Or so it seemed to him. On the other hand, showing that he could get the head of the New Republic to give him personal attention could as easily be seen instead as a sign of strength and solidarity.
Luke shook his head in mild frustration. It was, he supposed, a generally useful trait for a Jedi to be able to see both sides of an argument. It did, however, make the machinations of politics seem even murkier than they already were. Another good reason why he’d always tried to leave politics to Leia.
He could only hope that she’d be equal to this particular challenge.
The medical wing was as crowded as the rest of the huge Sluis Van Central space station, but here at least a large percentage of the inhabitants were sitting or lying quietly off to the side instead of running around. Threading his way between the chairs and parked float gurneys, Luke reached the large ward room that had been turned into a waiting area for low-priority patients. Lando Calrissian, his expression and sense hovering somewhere between impatience and boredom, was sitting off in the far corner, holding a medpack desensitizer against his chest with one hand while balancing a borrowed data pad with the other. He was scowling at the latter as Luke came up. “Bad news?” Luke asked.
“No worse than everything else that’s happened to me lately,” Lando said, dropping the data pad onto the empty chair beside him. “The price of hfredium has dropped again on the general market. If it doesn’t come up a little in the next month or two, I’m going to be out a few hundred thousand.”
“Ouch,” Luke agreed. “That’s the main product of your Nomad City complex, isn’t it?”
“One of several main products, yes,” Lando said with a grimace. “We’re diversified enough that normally it wouldn’t hurt us much. The problem is that lately I’ve been stockpiling the stuff, expecting the price to go up. Now it’s done just the opposite.”
Luke suppressed a smile. That was Lando, all right. Respectable and legitimate though he might have become, he was still not above dabbling in a little manipulative gambling on the side. “Well, if it helps any, I’ve got some good news for you. Since all the ships that the Imperials tried to steal belonged directly to the New Republic, we won’t have to go through the local Sluissi bureaucracy to get your mole miners back. It’ll just be a matter of submitting a proper claim to the Republic military commander and hauling them out of here.”
The lines in Lando’s face eased a little. “That’s great, Luke,” he said. “I really appreciate it—you have no idea what I had to go through to get hold of those mole miners in the first place. Finding replacements would be a major headache.”
Luke waved the thanks away. “Under the circumstances, it was the least we could do. Let me go over to the routing station, see if I can hurry things up a little for you. Are you finished with the data pad?”
“Sure, take it back. Anything new on your X-wing?”
“Not really,” Luke said, reaching past him to pick up the data pad. “They’re still saying it’ll take another few hours at least to—”
He caught the abrupt change in Lando’s sense a second before the other’s hand suddenly snaked up to grip his arm. “What is it?” Luke asked.
Lando was staring at nothing, his forehead furrowed with concentration as he sniffed the air. “Where were you just now?” he demanded.
“I went through the reception area to one of the public comm desks,” Luke said. Lando wasn’t just Sniffing the air, he realized suddenly: he was sniffing at Luke’s sleeve. “Why?”
Lando let Luke’s arm drop. “It’s carababba tabac,” he said slowly. “With some armudu spice mixed in. I haven’t smelled that since …” He looked up at Luke, his sense abruptly tightening even further. “It’s Niles Ferrier. Has to be.”
“Who’s Niles Ferrier?” Luke asked, feeling his heartbeat start to pick up speed. Lando’s uneasiness was contagious.
“Human—big and built sort of thick,” Lando said. “Dark hair, probably a beard, though that comes and goes. Probably smoking a long thin cigarra. No, of course he was smoking—you got some of the smoke on you. Do you remember seeing him?”
“Hang on.” Luke closed his eyes, reaching inward with the Force. Short-term memory enhancement was one of the Jedi skills he’d learned from Yoda. The pictures flowed swiftly backward in time: his walk to the medical wing, his conversation with Wedge, his hunt for a public comm desk—
And there he was. Exactly as Lando had described him, passing no more than three meters away. “Got him,” he told Lando, freezing the picture in his memory.
“Where’s he going?”
“Uh …” Luke replayed the memory forward again. The man wandered in and out of his field of vision for a minute, eventually disappearing entirely as Luke found the comm desks he’d been hunting for. “Looks like he and a couple of others were heading for Corridor Six.”
Lando had punched up a station schematic on the data pad. “Corridor Six … blast.” He stood up, dropping both the data pad and the desensitizer onto his chair. “Come on, we’d better go check this out.”
“Check what out?” Luke asked, taking a long step to catch up as Lando hurried off through the maze of waiting patients to the door. “Who is this Niles Ferrier, anyway?”
“He’s one of the best spaceship thieves in the galaxy,” Lando threw over his shoulder. “And Corridor Six leads to one of the staging areas for the repair teams. We’d better get out there before he palms a Corellian gunship or something and flies off with it.”
They made their way through the reception area and under the archway labeled “Corridor Six” in both delicate Sluissi carioglyphs and the blockier Basic letters. Here, to Luke’s surprise, the crowds of people that seemed to be everywhere else had dropped off to barely a trickle. By the time they’d gone a hundred meters along the corridor, he and Lando were alone.
“You did say this was one of the repair staging areas, didn’t you?” he asked, reaching out with Jedi senses as they walked. The lights and equipment in the offices and workrooms around them seemed to be functioning properly, and he could sense a handful of droids moving busily about their business. But apart from that the place seemed to be deserted.
“Yes, I did,” Lando said grimly. “The schematic said Corridors Five and Three are also being used, but there ought to be enough traffic to keep this one busy, too. I don’t suppose you have a spare blaster on you?”
Luke shook his head. “I don’t carry a blaster anymore. Do you think we should call station security?”
“Not if we want to find out what Ferrier’s up to. He’ll be all through the station computer and comm system by now—call security and he’ll just pull out and disappear back under a rock somewhere.” He peered into one of the open office doorways as they passed it. “This is vintage Ferrier, all right. One of his favorite tricks is to fiddle work orders to route everyone out of the area he wants to—”
“Hold it,” Luke cut him off. At the edge of his mind … “I think I’ve got them. Six humans and two aliens, the nearest about two hundred meters straight ahead.”
“What land of aliens?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never run into either species before.”
“Well, watch them. Aliens in Ferrier’s gang are usually hired for their muscle. Let’s go.”
“Maybe you should stay here,” Luke suggested, unhooking his lightsaber from his belt. “I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to protect you if they decide to make a fight of it.”
“I’ll take my chances,” Lando told him. “Ferrier knows me; maybe I can keep it from coming down to a fight. Besides, I’ve got an idea I want to try.”
They were just under twenty meters from the first human when Luke caught the change in sense from the group ahead. “They’ve spotted us,” he murmured to Lando, shifting his grip slightly on his lightsaber. “You want to try talking to them?”
“I don’t know,” Lando murmured back, craning his neck to look down the seemingly deserted corridor ahead. “We might need to get a little closer—”
It came as a flicker of movement from one of the doorways, and an abrupt ripple in the Force. “Duck!” Luke barked, igniting his lightsaber. With a snap-hiss the brilliant green-white blade appeared—
And moved almost of its own accord to neatly block the blaster bolt that shot toward them.
“Get behind me!” Luke ordered Lando as a second bolt sizzled the air toward them. Guided by the Force, his hands again shifted the lightsaber blade into the path of the attack. A third bolt spattered from the blade, followed by a fourth. From a doorway farther down the corridor a second blaster opened up, adding its voice to the first.