Han looked at her, tried to absorb the implications of what she was saying. No politician, he was still a skilled tactician, and the relative military strengths of Corellia with and without the station began clicking like numbers through his mind. They made him uneasy. With the station operable, Corellia could probably have achieved independence quickly, bloodlessly. But the system could only have done so by issuing threats-terrorist threats-against the Galactic Alliance. Suddenly he wasn’t sure he could support Corellian independence on those terms, and this lack of conviction made him uneasy. “You’re just full of good news,” he said, an attempt at humor that, to his own ears, fell flat.
“There’s more. And I don’t know what this means.”
“Go ahead.”
“Ben actually did the main bit of work in sabotaging the station. It was quite an achievement. But he’s not talking about it. He’s reported only to his father, and Luke hasn’t released any of that information. Ben’s not accepting congratulations very well. And when I went to him to offer mine, he couldn’t bring himself to talk to me. He just froze up and sort of nodded, and then made as hasty a retreat as he could. He looked … guilty.”
“He probably figured out how I’d take the news.”
“Maybe.”
Han drew a long, deep breath. “Anything else?”
She nodded. “They’re still going to try to fix everything by diplomatic means. There’s going to be a meeting between Saxan and Pellaeon. Both sides, and the Jedi, will be providing security. Luke asked me to be part of that effort. And he’s hoping you will be, too.”
“Did you accept?”
“I accepted for me.”
He nodded. “Then you accepted for me, too.”
Finally, Leia smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that. And we have one last problem to deal with.”
“Keep it up, my mind is going to crack. What problem?”
“Admirers.”
Han looked up. Just meters away, a crowd of at least twenty people, their attention on Han and Leia, had accumulated on the walkway, slowing foot traffic. When Han looked at them, some waved, some looked away, some stood as transfixed as if they’d been hit by a blaster’s stun bolt.
“Han Solo! Princess Leia!” called one, a Devaronian male, his ruddy red skin and white horns somehow out of place in this brightly sunlit spot. “Can we get a holo with you?”
“Our public,” Han muttered.
“You love it, you know you do.”
He flashed her a smile, stood, and offered her his hand, a gallant gesture, to help her rise. “Sure,” he called back. Then he whispered to his wife, “I hope there are no lip-readers in this crowd.”
KUAT SYSTEM, TORYAZ STATION
Five days later, an odd collection of ships converged on a space station in the Kuat star system.
The station itself was of unusual design. At its core was a disc two kilometers across, three hundred meters thick, its edges beveled and smoothed like an ancient, polished credcoin, its surface thick with glowing viewports in every imaginable color, blue predominating. From the edge of the disc, at regularly spaced intervals, radiated a dozen narrow spokes a quarter kilometer in length. At the end of each spoke was a pod a quarter kilometer across, forty meters high at its thickest point; six of the pods were discs, resembling the central core, and six were triangular, affixed to the spokes on one point of the triangle. The discs alternated with the triangles, giving the station symmetry of design.
Toryaz Station was a place of recreation and competition, negotiation and romance, cold-blooded calculation and hot-blooded rage. Its core disc was an environment of hotels and shops, gardens and waterfalls. By dictate of the trade families that ran the station, hotels did not offer single-room accommodations; the lowliest quarters available for rent were lavish suites whose daily rent was equivalent to the yearly earnings of a middle-class family. Here corporations and merchant clans leased or maintained suites, entertained holodrama stars, made business deals that dictated the fates of thousands of occupations and lives.
The twelve pods were somewhat less glamorous, at least on initial inspection. Each would have been a fully self-contained space station but for the spoke, a sturdy, broad traffic conduit, connecting it to the main station-and in fact, in times of crisis, any of the pods could separate from the station’s main body, thrust free through use of a slow but serviceable drive unit, and maintain itself in space for days or weeks until rescue arrived.
Each pod, which included hundreds of sets of quarters, conference chambers, exercise and recreation facilities, theaters, kitchens, vehicle hangars, security chambers, cell blocks for rowdy celebrants, and vast atria, could be rented as a single unit for any sort of corporate event. Merchant princes brought in several hundred of their closest friends to celebrate their hundredth birthdays in these pods; Kuat Drive Yards, the single greatest manufacturer in the system, had its trade shows in these pods.