“Yes,” Leia nodded. “My presence here is still a danger to you. I would ask one favor: that you would allow Khabarakh to return me to my ship.”
Vor’corkh looked at Khabarakh. “Khabarakh’s family conspired to free him,” he said. “They succeeded, and he escaped into space. Three commando teams who were here on leave have followed in pursuit. The entire clan Kihm’bar will be in disgrace until they yield up the names of those responsible.”
Leia nodded. It was as good a story as any. “Just he sure to warn the commandos you send to be careful when they make contact with the other teams. If even a hint of this gets back to the Empire, they’ll destroy you.”
“Do not presume to tell warriors their job,” Vor’corkh retorted. He hesitated. “Can you obtain more of this for us?” he asked, gesturing back at the cylinder.
“Yes,” Leia said. “We’ll need to go to Endor first and pick up my ship. Khabarakh can accompany me back to Coruscant then and I’ll get him a supply.”
The dynast hesitated. “There is no way to bring it sooner?”
A fragment of conversation floated up from Leia’s memory: the maitrakh, mentioning that the window for planting this season’s crops was almost closed. “There might be,” she said. “Khabarakh, how much time would we save if we skipped Endor and went directly to Coruscant?”
“Approximately four days, Lady Vader,” he said.
Leia nodded. Han would kill her for leaving his beloved Falcon sitting in orbit at Endor like that, but there was no way around it. “All right,” she nodded. “That’s what we’ll do, then. Don’t forget to be careful where you use it, though-you can’t risk incoming Imperial ships spotting new cropland.”
“Do not presume, either, to tell farmers their job,” Vor’corkh said; but this time there was a touch of dry humor in his voice. “We will eagerly await its arrival.”
“Then we’d better leave at once,” Leia said. She looked past him to the maitrakh, and nodded her head in thanks. Finally-finally-everything was starting to go their way. Despite her earlier doubts, the Force was clearly with her.
Turning back to Khabarakh, she ignited her lightsaber and cut him loose from his chains. “Come on, Khabarakh,” she said. “Time to go.”
Chapter 25
The Coral Vanda billed itself as the most impressive casino in the galaxy:and as he looked around the huge and ornate Tralla Room, Han could understand why he’d never heard of anyone challenging that claim.
The room had at least a dozen sabacc tables scattered around its three half-levels, plus a whole range of lugjack bars, tregald booths, halo-chess tables, and even a few of the traditional horseshoe-shaped warp-tops favored by hard-core crinbid fanatics. A bar bisecting the room stocked most anything a customer would want to drink, either to celebrate a win or forget a loss, and there was a serving window built into the back wall for people who didn’t want to stop playing even to eat.
And when you got tired of looking at your cards or into your glass, there was the view through the full-wall transparent outer hull. Rippling blue-green water, hundreds of brilliantly colored fish and small sea mammals; and around all of it the intricate winding loops and fans of the famous Pantolomin coral reefs.
The Tralla Room was, in short, as fine a casino as Han had ever seen in his life : and the Coral Vanda had seven other rooms just like it.
Sitting at the bar beside him, Lando downed the last of his drink and pushed the glass away from him. “So what now?” he asked.
“He’s here, Lando,” Han told him, tearing his gaze from the reef outside and looking one more time around the casino. “Somewhere.”
“I think he’s skipped this trip,” Lando disagreed. “Probably ran out of money. Remember what Sena said-the guy spends it like poisoned water.”
“Yeah, but if he was out of money he’d be trying to sell them another ship,” Han pointed out. He drained his own glass an,d got up from his seat. “Come on-one more room to go.”
“And then we do it all over again,” Lando growled. “And again, and again. It’s a waste of time.”
“You got any other ideas?”
“Matter of fact, I do,” Lando said as they swung wide to get around a large Herglic balanced precariously across of two of the seats and headed down the bar toward the exit. “Instead of just wandering around like we have for the past six hours, we should plant ourselves at a sabac table somewhere and start dropping some serious money. Word’ll get around that there are a couple of pikers ripe for plucking; and if this guy loses money as fast as Sena says, he’ll be plenty interested in trying to make some of it back.”