“Would you rather they have gotten hold of a Calamarian Star Cruiser?” Lando countered. “Ferrier’s probably good enough to have palmed one. Certainly with things as confused out there as they are.” He shook his head thoughtfully. “I wonder what’s going on over in the Empire. It doesn’t make sense to pay premium prices for used ships when you’ve got the facilities to make your own.”
“Maybe they’re having some trouble,” Luke suggested, closing down the lightsaber and returning it to his belt. “Or maybe they’ve lost one of their Star Destroyers but managed to save the crew and need ships to put them on.”
“I suppose that’s possible,” Lando conceded doubtfully. “Hard to imagine an accident that would destroy any ship beyond repair but leave the crew alive. Well, we can get the word back to Coruscant. Let the Intelligence hot-shots figure out what it means.”
“If they’re not all too busy playing politics,” Luke said. Because if Councilor Fey’lya’s group was also trying to take over Military Intelligence … He shook the thought away. Worrying about the situation wasn’t productive. “So what now? We give Ferrier his hour and then hand those slicer codes over to the Sluissi?”
“Oh, we’ll give Ferrier his hour, all right,” Lando said, frowning thoughtfully at the departing group. “But the slicer codes are another matter. It occurred to me on the way in that if Ferrier was using them to divert workers from this end of the station, there’s no particular reason why we can’t also use them to bump your X-wing to the top of the priority stack.”
“Ah,” Luke said. It was, he knew, not exactly the sort of marginally legal activity a Jedi should participate in. But under the circumstances—and given the urgency of the situation back on Coruscant—bending some rules in this case was probably justified. “When do we get started?”
“Right now,” Lando said, and Luke couldn’t help wincing at the quiet relief in the other’s voice and sense. Clearly, he’d been half afraid that Luke would raise those same awkward ethical questions about the suggestion. “With any luck, you’ll be up and ready to fly before I have to give these things to the Sluissi. Come on, let’s go find a terminal.”
CHAPTER
3
“Landing request acknowledged and confirmed, Millennium Falcon,” the voice of the Imperial Palace air control director came over the comm. “You’re cleared for pad eight. Councilor Organa Solo will meet you.”
“Thanks, Control,” Han Solo said, easing the ship down toward the Imperial City and eyeing with distaste the dark cloud cover that hung over the whole region like some brooding menace. He’d never put much stock in omens, but those clouds sure didn’t help his mood any.
And speaking of bad moods … Reaching over, he tapped the ship’s intercom switch. “Get ready for landing,” he called. “We’re coming into our approach.”
“Thank you, Captain Solo,” C-3PO’s stiffly precise voice came back. A little stiffer than usual, actually; the droid must still be nursing a wounded ego. Or whatever it was that passed for ego in droids.
Han shut off the intercom, lip twisting with some annoyance of his own as he did so. He’d never really liked droids much. He’d used them occasionally, but never more than he’d absolutely had to. Threepio wasn’t as bad as some of those he’d known … but then, he’d never spent six days alone in hyperspace with any of the others, either.
He’d tried. He really had, if for no other reason than that Leia rather liked Threepio and would have wanted them to get along. The first day out from Sluis Van he’d let Threepio sit up front in the cockpit with him, enduring the droid’s prissy voice and trying valiantly to hold something resembling a real conversation with him. The second day, he’d let Threepio do most of the talking, and had spent a lot of his time working in maintenance crawlways where there wasn’t room for two. Threepio had accepted the limitation with typical mechanical cheerfulness, and had chattered at him from outside the crawlway access hatches.
By the afternoon of the third day, he’d banned the droid from his presence entirely.
Leia wouldn’t like it when she found out. But she’d have liked it even less if he’d given in to his original temptation and converted the droid into a set of backup alluvial dampers.
The Falcon was through the cloud layer now and in sight of the monstrosity that was the Emperor’s old palace. Banking slightly, Han confirmed that pad eight was clear and brought them down.
Leia must have been waiting just inside the canopy that shrouded the pad’s accessway, because she was already beside the ship as Han lowered the Falcon’s ramp. “Han,” she said, her voice laced with tension. “Thank the Force you’re back.”
“Hi, sweetheart,” he said, being careful not to press too hard against the increasingly prominent bulge of her belly as he hugged her. The muscles in her shoulders and back felt tight beneath his arms. “I’m glad to see you, too.”
She clutched him to her for a moment, then gently disengaged. “Come on—we’ve got to go.”
Chewbacca was waiting for them just inside the accessway, his bowcaster slung over his shoulder in ready position. “Hey, Chewie,” Han nodded, getting a growled Wookiee greeting in return. “Thanks for taking care of Leia.”
The other rumbled something strangely noncommittal in reply. Han eyed him, decided this wasn’t the time to press for details of their stay on Kashyyyk. “What’ve I missed?” he asked Leia instead.
“Not much,” she said as she led the way down the ramp corridor and into the Palace proper. “After that first big flurry of accusations, Fey’lya’s apparently decided to cool things down. He’s talked the Council into letting him take over some of Ackbar’s internal security duties, but he’s been behaving more like a caretaker than a new administrator. He’s also hinted broadly that he’d be available to take charge of the Supreme Command, but he hasn’t done any real pushing in that direction.”
“Doesn’t want anyone to panic,” Han suggested. “Accusing someone like Ackbar of treason is a big enough bite for people to chew on as it is. Anything more and they might start choking on it.”
“That’s my feeling, too,” Leia agreed. “Which should give us at least a little breathing space to try and figure out this bank thing.”
“Yeah, what’s the lowdown on that, anyway?” Han asked. “All you told me was that some routine bank check had found a big chunk of money in one of Ackbar’s accounts.”
“It turns out it wasn’t just a routine check,” Leia said. “There was a sophisticated electronic break-in at the central clearing bank on Coruscant the morning of the Sluis Van attack, with several big accounts being hit. The investigators ran a check on all the accounts the bank served and discovered that there’d been a large transfer into Ackbar’s account that same morning from the central bank on Palanhi. You familiar with Palanhi?”
“Everybody knows Palanhi,” Han said sourly. “Little crossroads planet with an overblown idea of their own importance.”
“And the firm belief that if they can stay neutral enough they can play both sides of the war to their own profit,” Leia said. “Anyway, the central bank there claims that the money didn’t come from Palanhi itself and must have just been transferred through them. So far our people haven’t been able to backtrack it any further.”
Han nodded. “I’ll bet Fey’lya’s got some ideas where it came from.”
“The ideas aren’t unique to him,” Leia sighed. “He was just the first one to voice them, that’s all.”
“And to make himself a few points at Ackbar’s expense,” Han growled. “Where’ve they put Ackbar, anyway? The old prison section?”
Leia shook her head. “He’s under a sort of loose house arrest in his quarters while the investigation is under way. More evidence that Fey’lya’s trying not to ruffle any more feathers than he has to.”
“Or else that he knows full well there isn’t enough here to hang a stunted Jawa from,” Han countered. “Has he got anything on Ackbar besides the bank thing?”
Leia smiled wanly. “Just the near-fiasco at Sluis Van. And the fact that it was Ackbar who sent all those warships out there in the first place.”
“Point,” Han conceded, trying to recall the old Rebel Alliance regulations on military prisoners. If he remembered correctly, an officer under house arrest could receive visitors without those visitors first having to go through more than minor amounts of bureaucratic datawork.
Though he could easily be wrong about that. They’d made him learn all that stuff back when he’d first let them slap an officer’s rank on him after the Battle of Yavin. But regulations were never something he’d taken seriously. “How much of the Council does Fey’lya have on his side?” he asked Leia.
“If you mean solidly on his side, only a couple,” she said. “If you mean leaning in his direction … well, you’ll be able to judge for yourself in a minute.”