“Them,” Nashtah corrected. “I need three. Just defrosted will be fine.”
“Three?” Leia gasped. She did not mean to be rude, but even Saba would have trouble eating that much meat-and Saba was a Barabel. “Perhaps you’re accustomed to smaller steaks than we stock. These are half a kilo apiece.”
Nashtah’s eyes flashed as though insulted. “Make it four,” she ordered. “My species has an … unusual metabolism.”
“I think the word you’re looking for is ferocious,” Leia said. “Defrosted it is.”
She punched an order into the galley’s multiprocessor, requesting two gorba melts for her and Han, and the four steaks for Nashtah. Then she returned to the table and sat across from the assassin.
“What is your species?” Leia asked, trying to sound casual and polite. “You have a youthful appearance, but I sense that you’ve lived a long and interesting life already.”
“You sense?” Nashtah’s face remained as severe and unreadable as ever, but the Force around her began to warm with resentment. “Be careful what you sense, Jedi. The dark side can be catching.1’
Leia frowned, suddenly feeling even more cautious and curious about the assassin than before. “Are you saying you were a Jedi?”
Nashtah laughed-a dry, humorless croak-then promptly changed the subject. “Why don’t you and Captain Solo know where we are going?”
“I’ll take that as a no comment,” Leia said, automatically buying time. An abrupt change of subject could be just as effective for eliciting a candid reply as for avoiding one and, even without the tingle racing down her spine, Leia knew that her next answer would be a dangerous one. “Does that mean you don’t want to talk about your species, either?”
“My mother was human. My father was a ghost in the night, and I doubt even my mother knew his species-but it was obviously a long-lived one.” Nashtah drew her lips back in an indifferent smile. “If I ever find out who he was, perhaps I’ll be able to hunt him down and kill him.” Her hand drifted toward the swinging holster she wore on her hip. “So how come you and Captain Solo don’t know who our employer is?”
Leia’s danger sense turned to a sinking feeling. “Han and I don’t work for your employer.” She cautiously moved her hand to the hilt of her Ughtsaber. “We’re agents of the Corellian government.”
“That’s right,” Han said from across the cabin. He had stopped work and was facing Nashtah, his hand propped on the butt of his own blaster. “Prime Minister Gejjen asked us to go to the palace and lure Tenel Ka into a public area. That’s all we knew about your plan.”
“And you agreed?” Nashtah asked. It did not seem to trouble her that if a fight was to erupt, she would be caught in the middle of Han, Leia, and their Noghri-whom Leia felt sure the assassin could sense watching them. “My information says Tenel Ka is a Solo family friend.”
“She is-and she’s on the wrong side of this war.” Leia put some durasteel in her voice. “I’ve seen one Empire rise in my lifetime. I don’t want to see another.”
“We’ll do whatever it takes to stop it,” Han said. “My own son is torturing Corellians.”
“He does seem to be following his grandfather’s example, doesn’t he?” Nashtah kept her eyes fixed on Leia, and for the first time her smile appeared genuine. “That must make you very … unhappy.”
“Unhappy isn’t the way I’d put it.” Despite the obvious enjoyment Nashtah took in her pain, Leia answered honestly; if they were to have any hope of tricking the assassin into revealing the identity of the coup leader, they had to win her trust. “It terrifies me.”
Nashtah actually licked her lips. “Truly?”
“Yes.” Leia took a deep breath, then continued, “When Han and I married, I didn’t want children because I didn’t want to take the chance that one of them would grow up to become another Darth Vader.”
Han frowned across the cabin at Leia, clearly unhappy at having their family life revealed to an assassin.
“Then something happened to change your mind,” Nashtah surmised. “You hardly strike me as the careless type.”
“I’m not,” Leia said. “We were on a mission to Tatooine. I started to have Force-visions, and then someone gave me my grandmother’s vid-diary. When I began to see my father through her eyes …”
Leia let her sentence trail off, unable to help wondering if she had misinterpreted events all those years ago-if she should have seen Jacen’s dark future in the burning eyes of the Force-vision she had experienced, if she should have heard the menace in its cruel-voiced message: Mine, ., mine. She had concluded at the time that the Force was trying to tell her that she belonged to it, that she needed to entrust it with her future. But now … now she could not help wondering if the vision had been something darker, some unseen evil laying claim to her issue.