Batten shook her head once more. “Your mother will skin me alive. I mean this in a literal sense. My hide will be tanned and turned into some kind of belt or purse or other accessory.”
“Don’t exaggerate,” Leia said firmly. “You’d just spend some time in the brig.”
“Oh, that’s where we are,” Batten muttered. “Spending time in the brig counts as the bright side.”
The lead soldier said, “She’ll be safe.” Leia wanted to believe him.
Either way, she’d go where he led.
The shelters weren’t that far away—but trudging through the shifting salt made the hike feel as though it went on forever. Or maybe that was the distinct knowledge of the guns in the soldiers’ hands. Either way, by the time they reached a low-roofed, gray structure jutting from the salt drifts near the mountains, Leia’s breaths came fast and she was sweating. The soldiers led her through the door and down a few steps; echoing sounds in the distance revealed most of this base or station was located underground. However, Leia was steered through a narrow, featureless corridor that revealed nothing of this place’s layout or capacities.
By that point, it was fine with her. She wanted to simply drop to the floor in gratitude for a place to rest, but she couldn’t betray any weakness. These people needed to understand she’d come to them as an equal and a potential ally.
If they didn’t believe her…
Is this the most danger I’ve ever been in? Probably. Almost certainly.
“Stay here,” the lead soldier said as they ushered her into a small room half-filled with pale equipment crates. The activity within came from a tiny MSE-series droid, rolling through to scan content codes. As Leia took the one chair, the soldier continued, “We’ll bring our leader to you soon, or we’ll let you go.” He didn’t say which option was more likely, or what would make the difference. When he shut the door behind him, it locked with a solid metal chunk, which sounded very final.
“Why tell me to stay here if you’re going to lock me in?” Leia grumbled. But she didn’t think much about it. She was too busy unfastening her jacket to provide easier access to her blaster. They hadn’t even thought to check her for weapons. There were advantages to being a teenage girl in the middle of a situation like this; her opponents underestimated her, which made so many things possible.
Leia took the blaster in hand. She wasn’t a practiced shot, but in a room this small, surely it would be hard to miss.
Could she really fire at a person? Maim or kill them, even to save her own life?
Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that…but Leia knew it could.
All right, I sit in this chair right in front of the door. I point the blaster at the leader right away—no, that might look like an attack, and they’ll fire immediately—but if I don’t have it in my hands, they might search me after the fact and find it, which will leave me both a prisoner and unarmed—I can’t do that.
She didn’t make the decision with her conscious mind. When the door clicked again and swung open, Leia obeyed her instincts and swung the blaster up into position, ready to fire.
Then she saw the man stepping forward into the light, pulling back the hood of his jacket to reveal the shock on his face—a face she knew by heart.
Leia whispered, “Daddy?”
Bail Organa took another step forward and stared at Leia as though he’d never seen her before. The shock weakened every muscle in her body, and she let her arm drop to her side, the blaster now dangling from slack fingers.
“They told me you were here,” her father said, “but I didn’t believe it. How did you find us?”
“I traced some strange traffic through Calderos Station.” But why were they even talking about that? “Dad, what’s going on?”
“You don’t need to know.”
“Well, I do know.” Shaking off her stupor, Leia reholstered her blaster at her side. “Are you really going to try to keep hiding this from me? Here and now?”
Bail put one hand to his forehead like a man with a headache. Probably she’d given him one. “Tell me what you’ve learned, Leia. And tell me how you learned it.”
Shock was quickly morphing into anger. “I find you in the middle of some kind of…insurgent camp, and I’m the one who has to answer questions?”
“It matters,” he said, a note of urgency in his voice she’d never heard before. “If you could find us, so could the Empire. We thought we’d erased all data about Calderos Station, but if we missed something—lives are at stake.”
A jolt of fear straightened her spine. Her vivid imagination showed her visions of Star Destroyers overhead, TIE fighters swooping down like rye-crows to destroy them all. “The data about shipping traffic between here and Calderos was stored in some older records I’d put together for the Apprentice Legislature. And some of the hostages I rescued from Wobani mentioned Itapi Prime, that they had cousins there who did a lot of business through the station. Something about that link seemed odd, so I followed the trail. It brought me here.”
“I’ll need you to destroy that data as soon as you return to Coruscant,” Bail said. His stance relaxed slightly as he nodded, answering a question within his own mind. “Thank the Force it came from your private records.”
“All right, I’ll destroy it,” Leia promised. “But what is this? Whatever it is—you attacked Calderos Station, right? You attacked the Empire!”
Her father held up one hand to forestall any more questions, but at least he’d accepted he couldn’t get out of this without telling her something. “Not personally. But our…one of our groups was responsible, yes. We’re carrying out a few tactical strikes meant to weaken Imperial control.”
“You always said we had to exercise influence through the Senate, to change the system from within.”
“I still believe there’s valuable work to be done there. But Palpatine’s rule only grows more despotic as time goes on. A few of us have come to accept that operating within the law won’t be enough.” He sighed heavily as he sat on the edge of one of the crates, the tiny MSE droid whirring near his feet. “I realize this must be upsetting for you. That you’re disappointed in me. I don’t blame you for feeling that way, Leia. I only ask that you try to understand.”
“Disappointed? Dad—this is amazing.” Her doubts about violent action had faded the instant she realized her father played a part in all this, that he even seemed to be the one in charge. Despite the recent distance between them, her trust in his goodness remained absolute. For Leia, it was this simple: if Bail Organa led this movement of rebels, then they were doing the right thing.
And she wanted to be a part of it.
“Does Mom know?” she asked.
Bail gave her a look. “As if I could hide anything from your mother. The truth is, she had the idea even before I did. She remains on Alderaan, but she has a role to play. Let’s leave it at that.”
Not likely. “What about me? What can I do?”
“Leia, no. You’re not to have any part in this.”
“I already do,” she pointed out. “I let you know how people might find this base!”