[Thrawn Trilogy] - 02(26)

He felt Leia come up behind him. “I’ll be all right, Chewie,” she assured him. “Really I will.”

Chewbacca growled again, making it abundantly clear what he thought of her assessment. “You got any suggestions, let’s hear ‘em,” Han said.

Not surprisingly, he did. “Chewie, I’m sorry,” Leia said. “I promised Khabarakh I’d come alone.”

Chewbacca shook his head violently, showing his teeth as he growled his opinion of that idea. “He doesn’t like it,” Han translated diplomatically.

“I got the gist, thank you,” Leia retorted. “Listen, you two; for the last time-“

Chewbacca cut her off with a bellow that made her jump half a meter backward. “You know, sweetheart,” Han said, “I really think you ought to let him go with you. At least as far as the rendezvous point,” he added quickly as she threw him a glare. “Come on-you know how seriously Wookiees take this life debt thing. You need a pilot, anyway.

For just a second he could see the obvious counter argument in her eyes: that she was perfectly capable of flying the Falcon herself. But only for a second. “All right,” she sighed. “I guess Khabarakh won’t object to that. But once we reach the rendezvous, Chewie, you do as I tell you, whether you like it or not. Agreed?”

The Wookiee thought about it, rumbled agreement. “Okay,” Leia said, sounding relieved. “Let’s get going, then. Threepio?”

“Yes, Your Highness?” the droid said hesitantly. For once, he’d had the brains to sit quietly at the reception desk and keep his loose change out of the discussion. It was a marked improvement over his usual behavior, Han decided. Maybe he ought to let Chewbacca get angry more often.

“I want you to come with me, too,” Leia told the droid. “Khabarakh spoke Basic well enough, but the other Noghri may not, and I don’t want to have to depend on their translators to make myself understood.”

“Of course, Your Highness,” Threepio said, tilting his head slightly to the side.

“Good.” Leia turned to look up at Han, licked her lips. “I guess we’d better get going.”

There were a million things he could have said to her. A million things he wanted to say. “I guess,” he said instead, “you’d better.”





Chapter 5


“You’ll forgive me,” Mara said conversationally as she finished the last bit of wiring on her comm board, “if I say that as a hideout, this place stinks.”

Karrde shrugged as he hefted a sensor pack out of its box and set it down on the side table with an assortment of other equipment. “I agree it’s not Myrkr,” he said. “On the other hand, it has its compensations. Who’d ever think of looking for a smuggler’s nest in the middle of a swamp?”

“I’m not referring to the ship drop,” Mara told him, reaching beneath her loose-flowing tunic sleeve to readjust the tiny blaster sheathed to her left forearm. “I mean this place.”

“Ah. This place.” Karrde glanced out the window. “I don’t know. A bit public, perhaps, but that, too, has its compensations.”

“A little public?” Mara echoed, looking out the window herself at the neat row of cream-white buildings barely five meters away and the crowds of brightly clad humans and aliens hurrying along just outside. “You call this a liulc public?”

“Calm down, Mara,” Karrde said. “When the only viable places to live on a planet are a handful of deep valleys, of course things are going to get a bit crowded. The people here are used to it, and they’ve learned how to give each other a reasonable degree of privacy. Anyway, even if they wanted to snoop, it wouldn’t do them much good.”

“Mirror glass won’t stop a good sensor probe,” Mara countered. “And crowds mean cover for Imperial spies.”

“The Imperials have no idea where we are. He paused and threw her an odd look. “Unless you know differently.”

Mara turned away. So that was how it was going to be this time. Previous employers had reacted to her strange hunches with fear, or anger, or simple bald-faced hatred. Karrde, apparently, was going to go for polite exploitation. “I can’t turn it on and off like a sensor pack,” she growled over her shoulder. “Not anymore.

“Ah,” Karrde said. The word implied he understood; the tone indicated otherwise. “Interesting. Is this a remnant of some previous Jedi training?”

She turned to look at him. “Tell me about the ships.”

He frowned. “Excuse me?”

“The ships,” she repeated. “The capital warships that you were very careful not to tell Grand Admiral Thrawn about, back when he visited us on Myrkr. You promised to give me the details later. This is later.”