically climbing into the Wookiee’s lap.
“See-Threepio, get on the high—”
“I am, Princess Leia,” C-3PO said. “But I’m not heavy enough. We’ll flip!”
Chewbacca groaned at the droid, then eased the nose a few degrees back into the wind and continued forward. Once the light was directly leeward of Leia’s side window, he swung them full into the wind again, placing the red column directly behind them. The nose dropped, and he eased off the power, allowing the storm to push them back toward the glow.
“Well done, Chewie,” Leia said.
The red light grew steadily larger and brighter in the rear viewport, shining up from behind a large sand berm. Chewbacca let the wind push them over the rim, and the wind calmed to a swirling gale. The landspeeder settled onto its repulsors in the heart of a sunken courtyard, not far from the red spotlight that had served as their beacon. Visibility improved enough to see a sturdy figure in a cloak waving for them to follow.
The figure led them through a barrier field into a crowded and disorganized hangar, motioning them to park beside a modified S-swoop with three small seats where normally there was one. It took Leia a moment to realize the hangar was not just disorganized, it was torn apart, with a speeder bike lying on its side and hover-sleds shoved hither and thither. Toppled tool cabinets lay along the walls with the contents spilled across the floor, while canisters of maintenance fluids lay heaped in the corner.
“This hangar was certainly much better organized when Master Luke inhabited this farm,” C-3PO said. “I have seldom seen such a mess.”
“I don’t think this is its normal condition.” Leia slipped her hold-out blaster into her pocket. “Don’t shut down yet, Chewie.”
Chewbacca groaned an affirmative, then the figure that had guided them into the hangar was beside the landspeeder, pulling back his hood. A moonfaced man with gray hair and long sideburns, he had the same brown eyes and warm smile as his son Gavin. Leia raised the cowling on her side of the speeder and saw the man’s expression fade from welcoming to shock. After his eyes flicked to Chewbacca and C-3PO, the shock changed to fear.
“I was going to say you picked a devil of a time to come shopping for produce.” He offered his hand to Leia. “But I know you didn’t come from Coruscant looking for hubbas. What happened to Gavin?”
“Nothing!” Feeling a little foolish for not having anticipated this reaction, Leia took his hand and allowed him to help her out of the landspeeder. Upon seeing an official representative of the New Republic, any parent with a child in Rogue Squadron would react with alarm. “As far as I know, your son’s in perfect health—assuming, of course, you are Jula Darklighter.”
The man’s easy smile returned. “Sorry—I guess you don’t see many holos of me making speeches.” He shook her hand, which he was still holding, and said, “Jula Darklighter. My son served on the Mon Remonda under your husband’s command.”
Leia returned Jula’s smile. “I know. Lieutenant Darklighter is making quite a reputation for himself in Rogue Squadron.”
This brought a proud flush to Jula’s cheeks. He leaned down and looked into the landspeeder to address Chewbacca.
“You can shut her down, big fella. The Imperials have come and gone already.” He stood up and smiled at Leia again, as though not quite able to believe what he was seeing. “At least now I know what they were looking for. I thought it was the Squibs.”
“Squibs?” Leia’s stomach twisted in a knot.
Jula gestured at the three-seated swoop. “Came in a couple of hours ago, the minute the stormtroopers left. They were in pretty sad shape.”
“Good to see you again, Princess!”
A trio of familiar figures appeared from deeper in the hangar, coming from the direction of a lit doorway.
“No hard feelings about Espa Heights,” Sligh said.
All three had sanisteam-ruffled fur and were stained head to toe with orange bacta lotion.
“You butted in,” Grees added, “but no real harm.”
Only their faces, which had been covered by masks and goggles, had no bare spots.
Leia narrowed her eyes. “What are you three doing here?”
“Is that any way to talk to your partners?” Emala asked, sounding hurt. “We’re very happy to see you.”
Chewbacca climbed out of the landspeeder and growled, which C-3PO translated almost correctly as, “Master Chewbacca will thank you not to presume.”
Jula frowned and looked to Leia. “You know these three?”
Leia sighed and nodded. “We’re acquainted. But we’re not partners.”
“Wrong again, sweetheart.” Grees stopped and propped his hands on his hips. “Han saved our lives, and now—”
Chewbacca snatched Grees and held him up in front of his face, asking the same question as Leia.
“You saw Han?”
“Isn’t that what I just said?” Grees grabbed one of Chewbacca’s thumbs in each hand and tried unsuccessfully to peel them back. “If you’d let me finish—”
“Where?” Leia grabbed the Squib by his utility bandolier. “When?”
“Not until that furwall puts him down.” Emala stepped in front of Leia and shoved her in the thighs. “It’d do you good to remember the painting belongs to us right now.”
“What? Are you—” Leia recognized the tactic as diversionary and caught herself. “Never mind.” She waved her hands. “We’ll deal with that later. Where’s Han?”
Emala and Sligh exchanged smirks, then nodded together.
“He set things right in Tuskens’ Escape,” Emala said.
“We held the Imperials off so he could go after the painting.” Grees flashed a plasteel smile. “We didn’t want him going it alone, but no way we could keep up.”
“Last we saw of him was a flaming dot streaking off into Mesa Flats,” Sligh added. “That’s some swoop he has.”
“General Solo is here, too?” Jula asked.
“Captain Solo is no longer a general,” C-3PO said. “He resigned his commission less than—”
“I’m sure Jula knows all about that, Threepio,” Leia interrupted. The last thing she wanted right now was to rehash the events of the Hapan rift for Gavin Darklighter’s father. “The whole galaxy knows about that.”
Jula earned Leia’s undying gratitude by nodding gruffly. “More than it needs to.” He glanced at C-3PO. “And Han Solo will always be Gavin’s general to me.”
“He’ll appreciate hearing that,” Leia said. “Can you tell me how difficult it would have been for him to reach Anchorhead from Mesa Flats last night?”
Jula tried to hide his alarm by glancing toward the barrier field, but he was not quick enough to fool Leia—not when the answer mattered so much.
She grasped his forearm. “He couldn’t.”
“He didn’t,” Jula said. “No one did. The last thing we heard from Anchorhead was an alert advising travelers to seek shelter and ride the storm out. Nobody made it into town.”
Leia didn’t bother asking if he could be sure, or arguing that nobody was as lucky or resourceful as Han. She knew he had not made it to Anchorhead. She had known before they stopped.
Leia slipped back into the landspeeder and reached for the vidmap, only to find Chewbacca’s long fingers already calling up an overview of the area. She turned to Jula.
“Could we have some water and a few power cells?”
“No.” Jula leaned into the speeder and put his hand on her arm. “I can’t let you do that.”
Leia began to fish for credits. “I’ll gladly reimburse—”
“Now you’re insulting your host,” Jula warned. “On Tatooine, that can get you thrown in a Sarlacc pit …”
Leia frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“I think you do.” Jula took a remote from his cloak pocket and flicked it toward the barrier field, which instantly turned gold and opaque. “I can’t let you go out there, not in this storm, not even for Han.”