the scowl off her face.
Furgan waved her comment aside as if it were of no consequence. "Very well
then, Minister, what did you wish to discuss?"
Leia took a deep breath, quelling the hot temper rising behind her cool
expression. "I wanted to inform you that Mon Mothma and the other Cabinet
members of the New Republic will be hosting a formal reception in your honor
when you reach Coruscant."
Furgan bristled. "A frivolous reception? Am I supposed to give a warm and
glowing speech? Make no mistake, I am coming to Coruscant on a pilgrimage to
visit the home of the late Emperor Palpatine--not to be pampered by an
upstart, illegitimate band of terrorists. Our loyalty remains with the
Empire."
"Ambassador Furgan, there is no centralized Empire." It took all her effort
not to rise to the bait. Her dark eyes burned with obsidian fires, but she
smiled instead at the ambassador. "Nevertheless, we will extend to you every
courtesy in the confidence that your planet will find a way to adapt to
political reality in the galaxy."
The Caridan's holographic image shimmered. "Political realities change," he
said. "It remains to be seen just how long your rebellion will last."
Furgan's image fizzled into static as he cut the transmission. Leia sighed
and rubbed her temples, trying to massage away the headache lurking behind
her eyes. She left the communications chamber discouraged.
What a way to end the day.
Deep underground in the Imperial Information Center, all hours looked the
same, but See-Threepio's internal chronometer told him it was the middle of
Coruscant's night. A pair of repair droids worked at dismantling one of the
great air-exchange systems that had burned out. The repair droids dropped
tools and discarded pieces of metal shielding with reckless abandon, making
the echoing chamber sound like a war zone. Threepio much preferred the
humming loneliness of the previous day.
Buried in their own universe of data networks, the hunched slicer droids
worked undisturbed. Artoo-Detoo slavishly continued his days-long search
without pause. With a loud clatter the repair droids dropped an entire
three-bladed fan assembly. "I'm going to give those droids a piece of my
mind!" Threepio said.
Before Threepio could march off, Artoo jacked out of the data port and began
chittering and whistling. In his excitement the little astromech droid
rocked back and forth, bleeping.
"Oh!" Threepio said. "You'd better let me check that, Artoo. It's probably
another one of your false alarms."
When data scrolled up on the screen, Threepio could see nothing that would
have captured Artoo's interest--until the other droid recompiled the
information to emphasize his point. A name popped up beside every
entry--TYMMO.
"Oh, my! It does appear suspicious when you look at it that way. This Tymmo
person seems a likely candidate indeed." Threepio straightened, suddenly at
a loss. "But Master Luke isn't here, and he gave us no further instructions.
Whom can we tell?"
Artoo bleeped, then whistled a question. Threepio turned to him with
offended dignity. "I will not wake Mistress Leia in the middle of the night!
I am a protocol droid, and there is a proper way to go about these things."
He nodded in affirmation of his decision. "We will inform her first thing in
the morning."
The levitating breakfast tray brought itself to Leia's table on the park
balcony high in the Imperial towers. The sun gleamed on the city that
stretched across the entire landmass of Coruscant. High in the air flying
creatures rode the morning thermals.
Leia scowled down at the food the breakfast tray presented to her. None of
it looked appetizing, but she knew she had to eat. She selected a small
plate of assorted pastries and sent the breakfast tray on its way. Before it
departed, the tray told her to have a pleasant day.
She sighed and picked at her breakfast. She felt exhausted mentally as well
as physically.
She hated to feel so dependent, even on her own husband, but she never slept
well while he was away. Han should have arrived on Kessel three days ago,
and he was due back in two days.
She didn't want to cling, but it disappointed her that he had not yet
transmitted so much as a greeting. With diplomatic duties that kept her busy
at all hours, they saw too little of each other even when they were both on
the same planet.
Well, the twins would be coming home in another six days. Han and Chewbacca
would be back by then, and their entire lifestyle would change. A pair of
two-year-olds running around the palace would force Han and Leia to look
differently at many of the things they took for granted.
But why hadn't Han gotten in touch? It shouldn't have been so difficult to
send a holonet communiqué from the Falcon's cockpit. She wasn't quite ready
yet to admit she was worried about him.
With a greeting signal from the archway of the park balcony, an older-model
protocol droid marched into view. "Excuse me, Minister Organa Solo. Someone
wishes to see you. Are you accepting visitors?"
Leia set down her breakfast pastry. "Why not?" It was probably some lobbyist
wanting to complain to her in private, or a panicked minor functionary who
needed her to make a decision on some uninteresting detail, or one of the
other senators trying to hand off some of his own duties.
Instead, with a flourish of his vermillion cape, Lando Calrissian walked
through the arch.
"Good morning, Madame Minister. I hope I'm not disturbing your breakfast?"
He flashed a broad, disarming smile.
Seeing him, Leia felt her mood immediately lighten. She stood up and met him
near the archway. He gallantly kissed her hand, but she was not satisfied
until she had given him a friendly hug. "Lando, you're the last person I
expected this morning!"
He followed her back to the table overlooking the skyline of Imperial City
and pulled up a chair, sweeping his cape over its back. Without asking,
Lando took one of her untouched pastries and began to munch on it.
"So what brings you to Coruscant?" she asked. She realized how eager she was
just to have a normal conversation without diplomatic entanglements and
hidden agendas.
Lando brushed crumbs from his mustache. "I just came to see how you all are
doing in the big city. Where's Han?"
She grumbled. "That seems to be a sore subject this morning. He and Chewie
went off to Kessel, but I think they just used it as an excuse to go
joyriding and remembering their glory years."
"Kessel can be a pretty rough place."
Leia avoided his eyes. "Han hasn't bothered to call in six days."
"That's not like him," Lando said.
"Oh, yes, it is--and you know it! I suppose we'll have words when he comes
back day after tomorrow." Then she forced an artificial air of brightness.
"But let's not talk about that right now. How can you find time to trot
around visiting people? A respectable man like yourself has so many
responsibilities."
Lando averted her gaze this time and began fidgeting. He stared at the
expanses of gleaming new buildings visible through the metropolis. For the
first time Leia noticed a slight scruffiness to his appearance. His clothes
seemed a bit ragged around the edges, the colors faded as if from too much
wear.
He spread his hands, then took another breakfast pastry. "To tell you the
truth, I'm ... um, in between engagements right now." He gave her a lopsided
grin, but she frowned back at him.
"What happened to your big mining operation on Nkllon? Didn't the New
Republic replace most of your destroyed machinery?"
"Well, it was still a lot of work, and not paying off--bad publicity after
the Sluis Van attack, you know. And Nkllon is a hellish place--you were
there. I just needed a change."
Leia crossed her arms and looked at him skeptically. "All right, Lando. The
appropriate excuses are logged and recorded. Now, what really happened to
Nkllon?"
He squirmed. "Well, I lost it in a sabacc game."
She couldn't keep herself from laughing. "So you're out of work?" His
expression of wounded pride was obviously faked. Leia considered for a
moment. "We could always reactivate your commission as a general in the New
Republic. You and Wedge were a great team on Calamari."
His eyes widened. "Are you offering me a job? I can't imagine what you would
want me to do."
"Formal receptions, state dinners...plenty of wealthy backers wandering
around," Leia said. "The possibilities are endless."
Just then the old protocol droid shuffled through the arch again, but before
he could announce his business, See-Threepio and Artoo-Detoo bustled around
him, making a direct path to Leia. "Princess Leia!" Threepio could not
contain his excitement. "We've found one. Artoo, tell the princess. Oh,
General Calrissian! What are you doing here?"
Artoo launched into a series of electronic sounds, which Threepio dutifully
translated. "Artoo was checking the records of various winners in different
gambling establishments throughout the galaxy. We seem to have encountered a
man who has extraordinary luck at the Umgullian blob races."
Threepio handed a hardcopy printout of the winning statistics to Leia, but
she passed it on to Lando. "You're better trained to understand this than I
am." Lando took the page of figures and stared at them. He didn't appear to
know what he was looking for.
Threepio added his own commentary. "If it is displayed only as wins and
losses, Mr. Tymmo's record shows nothing out of the ordinary. But when I had
Artoo plot the magnitude of wins, you will note that while Mr. Tymmo loses
quite often in minor races, in every instance when he bets more than a
hundred credits on a particular blob, that blob wins the race!"
Lando tapped the sheet of numbers. "He's right. This is pretty unusual. I've
never seen the Umgullian blob races myself, and I'm no expert in the
nuances, but I'm inclined to say that these odds are next to impossible."
"This is exactly the sort of thing Master Luke asked us to look for."
Threepio moved his arms up and down, whirring the servomotors until they
whined in protest. "Do you think Mr. Tymmo could be a potential Jedi for
Master Luke's academy?"
Lando looked at Leia with questions in his eyes. He had obviously not heard
of Luke's recent speech. But Leia's eyes sparkled. "Someone needs to check
this out. If it's just a scam, we need a person who knows his way around
gambling establishments, Lando, isn't that a job you could do?"
She knew his answer before she even asked the question.
The cracked and gasping wastelands of Kessel always made Moruth Doole
hungry. Staring out the landscape window, Doole's mechanical eye focused to
the far distance.
Kessel's surface was whitish and powdery, with a few hardy transplanted
weeds trying to survive in the crevices. Great plumes from the atmosphere
factories gushed into the pinkish sky in a losing battle against the weak
gravity. Unseen radiation from the Maw crackled against the atmospheric
shields. The garrison moon housing Kessel's defense fleet was just setting
on the horizon.
Doole turned from the window and went to an alcove in the former warden's
office. Time for a snack.
He withdrew a cage of fat and juicy flying insects, pressing his face close
to the mesh so he could see better with his dim eyesight. The insects had
ten legs, iridescent body cases, and succulent abdomens. They panicked the
moment he moved the cage.
Doole rapped spongy fingers on the mesh, stirring them up. The insects flew
around the confined space in a frenzy. Somehow terror released a hormone
that made their meat sweeter. He licked his swollen Rybet lips.
Opening the mesh door, Doole thrust his entire head into the cage. The
insects fluttered around his eyes, his ears, his cheeks. Doole's sharp
tongue shot out again and again, spearing the insects and slurping them into
his mouth. He snapped up three more, then paused to swallow.
Their squirming legs tickled the inside of his mouth. Giving a sigh of
pleasure, Doole lapped up another pair. One insect flew directly into his
open mouth, and Doole swallowed it whole.
Someone knocked on his door and marched in before he could respond. Wearing
the insect cage over his head, Doole turned around to see Skynxnex, his
gangly arms and legs jittering. "I have a report, Moruth."
Doole extricated his head from the insect cage, then sealed the opening.
Three bugs managed to escape and flew to the wide picture window, flinging
themselves against the transparisteel. Doole decided to catch them later.
"Yes? What is it?"
"We have finished overhauling the Millennium Falcon. All identifying marks
are removed, replaced with fake serial numbers. We made a few other
modifications in addition to the regular repairs it needed. With your
permission I'll have it flown up to the garrison moon where it can be
incorporated into our space navy. Light freighters aren't the best warships,
but with a good pilot they can still cause plenty of damage--and the Falcon
is closer to a fighter than a freighter."
Doole nodded. "Good, good. What about our work on the energy shield
generators? I want them functional as soon as possible, just in case the New
Republic comes after us."
"Our engineers on the moonbase think they can reroute the circuits so we
won't need all the parts we're missing. Kessel will be impregnable before
long."
Doole's single eye lit up with eagerness. "Have Han Solo and his Wookiee
gone into the mines yet?"
Skynxnex tapped his fingertips together. "I've reserved an armored personnel
transport and will make the delivery personally within the hour." He
fingered his double-blaster. "If they try anything, I want to be the one to
deal with it."
Doole smiled. "I look forward to them rotting in the dark." He waved his
splayed hands. "Well, what are you waiting for?" Moving with his jerky walk,
Skynxnex left the warden's chambers.
Doole smiled at the thought of his r
evenge on Solo, but uneasiness tugged at
him. The New Republic seemed far away and insignificant, but from his scan
of Han's mind, he knew the magnitude of firepower that could be directed
against him. Not since Doole had taken over the prison facilities from
Kessel's upstart slave lords had he felt such impending doom.
Under the old system it had been so much simpler. By blackmailing or paying
off prison guards, Doole had managed to set himself up as a kingpin of spice
smuggling right under the Empire's nose. He sold maps and access codes for
Kessel's energy shield, fostering small-time spice operations on other parts
of the planet. Hapless entrepreneurs would work their new mines, then sell
the product in secret to Doole. Once the spice veins began to play out,
Doole (acting as a loyal prison official) would "discover" the illicit
operation and report it to his Imperial contact. When Imperial troops raided
those illegal mines, Doole's handpicked guards made certain that anyone who
could point a finger at Doole never survived capture. The other helpless
lackeys would be put to work in the primary mines. It was a win-win
situation for Doole.
During the prison revolt Doole targeted his primary rivals and made the
toughest guards go after the worst smugglers until they slaughtered each
other. This left Moruth Doole in charge, with Skynxnex as his right-hand
man.
Doole had captured the warden, sending him to work in the spice mines until
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