Not surprisingly, he did. “Chewie, I’m sorry,” Leia said. “I promised Khabarakh I’d come alone.”
Chewbacca shook his head violently, showing his teeth as he growled his opinion of that idea. “He doesn’t like it,” Han translated diplomatically.
“I got the gist, thank you,” Leia retorted. “Listen, you two; for the last time—”
Chewbacca cut her off with a bellow that made her jump half a meter backward. “You know, sweetheart,” Han said, “I really think you ought to let him go with you. At least as far as the rendezvous point,” he added quickly as she threw him a glare. “Come on—you know how seriously Wookiees take this life debt thing. You need a pilot, anyway.”
For just a second he could see the obvious counter-argument in her eyes: that she was perfectly capable of flying the Falcon herself. But only for a second. “All right,” she sighed. “I guess Khabarakh won’t object to that. But once we reach the rendezvous, Chewie, you do as I tell you, whether you like it or not. Agreed?”
The Wookiee thought about it, rumbled agreement. “Okay,” Leia said, sounding relieved. “Let’s get going, then. Threepio?”
“Yes, Your Highness?” the droid said hesitantly. For once, he’d had the brains to sit quietly at the reception desk and keep his loose change out of the discussion. It was a marked improvement over his usual behavior, Han decided. Maybe he ought to let Chewbacca get angry more often.
“I want you to come with me, too,” Leia told the droid. “Khabarakh spoke Basic well enough, but the other Noghri may not, and I don’t want to have to depend on their translators to make myself understood.”
“Of course, Your Highness,” Threepio said, tilting his head slightly to the side.
“Good.” Leia turned to look up at Han, licked her lips. “I guess we’d better get going.”
There were a million things he could have said to her. A million things he wanted to say. “I guess,” he said instead, “you’d better.”
CHAPTER
5
“You’ll forgive me,” Mara said conversationally as she finished the last bit of wiring on her comm board, “if I say that as a hideout, this place stinks.”
Karrde shrugged as he hefted a sensor pack out of its box and set it down on the side table with an assortment of other equipment. “I agree it’s not Myrkr,” he said. “On the other hand, it has its compensations. Who’d ever think of looking for a smuggler’s nest in the middle of a swamp?”
“I’m not referring to the ship drop,” Mara told him, reaching beneath her loose-flowing tunic sleeve to readjust the tiny blaster sheathed to her left forearm. “I mean this place.”
“Ah. This place.” Karrde glanced out the window. “I don’t know. A little public, perhaps, but that, too, has its compensations.”
“A little public?” Mara echoed, looking out the window herself at the neat row of cream-white buildings barely five meters away and the crowds of brightly clad humans and aliens hurrying along just outside. “You call this a little public?”
“Calm down, Mara,” Karrde said. “When the only viable places to live on a planet are a handful of deep valleys, of course things are going to get a bit crowded. The people here are used to it, and they’ve learned how to give each other a reasonable degree of privacy. Anyway, even if they wanted to snoop, it wouldn’t do them much good.”
“Mirror glass won’t stop a good sensor probe,” Mara countered. “And crowds mean cover for Imperial spies.”
“The Imperials have no idea where we are.” He paused and threw her an odd look. “Unless you know differently.”
Mara turned away. So that was how it was going to be this time. Previous employers had reacted to her strange hunches with fear, or anger, or simple bald-faced hatred. Karrde, apparently, was going to go for polite exploitation. “I can’t turn it on and off like a sensor pack,” she growled over her shoulder. “Not anymore.”
“Ah,” Karrde said. The word implied he understood; the tone indicated otherwise. “Interesting. Is this a remnant of some previous Jedi training?”
She turned to look at him. “Tell me about the ships.”
He frowned. “Excuse me?”
“The ships,” she repeated. “The capital warships that you were very careful not to tell Grand Admiral Thrawn about, back when he visited us on Myrkr. You promised to give me the details later. This is later.”
He studied her, a slight smile creasing his lips. “All right,” he said. “Have you ever heard of the Katana fleet?”
She had to search her memory. “That was the group also called the Dark Force, wasn’t it? Something like two hundred Dreadnaught-class Heavy Cruisers that were lost about ten years before the Clone Wars broke out. All the ships were fitted with some kind of new-style full-rig slave circuitry, and when the system malfunctioned, the whole fleet jumped to lightspeed together and disappeared.”
“Nearly right,” Karrde said. “The Dreadnaughts of that era in particular were ridiculously crew-intensive ships, requiring upwards of sixteen thousand men each. The full-rig slave circuitry on the Katana ships cut that complement down to around two thousand.”
Mara thought about the handful of Dreadnaught cruisers she’d known. “Must have been an expensive conversion.”
“It was,” Karrde nodded. “Particularly since they played it as much for public relations as they did for pure military purposes. They redesigned the entire Dreadnaught interior for the occasion, from the equipment and interior decor right down to the dark gray hull surfacing. That last was the origin of the nickname ‘Dark Force,’ incidentally, though there was some suggestion that it referred to the smaller number of interior lights a two-thousand-crewer ship would need. At any rate, it was the Old Republic’s grand demonstration of how effective a slave-rigged fleet could be.”
Mara snorted. “Some demonstration.”
“Agreed,” Karrde said dryly. “But the problem wasn’t in the slave circuitry itself. The records are a little vague—suppressed by those in charge at the time, no doubt—but it appears that one or more of the fleet’s crewers picked up a hive virus at one of the ports of call on their maiden voyage. It was spread throughout all two hundred ships while in dormant state, which meant that when it suddenly flared up it took down nearly everybody at once.”
Mara shivered. She’d heard of hive viruses leveling whole planetary populations in pre-Clone Wars days, before the medical science of the Old Republic and later the Empire had finally figured out how to deal with the things. “So it killed the crews before they could get to help.”
“Apparently in a matter of hours, though that’s just an educated guess,” Karrde said. “What turned the whole thing from a disaster into a debacle was the fact that this particular hive virus had the charming trait of driving its victims insane just before it killed them. The dying crewers lasted just long enough to slave their ships together … which meant that when the Katana command crew also went crazy and took off, the entire fleet went with them.”
“I remember now,” Mara nodded slowly. “That was supposedly what started the big movement toward decentralization in automated ship functions. Away from big, all-powerful computers into hundreds of droids.”
“The movement was already on its way, but the Katana fiasco pretty well sealed the outcome,” Karrde said. “Anyway, the fleet disappeared somewhere into the depths of interstellar space and was never heard from again. It was a big news item for a while, with some of the less reverent members of the media making snide word-plays on the ‘Dark Force’ name, and for a few years it was considered a hot prospect by salvage teams who had more enthusiasm than good sense. Once it finally dawned on them just how much empty space was available in the galaxy to lose a couple hundred ships in, the flurry of interest ended. At any rate, the Old Republic soon had bigger problems on its hands. Aside from the occasional con artist who’ll try to sell you a map of its location, you never hear about the fleet anymore.”
“Right.” It was, of course, obvious now where Karrde was going with this. “So how did you happen to find it?”
“Purely by accident, I assure you. In fact, it wasn’t until several days afterward that I realized what exactly I’d found. I suspect none of the rest of the crew ever knew at all.”
Karrde’s gaze defocused, his eyes flattening with the memory. “It was just over fifteen years ago,” he said, his voice distant, the thumbs of his intertwined hands rubbing slowly against each other. “I was working as navigator/sensor specialist for a small, independent smuggling group. We’d rather botched a pickup and had had to shoot our way past a pair of Carrack cruisers on our way out. We made it all right, but since I hadn’t had the time to do a complete lightspeed calculation, we dropped back to real-space a half light-year out to recalculate.” His lip twitched. “Imagine our surprise when we discovered a pair of Dreadnaughts waiting directly in our path.”