Then Lando frowned. Jarril usually had a Sullustan with him. Seluss. Had Seluss taken the A-wing? For help? That made no sense. He would have been back.
Unless he was followed.
But Lando had seen no other vessels in this corner of space. Very few ships went back and forth here. There was nothing to smuggle. Lando himself wouldn't have been here if Mara hadn't had to meet Karrde. The Republic had little interest in the primitive planets nearby and the Empire had abandoned hope of uniting such diverse peoples.
The Empire had long ago abandoned hope of anything.
Something nagged at the back of Lando's mind. He had seen something in that debris. Something that didn't belong.
He opened his eyes as he panned away from the cockpit, searching, searching, scanning the debris at close range until he found what he was looking for.
In the galley, banging off one wall and ricocheting into another like a puck in null hockey, a stormtrooper helmet floated.
A helmet so clean it reflected the emergency glow panels.
Stormtroopers. This far out. Perhaps Lando had been wrong about the Empire.
With a flurry of movements, he rigged up the rest of the slave circuitry. He'd tow the Spicy Lady to his mining operation on Kessel and then inspect the interior himself. Maybe he could see what Jarril had been into.
Lando had a hunch he wouldn't like what he was about to find.
EIGHT
The surviving senators filled the Emperor's Audience Room in the Imperial Palace. The senior senators, the ones who clearly supported the Republic, were mingling with one another, and talking about substantive issues. Leia stood beside the buffet table that lined one wall. She wasn't interested in her colleagues. She was watching the junior senators, many of them former Imperials, argue. Her hands still hurt from the burns she had sustained in the blast, but otherwise she felt fine.
Except for her hearing.
She wished it hadn't returned.
The arguments rose around her, so loud that one voice would quickly cover another.
"... decide who's in charge now that..."
"... never would have allowed such chaos..."
"... glad we're here. The New Republic can't afford such lax..."
She didn't need to hear more than a few snatches of conversation to know what was happening. Here, at least among the junior senators, the blame for the destruction of the Senate Hall was going to fall on her government. She shouldn't have listened to Han. She should have been up and around the day of the explosion. Two days away had allowed this situation to get out of hand.
Leia took a vagnerian canape and ate it quickly, hoping its sweetness would give her energy she still lacked. The doctors said she needed time to recover, that she had nearly died, but she had made it through serious wounds before. This time, she suspected, part of the problem was her attitude.
She wiped her hands on her pants—she wore a loose, flowing pair that resembled a skirt, with a blouse over them, deciding to be dressy but comfortable at this meeting—and stepped into the crowd of junior senators.
Their conversation ceased. She smiled at them, as if she had heard nothing, and clapped her hands for attention.
"I want to thank you all for coming on such short notice," she said. "We are currently preparing the ballroom as a temporary home for the Senate, but it won't be completed until tomorrow. In the meantime, I thought we would hold this informal meeting. I wanted to get you all up-to-date on the investigation."
"What investigation?" asked R'yet Coome, the junior senator from Exodeen. His voice, filtered through his six sets of teeth, sounded so much like that of his colleague, M'yet Luure, that Leia started. It was even a question that M'yet would have asked.
She glanced at R'yet as he preened his six arms against his side. If she hadn't known M'yet was dead, she would have thought she was speaking to him.
"We've had an investigation running simultaneously with the rescue effort," she said. "The rescue effort took top priority for a day. We had to make certain—" Her voice broke.
"We had to make certain that no one else was trapped in the rubble," said ChoFï, one of the senators who had been with her since the beginning of the New Republic. He stood just behind her, his seven-foot length protecting instead of dwarfing her.
She nodded, grateful for his support. She hadn't seen him when she came in. He must have been eavesdropping, as she had been.
"You should have taken the precautions up front," R'yet said. "I don't know how I'll tell the people of Exodeen that one of their most beloved figures is dead."
"We have the best security of any place in the Republic," Leia said. "Obviously, it wasn't good enough."
"Obviously," R'yet said.
Meido, vibroblade-thin, his crimson face covered with tiny white lines, put a two-fingered hand on R'yet's first arm. Leia was astonished that Meido knew Exodeenian etiquette. A touch on the first arm was a signal to stop speaking. A touch on the second would have been a challenge to fight.
"The Chief of State has had a difficult week," Meido said.
"As have we all," some senator in the back said.
Meido ignored him. "We must give her the benefit of any doubt. Of course, we had to see if anyone remained in the ruins of the Hall. Now the investigation can begin in earnest."
His support made Leia suspicious. Meido hadn't been supportive since his election.
"Thank you, Senator," she said. She took a deep breath. "The damage to the Hall was extensive. The bomb, if we might call it that, was detonated inside the Hall. There was no exterior damage at all. We are currently investigating all personnel who were in the Hall at the time of the explosion as well as people who had access to it in the days before."
"Does that include senators?" asked Senator Wwebyls, a tiny humanoid from Yn.
"It includes everyone," Leia said.
"Even the dead?" R'yet asked, his lower hands perched on his secondary hips.
"Even the dead," Leia said softly. "We can't overlook anyone or anything here."
"So you're being investigated as well," Senator Meido asked.
Leia started. Of course she wasn't being investigated. She knew she wasn't involved.
"She said everyone." ChoFï spoke without judgment as he reminded them to listen, and as he got Leia off the hook.
Kerrithrarr, the senior Wookiee senator, growled from the back of the room.
"My Wookiee colleague has a good point," ChoFï said. "The best way to survive this crisis is to work together."
"We can't work together when we're being investigated," said another junior senator.
"We're all being investigated," said Nyxy, a senator from Rudrig.
"We have to work together," said Senator Gno. He had been a senator in the Old Republic, and then a member of the Rebel ring in the Imperial Senate. He was one of the few Old Republic members who hadn't retired. "Have you ever thought that whoever set off that bomb did so for precisely this reason? If we fight among ourselves, we no longer focus on outside threats. We cannot tear this government apart from within."
That thought hadn't occurred to Leia either. She had been concentrating on finding the perpetrators, and on discovering if they were the source of the Force-vision she had shared with Luke. She hadn't forgotten that feeling of impending doom, not just for the Senate, but for the government itself.
She couldn't tell this body, though, about the new weapon. Not without a greater proof than her feeling, and Luke's.
"It seems to me that this government is already being torn apart," R'yet said. "We need leadership. Good leadership would have prevented this attack."
"We don't know that," ChoFï said. "We won't know anything like that until we discover what caused the destruction."
"The teams are working on that now," Leia said. "We have some experts digging through material removed from the building, as well as searchers still in the Hall. We'll know more by later today."
"Will we know then whether the attac
k was aimed at the Senate or aimed at you?" R'yet asked.
He had the right to ask that. Leia knew he did. But that didn't stop the flare of anger within her. She had had enough. He was acting as if he had attained a moral high road through M'yet Luure's loss.
"Senator Coome," she said, rising to her full height. "If the attack was aimed at you, at me, or at any of our colleagues, then it was aimed at all of us. We are a body, a group, whether you like it or not. The attack occurred in the seat of government, and affected all of us equally—"
"Not equally," R'yet said. "Some of us are dead."
"Equally," Leia said, "at least for the survivors. Now you can work with us and help the New Republic."
"Or?" He had stepped forward despite Meido's restraining hand. "Are you threatening me, Leia Organa Solo?"
"That wouldn't be good for unity, now would it?" Leia asked.
"It certainly wouldn't," Meido said smoothly. "Perhaps it would ease my colleague's mind if we had a separate investigation going, as well as the official investigation. With two teams, we might get better results."
"Or we might confuse the issue," Leia said.
"So you're opposed to a separate investigation?" Meido's tone implied that she had something to hide.
"Of course not," Leia said. "I just don't like expending unnecessary resources. The New Republic is not wealthy, either in credits or in available labor."
"I think that anything that enables us to trust one another again would not be a waste," Meido said.
Again? Leia thought, but did not voice it.
"She obviously doesn't like the idea," R'yet said.
They had forced her into this. She should have expected it. She took a deep breath. "We're a governing body," she said. "Let's vote."
"I thought this was an informal meeting," ChoFï said. It was an admirable ploy to delay the vote.
"An informal meeting is still a meeting," Meido said.
Leia suppressed a sigh. They had outmaneuvered her. It would be hard to take a vote without their consoles, without the electronic count, or computer backup. But a voice vote would work, if someone counted the votes, and tallied them to the proper senators. It also had the added benefit of making each voter accountable in front of the others.
She sent one of the pages to get an official tally sheet. When the page returned, she scanned the sheet, her gaze stopping each time it hit a dead or seriously wounded senator. She would remember that day in the Hall for the rest of her life. In its own, less devastating way, it had shaken her as the destruction of Alderaan had. She had thought the Hall a completely safe place. Perhaps that was why she fought the introduction of the former Imperials. Perhaps she wanted to protect one of the few havens left in the galaxy.
It only took a few moments to get the system set up. Time enough for each senator to think of a response.
"The question we are putting to the vote is this: Should we have an independent investigation team? Your vocal response must be 'yes,’ 'no,’ or 'abstain.' " She took a deep breath, then called on the first senator.
Both she and the page recorded the vote as it occurred. A protocol droid also listened, double-checking the tally. She had expected the vote to go in her favor. At the least, she expected to break the tie on a close vote. But as she ran through the list, skipping the missing and the dead, she realized that her voting block, which had been the majority, was now in the minority. Most of the uninjured were the junior senators. The senior senators, those with long ties to the Republic, had somehow received the brunt of the blast.
By the end of the list, Leia's throat was dry and her eyes burned. Her shoulders were stiff from tension. Fifteen senators voted against the independent investigation. Fifteen. The rest abstained or voted in favor. The measure won by an overwhelming majority.
Across the room, she met Kerrithrarr's gaze. The Wookiee senator believed, as Leia did, that the former Imperials would destroy the Senate. Kerrithrarr's hair stood on end, and when he noticed Leia, he shook his head in despair.
Leia checked her results against the page's. Then the droid confirmed their numbers. "By a clear majority," Leia said, "the measure to provide for an independent investigation passes."
The junior senators cheered while the rest of the room looked on in astonishment. Leia picked up a wooden cup and pounded it on the buffet table as she called for order. As the room quieted, she said, "I realize that we are not meeting in the Hall. Due to the informal setting, I will let this breech of etiquette pass. In the future, though, any senator showing undue partisanship will be expelled from the room and his vote will not be counted. This rule is in the Senatorial bylaws. I suggest you read them."
Her voice echoed back to her, and she could hear the thread of anger below it. Usually she prided herself on her restraint, but her patience was wearing thin. Didn't these so-called leaders understand the effects of their actions? Didn't they know that this kind of partisanship would divide the Republic?
Faces were turned to hers expectantly. She nodded toward them. "Since it was your idea to have an independent investigation, Senator Meido, I would like you to compile the team. We will need the names of the investigators for our records."
Meido smiled. His teeth were pale pink against his crimson skin. "Gladly, President."
She didn't like his expression. It made her feel vulnerable. It made her feel as if she had walked into a trap.
"Tomorrow we will meet in the ballroom at the normal time. Until then, we are adjourned." Leia pounded on the buffet table. As she did, the conversation rose around her. The junior senators were pounding one another on the back and laughing.
ChoFï was staring at the list. "You know," he said so softly that only Leia and Senator Gno could hear, "their report won't be the same."
"I know," Leia said. "But I had no real choice. I couldn't appoint one of our people to pick the investigative team. They outmaneuvered me. If I had been thinking when I came in—"
"It's not your fault, Leia," ChoFï' said. "If they didn't approach you on that issue, they would have done so on another. You were running the Senate as it used to be instead of as it is. It is no longer a uniform body. Now we have factions."
"I don't like it," Gno said.
"Like it or not," ChoFï said, "the factions exist and we have to live with them."
"I will not live with them," Gno said. "This is how the Empire took over the last time. Small disagreements became major. Major disagreements were ignored, until the government was so factionalized it didn't work at all."
"That won't happen here," ChoFï said.
Gno smiled. "I used to believe that, all those years ago."
Leia picked up the voting record, wincing at the pain in her hands. "We can't be afraid of change, Senator," she said to Gno. "We have to remember that there is one major difference between then and now. They don't have a leader like Palpatine."
"At least not yet," Gno said.
Sunlight poured through a hole in the collapsing roof of the Senate Hall. Against the sky, the black-clawed hand of a construction droid awaited orders to remove the rubble and rebuild.
Luke stood in the double doorway, and peered into the Hall. The sunlight illuminated only one corner. Emergency glow panels revealed more destruction.
Most of the voting desks were covered with stone and shattered crystal. The floor was a mass of debris. Freight droids, maintenance droids, and repair droids waited in the back. No one had started the cleanup yet. Leia wanted it to wait until the investigation was underway.
Luke had decided to do some investigating on his own.
Several things bothered him: Leia's insistence on the involvement of former Imperials; Han's strange conversation with the missing smuggler; and, most importantly, the disturbance in the Force that Luke, Leia, and the Solo children had felt to varying degrees. Luke agreed with Han; he doubted the direct involvement of the former Imperials. If they had all known, they would have found an excuse to be away from the Hall at the time. L
eia had a point too. Most of the junior senators were uninjured. If she was right, and a former Imperial or a group of former Imperials were involved, what greater way to turn away suspicion than to be in the Hall during the explosion and "miraculously" escape injury?
Luke stepped inside. Dust motes rose in the circle of sunlight. He had been in so many places of destruction, seen so much devastation, and still it didn't prepare him for this. This Hall was the working Chamber. It had housed the Old Republic's Senate, and even Palpatine's redesign hadn't affected that feeling of ancient and irrevocable law. It had been Leia's favorite room.
She had been below, at the podium, when the blast hit.
The podium was shattered. The circle on which it had stood was littered in ceiling rubble. The repair crews outside had warned Luke that the building was unstable. They weren't going to let him in without an escort, but he insisted. He had to see this, and he had to see it alone.
A chill pervaded the air. It was the same kind of chill he had felt on Yavin 4, the chill of quick, sudden death. So many lives, senselessly taken.
He stepped in deeper. Beneath the chill was that odd sense again, that sense of betrayal. Betrayal was probably a common response to sudden death, but this sense felt different. It felt—personal, like the betrayal Luke had felt when Kyp had joined forces with Exar Kun. As if all in this room had died at the hands of someone they once trusted.
Personal death. A bomb was an impersonal death.
He closed his eyes, let the Force flow through him, and felt for the pockets of coldness. Voices swirled around him, remembered voices, calling for help, shouting instructions. Shouts for friends, wails of the dying.
Pockets of cold.
He opened his eyes.
Not one large explosion. Several small explosions had detonated all at once in this room. And the senators sitting closest to the detonations died.
Several planned executions?
A warning?
Or a destruction of the Hall that went awry?
He couldn't tell. But now he had something to tell Leia's investigators. They should stop the search for one big cause, and search for several small ones.
Star Wars - The New Rebellion Page 6