[Thrawn Trilogy] - 02(51)

“And now to the children you bear within you?”

Leia looked at Chewbacca. “Yes.”

For a long minute the comm was silent. The patrol ship continued toward them, and Leia found herself grip ping the seat arms tightly as she wondered what the Noghri was thinking. If he decided that Chewbacca’s objections constituted betrayal of their arrangement:

“The Wookiee code of honor is similar to our own, Thabarakb said at last. “He may come with you.”

Chewbacca gave a throaty rumble of surprise, a surprise that slid quickly into suspicion. “Would you rather he have said you had to stay here?” Leia countered, her own surprise at the Noghri’s concession quickly covered up by relief that the whole thing bad been resolved so easily. “Come on, make up your mind.”

The Wookiee rumbled again, but it was clear that he’d rather walk into a trap with her than let her walk into one alone. “Thank you, Khabarakh, we accept,” Leia told the Noghri. “We’ll be ready whenever you get here. How long will the trip to your world take, by the way?”

“Approximately four days,” Khabarakh said. “I await the honor of your presence aboard my ship.”

The comm went silent. Four days, Leia thought, a shiver running up her back. Four days in which to learn all that she could about both Khabarakh and the Noghri people.

And to prepare for the most important diplomatic mission of her life.

As it turned out, she didn’t learn much about the Noghri culture during the trip. Khabarakh kept largely to himself, splitting his time between the sealed cockpit and his cabin. Occasionally he would come by to talk to Leia, but the conversations were short and invariably left her with the uncomfortable feeling that he was still very ambivalent about his decision to bring her to his home. When they’d set up this meeting back on the Wookiee world of Kashyyyk, she had suggested that he discuss the question with friends or confidants; but as they neared the end of the voyage and his dark nervousness grew, she began to pick up little hints that he had not, in fact, done so. The decision had been made entirely on his own.

It was not, to her way of thinking, a very auspicious beginning.

It implied either a lack of trust in his friends or else a desire to absolve them from responsibility should the whole thing go sour.

Either way, not exactly the sort of situation that filled her with confidence.

With their host generally keeping to himself, she and Chewbacca were forced to come up with their own entertainment. For Chewbacca, with his innate mechanical interests, such entertainment consisted mainly of wandering through the ship and poking his nose into every room, access hatch, and crawlway he could find-studying the ship, as he ominously put it, in case they needed at some point to fly it themselves. Leia, for her part, spent most of the trip in her cabin with Threepio, trying to deduce a possible derivation of Mal’ary’ush, the only Noghri word she knew, with the hope of at least getting some idea of where in the galaxy they might be going. Unfortunately, with six million languages to draw on, Threepio could come up with any number of possible etymologies for the word, ranging from reasonable to tenuous to absurd and right back again. It was an interesting exercise in applied linguistics, but ultimately more frustrating than useful.

In the middle of the fourth day, they reached the Noghri world : and it was even worse than she’d expected.

“It’s incredible,” she breathed, a hard knot forming in her throat as she pressed close to Chewbacca to stare through the ship’s only passenger viewport at the world they were rapidly approaching. Beneath the mottling of white clouds the planetary surface seemed to be a uniform brown, relieved only by the occasional deep blue of lakes and small oceans. No greens or yellows, no light purples or blues-none of the colors, in fact, that usually signified plant life. For all she could tell, the entire planet might have been dead.

Chewbacca growled a reminder. “Yes, I know Khabarakh said it had been devastated in the war,” she agreed soberly. “But I didn’t realize he really meant the whole planet had been hit.” She shook her head, feeling sick at heart. Wondering which side had been most responsible for this disaster.

Most responsible. She swallowed hard at the reflexively defensive words. There was no most responsible here, and she knew it. Khabarakh’s world had been destroyed during a battle in space : and there had been only two sides to the war. Whatever had happened to turn this world into a desert, the Rebel Alliance could not avoid its share of the guilt. “No wonder the Emperor and Vader were able to turn them against us,” she murmured. “We have to find some way to help them.”