“They want me alive,” Leia said, more to reassure herself than to remind them. “They don’t want to spook us.” She looked around, searching the void around them and the matted branches above them for inspiration.
And found it. “I need the rest of the rope,” she told Ralrra, peering back at the hovering airspeeder. “All of it.”
Steeling herself, she twisted partway around in her makeshift harness, taking the coil he gave her and tying one end securely to one of the smaller branches. Chewbacca growled an objection. “No, I’m not belaying us,” she assured him. “So don’t fall. I’ve got something else in mind. Okay, let’s go.”
They set off again, perhaps a shade faster than before … and as she bounced along against Chewbacca’s torso, Leia realized with mild surprise that while she was still frightened, she was no longer terrified. Perhaps, she decided, because she was no longer simply a pawn or excess baggage, with her fate totally in the hands of Wookiees or gray-skinned aliens or the forces of gravity. She was now at least partially in control of what happened.
They continued on, Leia playing out the rope as they traveled. The dark airspeeder followed, still without lights, still keeping well back from them. She kept an eye on it as they bounced along, knowing that the timing and distance on this were going to be crucial. Just a little bit farther …
There were perhaps three meters of rope left in the coil. Quickly, she tied a firm knot and peered back at their pursuer. “Get ready,” she said to Chewbacca. “Now … stop.”
Chewbacca came to a halt. Mentally crossing her fingers, Leia ignited her lightsaber beneath the Wookiee’s back, locked it on, and let it drop.
And like a blazing chunk of wayward lightning, it fell away, swinging down and back on the end of the rope in a long pendulum arc. It reached bottom and swung back up the other direction—
And into the underside of the airspeeder.
There was a spectacular flash as the lightsaber blade sliced through the repulsorlift generator. An instant later the airspeeder was dropping like a stone, two separate blazes flaring from either side. The craft fell into the mists below, and for a long moment the fires were visible as first two, and then as a single diffuse spot of light. Then even that faded, leaving only the lightsaber swinging gently in the darkness.
Leia took a shuddering breath. “Let’s go retrieve the lightsaber,” she told Chewbacca. “After that, I think we can probably just cut our way back up. I doubt there are any of them left now.”
[And then directly to yourr ship?] Ralrra asked as they headed back to the branch where she’d tied the rope.
Leia hesitated, the image of that second alien in her room coming back to mind. Standing there facing her, an unreadable emotion in face and body language, so stunned or enraptured or frightened that he didn’t even notice Chewbacca’s entry … “Back to the ship,” she answered Ralrra. “But not directly.”
The alien was sitting motionless in a low seat in the tiny police interrogation room, a small bandage on the side of his head the only external evidence of Chewbacca’s blow. His hands were resting in his lap, the fingers laced intricately together. Stripped of all clothing and equipment, he’d been given a loose Wookiee robe to wear. On someone else the effect of the outsized garment might have been comical. But not on him. Neither the robe nor his inactivity did anything to hide the aura of deadly competence that he wore like a second skin. He was-probably always would be-a member of a dangerous and persistent group of trained killing machines.
And he’d asked specifically to see Leia. In person.
Towering beside her, Chewbacca growled one final objection. “I don’t much like it either,” Leia conceded, gazing at the monitor display and trying to screw up her courage. “But he let me go back at the house, before you came in. I want to know-I need to know-what that was all about.”
Briefly, her conversation with Luke on the eve of the Battle of Endor flashed to mind. His quiet firmness, in the face of all her fears, that confronting Darth Vader was something he had to do. That decision had nearly killed him … and had ultimately brought them victory.
But Luke had felt some faint wisps of good still buried deep inside Vader. Did she feel something similar in this alien killer? Or was she driven merely by morbid curiosity?
Or perhaps by mercy?
“You can watch and listen from here,” she told Chewbacca, handing him her blaster and stepping to the door. The lightsaber she left hooked onto her belt, though what use it would be in such close quarters she didn’t know. “Don’t come in unless I’m in trouble.” Taking a deep breath, she unlocked the door and pressed the release.