Leia stopped short, a soft gasp escaping her lips before she could stop it. Preoccupied with her thoughts, and with Dx’ono’s somewhat overpowering presence beside her, she hadn’t extended her senses ahead down the corridor. Three people were standing outside her office door: one of Dx’ono’s aides, and two slender beings completely shrouded in hooded cloaks.
“They wish to speak with you,” Dx’ono said gruffly. “Will you speak with them?”
Leia swallowed, her memories flashing back to her childhood on Alderaan and the time her adoptive father Bail Organa had permitted her to go with him on a private trip to the South Islands …
“Yes,” she told Dx’ono quietly. “I will be honored to speak with your Caamasi friends.”
***
The way Senate meetings usually went, Han had expected to be stuck hanging around Leia’s office for at least another hour before she returned. It was therefore to his mild surprise that he’d barely gotten comfortable in his wife’s inner office when a flicker of displaced air pressure announced that the door from the outer office had just opened.
He swiveled his feet off the corner of her desk and landed them quietly on the floor, getting up just as quietly from her chair and padding his way to the door that separated the sections of the office. In the old days, he would have tried to surprise her by jumping out and giving her a big hug and kiss. But her increasing Jedi skills had long since made trying to sneak up on her a pretty futile exercise.
Besides which, embarrassing her with some silly schoolkid prank would make her madder at him than she probably already was over the Iphigin thing. Especially if she’d brought company with her.
She had. With his ear pressed against the door, he could hear at least two other voices besides Leia’s.
For a moment he stood there, waiting to see if she would either bring her visitors in or else invite him out to greet them. She certainly knew by now that he was in here. Unless she’d rather he keep out of sight completely …
And then, across the room at her desk, the intercom display abruptly came on.
“-understand that we have no desire to make trouble for anyone,” someone was saying. We do not wish vengeance, and it is far too late for justice.”
Frowning, Han crossed back to the desk. So okay. Leia wanted him to listen in on the conversation, but didn’t want him out there. Or didn’t want whoever it was knowing they were being listened to.
And then he got his first close look at the display, and suddenly he understood her reticence. There were two Ishori out there … and two Caamasi.
“It is not a question of vengeance,” one of the Ishori insisted. Probably a full Senator, Han decided, if the elaborate tangle of his shoulder clasp was any indication. “And it is never too late for justice.”
“Yet what purpose would this so-named justice serve?” one of the Caamasi countered quietly. “Our world is destroyed, and we are few and scattered. Would punishing the Bothans miraculously make all right again?”
“Perhaps it would,” the Ishori said, his voice starting to rise. Thinking hard and fast, with that trademark Ishori anger coming along with it. Han grimaced, the memory of his botched negotiation attempts at Iphigin nagging painfully at him. “If the Bothans were declared guilty and forced to make reparations-“
At the other side of the board, the comm pinged. Leia’s private comm channel, Han noted with annoyance. Just when the conversation out there was starting to get interesting; but it was probably one of the kids, and he really ought to answer it. Flicking the intercom channel to record the rest of the conversation going on out there-which was probably illegal, but he didn’t care-he muted the speaker volume and hit the comm key.
It wasn’t the kids, or Winter, or even one of the Noghri. “Hello, Solo,” Talon Karrde said. “I didn’t expect to find you on this channel.”
“Likewise,” Han said, frowning at the smuggler. “How did you get this frequency?”
“Your wife gave it to me, of course,” Karrde said, managing to look roguish and innocent at the same time. “I gave her a ride back here from Wayland in the Wild Karrde. I thought you knew.”
“Yeah, I got a quick message from her about that,” Han said. “I didn’t know you’d conned her out of her private frequency, though.”
Karrde smiled, then sobered. “We’re all suddenly sitting on some highly explosive matters, my friend,” he said. “Leia and I decided it might be useful for me to be able to contact her, shall we say, discreetly. Has she told you yet about the Caamas datacard we brought back from Wayland?”