Tyrant's Test

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  It was still an hour before the Senate was to dissolve into the New Republic Assembly to consider the petition of recall against Leia, and the session itself promised to last many hours under a rule of unrestricted debate. But both the media and public levels of the Senate gallery were already filled, and the corridors outside were choked with the overflow.

  Some of those crowding the public areas held a color-coded gallery pass for a later three-hour block. Others had managed to wangle only a site pass and a place in one of the overflow auditoriums. With demand exceeding supply, the going price for a gallery pass had already topped ten thousand credits—if you could find someone willing to sell.

  And despite the efforts of Palace security to discourage it, there was a brisk and animated swap meet under way among those already holding passes, driven by a series of contradictory rumors about when key events might take place—most especially when Leia would appear at the podium. Session Three passes, covering the period from seven to ten that evening, were presently commanding a three-thousand-credit premium over Session Two and a five-thousand-credit premium over Four and later.

  Both the commotion and anticipation were more muted in the private back corridors and chambers, but only by comparison to the public ones. The recall was the signal event of the Third Electoral, and no one with a claim to a seat in the great chamber meant to miss it. Crowds and unfamiliar faces were everywhere, and the normally tranquil Council caucus room was hosting a heated shouting match between half a dozen senators who couldn’t wait for the session to begin.

  In such an atmosphere, Leia’s unheralded arrival in the Senate anteroom went unnoticed at first. And the first to spot Leia were among the last she wanted to see—Engh’s image analysts.

  She had never troubled to learn or remember their names—she called them the Ventriloquist and the Costumer. The Ventriloquist, who called her President Solo, was forever trying to put words in Leia’s mouth, then critiquing the words that had come out of Leia’s mouth. The Costumer, who called her Princess Leia, treated Leia like a dress-up doll, endlessly worrying about whether her clothes sent the right image for a particular public appearance.

  They came rushing up to her together and greeted her with a rush of words.

  “Princess! Where have you been?—”

  “President Solo! I haven’t seen your speech yet—”

  “—I have your clothing in the diplomatic lounge. There’s no immediate urgency, but I need to talk to you about your jewelry choices—”

  “—thank goodness you won’t be the first to the podium. Let’s find a room where we can go over what you expect to say—”

  “—I’ve opted for a very plain look, not quite widow-in-mourning but moving in that direction, and anything too gaudy would just be jarring—”

  “—I’ve scheduled you for interviews with Global, Prime, and ING right after the session—”

  “Stop,” Leia said sharply. “Both of you—just stop.”

  Both stared at her with the same flavor of we’re-just-trying-to-help surprise.

  “Is there something wrong, President Solo—”

  “I didn’t mean to be insensitive, Princess Leia—”

  “Not another word,” she said, interrupting. “Not one more. As of this moment, you’re both fired.” With two quick movements, she collected their area passes from their clothing. “Report back to the ministry and resume doing whatever it is you used to do—which I can only hope is something more useful than what you’ve done here.”

  By then, everyone within ten meters was aware of her presence, and a curious crowd had begun to gather around her. Ignoring them, Leia brushed past the Ventriloquist and continued on through the anteroom until she found Behn-Kihl-Nahm. The chairman was with Doman Beruss, huddled over what looked like a chalice of dark brew and a schedule of speakers at a table near the courtesy bar.

  “Bennie,” she said, turning her shoulder to Beruss and ignoring him completely. “Let’s go upstairs. We need to talk.”

  There was a sudden murmur—a collective gasp, more truly—from the thousands packed into the Senate chamber when Behn-Kihl-Nahm and Leia entered together and ascended to the upper tier of the podium. When the murmur subsided, all that could be heard were the faint voices of newsgrid commentators echoing through a dozen or more active comlinks scattered across the floor of the chamber.

  “—was not expected to appear until much later, until called on to make her own presentation. Her unexpected—”

  “—fueling immediate speculation here of a surprise resignation—”

  “—was considered unlikely that she would choose to be present during what promises to be a long and intense debate—”

  But the Senate’s protocol officers quickly hunted down the offending devices, and there was barely a rustle as Behn-Kihl-Nahm walked to the podium.

  “Fellow senators,” he said, then cleared his throat twice. “Fellow senators, there will be a change in the published schedule for today’s session.”

  Innocuous as they were, his words caused an immediate stir in the audience. He ignored the stir and went on, leaning in toward the podium’s audio scanner. “As provided for under the Senate rules of order, and in respect of the provisions of Article Five of the Common Charter, I yield the gavel to the President of the Senate, Leia Organa Solo, hereditary Princess of House Organa of Alderaan and elect senator of the restored Republic of Alderaan.”

  As Leia rose from the bench where she had been waiting, something unexpected happened—a slow-growing, defiant-sounding ovation. In scattered twos and threes, then pockets of ten and twenty, seated senators rose to their feet clapping and calling out the traditional affirmation of “Ho, huzzah!” By the time Leia reached the podium, half of the left aisle and nearly all of the right had joined the impromptu demonstration.

  There was less enthusiasm from the center aisle, where representatives from most of the human worlds were seated, but even there nearly half were on their feet, with stragglers still swelling that number. Noisiest of all was the public gallery, the occupants of which were ignoring the warnings of the protocol officers and the architects both and stamping in unison. Taken aback, Leia looked to Behn-Kihl-Nahm for a cue or an explanation, only to find him applauding her as well, with equal measures of determination and dignity.

  Leia turned back to the chamber and raised her right hand, asking for silence. “Please,” she said. “Please. I’m grateful for your support, so spontaneously and genuinely offered. I accept it as a deeply felt expression of your concern for Han—mirroring the concern that so many people from all over the New Republic have taken the trouble to share with our family. I am gratified to learn that his welfare matters to so many of you. We love him dearly, and it’s unimaginably hard for us to see him suffering.

  “But I did not come here today to speak of Han, or to presume on your sympathy,” Leia said. “I have come here to make an announcement in a matter of great gravity. I’m glad that so many of you are here to hear it firsthand.

  “At thirteen-thirty today, in the presence of the chairman of the Defense Council, the first administrator, the minister of state, the admiral of the fleet, and the director of the Intelligence Ministry, I invoked the emergency-powers provisions of Article Five with respect to the crisis in Farlax Sector.”

  A startled gasp from thousands of throats tore the silence. “That is the formal language required by the Charter,” Leia went on. “But it can be said more simply—we have declared war on the Duskhan League.

  “I have taken this step for one reason, and one reason only—because it is the right thing to do.

  “This is not a personal crusade or a political maneuver. It is a campaign for justice—justice for the victims, and justice for the criminals.

  “The crimes of the Yevetha are not as well known to you as they should be, nor as they will be. You have seen the faces of two of Nil Spaar’s victims: Han and Plat Mallar. But what the Yevetha have done to these two—as much as it
hurts those who love them—is among the least of their offenses.

  “The Duskhan League is led by an absolute dictator whose bloody amorality is the equal of any enemy the Republics have known. They have exterminated, without the slightest provocation, the populations of more than a dozen peaceful worlds. They have murdered innocents by the tens of thousands, without the slightest justification.

  “Humans, Morath, H’kig, Kubaz, Brigians—no one who stood in their way was spared. Not the women. Not even the children. Their bodies were incinerated. Their homes were leveled. Their cities were bombed back to atoms.

  “And the last memories of those children, those cities, are now held by the few who the Yevetha spared—spared so that the Yevetha could use their living bodies as shields in battle.

  “The possibility that the Yevetha may not be finished with their murderous expansion, the prospect that they might next fall on Wehttam or Galantos or another more familiar world, is unnecessary to our response.

  “If these horrors do not demand our answer, then shame on us. If these tragedies do not enrage your conscience, then shame on you. If we cannot stand together against such a predator, the New Republic stands for nothing of value.”

  Leia paused to drink in the utter silence that reigned in the great chamber.

  “In consultation with Admiral Ackbar and the Fleet Office, I have ordered additional forces to Koornacht to strengthen our position there. I have charged General A’baht, the sector commander, with the task of eliminating the Yevethan threat and reclaiming the conquered worlds of Koornacht. He has the necessary command authority to do so, and he has my full confidence.

  “We will take away the Yevetha’s ability to make war on what they call the vermin. Not only because we, too, are vermin in their eyes, but because they have shown us an evil heart, and evil must be challenged, even though the cost may be great.

  “Any government that objects to this decision is free to withdraw from this body. And this body is welcome to choose a new President—the day after Nil Spaar is defeated and the Yevetha disarmed.”

  Leia fully expected the silence to follow her away from the podium. But she had not gone two steps before a tumultuous roar of approval washed over her from the floor below and the galleries above. Turning, she saw virtually the entire Senate on its feet, affirming her decision by acclaim.

  The acclaim was not unanimous—dozens of dissenting senators had remained in their seats or headed for the exits in disgust. But they were a startlingly tiny minority of the whole. Leia stared, barely comprehending the miracle she had wrought. Her words had reached them, and moved them, and united them—for a moment, at least, a moment of principle over politics.

  She would have been moved to joy, but for the fact that at the end of the straight line she had drawn, Leia saw Han’s death.

  Interlude IV: Maltha Obex

  It was a cold day on Maltha Obex, even by the standards of a planet locked in the grip of a century-long ice age. A brutal storm half a continent wide was scouring the northern latitudes with driving winds and sheets of tiny, hard snowflakes as coarse as sand. The storm had forced Team Alpha to abandon its excavation site on the ice field east of Ridge 80.

  Team Alpha’s cold shelters had been fighting their tie-downs all night, as though eager to take flight and tumble headlong across the wastes. When team leader Bogo Tragett suited up to check the status of the excavation dome, he found the rip-proof tunnel connecting his shelter to the dome torn lengthwise and shredded to tiny yellow flags whipping from the tension cables. Visibility fell to near whiteout with the gusts, hiding a bright blue work dome that was no more than five meters away from Tragett.

  Inside the dome Tragett found an ice-cold heater, a massive drift of crystalline white, and a continuing swirl of snow particles blowing in from under the dome’s partial floor. The heater had chewed through a three-day fuel supply in something less than ten hours and then quit, surrendering.

  Tragett did likewise. Crossing to the supply shelter through a still intact connecting tunnel, he hailed Penga Rift and asked for a pickup, then paged the rest of the team and told them to pack whatever personal and team gear they could backpack or carry. Then it was a matter of waiting for conditions to ease enough for the expedition’s weather-rated shuttle to fight its way through to them.

  That wait stretched to three hours, in the course of which Tragett’s shelter broke loose from its tie-downs and was thrown against the upwind side of the excavation dome. Before the shelter itself had collapsed and torn free, it had caved in a third of the dome and turned the faces of two team members as white as the landscape.

  But Dr. Joto Eckels never gave as much as a passing thought to offering Team Alpha a respite aboard Penga Rift. He regretted the loss of equipment and the investment of time at N3, with no return on either—but there were many more sites, and far too little time. Trusting that Tragett would see to the motivational needs of his team, Eckels had dispatched the shuttle to the relatively balmy coastal site S9, where the dawn temperature had been twenty-six degrees below freezing under quiet skies.

  “We preloaded the shuttle with the entire spare excavation kit, from domes to bits,” Eckels informed Tragett as the shuttle turned south instead of skyward. “You can draw whatever replacements you need from there. I’d say you should have no trouble getting set up by nightfall—be ready to go again first thing in the morning.”

  Tragett, a veteran and a pragmatist, understood the issues driving the decision. “Affirmative, Penga Rift. But if that’s the plan, I’d like to rotate Tuomis out, bring someone else down. He’s been fighting shelter fever, and he’s a little shaken right now.”

  “Site setup is half outside work,” Eckels said. “Might turn him around, just being able to see that horizon. And hard work is a lot better for the disposition than lying there all night listening to the wind howl. Let’s wait twenty and review the options when we see how he is in the morning.”

  With the Team Alpha crisis past, Penga Rift returned to its normal orbital pattern, and Eckels contacted the other teams in turn for their daily updates. Team Beta was conducting a deep-water survey from a camp on a massive slab iceberg; Team Gamma was working the ridges above Stopa-Krenn Glacier in search of postcatastrophe Qella habitations and nomadic artifacts.

  “You have one more day to wrap things up there,” Eckels informed the Beta team leader. “Then I’m moving you to S-Eleven. With Alpha being driven out of N-Three, we still haven’t gotten into a city site—which is why I’m making that our top priority for the time remaining.”

  “Understood, Dr. Eckels. No objection here—we’re clearly into diminishing returns.”

  Eckels’s news for Gamma, delivered half an orbit later, had a similar flavor. “You have a hundred hours to find a no-fooling, hip-deep-in-midden habitation before I pull you off and split you up so we can go double-shifts at S-Nine and S-Eleven. We have all the skin flakes, callus scrapings, scat sheddings, and ice-burned limbs the Institute can use. We’re not leaving here without at least a peek at how they lived—before if not after, and both if at all possible.”

  “Acknowledged,” said the Gamma leader. “Let me talk to Tia about yesterday’s side scans. There’s a spot I want her to get a second look at.”

  “Transferring you now.”

  Eckels studied the schedule on his datapad’s display a moment longer, then stored it. He knew that he was pushing the team hard, both those on the surface and the analysts and catalogers in the lab. But he saw no real alternative. They had custody of Penga Rift for twenty-nine more days—after which Dr. Bromial’s Kogan 6 expedition, already postponed two months, would take over. That broke down to thirteen productive days at Maltha Obex and sixteen wasted days in transit back to Coruscant.

  All that time just to drag our hands and brains from one side of the galaxy to another—the universe is an offense to any reasonable concept of order.

  Eckels found himself envying his client for having a ship like Meridian
at his disposal. The black-hulled sprint that had made the pickup had completed a round trip to Coruscant in less than the time it would take the elderly research vessel to complete one leg. But the Obroan Institute would never invest its precious resources in something as ephemeral as speed.

  “Archaeology is not a race,” Director bel-dar-Nolek would say. “It is a profession for the patient. We, who think in centuries and millennia, can hardly notice a handful of days.”

  But bel-dar-Nolek no longer did fieldwork. The longest trip he regularly made was a twenty-minute walk from his home to his office at the Institute.

  Leaving the comm booth, Eckels started aft toward the labs. But before he reached them, he found himself paged over the shipcomm.

  “Captain Barjas, to the bridge, please. Dr. Eckels, to the bridge, please.”

  Eckels recognized the voice of the first officer, who had been with the ship for nine years and uncounted expeditions. Eckels also recognized the note of urgency that made Manazar’s words more than a polite request. Turning, Eckels reversed his steps, adding a jot of haste to them until he passed into the crew section and climbed the triangular ladder to the bridge.

  Barjas had arrived before him. “Doctor,” he said with an acknowledging nod.

  “What is it?”

  Barjas pointed at the navigation display, Manazar out the forward viewport.

  “Incoming ship,” Barjas said.

  Manazar added, “And they don’t seem too happy that we’re here.”

  Wary of being followed, Pakkpekatt had guided Lady Luck through a series of three hyperspace jumps en route to Maltha Obex. The extra jumps added less than an hour to their travel time, but vastly increased the difficulty for anyone attempting to divine their destination.