by Martha Wells
Metara looked honestly startled, as if the thought had never occurred to her. “No, of course not. I can’t avoid going with them now, but once we can leave, I’ll bring you and your people back here, or wherever you can rendezvous with your ship.” She added, “If you don’t trust us, and believe me, I understand why you wouldn’t, I can drop you off at a safe commercial port, where your ship can meet you.”
“I see. Thank you.” Leia felt the tightness in her chest ease. Metara’s words had the ring of truth; someone who wasn’t planning to release them wouldn’t worry about the details of how to get Leia back to her ship. Metara had felt she had to see Leia in person because, whether she realized it or not, she wanted to justify her behavior to someone who represented the Alderaanian military and civil authority that she had once served. Leia didn’t think Metara had gotten what she needed out of their meeting, but it was clear Metara didn’t want her hurt or captured, either.
She thought Metara had gotten in over her head, and that Metara knew it, but saying so now would be a terrible mistake. Leia had been looking for a common ground with the Aegis’s crew, a way to put them all on the same side so further negotiation would be possible. This could be her best chance. “Do you trust these pirates?”
Metara glanced at Terae and Kelvan. Terae’s shoulders hunched uncomfortably; Kelvan’s expression was grave. He said, “We didn’t have much of a choice. They claimed we were poaching on their territory, that we had to join them or leave. And we needed repairs we couldn’t pay for. If we didn’t accept their help, we would have had to sell the ship for scrap.” He shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know what we would have done then.”
Leia knew. The crew would have had to break up, drift off, look for other ways to survive. People who had lost everything would lose one another, too.
Metara admitted, “I trust them to hunt us down and destroy us if we don’t fulfill our end of this bargain.”
Leia lifted a brow. “Perhaps I can help you with that.”
Metara stared at her. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure yet. I need to know more about your situation. But I have a great deal of experience in talking my way out of tough corners.” Leia added deliberately, “You may not be as trapped as you think.”
CHAPTER FIVE
After the Aegis went into hyperspace, Kelvan led Leia back to the lounge. As she stepped in, the others were already on their feet, giving the impression that the door sliding open had just interrupted a particularly intense conversation. From their expressions, especially Han’s, the fact that the ship had gone into hyperspace had not escaped anyone’s attention.
Kelvan hesitated, as if he felt all the awkwardness of the situation but had no idea what to do about it. He just nodded to Leia and left, letting the door slide shut behind him.
“What happened?” Han demanded.
Leia explained briefly, keeping her voice quiet. When she finished, Han said, “You know how much trouble we could be in, here.”
“Yes, I know, Han, but thank you very much for pointing out the obvious,” Leia said with some asperity. “I think we could also have an excellent opportunity.”
Han clapped a hand over his eyes.
“You mean an opportunity to recruit this crew?” Sian asked dubiously.
“It’s certainly a possibility.” Leia knew she sounded more confident about that than the situation warranted, but if she didn’t believe in the Aegis’s crew, no one would. “This is going to give me time to talk with them, and if I can help them get out of this situation—”
“The situation of being in debt to some pirate lord, and headed to his base with us aboard their ship?” Han said, annoyingly accurate. “That situation?”
“Surely they won’t betray the Princess,” Kifar said. “I mean, they’re pirates, but they’re still Alderaanians.”
Han gave Kifar a withering look. “It’s hilarious that you believe that.”
Sian didn’t look happy, but said, “We’re stuck here with them; we might as well make the best of it.”
Before Han could respond, Metara walked into the lounge, accompanied by Terae and Kelvan. Leia asked her, “Where exactly are we going, Captain?”
“To a meeting place for the pirates in this area,” Metara told her. “They call it a clearinghouse.”
“A what?” Sian asked, but Leia had heard the term before.
She explained, “Pirates come from other sectors, places with richer trade routes. They bring their stolen cargoes and trade or sell them at the clearinghouse to fences and dealers or other pirates.” They would also bring captive crew and passengers here, to sell them far away from wherever they had originally been taken prisoner,. Leia kept her voice cool by habit, but she was thinking that this explained a great deal about the level of pirate activity in this sector.
“That’s correct.” Metara rubbed her palms together, distracted and clearly still uneasy. “We haven’t been there before, and I haven’t met their leader. Our arrangement was made through intermediaries, who gave me access to the funds to have the modifications made. They also gave us the location of a shipyard that wouldn’t ask questions.”
“But why do they have a clearinghouse here?” Kifar asked. “What’s the attraction?”
“The attraction is that this place is too backwater for the Empire to do anything but collect taxes,” Han answered. “And there’s no local patrols or militia to worry about, just a few armed merchants and farmers.”
Metara remained focused on Leia. “You said you could help us. How? Were you suggesting that you pay our debt?” She looked troubled by the thought.
“And what would you want in return?” Terae put in, clearly skeptical.
Leia ignored her. She knew the Alliance had no spare funds to pay off the Aegis’s debt, and she wanted to avoid handing over money to pirates and slavers. “That wasn’t what I had in mind. But if I can convince the pirates that we have something to offer them worth more than your service, and if we can get them to release the merchant crew and then let us leave … I don’t know if it’s possible, but it’s worth a try.”
Han stared incredulously at her, but Metara was nodding slowly.
“You’re going to lie to them, in other words?” Terae asked. “Break our agreement with them?”
Metara gave the younger woman a cold look that suggested she had heard about all she needed to from Terae. But Leia said, “When it comes to trying to stop a crew of innocent bystanders from being sold into slavery, yes, I’m happy to lie with the best of them.”
Leia had hoped for an opportunity to speak to the other Aegis crew members, so she was pleased when she and the others were invited to eat with Metara and the rest of the off-duty crew in the ship’s galley. The table in the compartment was only large enough for one shift, but it seemed as if everyone who didn’t fit had crammed into the two corridors and the doorways that accessed the galley, listening intently to the conversation. Leia suspected that Metara was fairly expert at gauging her crew’s mood, and knew that denying them the opportunity to see and speak to Leia would only foster dissent.
Also, Leia didn’t want Metara to think she was trying to sway the loyalty of her crew. Well, I am, but I’m not planning a mutiny. Leia had seen enough as the crew assembled for dinner to know that they weren’t afraid of Metara. They obviously liked her and trusted her; trying to drive a wedge between them and their captain would be as ineffective as it would be cruel.
The situation was a tricky one. Leia felt she had made some progress with Metara, getting her to admit that making the deal with the pirate clearinghouse had been a mistake. It gave them a goal in common, and Leia wanted Metara to keep thinking of her as an ally and not an enemy. She didn’t want to lose that ground. It might not be possible to convince Metara to join the Alliance, but maybe Leia could convince her to abandon piracy and find a more legitimate occupation somewhere far from here. She had conducted some negotiations in the senate under her father’s tutelage th
at were almost as personal and delicate, and she was going to have to use every trick he had showed her.
The food was only the usual uncreative shipboard rations, and Leia ate without paying much attention to it. She spent her time answering questions from the crew and listening as they spoke, tentatively at first and then with more confidence, about Alderaan.
Then one of the crew asked her, “But what were you doing out here, Your Highness?”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” Leia said, with a slight smile to soften her reply.
“You mean, you’re here on Alliance business?” Someone nudged him, and he said hastily, “I’m sorry. I just didn’t think—I assumed—”
“That I was a figurehead? A symbol?” Leia said. She got that a lot, and it wasn’t as if Mon Mothma and other members of the Alliance High Command hadn’t tried to make it clear that that was how they preferred it. Leia knew that being a symbol was part of her duty to the Alliance, but she wasn‘t sure Mothma and the others really understood what they were asking of her. Unlike living, breathing people, figureheads were made of stone and incapable of mistakes; Leia wasn‘t certain how long she could bear that weight. Failure at some point seemed inevitable, and she hated to fail.
“I didn’t think they let you do anything dangerous,” the young man persisted, then winced in embarrassment when someone—probably Kelvan, judging from the angle—kicked him under the table.
Leia heard Sian make a quiet snort of derision, obviously remembering their moment of near-explosive decompression on the Gamble’s bridge. She glanced up at Han, who was giving her a look that was so sardonic she almost snorted herself. “Well,” she said drily, “the Imperial Senate was always fairly dangerous,” and used the moment to segue into a funny story about a junior Senator’s aide who had climbed down a maintenance shaft to avoid Senator Palpatine.
At the end of the meal, with the tension eased and the crew talking more naturally among themselves, Leia caught Metara watching her with an expression she couldn’t quite read. She wondered if the captain regretted bringing her aboard, if she thought Leia might already be gaining too much influence over the crew.
Leia decided she was going to have to keep her efforts subtle, at least until she had more of a chance to work on Metara herself.
Leia and Han were on the bridge observation platform when the Aegis came out of hyperspace.
Sian and Kifar were back in the lounge, but Han had insisted he accompany Leia when Kelvan came to take her to the bridge. Leia hadn’t objected. She wanted his opinion, and she wanted to encourage any situation that allowed them to move more freely around the gunship. Metara still seemed to be easing into the idea of seeing them as allies, and Leia wanted to keep pushing that envelope.
Kelvan hesitated, then asked Han, “Are you the Princess’s bodyguard?”
Leia watched Han fight a short battle with himself, while she stared archly at him, braced for whatever innuendo-laden response he would come up with. He finally said, “I’m her pilot.”
Kelvan glanced at Leia, but just then an alert ping sounded over the comm system, telling them that the ship was only a few moments from exiting hyperspace, and Kelvan clearly decided he didn’t have time to argue about Han coming along. As he led them through to the bridge, Leia noted that he hadn’t needed to contact Metara for permission, either. He and Terae might have more authority on the ship than Leia had originally thought.
When they reached the bridge, Han and Leia remained on the observation area with Kelvan. Metara and Terae were below, standing behind the four crew members who were operating the bridge stations. The Aegis came out of hyperspace smoothly, the stars streaking back into coherence. The main sensor screen was clearly visible from the observation area; it showed empty space, except for the Wastrel, the pirate ship that had led them here. They must have emerged from hyperspace a good distance away from their destination. Leia assumed that was the local etiquette, designed to give any picket ships time to identify the newcomers.
Leia watched Metara conduct a brief conversation on the comm headset, probably with the Wastrel, as the two ships traveled farther into the system on their sublights. Then Han said, “There it is.”
There was nothing to see in the viewport yet, so Leia watched the sensor screen. A scatter of dots and numbers showed sensor contacts with five other ships. That’s not too bad, she thought. Then the screen blossomed with dots as the other contacts came within range. That small scatter of ships had just been the outliers.
There were ships all over the screen, some locked together in clusters, some orbiting separately. All were gathered around something that the sensors interpreted as a large dark mass, bristling with spikes of energy.
Kelvan looked almost as horrified as Leia felt. He murmured, “There’s more than fifty of them.” Below, Terae stared at the sensor screen. Leia couldn’t see Metara’s expression, but her shoulders were tense. More confirmation, Leia thought, that Metara hadn’t known what she was getting her crew into.
Han glanced over at Leia. “Enough pirates for you, Your Worship?”
“I’m thrilled,” Leia muttered. This many pirates could totally destroy Arnot Station and all the small planetary settlements that were supplied by the local trade routes.
The mass at the center of all the ship contacts grew larger. Leia was afraid for an instant that it was a massive ship, something even larger than a Star Destroyer, but the sensors seemed confused as to just what it actually was. It emitted comm signals and power, but large sections of it were inert. Many of the other ships orbited it, but it was far too small for a moon, let alone a planet.
“What is that thing?” Kelvan asked.
“That’s what I was wondering,” Han said. “I thought it was a dead station they had towed out here, but it looks like there’s lots of raw minerals …”
The crew member at the sensor station must have been working on the problem. Metara stepped up behind him as the sensor view formed into an image of an irregularly shaped mass, with glowing spots that showed power sources emanating from all over it. Dark spots marked hatches and bays large enough for huge cargo transports to enter; the sensors seemed to be indicating that it was hollow, riddled with meandering shafts, but also with the shapes of pressurized areas that looked constructed—”It’s an asteroid mine,” Leia said, startled.
Han agreed. “Must be an old, played-out one. It might be a leftover from the Republic, or before.”
Asteroid fields with valuable minerals often drew rushes of prospectors and mining corporations, which then left once the most accessible veins had been played out. Some of the original planetary populations in this area might have come from miners and support personnel who had stayed in the sector after the mines shut down. Leia said, “And it’s one more reason why the pirates chose this area for their clearinghouse. It’s huge, there must be plenty of room to repair ships, store cargoes, meet with dealers, whatever else they need.” She looked at Kelvan. “And hold prisoners until they can be sold to slavers. Like the merchant crew.”
Kelvan‘s expression was conflicted.. “We didn’t have any idea this was such a big operation. I think we convinced ourselves it was just a business deal.”
Metara had called it that, too. “Would it have made a difference?” Leia asked.
He shook his head. “Maybe. I don’t know. We were desperate.” He lifted one hand helplessly. “We’ve been desperate for so long.”
Leia nodded understanding. Desperate, and he, Terae, and Metara were responsible for the safety of the other crew members.
Han still watched the sensor screen, obviously troubled. “Clearinghouses aren’t meant to stay in one place. They have to move pretty frequently, depending on how much business they do and how much attention they attract. But this setup looks permanent.”
“I wonder if this is more than just a clearinghouse,” Leia said. If some Imperial official was connected to this place, that might be a reason why the Imperial authorities we
re so uninterested in the pirate traffic in this sector.
Han shrugged. “We’ll know more once we get inside.”
The images on the sensor screen were getting larger and clearer every moment. It wouldn’t be long now.
The Aegis was given coordinates for a docking port, and it approached the asteroid mine under the shadow of what felt like every pirate gun from the Outer Rim to the Core Worlds. Leia reminded herself that it wasn’t really that bad. Of course, if all the ships started shooting at once, it might as well be.
The asteroid had probably once been a spheroid, but extensive mining had hollowed out one whole hemisphere, and malformed one of the poles, so the shape from this angle resembled a half-moon wearing a floppy cap. They were close enough now to see that the surface was covered by pits, holes, and craters that bore the marks of drilling and digging until it was hard to tell if they had been caused by natural impacts or had been carved out by the abandoned mining apparatus that lay everywhere. Leia saw a large blast scar surrounded by the remnants of a crashed ship—no, two crashed ships—scattered across the dusty surface. It was impossible to tell the age of the crash, or whether the wrecks were pirate ships destroyed in some conflict or an old mining accident.
The docking port to which they had been directed was built into a ridge protruding from what was roughly the middle of the asteroid. It was an open port, without an air lock, protected only by a containment field. It looked as if it had been originally meant for droid-operated loading transports.
“Not exactly a warm welcome,” Leia commented to Han. They stood alone on the observation platform. Terae had left the bridge to return to engineering while the ship docked, and Kelvan had joined Metara below. “It’s not a very secure berth.”
Han shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. As far as we know, they don’t have any reason to kill us. Yet.”
True, Leia thought. Though the Aegis might be worth more without a crew than with one, if the pirates had any inkling that Metara meant to refuse to supply captive crews to slavers.