especially, seem to me driven this way."
Nil Spaar nodded slowly. "You failed to anticipate that the vermin who
came would choose death over captivity.
That failure has cost my fleet a useful vessel, and wasted Yevetha
blood."
Drawing a hard breath, Tal Fraan dropped immediately to one knee.
"Yes, darama. I know my error."
"Rise," Nil Spaar said, and the younger Yevetha complied. "I shall not
hold you to account for the failure of Kol Attan to seize the hostage
you brought to him.
Nor for the offense of the vermin in killing above their station."
"You are gracious, Viceroy."
"There are many kinds of vermin," Nil Spaar said offhandedly. "Perhaps
those that were sent here are more like Commander Paret, who at least
had the courage to defy me when I took this ship from him, than they
are like those we hold in service. Otherwise, I would have judged them
as you do."
"I do not deserve your mercy, darama."
"No," Nil Spaar said. "But you will help me think on how to answer the
vermin for their boldness, and to strike at this one called Leia, for
commissioning such sacrilege. And perhaps I will forget the other
after a while, on such pleasures of revenge as you devise."
Ackbar stood before the briefing room viewscreen holding one hand
behind his back and pointing with the other.
"This seems workable to me," he said. "If we tap Task Forces Apex and
Summer from the Fourth Fleet, Task Forces Bellbright and Token from the
Second Fleet, and Task Force Gemstone from the Third, we should be able
to maintain our current patrols through the rest of the New Republic
while building the force in Farlax to the strength of two battle
groups."
"Meanwhile, the Home Fleet will be left at full strength to defend
Coruscant," Leia said. "Which may not sit well with the border
sectors, but seems only prudent."
"Well--General A'baht will be happy," Han said, leaning back in his
chair. "This is what he's been saying he needed ever since he got
there."
Turning half away from the viewscreen, Ackbar exchanged glances with
Leia. "General A'baht will not be in command of the combined force,"
Ackbar said, and turned back.
"No? Well--he might not mind too much," Han said, folding his hands on
his lap. "A combined command like that is kind of like being put in
charge of a zoo. Who are you going to pull off the line? Admiral
Nantz is senior flag officer now, right?"
Ackbar turned back toward the viewscreen, both hands tucked behind
him.
"No," he said. "Not Nantz."
A crooked smile creased Han's face. "You'll do fine, Admiral," he
said. "It's like riding a--it's something you don't forget how to
do."
"Han, Admiral Ackbar will be staying here with me," Leia said
quietly.
"I'm putting you in charge of the forces in Farlax."
The smile faded quickly. "Didn't we take this class already?" he
asked, sitting forward and dropping his forearms on the table. "I'm
not the grand admiral kind.
And this'll just make it look like you can't make up your mind--Etahn,
me, Etahn, me--" "Han, she had no choice," Ackbar said without
turning.
"The Defense Council, led by Senator Fey'lya, insisted on approving the
commander. He's lost confidence in General A'baht."
"So why me?"
"Because you've already spent some time with the Fifth. Because you're
already familiar with the geogra phy and logistics out there. But
mostly because you're not tainted," Leia said. "Fey'lya wanted Admiral
Jid'yda--" "A Bothan--of course."
"--and Bennie offered you as a compromise. As he explained it, the
pro-Leia senators see you as supportive of me, and the anti-Leia
senators think you're independent enough to deal with me."
Han shook his head. "I can tell that that must have been an elevated
debate."
"You can't begin to know how absurd it was at times," Ackbar said,
turning away from the viewscreen and approaching the table. "Senator
Cundertol actually supported you on the grounds of--and I quote the
great man verbatim--'He's not doing anything else, is he?"" "A
heartwarming recommendation," Han said.
"Remind me to thank His Denseness." He pulled Ackbar's datapad toward
him and studied the list of force assignments. "I suppose it's a
little late at this point to consider negotiating a truce."
"I can't believe that the Yevetha will ever consider us their equals at
the table," Leia said.
"I suppose not," Han said, and pushed the datapad' away. "For a while
there, Leia dear, I actually let myself think that we'd have a chance
for that normal life you told Luke you wanted. I let myself believe
that we were through with this sort of thing. And I have to tell
you--leaving the uniform in the closet really agreed with me."
Leia and Han exchanged rueful smiles at that.
"Well--seems like going all the way back to Yavin," he added, "I've
made you coax, wheedle, guilt, and shame me into volunteering for dirty
jobs. I won't make you do it this time. Fact is, the Yevetha disgust
me--and they scare the stang out of me, too. If we don't control them
now, the future could get very messy. So I'll take this job, because
it needs to be done."
"The hard jobs are usually necessary ones," Ackbar mused.
"This isn't hard," Han said. "Those pilots who flew into the Cluster,
knowing the odds on coming back--that's hard. All I have to do is give
men like that a reason.
What's the timetable, Admiral?"
"There is a ferry flight of recon-X's leaving for the Fifth Fleet in
fifteen hours. They will fly escort for your shuttle," Ackbar said.
"You should arrive not long after the task groups from the Fourth Fleet
reach Farlax. Oh, and you will take the temporary rank of commodore
for the duration of this assignment."
"Commodore, eh?" He tried a cheerful smile on Leia, but she was no
more persuaded by it than he was.
"Does that come with a hat?"
Even though he was caught in legal limbo--not quite a full member of
the Senate, nor quite a former one--Tig Peramis of Watalla retained
some of the usual courtesies of office. Behn-kihl-nahm would not allow
him to speak or vote in the Assembly and had removed him entirely from
the Defense Council. But Peramis's 'access keys still allowed him
entrance to all but the Council chambers and restricted records. And
that meant access to the other senators, whose gossip he thought worth
nearly as much as a senatorial record search.
Months ago he had denounced the Fifth Fleet as a weapon of conquest and
tyranny and warned the Defense Council about the ambitions of Vader's
daughter.
He had been reprimanded by Behn-kihl-nahm and ridiculed by Tolik Yar,
but events had proved him prophetic, confirming his worst fears. And
the lightning annex-ation--on the flimsiest of pretexts--of eighteen
formerly independent worlds in Farlax seemed to Peramis to foreordain a
dramat
ic escalation.
The middle-of-the-night gatherings in the Defense chambers, Leia's
secret meeting with the Ruling Council, the "bungled" blockade attempt,
the nakedly emotional appeals on behalf of tiny alien populations, and
the open and deliberate provocation of the Yevetha at every turn all
appeared to Peramis as pieces of an elaborate plan to justify
annexation of Koornacht itself. Even the periodic outbreaks of
criticism in the Senate seemed calculated, the critics themselves
buffoons doing more discredit to their cause than damage to the
Princess.
But something a drunken Senator Cundertol carelessly said to him
alarmed Peramis to the point that he could no longer be satisfied with
rumor and gossip.
"A Corellian pirate with two battle groups to command," Cundertol had
giggled. "He'll show you goon-faces something about fighting. Old
Eating-a-Boat didn't want to kill other goon-faces, so he's
goon-goon-gone--" Peramis fed him more doan wine in the hopes of
coaxing Cundertol to tell him more, but the Bakuran only grew more
childishly self-amused at being in the superior position.
"Should have been a good boy," Cundertol said, swaying on his feet as
he shook a finger. "You can't come to the party."
Half an hour later Cundertol was glassy-eyed with doan shock, and
Peramis was entering the Senate office complex with both his and
Cundertol's voting keys in his hand.
Cundertol's key alone would not be enough to give Peramis access to the
Defense Council records, but Per-amis knew from experience that
security on senators' personal logs was much more lax. Convenience
demanded it. A personal log kept behind too many barriers would never
be used. Of course, nothing classified Secure was supposed to be kept
in something as unsecured as a personal log. But Peramis thought
Cundertol someone who was likely to place more value on convenience
than confidentiality.
The Bakuran's voting key opened every necessary door and every damning
file. It was all there, in a xeno phobic rant that demonstrated the
surprising fact that the senator actually did temper his words in
public.
A battle group-strength force was headed to Farlax to reinforce the
Fifth--but piecemeal, a clever stratagem that would help conceal what
was happening by allowing all the other battle groups to remain visible
on their patrol stations. And the Corellian who was to take charge of
the war fleet was, as Peramis had suspected, Princess Leia's husband,
Han Solo.
Peramis stayed in Cundertol's office only long enough to watch the log
once and copy it to a data card.
Then he returned to the private dining room where he had left
Cundertol, replaced the voting key in the senator's valise, and left
him to ride out his pleasure trance alone.
In the privacy of his own quarters in the Walallan mission, he
retrieved the small black box Nil Spaar had given him from its hiding
place in a chest of his eldest son's toys. There was no one to see
him--he had sent his family home months ago, and the modest staff that
served him knew better than to intrude in the middle of the night.
Seated at a table in his office, Peramis connected both the black box
and his datapad to the hypercomm.
At that point he paused. The furtiveness, the physical act of readying
the devices, made him uncomfortable. He had not used the black box
before. He had told himself that he never would. Peramis did not
think of himself as a spy, much less a traitor.
But he had kept the box nonetheless.
He told himself he was an honorable man, with an honorable cause--to
contain the militarism that threatened all that had been won in the
Rebellion. After a successful adventure in Farlax, Leia would be
untouchable.
The Yevetha had to be warned.
And it appealed to Peramis's vision of cosmic irony that Senator
Cundertol would be the one to warn them, in his own words.
But when Peramis activated the hypercomm, he left his office so that he
would not have to hear those words again.
Three hours short of reaching Intrepid, the commodore's Fleet shuttle
Tampion and its ferry flight escort abruptly dropped out of
hyperspace.
They found half a dozen Yevethan ships waiting for them--the
Interdictor Dreadnaught that had yanked them down, two thrust-ships,
and three smaller vessels.
The ambush had been perfectly planned. Before the dozing recon-X
pilots and startled shuttle passengers even understood what was
crossfire. The fighters were disabled almost at once, then left
drifting, ignored.
The unarmed but better-shielded shuttle took more subduing but was soon
dead in space, unable to maneuver or escape.
Shortly after, Tampion was moving away from its escorts on a new
course, under tow alongside one of the spherical thrustships. Raging
over his impotence, unable even to signal the other pilots, Plat Mallar
watched the pair jump out toward Koornacht. The Cluster filled the
entire sky on the starboard side of his ship, like a painting of a
swarm of night sparks.
Mallar was never so sure of death as he was when the shuttle
vanished.
Helpless as the fighters were, any one of the five remaining ships
could have dispatched them at leisure.
Instead, the five ships gracefully arrayed themselves in a V, with the
Interdictor in the lead position. Moments later they jumped away from
the ambush point, their mission seemingly complete.
Why did they leave us alive? Mallar wondered.
An answer came to him almost at once, and it made him feel sick
inside.
So we could tell the Fleet, tell Corus cant, what happened to the
commodore. So we would know that they have him.
Han was brought before Nil Spaar not as a trophy, but as an object of
curiosity.
The encounter was in private, with no one else present except for Han's
guards--two immensely strong male Yevetha who carried no weapons and
seemed unlikely to need any, given how Han was bound. And the setting
for the encounter was puzzling--not a throne room or arena of
humiliation for the conquered, but a tile-wrapped chamber with floor
gutters and valve jets mounted high on the walls. It made Han think of
a shower stall, or an abattoir--and he wished he hadn't thought of the
second possibility.
As the Yevethan viceroy slowly circled his prisoner, he took particular
interest in the bruises and burns Han had acquired by resisting when
the soldiers boarded Tampion. Nil Spaar leaned in close to study the
marks but was careful not to touch Han, even with gloved hands.
"You are the mate of Leia."
"I guess that secret's out," said Han, deciding to try to take his
captor's measure. "And you're Nil Spaar. I've heard a lot about you,
all of it bad. You've moved right to the top of my least favorite
people list. I had to drop Jabba the Hutt off to make room for you.
&nbs
p; It's only fair to tell you that my number one goal in life is to
outlive everyone on the list. I was halfway there before you replaced
Jabba."
The Yevethan ruler did not seem to take any notice of Han's goading.
"What sort of vermin are you?"
"I think the word you're looking for is 'scoundrel,' as in 'Corellian
scoundrel,'" Han said. "I've also answered to 'rascal,' 'pirate,'
'smuggler,' 'wretched scum,' 'toad-licker,' and a few others. Not all
of those are considered polite where I come from, though--so I don't
always answer politely. Just so you'll know, 'vermin' probably counts
as impolite."
"You are stronger than she," Nil Spaar said, cocking his head. "Why do
you follow her? Why do you not lead?"
Han answered with a contemptuous gaze and a shake of his head. "I was
gonna tell you that grabbing me was the biggest mistake you ever made,"
he said.
"Now I see it's the second biggest. You've misjudged Leia from the
beginning. Day in and day out, she might just be the strongest person
I know. And you're gonna find that out the hard way now."
Saying nothing, Nil Spaar retreated to the far end of the chamber, as
if to leave. Then he gestured to the guards and spoke a few words in
an unfamiliar language.