Ambush at Corellia

by Roger MacBride Allen

  Leia looked out the window, down into the darkening night, and the gloom of a torchlit parade seen from a distance. She turned her back on the view, crossed, and sat next to Han. “I’m not sure I like where you’re going with this, but say on,” she said.

  “For millennia, all the species of the Corellian Sector lived under the monolithic government of the Old Republic, and then under the Empire. But then the war came, war came, and the Empire collapsed. There was some fighting here, but not much. Here, the Imperial system simply fell in on itself. It collapsed, like a balloon with a slow leak.

  “Since the Empire ceased to govern here, the sector has been left, left to its own devices. Our very fine New Republic sent me in as a Governor-General, but what is there for me to govern? Where are my tools to govern with? These last years, the Corellians have learned to pay me no mind. I have a huge, a huge shortage of skilled, politically reliable people. There are not enough actively pro-Republic people to fill all the needed governmental positions, or to staff the internal security forces. I must hire ex-Imperial bureaucrats and soldiers. Worse, nearly every one of these breakaway groups employs some sort of mercenaries. Mostly ex-Imperial soldiers, but there are a few, a few retired from the Republic’s armed forces. But scarcely any of them are truly loyal to me, to the New Republic. And so the people know my soldiers and bureaucrats fail to follow my orders.

  “Under the Empire, the generals and bureaucrats gobbled up other jobs with power. They were factory managers, business directors, on the controlling board of this and that and the other thing. Now, even with their Imperial positions and commissions gone, they still have the power of those other jobs.

  “We say the Empire is dead, but here in Corellia the body lives on after the head has been lopped off. The little bosses are still there, doing what they have always done. But now these police officials and Imperial bureaucrats answer to no one, no one. There is no higher authority that can punish them for going too far. And they are discovering that they like it that way. They can have the revenge, revenge, for the harm done to them five, ten, twenty, a hundred standard years ago, safe in the knowledge that no Imperial stormtroopers will break down their door and take them away. And that is the core of the problem.

  “For endless years, endless years, it was the strong central government that kept the different species from having at each other. The Empire didn’t much like nonhumans, but it liked antialien riots even less. They were bad, bad for business. People learned that if they caused trouble, they would be punished. So they didn’t cause trouble. The three Corellian species lived in harmony because they were forced, forced to do so. Now no one is forcing them. Times are bad. They need someone to blame. They blame each other.

  “During the war, Corellians were asked to choose between alliance to the Republic and fealty to the Empire. Now members of all the species of the Corellian system are asking, asking themselves—why any exterior authority at all?” Micamberlecto gestured out the window. “They are starting to ask—why be in the New Republic if it cannot promise order? Why not one planet, one government? Or one landmass, or one race, one government?”

  Han shook his head mournfully. “I can’t believe it. I can look out the window. I can see it. I know it’s happening. But I don’t believe it. I was born and raised in a united Corellian Sector—”

  “Except that you weren’t,” Leia said. “What Micamberlecto is saying is that the Empire forced the Corellians to pretend they were united and at peace.”

  “And now they—we—don’t have to pretend anymore. Incredible.”

  “Incredible, only perhaps, but true, certainly. The Five Brothers, the inhabited worlds of the Corellian System, are on the brink of anarchy. Generations of enforced peace between the three leading species—human, Selonian, and Drall—have come to an end.”

  Leia looked at her husband, and she needed no ability in the Force to understand his pain, his numbness, his shock. The sights they had seen were bad enough for her. She could imagine what they had been like for Han. But for Leia, what Micamberlecto was saying was far more disturbing than a mob of street brawlers. Her whole life had been centered around the choice between Republic or Empire. The question had always been which was to be the central authority, never whether there was to be a central authority. Now, here, that was no longer so. The idea of going it alone was starting to take hold. It took little imagination to see how quickly that might spread.

  “Micamberlecto, we cannot allow this to happen,” she said. “If the Corellian Sector is allowed to disintegrate, the idea of separatism could spread—and lead to chaos.”

  “It has begun to spread already,” said Micamberlecto in a still more morose tone of voice. “Groups of all three species—and of other Corellian Sector species—are starting to set up independent states in the Outlier systems that surround us. Already a number of them have broken away, broken away from the sector, rejecting my authority—and thus, by extension, the authority of the New Republic as a whole. The sector is threatening to degenerate into a crazy quilt of mini-empires and rump states.”

  “Is that such a bad thing?” Han asked. “I mean I can see the problems, but what does it matter if all these little planets are independent, as long as they’re peaceful and don’t hurt anyone?”

  Micamberlecto shook his head sadly. “But they do hurt each other,” he said. “You saw the sort calling for independence tonight. They are rabble-rousers, and rabble-rousers need enemies. People like your friends in the Human League need someone to blame. No, there will be no peaceful, amicable separation. There will be war and riot and vengeance that will go on and on. If the old enemy was the Empire, the new enemy is fragmentation and chaos, chaos.”

  “How serious a threat is the Human League?” Han asked. “And who’s this Hidden Leader character?”

  Micamberlecto shook his head sadly. “If I could answer those questions, I would be a most happy, happy Froz. There seem to be Human League thugs everywhere one moment, and none at all the next. They are good at vanishing when they need to do so. And the Hidden Leader is just that. Hidden. Some inside the organization know who he is, but no one, no one outside. I simply don’t have the police and intelligence facilities to do a proper investigation of them. And of course the NRI seems to have its own troubles, own troubles in Corellia. We don’t get much information from them.”

  Leia frowned. “If the situation gets much worse, the New Republic is not going to have much choice but to start acting like the Empire. We’ll have to bring in peace enforcement troops to stop the fighting. We’ll have to impose our will on the Corellian Sector, the same way the Empire did.”

  “But we fought the war against the Empire to put an end to that sort of thing,” Han said.

  “I know,” Leia said. “And just think what it will be like to get that sort of policy approved, and how expensive it would be. But the alternative is to stand back and let a bloodbath happen.”

  “I am not even sure, even sure, we can impose a peace,” Micamberlecto said. “We have no heavy ships to speak of in the sector.”

  “Can’t we bring in ships and troops from elsewhere?” Han asked.

  “That would cost a tremendous amount of money that we just don’t have,” Leia said. “Besides which, there’s not much call for warships or armies at the moment, thank the stars. Most of the forces have been disbanded. We’ve got lots of New Republic and captured ex-Imperial ships, but most of them are mothballed, or being broken up for scrap. And a lot of the supposedly active-duty ships are in drydock getting upgrades. What few ships are effective are on duty in other sectors.”

  “There must be some sort of forces in reserve,” Han said.

  Leia shrugged helplessly. “There are, but there aren’t many. And what reserves we do have will take time to activate. We’re stretched awfully thin. Readiness is at its lowest ebb in years.”

  “Then let us hope there is nothing we need be, need be ready for,” said Micamberlecto. “I suspect it is a forlor
n hope, but there it is.”

  “But what are we to do?” Leia asked.

  Micamberlecto shrugged again. “There is nothing we can do,” he said. “However, there is another point, another point. Although it sounds as if Captain Solo’s capture was almost at random, it could have been a deliberate threat directed at all of you. A warning. A warning.”

  “You’re saying they might be trying to chase us off,” suggested Han.

  “Possibly,” Micamberlecto said. “The staged attack certainly makes it seem that way.”

  “Well, we’re not going to let them win,” said Han. “I don’t cut and run. I say we stay—that we stay and do exactly what we would have done otherwise.”

  “Excellent,” said the Governor-General. “However, I would suggest taking one or two precautions. I know that your ship is under guard at the spaceport, but it is not the most secure of locations. Someone could place a tracer—or, ah, other device—aboard it.”

  “ ‘Other device,’ ” Leia said. “You mean a bomb.”

  Micamberlecto nodded. “Well, yes, I do. In any event, it might be best to place the Falcon elsewhere.”

  “I’ve been thinking on that point myself,” said Han. “But there’s no place out by the villa that would be any better.”

  “I was about to suggest that there is a small, a small landing pad and hangar complex here, on the roof of Corona House,” said Micamberlecto. “You could store the ship there, and I could have my own personal technical staff examine it to make sure that no one has played any games with it already.”

  “Can they be trusted?” Leia asked. “You’ve made it clear that you can’t rely on most of your staff.”

  “My technical staff, and my personal bodyguards, are all decorated veterans of the war against the Empire,” he replied. “They are all handpicked, handpicked, and all of them have been vetted. I am quite comfortable with my life in their hands. It is the locally recruited people working in other departments I suspect.”

  “Okay, then,” Han said. “I’ll have Chewbacca fly the ship over tomorrow morning, first thing. It’ll give him something to do. More to do than we’ll have, in any event.”

  Leia smiled, with at least some hint of real humor in the expression. “Oh, we have a lot to do, Han, if we’re going to keep up appearances.”

  “Like what?” he asked.

  “We have to play tourist.”

  Han let out a low moan. “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s what I was doing today, and look how it turned out.”

  * * *

  The next morning was not a pleasant one. The weather had shifted, and rain was lashing down on the villa. That meant the kids were trapped inside, and that meant they were restless, and that meant noise. Despite the best efforts of the CDF medical droids, Han’s head was still throbbing from the beating he had taken, and that did not help either.

  Han sat in the living room and watched the children set to work once again, attempting to build another impossibly tall and spindly tower out of the blocks. Blocks. All the super-duper high-tech toys in the universe, and they were playing with blocks.

  At least Chewbacca had managed to escape. He got to fly the Falcon from the spaceport to the top of Corona House. Han reflected that things had to be pretty bad if the idea of flying a spacecraft in a rainstorm through congested airspace to a rooftop landing sounded like fun by comparison. On the other hand, Leia had retreated to her office with Ebrihim to plan their itinerary, and that didn’t appeal to Han at all.

  The tower of blocks collapsed in a totally predictable roar of noise, and the kids all laughed just a bit too loud.

  Han decided to beat a retreat. He went upstairs to the library, in hopes of being alone. He needed to think things through for a while—and maybe a bit of calm and quiet would keep his head from throbbing.

  He went into the library and sat down in one of the infinitely comfortable reading chairs. Some part of the back of his mind, trained back when he had been a smuggler, warned him that he had made the double mistake of leaving the door open and sitting with his back to it.

  But Han pushed that foolish worry aside. It was just that he was nervous and edgy, and his old reflexes were coming back. Besides, he had other worries. He thought back to the incident—no, use the real name—the kidnapping yesterday. Why had they grabbed him? Why had they held him? And why on Corellia had they let him go? The only thing he could think of was that, somehow—

  “Master Solo, if I might have a word?”

  Han jumped, startled, and turned around in his chair to find Q9-X2, that weird droid of Ebrihim’s, floating behind him. So much for the idea of peace and quiet. “Don’t do that,” he said.

  “Do what, sir?”

  “Come up behind me so quietly. Make a little noise. Use your wheels instead of floating around like that.”

  “But I would not have been able to get upstairs using my wheel system,” Q9 said.

  “And wouldn’t that have been a shame,” Han muttered. “Look, I came up here after some peace and quiet. Could you please just roll away, or float away, or something?”

  “But there is something of importance that I must tell you,” the droid said as it floated around to face the front of the chair. “Something that I thought that we should discuss in private.”

  “Yeah?” Han asked tiredly as he leaned back in the chair. “What might that be?” It had been his experience that what droids thought of as important rarely matched his ideas on the subject.

  “First, when I learned that Master Ebrihim and myself were to serve in the household of such important persons as yourselves, in a situation as unsettled as that currently obtaining on Corellia, I elected to make whatever contribution I could to your security, and I therefore made a number of purpose-built modifications to myself.”

  “Huh? What?” Han asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “Excuse me for taking so long to get to the point, but you must understand that I have installed quite a bit of sophisticated detection and observation equipment. I now carry a wide range of highly capable scanners and comparators, and I have performed repeated sweeps of the vicinity, whenever possible, in between the execution of my other duties.”

  “Good for you,” Han said, still not really paying attention. Why did every droid feel the need to buttonhole him and yammer on about its specs and capabilities?

  “And good for you, too, Master Solo,” Q9 said. “I do think you would be well advised to take what I am saying more seriously.”

  “And why is that?” Han said.

  “Because you are being watched.”

  That got his attention. “If you mean the CDF agents—”

  “Please, Master Solo. I am no addlebrained protocol unit. Give me some credit. No. In fact, judging by her behavior, I believe the watcher in question is doing her best to stay out of their sight, more than she is worried about hiding from you or your family.”

  “She?” Han asked.

  “Yes, sir. There is just one, a human female, and she appears to be on her own. At least I have spotted no one else working with her. She has stationed herself in the empty villa a short distance from here. She watches from an upstairs window, doing her best to conceal herself. I might add that she is probably all but invisible to normal human vision. The window transparency is thick, the room she is in is dark, and she has been quite skillful in keeping a low profile. However, I managed to record a few low-resolution flat-image shots of her in polarized infrared before the rains blew in earlier this morning.”

  “Let’s see.”

  Han had expected Q9 to project a fuzzy holographic image on the wall or something. Instead, there was a quiet whirring noise, and a flat-image photo rolled out of the printout slot in Q9’s chest. Maybe there was something to be said for a droid that upgraded itself. “Most of the time, of course, the macrobinoculars conceal her,” Q9 went on. “This is the highest-resolution image of her face that I have secured. The quality is still quite low, although I h
ave run it through all the appropriate enhancement routines.”

  Han took the photo from the slot and looked at it. It was rather grainy and extremely contrasty, and the image itself was a bit blurred. But there could be no mistake. It was Kalenda, the NRI agent, caught in the act of lifting the macrobinoculars to her face. Somehow, Han was not at all surprised. She was just the sort of person who would pop up out of nowhere, light-years from where he thought she was.

  She had a worried look on her face, and she looked gaunt and worn. But it was her, all right. There could be no mistaking those disconcertingly wide-set eyes. He thought back to what Leia had said, about her sense of being watched at the spaceport. Yes. It all fit.

  But what did it all mean? What the devil was Kalenda doing here, and if she was here, why hadn’t she tried to contact Han? The only answer he could come up with was that she didn’t trust the CDF either.

  “Have you told anyone else about this?” Han asked.

  “No, sir. It seemed to me that I should come to you first.”

  Han thought for a moment. “You have done very well, Q9,” he said. “This is vital information—but I must order you to tell no one—no one else about it. Not your master, not my wife, not anyone. It will be bad enough having me wandering around pretending not to know I am being watched. If the whole house had to pretend, someone would make a slip.”

  “Then this watcher is an enemy, sir?”

  “No, no. A friend. I don’t exactly know what she intends, but she is on our side. The problem is that we are not at all sure the CDF is friendly. It might be that she is there trying to protect us against the CDF in some way. If their agents discovered her, we could lose a very useful asset.”

  “Useful for what?”