Star Wars - Thrawn Trilogy - Dark Force Rising 02 (9 page)

Whether she would have answered him or not he never found out. From over at the door Chewbacca growled out the whole story.

Han turned to stare at his wife, his mouth falling open. "You promised what?" he breathed.

She swallowed visibly. "Han, I had no choice."

"No choice? No choice? I'll give you a choice-no, you're not going."

"Han"Excuse me," Luke interrupted, standing up. "I have to go check out my X-wing. I'll see you both later."

"Sure, kid," Han growled, not looking at him.

Luke stepped to the door, catching Chewbacca's eye as he passed and nodding toward the outer office. Clearly, the Wookiee had already come to the same conclusion. Heaving his massive bulk to his feet, he followed Luke from the room.

The door slid shut behind them, and for a long moment they just stared at each other. Leia broke the silence first. "I have to go, Han," she said softly. "I promised Khabarakh I'd meet him. Don't you understand?"

"No, I don't understand," Han retorted, trying hard to hold on to his temper. The gut-wrending fear he'd felt after that near-miss on Bpfassh was back, churning hard at his stomach. Fear for Leia's safety, and the safety of the twins she carried. His son and daughter : "These whatever-they-ares-"

"Noghri," she supplied the word.

"-these Nogti have been taking potshots at you every chance they've had for a couple of months now. You remember Bpfassh and that mock-up of the Falcon they tried to sucker us into getting aboard? And the attack on Bimmisaari before that-they came within a hair of snatching us right out of the middle of a marketplace. If it hadn't been for Luke and Chewie they'd have done it, too. These guys are serious, Leia. And now you tell me you want to fly out alone and visit their planet? You might as well turn yourself over to the Empire and save some time."

"I wouldn't be going if I thought that," she insisted. "Khabarakh knows I'm Darth Vader's daughter, and for whatever reason, that seems to be very important to them. Maybe I can use that leverage to turn them away from the Empire and onto our side. Anyway, I have to try."

Han snorted. "What is this, some kind of crazy Jedi thing? Luke was always getting all noble and charging off into trouble, too."

Leia reached over to lay her hand on his arm. "Han I know it's a risk," she said quietly. "But it may be the only chance we ever have of resolving this. The Noghri need help-Khabarakh admitted that. If I can give them that hell if I can convince them to come over to our side-that'll mean one less enemy for us to have to deal with." She hesitated. "And I can't keep running forever."

"What about the twins?"

He had the guilty satisfaction of seeing her wince. "I know," she said, a shiver running through her as she reached her other hand up to hold her belly. "But what's the alternative? To lock them away in a tower of the Palace somewhere with a ring of Wookiee guards around them? They'll never have any chance of a normal life as long as the Noghri are trying to take them from us."

Han gritted his teeth. So she knew. He hadn't been sure before, but he was now. Leia knew that what the Empire had been after this whole time was her unborn children.

And knowing that, she still wanted to meet with the Empire's agents.

For a long minute he gazed at her, his eyes searching the features of that face he'd grown to love so deeply over the years, his memory bringing up images of the past as he did so. The young determination in her face as, in the middle of a blazing firelight, she'd grabbed Luke's blaster rifle away from him and shot them an escape route into the Death Star's detention-level garbage chute. The sound of her voice in the middle of deadly danger at Jabba's, helping him through the blindness and tremor and disorientation of hibernation sickness. The wiser, more mature determination visible through the pain in her eyes as, lying wounded outside the Endor bunker, she had nevertheless summoned the skill and control to coolly shoot two stormtroopers off Han's back.

And he remembered, too, the wrenching realization he'd had at that same time: that no matter how much he tried, he would never be able to totally protect her from the dangers and risks of the universe. Because no matter how much he might love her-no matter how much he might give of himself to her-she could never be content with that alone. Her vision extended beyond him, just as it extended beyond herself, to all the beings of the galaxy.

And to take that away from her, whether by force or even by persuasion, would be to diminish her soul. And to take away part of what he'd fallen in love with in the first place.

"Can I at least go with you?" he asked quietly.

She reached up to caress his cheek, smiling her thanks through the sudden moisture in her eyes. "I promised I'd go alone," she whispered, her voice tight with emotion. "Don't worry, I'll be all right."

"Sure." Abruptly, Han got to his feet. "Well, if you're going, you're going. Come on-I'll help you get the Falcon prepped."

"The Falcon?" she repeated. "But I thought you were going to New Cov."

"I'll take Lando's ship," he called over his shoulder as he strode to the door. "I've got to get it back to him, anyway.

"But-"

"No argument," he cut her off. "If this Noghri of yours has something besides talking in mind, you'll stand a better chance in the Falcon than you will in the Lady Luck." He opened the door and stepped into the reception area.

And stopped short. Standing directly between him and the door, looking for all the world like a giant hairy thundercloud, Chewbacca was glowering at him. "What?" Han demanded.

The Wookiee's comment was short, sharp, and very much to the point. "Well, I don't much like it, either," Han told him bluntly. "What do you want me to do, lock her up somewhere?"

He felt Leia come up behind him. "I'll be all right, Chewie," she assured him. "Really I will."

Chewbacca growled again, making it abundantly clear what he thought of her assessment. "You got any suggestions, let's hear 'em," Han said.

Not surprisingly, he did. "Chewie, I'm sorry," Leia said. "I promised Khabarakh I'd come alone."

Chewbacca shook his head violently, showing his teeth as he growled his opinion of that idea. "He doesn't like it," Han translated diplomatically.

"I got the gist, thank you," Leia retorted. "Listen, you two; for the last time-"

Chewbacca cut her off with a bellow that made her jump half a meter backward. "You know, sweetheart," Han said, "I really think you ought to let him go with you. At least as far as the rendezvous point," he added quickly as she threw him a glare. "Come on-you know how seriously Wookiees take this life debt thing. You need a pilot, anyway.

For just a second he could see the obvious counter argument in her eyes: that she was perfectly capable of flying the Falcon herself. But only for a second. "All right," she sighed. "I guess Khabarakh won't object to that. But once we reach the rendezvous, Chewie, you do as I tell you, whether you like it or not. Agreed?"

The Wookiee thought about it, rumbled agreement. "Okay," Leia said, sounding relieved. "Let's get going, then. Threepio?"

"Yes, Your Highness?" the droid said hesitantly. For once, he'd had the brains to sit quietly at the reception desk and keep his loose change out of the discussion. It was a marked improvement over his usual behavior, Han decided. Maybe he ought to let Chewbacca get angry more often.

"I want you to come with me, too," Leia told the droid. "Khabarakh spoke Basic well enough, but the other Noghri may not, and I don't want to have to depend on their translators to make myself understood."

"Of course, Your Highness," Threepio said, tilting his head slightly to the side.

"Good." Leia turned to look up at Han, licked her lips. "I guess we'd better get going."

There were a million things he could have said to her. A million things he wanted to say. "I guess," he said instead, "you'd better."

"You'll forgive me," Mara said conversationally as she finished the last bit of wiring on her comm board, "if I say that as a hideout, this place stinks."

Karrde shrugged as he hefted a sensor pack out of its box and set it down on the side table with an assortment of other equipment. "I agree it's not Myrkr," he said. "On the other hand, it has its compensations. Who'd ever think of looking for a smuggler's nest in the middle of a swamp?"

"I'm not referring to the ship drop," Mara told him, reaching beneath her loose-flowing tunic sleeve to readjust the tiny blaster sheathed to her left forearm. "I mean this place."

"Ah. This place." Karrde glanced out the window. "I don't know. A bit public, perhaps, but that, too, has its compensations."

"A little public?" Mara echoed, looking out the window herself at the neat row of cream-white buildings barely five meters away and the crowds of brightly clad humans and aliens hurrying along just outside. "You call this a liulc public?"

"Calm down, Mara," Karrde said. "When the only viable places to live on a planet are a handful of deep valleys, of course things are going to get a bit crowded. The people here are used to it, and they've learned how to give each other a reasonable degree of privacy. Anyway, even if they wanted to snoop, it wouldn't do them much good."

"Mirror glass won't stop a good sensor probe," Mara countered. "And crowds mean cover for Imperial spies."

"The Imperials have no idea where we are. He paused and threw her an odd look. "Unless you know differently."

Mara turned away. So that was how it was going to be this time. Previous employers had reacted to her strange hunches with fear, or anger, or simple bald-faced hatred. Karrde, apparently, was going to go for polite exploitation. "I can't turn it on and off like a sensor pack," she growled over her shoulder. "Not anymore.

"Ah," Karrde said. The word implied he understood; the tone indicated otherwise. "Interesting. Is this a remnant of some previous Jedi training?"

She turned to look at him. "Tell me about the ships."

He frowned. "Excuse me?"

"The ships," she repeated. "The capital warships that you were very careful not to tell Grand Admiral Thrawn about, back when he visited us on Myrkr. You promised to give me the details later. This is later."

He studied her, a slight smile creasing his lips. "All right," he said. "Have you ever heard of the Katana fleet?"

She had to search her memory. "That was the group also called the Dark Force, wasn't it? Something like two hundred Dreadnaught-class Heavy Cruisers that were lost about ten years before the Clone Wars broke out. All the ships were fitted with some kind of new-style full-rig slave circuitry, and when the system malfunctioned, the whole fleet jumped to lightspeed together and disappeared."

"Nearly right," Karrde said. "The Dreadnaughts of that era in particular were ridiculously crew-intensive ships, requiring upwards of sixteen thousand men each. The full-rig slave circuitry on the Katana ships cut that complement down to around two thousand."

Mara thought about the handful of Dreadnaught cruisers she'd known. "Must have been an expensive conversion."

"It was," Karrde nodded. "Particularly since they played it as much for public relations as they did for pure military purposes. They redesigned the entire Dreadnaught interior for the occasion, from the equipment and interior decor right down to the dark gray hull surfacing. That last was the origin of the nickname 'Dark Force," incidentally, though there was some suggestion that it referred to the smaller number of interior lights a two-thousand-crewer ship would need. At any rate, it was the Old Republic's grand demonstration of how effective a slave-rigged fleet could be."

Mara snorted. "Some demonstration."

"Agreed," Karrde said dryly. "But the problem wasn't in the slave circuitry itself. The records are a little vague-suppressed by those in charge at the time, no doubt-but it appears that one or more of the fleet's crewers picked up a hive virus at one of the ports of call on their maiden voyage. It was spread throughout all two hundred ships while in dormant state, which meant that when it suddenly flared up it took down nearly everybody at once."

Mara shivered. She'd heard of hive viruses leveling whole planetary populations in pre-Clone Wars days, before the medical science of the Old Republic and later the Empire had finally figured out how to deal with the things. "So it killed the crews before they could get to help."

"Apparently in a matter of hours, though that's just an educated guess," Karrde said. "What turned the whole thing from a disaster into a debacle was the fact that this particular hive virus had the charming trait of driving its victims insane just before it killed them. The dying crewers lasted just long enough to slave their ships together : which meant that when the Katana command crew also went crazy and took off the entire fleet went with them."

"I remember now," Mara nodded slowly. "That was supposedly what started the big movement toward decentralization in automated ship functions. Away from big, all-powerful computers into hundreds of droids."

"The movement was already on its way, but the Katana fiasco pretty well sealed the outcome," Karrde said. "Anyway, the fleet disappeared somewhere into the depths of interstellar space and was never heard from again. It was a big news item for a while, with some of the less reverent members of the media making snide wordplays on the 'Dark Force' name, and for a few years it was considered a hot prospect by salvage teams who had more enthusiasm than good sense. Once it finally dawned on them just how much empty space was available in the galaxy to lose a couple hundred ships in, the flurry of interest ended. At any rate, the Old Republic soon had bigger problems on its hands. Aside from the occasional con artist who'll try to sell you a map of its location, you never hear about the fleet anymore."

"Right." It was, of course, obvious now where Karrde was going with this. "So how did you happen to find it?"