Star by Star (18 page)

“We all do what is necessary, Executor, and you have already been commended for enduring the enemy’s filth.” Tsavong Lah’s tone was irritated, and perhaps a little distracted. “We cannot defeat what we do not understand. For instance, our coralskipper pilots could easily be misled by an image such as this. Were I the enemy, the galaxy would be littered with these devices.”

“The galaxy
is
littered with them,” Nom Anor answered, bristling. “They are not really much to admire, Great One. They are as limited in their capacities as are our enemies.”

The X-wing vanished, then Tsavong Lah dropped the holopad to the floor and crushed it beneath the armored vua’sa claw that he now stood upon in place of the foot taken by Jacen Solo.

“The enemy has proven challenging enough to thwart
you
several times.” The warmaster’s voice was full of loathing; a true believer in the supremacy of the Yuuzhan Vong gods, he disavowed the influence of chance and viewed any failure as a sign of the instrument’s spiritual decadence. “I trust that was not the case this time?”

“The chilab worked beautifully.” Nom Anor tipped his head to one side, then covered his nostrils and blew air into his sinuses. Though he lacked the faith to truly enjoy the pain of the neural grub’s detachment, he feigned a smile of satisfaction as the thing tore its dendrites from his optic chiasma and exited through his nasal cavity. He let it drop into his palm, then presented it to Tsavong Lah. “I had a good view on the way in. I am certain the chilab’s memories will prove useful in planning your attack.”

“No doubt.” Tsavong Lah slipped the grub into the pocket of the sharp-clawed cape clinging to his shoulders. “I will view them later. Your meeting with Leia Solo went well?”

“Very well.” It would have been unthinkable to answer anything else. “I have no doubt that the Jedi will respond to our challenge.”

“You are more confident than I would be in your place,” a wispy voice said, low and behind him. “The Jedi will smell our trap and be wary.”

Nom Anor turned and saw a motley featherball hopping past the guards on thin, reverse-jointed legs. Her willowy ears and corkscrew antennae bestowed on her a vaguely mothlike aspect, though Nom Anor considered her a pest more on the magnitude of a radank.

“Vergere,” he fumed. “I was not aware you knew the ways of the Jedi.”

“Vergere knows them better than I,” Tsavong Lah said. “She was the one who said the
Jeedai
would let you live. I believed they would kill you outright.”

“You were perhaps closer to the truth than your pet.” Nom Anor refused to call Vergere an aide, for the peculiar little creature was no more than the familiar of an agent who had perished during an ill-fated attempt to disease the Jedi. She had become an adviser to Tsavong Lah after a brief captivity in the hands of New Republic Intelligence, where she managed to learn as much about the enemy in a few weeks as had Nom Anor in all his years as an agent provocateur. Questions had been raised about her loyalties, but once the reliability of her information had been established, she had quickly become Nom Anor’s greatest rival.

“Leia Solo and her consort did attempt to kill me as you expected,” Nom Anor continued, “but I was able to play on her human emotions to save my life.”

“So now you can control the emotions of the Jedi?” Vergere mocked. “Then perhaps you should make them surrender.”

“One can lure a tana into the spatter pit with a smile and soft words.” Nom Anor spread his hands and turned to Tsavong Lah. “Even I cannot persuade it to lay its neck in the cleaving yoke.”

The warmaster rewarded him with a curt nod. “I am more interested in what Leia Solo said than why you are still alive. How did she respond when the
Gift of Anguish
destroyed the infidels?”

“She wanted to kill me.”

“But she did not,” the warmaster observed. “What did she do instead?”

“I convinced her she would also be killing millions of refugees.” Even Nom Anor realized he was clinging to the claim a little too closely—perhaps because of the shame he had already suffered at Leia’s hands on Duro. “She yielded.”

“Not yielded—she refused to accept blame.” Vergere stated her rebuttal as fact, not supposition. She hopped over to Tsavong Lah. “She’s been a diplomat all her life. For her to fall into such a trap would be akin to you flying into an ambush.”

Tsavong Lah considered her argument for only an instant. “It may appear so, but something else is happening.” He looked over Vergere’s feathery back at Nom Anor. “She let you live for a reason. What is it?”

The answer, of course, was because she had given her word, but Nom Anor knew better than to say so. Such an answer would contradict the opinion the warmaster had expressed earlier, and while a Yuuzhan Vong subordinate could insinuate, thwart, even subvert and still hope to live, he could never contradict. Sometimes Nom Anor wondered if the infidels’ way was not better, and he supposed the fact that he did not immediately cower in fear of the gods’ retribution was in itself a sign that he had spent too long away from his people. Leaving aside for the moment the question of why he had been forced to endure the painful introduction of the chilab if the warmaster had not expected him to return, Nom Anor shrugged.

“Before she released me, she gave me a warning. She said to tell you that the Jedi accept no responsibility for the hostages, and that any emissary you send with a similar threat will not be returned.”

If Tsavong Lah noticed the slight contradiction of Nom Anor’s contention that he had been the one controlling Leia, he showed no sign. He simply looked to Vergere.

“Right again, my servant.”

She smiled up at him. “Have I not said the Jedi will prove worthy foes?”

“You have indeed,” the warmaster said. “But the refugees will be their undoing yet. They will become the wedge that drives the New Republic away from the
Jeedai
.”

The one good thing to come of Tsavong Lah’s threat was that General Muun decided now would be a bad time to appear indifferent to the fate of refugees—and a particularly good time to boost his career by “rescuing” a group of evacuees. Not only did he send ten vessels to escort the Vray to safety, he insisted on leading the operation himself—freeing Leia and Han to return directly to Eclipse.

One of the many bad things to come of the threat was that when they arrived, Luke was waiting with a mission and a request to borrow C-3PO. The Solos barely had a chance to say hello to Anakin and the twins before they were on their way again, this time to Nova Station in what had once been the Carida system.

Surrounded as it was by the still-cooling ejecta of the explosion that had turned its sun into a supernova, space outside Nova Station was the reddest space Leia had ever seen. Wispy curtains of crimson gas swept slowly past the turning station, obscuring the distant stars and calling to mind the flash-boiled blood of billions of perished Caridans. Sitting there with Han in the wryly named Big Boom cantina, sipping an eyeblaster and trying to ignore Bobolo Baker’s All-Bith Band, Leia could not help feeling a little sickened by the knowledge that this had been an artificial cataclysm, one wrought by her own species’ boundless thirst for vengeance and destruction.

An electronic attention bell chimed three times, temporarily drowning out Bobolo’s flighty melody, then a male voice said something garbled over the public-address system. Along with every other being in the cantina, Leia and Han turned their heads toward a hologram projector hanging over the All-Bith Band.

The name
Asteroid Dancer
appeared, with a line beneath designating the vessel a YT-1500 freighter. A few moments later, the word
Confirmed
was added, and a hologram depicting the craft’s distinctive cockpit arrangement appeared.

Han grunted in frustration and reached for the pitcher of eyeblasters sitting in front of him. “They should’ve been here by now.” He filled his glass, took a sip, then tried not to make a sour face and returned the drink to the table. “Booster’s not coming.”

“He has to,” Leia said, glad to see the distaste in Han’s expression. For a long time after Chewbacca’s death he would drink anything, the fouler the better. The healing of his taste buds was yet one more sign of the healing inside. “Even the
Errant Venture
needs to resupply. Could we have missed them?”

Han gave her one of his patented dumb-question looks, then waved at the holo display. “How do we miss a Star Destroyer?”

“We don’t,” Leia agreed. “Not here.”

Built to replace Carida as a way stop on the Perlemian Trade Route, Nova Station floated just inside the supernova’s expanding gas shell, moving along behind the edge at the same three kilometers per second. As a result, any starship wishing to dock with the station had to leave hyperspace and enter the cloud at sublight speed, then use its sensors to obtain a final location. This gave station security and anyone else with a decent sensor package a chance to identify the ship long before it arrived, making the station an ideal haunt for smugglers, criminals, and anyone else with reason to appreciate a head start.

Han looked across the table. “What do you think, Red?” He was referring to Leia’s neon-colored hair—now almost down to her collar after being shaved off during a decon alert on Duro last year. Along with a blastback pilot’s jacket and stretchtight flight suit she could still pull off, the temporary dye job was part of her smuggler’s-moll disguise. “Time to go?”

Leia smiled and shook her head. “How about something to eat?”

She reached over to thumb the service pad, but stopped when she noticed Han being eyed from the next table. The watcher was a small mountain of a Weequay, with a broad nose and a deeply creased face almost as gruesome as a Yuuzhan Vong’s. “I think you’re about to be recognized.”

“Me?” Han turned to gaze out the viewport and see if he could spy the watcher in its reflection. “It’s not
my
face that’s been flashing over the ’Net for the last twenty years.”

Long resentful of the loss of anonymity that came with being a hero of the Rebellion, Han had limited his disguise to a bottle-brush mustache and a pair of cheek pads. Along with a two-day growth of beard, the costume had worked so far, probably because people did not expect to see the husband of a former chief of state in a place like the Big Boom.

Clearly, their luck was changing. The big Weequay picked up his drink and stood, flight duster flapping open to reveal the hilt of a big vibroblade on his hip. Knowing that her Noghri bodyguard would be growing nervous, Leia glanced quickly in Meewalh’s direction. Gaunt, wiry, and no more than a meter and a half tall, Meewalh was nevertheless such an intimidating sight with her leathery skin and wild eyes that even the Big Boom’s clientele gave her wide berth. Leia signaled the Noghri to wait with a double eyeflick, then pretended not to notice as the stranger started toward Han.

“Wait a minute,” Han said, more to himself than Leia. “I know this guy.”

Leia casually lowered a hand beneath the table and loosened the blaster on her hip. The mere fact that her husband knew someone was no guarantee that the party in question did not have murder in mind. The big Weequay stopped beside their table and, after casting an appraising glance at Leia, turned to Han.

“Thought it was you,” he said. “I’d recognize that smell anywhere.”

“Yeah?” Han narrowed his eyes at the Weequay, clearly trying to recall where he had seen him before. “I get that a lot.”

“Didn’t see your ship come in on the board, Miek.” The Weequay’s smile was almost a sneer; clearly, he enjoyed watching Han struggle to remember him. “You still with the
Sunlight
?”

“You might say that.” Han flashed a conspiratorial smile, then took a long drink of his eyeblaster to buy himself some time.
Sunlight Franchise
was one of a dozen false transponder codes the
Falcon
used regularly. They had docked with Nova Station under the name
Longshot
, and Han had more aliases than even
he could track. Finally, he returned the glass to the table and refilled it from the pitcher. “Only you’d have to try a different name.”

The Weequay laughed. “I thought as much. That captain of yours was a tricky one.” He pulled up a chair and sat down, then glanced around the room. “Haven’t seen any Ryn around, though.”

That hardness only a wife can see came to Han’s eyes, and Leia knew he had finally placed their uninvited guest.

“Droma doesn’t run things anymore,” Han said. Droma and Han had fallen in together for a time after the capture of Ord Mantell, then spent half a year tracking down Droma’s lost Ryn clanmates and bringing them together in a Duros refugee camp. Though Droma and his people had since vanished into space, they had given Han a focus when Leia could not and would therefore always have a warm place in her heart. “He and I parted ways nearly a year ago.”

“Really?” The Weequay turned to Leia again, half leering and half appraising. “This your new captain?”

Han looked hurt. “I’m captain. She’s the mate.”

“You might say that.” Leia glared across the table at her husband. “On a good day.”

The Weequay laughed heartily, then surprised Leia by reaching under the table to lay a meaty hand on her knee. “The next time you have a bad day, come over and see me on the
Sweet Surprise
. I’m the mate there, but you can have any post you want.”

“That’s enough, Plaan. She’s not looking.” Han’s voice was serious now. “What are you doing off Tholatin, anyway? I thought you were the security chief.”

The small amount of humor Leia saw in the situation vanished. Tholatin was the home of a group of traitorous smugglers who were not above aiding the Yuuzhan Vong when the price was high enough.

“Change of jobs. Like I said, I’m first mate on the
Sweet Surprise
now.” He removed his hand from Leia’s thigh. “Reason I came over, we’re short of help this run. Pay’s good.”

Han waited just long enough for Leia to shake her head, then raised his hand to silence her. “How good?”

“
Captain,
” Leia interrupted. Whether it was through the Force or because of all their years together, the role he wanted
her to play came to her almost instinctively. “What about that load we’re waiting for?”