A guidance signal clicked on, and the radio squealed back to life. “All right, unidentified freighter. You’re in dock four, slip number three. Gonna be a fine for not putting in a flight plan, though.”
“A what?” Han said.
“I don’t make the rules, Papa. You don’t like it, you can pull up now.”
“How much of a fine?”
“Supposed to be eight hundred credits, but you seem like a nice guy. Four hundred, we’ll call it good.”
“Inefficiency and corruption every time?” Scarlet asked with a sharp smile.
“We’re coming in,” Han snarled.
“Welcome to Kiamurr,” the voice on the radio said. “Enjoy your stay, right?”
Talastin City squatted in the depths of a narrow valley, its buildings pressed close together on the few precious kilometers of nearly flat ground. At the densest part of the city, structures also climbed up the cliff faces to either side. The vast mountains towering above left the streets in near-permanent shadow except for a few hours in the middle of the day when the sun shone straight down into it. It was like a city at the bottom of a well.
Han followed the guide signals into a slip dug into the mountain’s side. Across the valley, dozens more like it glowed: arched caves in the pale rock crowded with transports and freighters and low-powered fighters peeking out of them. The air of Kiamurr smelled of moisture and wood, like being in a rain forest. An early-model LOM protocol droid made its way toward them. Its breastplate was mottled by old damage that had been pounded back into shape and covered with a cheap patina. Han let Chewbacca discuss exactly how much they were going to pay in docking fees and taxes while he made his way slowly around the Falcon, surveying the damage from the outside. The Imperial fighters and fliers had done a pretty good job. Scorch marks blackened the ship’s side, and the smell of burned-out circuit boards and blown actuators was sadly familiar.
The missile—if it really was a missile—was solidly in the skin of the ship. The ropy things around it weren’t just frozen coolant. There were visible structures coming from the gray-green oblong and anchoring themselves to the metal hide of the Falcon. Scarlet stepped to his side, her arms crossed like a reflection of his own stance.
“Tracking beacon?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“So your friend Baasen knows where we are.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a pity.”
“Well,” Han said, “maybe we’ll get lucky, and he’ll jump in during a massive Imperial assault.”
They stood together silently for a long moment.
“Seriously, though, I’ll get Chewie to pull that out first thing,” Han said.
“Good plan,” Scarlet said.
Once the accounts were settled and the old droid limped its way back toward the business offices, Chewbacca hauled out the repair kit. Han and Scarlet headed through the carved stone tunnels, down into the city. Thin, awkward rickshaws haunted the streets, hauled by nervous-looking lizards and their handlers. A walrus-faced Aqualish woman paced back and forth along the shadowed pavement, offering ship parts at a discount. The security patrol droids hummed through the air, ignoring everything. High above, the thin strip of actual sky was shifting from the hazy blue of late afternoon toward the gold of evening.
Han had been in a thousand places like it, all across the galaxy. The details were different everywhere, but the sense was the same. Some had been as large as star systems, others as small as a back room in a cantina. They were the niches of the universe where authority meant a little less, where freedom was a little more available and the scope of negotiation might include hiding the bodies of the people who got too aggressive about their pricing. Justice could mean going before some sort of local magistrate, or it could mean doing the obvious thing and tipping the bartender for the trouble of cleaning up the mess. They were violent places, and they were joyful, and they didn’t last. The food tended to be worse and the music better. It was the only kind of place where the representatives of a dozen illegal groups and religions and political movements could come to negotiate. Anyplace more controlled—whether the control came from the Empire, or a Hutt, or the Black Sun crime syndicate—would keep away exactly the people who were needed for that conversation. Han breathed deeply and felt a tension he’d barely known was there let go.
“It’s good to be home,” he said.
“You’re from Kiamurr?” Scarlet asked, raising her hand to flag down a lizard rickshaw.
“Never been here before, and I don’t aim to stay here long. It’s just not the Core.”
The rickshaw driver, a Dressellian with a dark green lesion above his left eye, nodded to them and snapped the leather lead of his draft lizard. “Where to?” he asked.
“Same place everyone else has been going,” Han said, hauling himself up to the rickshaw’s seat. He put his hand down to help Scarlet up, but she was already on the other side, clambering aboard without aid.
“The conclave hive,” the driver said. “You with the Arthos House?”
“The who?”
“Arthos House,” the driver said, sliding onto the lizard’s thin, anxiously shifting back. “Are you missionaries?”
“No,” Han said.
“Good,” the driver said and spat. “Can’t stand the blasted religious.”
The lizard started off, going from dead stop to full speed without any transition in between. The streets of the city were narrow, dark, and crowded. Speeders crowded against the lizard rickshaws. Barge droids lumbered through intersections without bothering to check whether traffic on either side looked like it would stop for them. The cushions in the rickshaw were old and stained and sank in at the middle so that Han and Scarlet Hark drifted toward each other, pulled into contact by gravity. Her gaze flickered over the streets, up into the stone-and-ivy terraces they passed, but her attention seemed turned inward. The voices of street vendors called out in a dozen different languages, offering everything from fresh-picked fruit to computer hardware to weapons.
“I have a question,” she said. “What you said before about how, if the rebels win, they’ll just turn into another thing to rebel against? Did you really mean that, or were you just trying to sound impressive?”
Han smirked. “I can say what I mean and still be impressive.” Her eyes weren’t hard, but they weren’t soft, either. A beggar ran out into the street, and the lizard lurched around her. Han shrugged. “Sure, I meant it.”
“So if we win, you’ll turn against us?”
“I’m very consistent,” he said. “If we wind up on opposite sides of this, it won’t be me that changed.”
Scarlet thought about that for a moment. “You think all governments are the same.”
“I think anyone who’s telling me what I can and can’t do is the same. I take it you don’t.”
“I think you can hold water in a cupped hand and you can’t in a fist,” she said. Then, “That’s a metaphor.”
“I know it’s a metaphor.”
“I wasn’t sure, because—”
“I know what a metaphor is.”
The driver twisted around on the lizard to look back at them. “You two sure you ain’t missionaries?” he asked.
“I’m positive,” Han said.
The conclave hive was a single, massive dome that stretched from the mountain face at one side of the valley all the way to the other. It was the color of the mountains, with tier after tier of arches rising one above the other until the pale smooth stone of the dome began. At the structure’s base, dozens of small fliers and speeders, rickshaws and transports clogged the streets and alleyways. At a glance, Han could see members of a dozen different species, mostly clumped together and eyeing one another warily. Across from the massive worked metal doors, a Kinyenian was focusing all three of its stalked eyes politely on three black-robed Roonans as they gesticulated angrily. Scarlet leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder.
“We’ll walk from he
re,” she said.
“Damned right,” the old Dressellian said. “Can’t park any closer than this anyway.”
Han paid the man as Scarlet dropped to the street and made her way toward the Kinyenian. From where he stood, Han could see the interest of the aliens on the street follow her. A new player had arrived, and everyone there was immediately curious about who she was, who she represented, and how she would change the balance of whatever conversations were going on inside the dome.
By the time he reached her, she was thanking the Kinyenian and bowing a formal farewell to the three Roonans. She took Han by the elbow before he could speak and steered him gently but firmly toward the open doors.
“We need to get to the arcade on the third level,” Scarlet said. “The Alliance delegation’s in the middle of a conference.”
“Let’s go.”
The interior of the conclave hive was as ornate as the outside. Maybe more. Terraced gardens alternated with structures that seemed to grow from the walls. Near the top of the massive dome above them, a circle of twelve brilliant lights glowed and rotated slowly, bathing the interior in a permanent high noon. Everywhere, people were talking or arguing or watching with sullen anger and sly curiosity. Han knew that every extra side that came into a negotiation raised the complexity of the deal exponentially. Just walking across the broad courtyard, he could feel the density of attention like radiant heat. It was the pressure of people trying to play an angle. He was a little surprised that no one had asked him to leave his blaster outside.
Wide, stone stairs led up from the courtyard and around a massive pillar carved with the faces of an alien species Han didn’t recognize. Then an open garden where two lines of Gamorreans in different-colored uniforms were squealing and grunting at one another, while a pair of recording droids zipped among them, trying to catch everything that was being said and screamed and muttered. Another set of stairs led to the left, rising to another tier.
“You sure this is the right way?” Han asked as they started up.
“No.”
They walked along a wide terrace with a stone railing that looked down over a walled garden. Two men in bright yellow robes with shaved heads and cranial implants stood at the rail, their eyes locked and their implants flickering wildly. Scarlet started to steer Han around them, but he pulled her back.
“Down there,” he said, pointing over the rail.
In the walled garden below them, three humans sat across a stone table from a pair of Rodians. The two human men wore the uniforms of Alliance High Command, and between them Leia was in a white gown with a bright blue brooch. Her hair was pulled back, and her face had a pleasant, amused, almost generous expression that he knew at a glance was as fake as a Merian tricorn hoof.
“This way,” Scarlet said, ducking into the archway at the terrace’s edge. A thinner stairway led down, and they took it three steps at a time. When they reached the alcove at the garden’s edge, the Rodians were standing and making small, insincere bows to the humans. Leia’s smile gave away nothing. She held herself with a grace and ease of a Twi’lek dancer. Han paused. Another few seconds and they wouldn’t be interrupting her meeting.
The bowing finished and the Rodians trooped away, gabbling to each other in their native language. Han stepped out into the garden, Scarlet at his side. One of the commanders glanced his way, eyebrows rising in surprise.
Leia turned. Her face was soft and round, her pale cheeks touched with pink. The fake politeness fell away from her, and a tired, sardonic smile pressed her lips thin. She looked from Han to Scarlet and back again.
“This isn’t good news, is it?”
Thirteen
“We have to leave,” Han said. “Right now.”
Leia stared at him as if he were gibbering. Her scorn almost had a physical weight to it.
“Fine. You tell her,” Han said to Scarlet, trying to get Leia to look at someone other than him. Scarlet took a step forward, nodding respectfully.
“Princess. We’re trying to track down a criminal named Hunter Maas. He has information that the Empire badly wants to keep quiet.”
“No,” Han said, cutting her off. “No, that’s not what we’re doing at all.”
“I don’t know the name,” Leia said, tapping her chin with one slim finger. “Haven’t met him yet. Is he here at the conference?”
“There is an Imperial strike force looking for him, and they might be jumping in system any minute now,” Han told her.
“I think he will be,” Scarlet said. “Not as an invited delegate, though. He’s got something to sell, so he’ll probably be setting up private meetings and making the rounds at the bars and parties looking for a buyer.”
“Also,” Han said. “A bounty hunter put a tracking device on the Falcon, so he’s probably on his way, too.”
“All right,” Leia said. “I’ll put out inquiries. See if anyone I know has been contacted by him. What information does he have?”
“Or maybe the bounty hunter has sold our location to the Empire for amnesty,” Han said. “Or to Jabba. Really, he’s in a pretty rough spot, and just about anything’s possible, so we should really get our people out of here. Now.”
“He has an initial report from an expedition by Essio Galassian,” Scarlet said.
“I’ve heard about him,” Leia said. “He’s an astrocartographer, isn’t he?”
“And a murderous thug who likes beating people to death with his custom droids. I lived at his compound. He impressed me, but not in a good way.”
“All right,” Leia said. “And I take it we want to buy this stolen report.”
“No,” Han said. “We want to leave.”
“Buy it or steal it,” Scarlet said. “The threat of its leaking has mobilized more Imperial resources than anything I’ve seen.”
“Really?” Leia said. “That’s interesting.”
“I don’t know what it says,” Scarlet said. “But I know I want it.”
Leia nodded to herself, thinking. “Then I want it, too.”
“Chewie will have the ship ready to go in a few hours,” Han said. “So I think we should all head back to the docks now.”
“I’ve got a meeting I have to take,” Leia said. “Once it’s done, I’ll let you know what I’ve found.”
“No, because—” Han started.
“We’ll be here,” Scarlet said and walked away, not waiting for Han.
Leia started to leave, but Han caught her arm and pulled her in close. “This is serious,” he said in a rough whisper. “When that Imperial fleet jumps in, they’re going to kill this Maas and anyone who’s on the same continent with him.”
Leia pulled her arm away. “Don’t grab me.”
“Are you listening to me? Imperial strike force?”
“I heard you,” Leia said, crossing her arms. “But Scarlet Hark’s reputation as an intelligence agent is beyond reproach. She’s spent years on this. If she thinks this Hunter Maas and his information is worth the risk, then it is.”
“But once the Imperials jump in—”
“And,” Leia went on, cutting him off, “this conference is filled with potential allies of the Rebellion, which means we owe it to them to warn them of the danger. In the right way.”
“But—”
“And,” Leia said, “I’m not done here. I have a presentation and a number of important meetings.”
“Well, don’t expect me to come worship at your feet. If giving a speech is more important than—”
“If I leave in the middle of it, I’d have been better off not coming at all. These groups fund the Alliance, Han. Where do you think we get our money? It’s from places like this. Groups that want to end the Empire but don’t have the will or the weapons or the numbers. They give us money so we can do it for them. If we look scared, that’s not going to happen.”
“I didn’t know that,” Han said. The truth was, he’d never much thought about where the rebels got their financing. He’d only ever worrie
d about getting his hands on some of it.
“We’ll figure out this Hunter Maas situation, I’ll cement a few deals for alliances and financing, and we’ll quietly warn the people who need to know about the Empire before their strike force arrives. I can handle this. It’s what I do.”
He looked down into her eyes. He’d forgotten how dark they were. What you do is get in trouble, he wanted to say, but he could already hear half a dozen of her replies. She lifted her eyebrows.
“Yeah,” Han said. “All right, Princess. You talked me into it.”
“Oh,” Leia said with a sweet smile. “I wasn’t asking.”
Han sat in a small, parklike courtyard. Large trees deepened the shadows around cool stone benches and fountains. Patches of grass and carefully tended flowers filled the spaces between gently curving walkways. The space was unoccupied, so Han took a seat on one bench, leaned back against a tree, and stretched out. Above, the thin strip of sky was a pale cerulean blue dotted with puffy white clouds. Kiamurr was a beautiful planet. Han pictured Imperial concussion bombs and plasma bolts tearing down through that serene sky like the thunder of an angry god, the carefully tended landscape turned into a nightmare of smoking craters. The Death Star might be gone, the Empire no longer able to destroy an entire world outright, but they could still turn the surface charred and uninhabitable.
Han watched the blue skies, waiting for the ships to appear, the bombardment to begin.
When it didn’t, he called Chewbacca.
“Hey, pal, how’s it looking?”
The Wookiee growled through a lengthy description of the damaged systems on the Falcon, then ended with an angry description of his feelings at being stuck with all the repair work.
“Yeah, sorry about that. We’ve checked in with Leia, but she doesn’t want to leave until she gives another speech, and Scarlet finds this Maas character.”
Chewbacca growled and snorted.
“Yes, I did tell her. She apparently doesn’t find that as urgent as I do. It’s Leia. You can’t tell that woman anything.”