[Hand Of Thrawn] - 01(140)

“Yet you asked Mara and me to go hunt him down.”

“I didn’t ask you to do anything at all,” Karrde said. “If you’ll recall, I tried to get you to sell me that beckon call outright.”

“You also tried to tell me it was just some useless curiosity from pre-Clone Wars days,” Calrissian reminded him dryly. “You knew perfectly well I wouldn’t fall for a story like that. Anyway, that’s beside the point. We tracked him down, and made it back just fine.”

“You only tracked him as far as a likely system,” Karrde said. “You’re asking me to walk into whatever fortress he’s set up there and go face-to-face with him.”

“If Thrawn isn’t stopped, he’ll be the one who eventually comes knocking at Car’das’s retirement home,” Calrissian said. “If Car’das has any brains, he’ll thank you for the warning.”

“Car’das never thanked anyone for anything in his life,” Karrde said bluntly. “And he most certainly hasn’t retired, either. He’ll be scheming or plotting something-that’s the nature of the man. And he will not want to be found. Particularly not by me.”

Calrissian hissed between his teeth. “Fine,” he bit out. “You want to go bury yourself in a hole and wait for Thrawn to come dig you out, you go right ahead. Give me a copy of Mara’s route to the Exocron system and I’ll go find him myself.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Karrde said. “You and the Lady Luck wouldn’t last two days alone in the Kathol Outback.”

“Who says I’ll be going alone?” Calrissian countered. “I thought I’d ask General Bel Iblis and the Peregrine along.”

“That would be the absolute worst thing you could do,” Karrde said, an edge of exasperation starting to color his tone. “You bring a capital warship into the Exocron system and Car’das will either go completely underground or blow it out of the sky. You don’t know him the way I do.”

“No,” Calrissian agreed quietly. “I don’t.”

There was a long silence. A long, waiting silence. “You should never have given up on your con man origins, Calrissian,” Karrde said at last. “You’re far too good at it. All right. I’ll go.”

“Thanks,” Calrissian said. “You won’t regret this.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Karrde warned, his usual easy humor back in his voice. “I suppose we should go break the news to the others.”

The door whispered open and the glow panels shut off; and as the room went dark again, Shada heaved herself up out of her hiding place. Rolling back across the bed and onto her feet, she crossed the room and slipped out just before the door closed again.

The two men, Calrissian in the lead, were heading down the hallway toward the edge of what looked like an Alderaanian-style conversation circle, both of them completely oblivious to her presence behind them. Moving up, she fell into silent step behind Karrde.

***

“Okay, I give up,” Han said, a puzzled look on his face. “What was that all about?”

Leia shook her head. “I don’t know,” she admitted, replaying the last exchange between Lando and Karrde in her mind as she gazed at the hallway where the two of them had disappeared toward the boys’ bedroom. “Some kind of secret they don’t want us to know about.”

“Yeah, I figured that much,” Han said. “What I meant was what’s the secret?”

Leia threw him one of her vast repertoire of patient looks, an inventory created by a lifetime of diplomatic service and honed to a fine art by ten years of dealing with three boisterous children. “You know I can’t just go in and dig things out of their minds,” she reminded him. “It’s not even ethical with enemies, let alone friends.”

“You Jedi are no fun sometimes,” Han said. His tone was bantering, but she could tell from his eyes and mood that he was still uneasy about the situation.

“We’re not in the business to have fun,” she pointed out.

“You couldn’t just sort of, oh, stretch out and get a feel for what they’re talking about in there?”

Leia smiled wryly. “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she admonished him.

He pulled out one of his own repertoire of innocent looks. “Do what?”

“Suggest that I do something unethical right when I’m trying to persuade myself that it wouldn’t hurt anyone,” she told him. “That’s very disconcerting.”

“Specially coming from a guy who isn’t supposed to have near as good a conscience as you do?” he suggested blandly.