Jacen looked around, his tangled hair damp with sweat. His lungs burned from the long run. “Do you think we’ve gotten away from them?” he said.
“Too easy,” Tenel Ka answered with an emphatic shake of her head. Her lightsaber still hummed and vibrated in her hand.
Up ahead they spotted a ladder that would lead to a higher level. “We must climb again,” Tenel Ka said. She switched off her lightsaber and clipped it back to her belt so she could use her single hand for climbing.
“It’s a long way back up,” Jacen gasped. He struggled to force air back into his lungs, then sighed. “So I guess we’d better get started.”
But as they rushed toward the beckoning escape ladder, a trio of their pursuers scrambled out of another side shaft and came to a halt, leering at the three young Jedi clustered together. A scaly-skinned, skull-faced bandit snarled, preparing to fire; the hairy man brought up his heavy blaster rifle. Beside them the little Ugnaught panted. Raising a gnarled, furry hand, the creature chittered and squealed in triumph.
Em Teedee said, “Oh no! He says he’s going to—”
The Ugnaught slapped a button set into the wall, and suddenly the floor dropped out from under Jacen’s feet. He, Tenel Ka, and the ginger-furred Wookiee all tumbled down into a bottomless shaft. They fell and rolled, slamming against the walls with bruising force—nothing at all like their enjoyable experience in the vortex tunnel at the SkyCenter Galleria.
Dropping first, Lowie bounced and jolted down the curves of the steep tube, with Tenel Ka close behind. In the rear, Jacen tried to grab Tenel Ka’s leg or foot, anything to slow them down, but the shaft walls were far too slick, and gravity did its work. They picked up speed.
Twenty meters below them, a wide hatch opened up, a round circle that let in a breeze and raw daylight. Jacen realized with horror that this was a garbage chute or an exhaust tube—something that led out into Bespin’s open sky.
With a yowl of dismay, Lowbacca shot down through the hatch, falling, tumbling, dropping into empty space.
He reached out with his long Wookiee arms and managed to grab on to a dangling transmission antenna. With a sudden severe jerk, he hung still, holding on with his powerful grip, his legs dangling over the sea of infinite clouds.
He roared and extended his other arm as Tenel Ka dropped beside him. With lightning reflexes he snatched at her. Just in time the warrior girl reacted, flailed backward with her single arm—and grasped his powerful furred grip like a Karduran acrobat.
A split second later, Jacen came tumbling down, yelling at the top of his lungs, flailing his arms and legs, trying to grab on to something.
Lowie hung in the notch of the antenna with one arm and grasped the dangling Tenel Ka with the other. He roared, but he had no free arm. Tenel Ka had only one hand, and that was grasped tightly in Lowbacca’s. Thinking fast, she swung her body, arched her back, and reached out with her legs.
Jacen managed to grab her calf but then slid down, clutching at her lizard-hide boot for just a moment. His sweat-slick fingers gripped her ankle; then slipped….
“Jacen!” Tenel Ka cried.
Jacen looked up at her for one last fleeting instant as she tried to reach out to him. Lowie yowled in despair.
Jacen’s fingers slid from Tenel Ka’s boot, and he dropped….
Dropped far away from Cloud City … plummeting into the bottomless sea of sky, where he vanished like a speck of dust.
12
Surrounded by the bayou sounds of hoots and hums and squawks that seeped from the dense marsh through the ragged walls of the shack, Jaina sat back to listen to the band’s tale.
The fame of Figrin D’an and his crew had risen and fallen over the years, and “Fiery Figrin” himself never understood what they were doing right or wrong. All through old Imperial days, the time of Rebellion, and then the formation of the New Republic, the Modal Nodes had played their own music, sometimes to great fanfare, sometimes to few—if any—appreciative ears.
But they played and they traveled. That’s what the Bith did. They were members in good standing of the Intergalactic Musicians’ Guild and generally made a good living, although Figrin had a long-standing tradition of losing their earnings at the sabacc table. He never could resist a good high-stakes game, and more than once had lost his own instruments and those of his fellow band members, only to win them back again in his next all-too-brief streak of luck.
For a time they had been Jabba the Hutt’s favorite band. Then they had reluctantly agreed to play at the disastrous wedding of the Lady Valarian in Mos Eisley, at which point they had been stuck performing as a mere bar band in the cantina, lucky to emerge with their lives.
Since then, they had moved on from planet to planet, playing in any paying venue, from prestigious resorts to drained-dry farming communities. They had gone to Borgo Prime, where they’d been the hit of Shanko’s Hive for five months running before a bad gambling debt had forced Figrin and his band members to leave discreetly in the night on the first cargo ship they could stow away on.
They’d also done a stint in the floating casinos on Mon Calamari, but the gambling tables proved too tempting for Figrin, and his own musicians had finally dragged him away and taken a booking on Cloud City. Lando’s business partner, Cojahn, had promised them that their new gig to publicize SkyCenter Galleria would be a renaissance for them, a real comeback tour.
Now, though, that had fallen to pieces as well.
“But that doesn’t explain it, Figrin,” Lando said. “Cojahn was my friend. You’ve got to tell me what really went down.”
Behind him, the band members continued their accompaniment on the Fizzz, the fanfar, and the ommni box. The eerie music added depth to the story, making Figrin’s words richer, more ominous.
“It’s all about Black Sun,” Figrin said. “They’ve gone underground for many years, but they’ve got a cover story now. Black Sun lieutenants act respectable, but when nobody’s looking, they set up their old criminal connections, just like Prince Xizor used to do, and Durga the Hutt, and all the other deposed kingpins. Black Sun has its clutches on weapons runners, illegal spice trade, and now the gambling and entertainment industries.”
Figrin swiped a hand across his high, smooth cranium, knocking away tiny droplets of sweat that had collected there. “That’s why they were trying to get their toehold on Cloud City—especially your new establishment, Lando. Black Sun wanted a cut of SkyCenter Galleria…. In fact, they wanted to run the place. In absentia, of course.”
Lando just shook his head. “Cojahn would never have allowed that to happen to our entertainment center—which is a perfectly legitimate place, I might add. A real family amusement center with no shady dealings whatsoever, despite what you may have heard about me in the past.”
“Believe me, Lando, compared to Black Sun, you’re just an Ewok that got happy on juri juice.”
“Thanks … I think,” Lando said.
“But you’re right,” Figrin said. “Cojahn wasn’t easily pushed around.” The musicians kept playing from the corners of the hut as if they had practiced this number over and over again and knew exactly what to do. Jaina wondered if they had considered writing a song about their ordeal on Bespin. Maybe it would even be a hit.
Zekk nodded and rested his chin in his hands. “If you’re running a business like Cojahn was, you’d have to be ready to stand up to hoodlums and all sorts of people trying to push you around.”
“Yeah, you get that a lot,” Lando said. “But most of them are cowards anyway.”
“Cojahn did his best, man, but Black Sun infiltrators popped up everywhere. You never knew who they were, or when they might come after you in a dark corridor down in Port Town. Got so you had to have a Wing Guard escort to take you to the gambling tables and back again. Those bullies could stick your head in a carbon-freezing tube, or drop you out an exhaust shaft. They meant business.”