Exile Page 8

  “But you look magnificent,” Leia said.

  “Oh, I know that. Not even the wig could downgrade me to ‘just startlingly handsome.’ ” Shrugging, Lando swung the display screen completely out of the way. He affixed Han with a stern stare. “Navigator, our heading?”

  Han returned his glare. He’d had to go to a greater extreme to disguise himself. Without a beard, he looked like Han Solo; with one, he looked like his cousin, Thrackan Sal-Solo, the late Corellian President. So more significant efforts were called for. He’d sprayed all exposed areas of skin with a cosmetics compound that turned him a yellowish hue, and the spiky black halves of his false mustache, had they continued up to his nose, would have made a perfect chevron. “Same as it was five minutes ago, Captain,” he said. “Straight toward Corellia. Straight from Coruscant. Along the most heavily patrolled corridor through the exclusion zone.”

  “Good, good.” Lando nodded benignly. “I’m glad you haven’t managed to foul up in five minutes.”

  Han flexed his shoulder experimentally. He was recovered enough not to need the sling at most times, but still not in shape to handle piloting in extreme situations. “When I’m better, I’m going to throttle you.”

  “Good, good.”

  Leia smiled and turned back to her control board. She was the least dramatic looking of the three. Dressed in a dumpy brown jumpsuit padded here and there to make her less visually interesting to male observers, wearing makeup that diminished her beauty rather than enhancing it, her hair in a nondescript style and tucked up into her cap, she was unexceptional in every way.

  Then, as her attention fell on the sensor screen, her eyes brightened. “We have an incoming blip. No telemetry yet, except that it’s bigger than a starfighter, smaller than a capital ship.”

  “Good, good.”

  “Stop saying that,” Han muttered.

  “Here we go.” Leia patched the comm board through the overhead speakers.

  “Incoming craft, this is Spinnerfish, Galactic Alliance Second Fleet. Cut your sublight engines and identify yourself immediately.” The voice was male, curt, an alto trying to force itself into the range of a baritone.

  At Lando’s nod, Leia killed the ion thrusters. Lando swung out his display screen again and activated it.

  Before him was the image of a young man, crisply attired in an Alliance Fleet lieutenant’s uniform. He was cleanshaven, his face angular, his manner stern, official. Behind him were cockpit chairs arranged in a configuration Lando recognized. Armed shuttle, he told himself. Don’t we rate at least a corvette?

  But he put on his friendliest smile and modulated his voice into its richest tones. “Hello! I’m Bescat Offdurmin, master of the private yacht Looooove Commander. What’s a spinnerfish?”

  The lieutenant opened his mouth as if to answer, looked confused for just a fraction of a second, and thought better about responding. “Love Commander, you are entering restricted space. You have to turn around and depart the Corellian system.”

  “Oh, no, son, I’m here for at least a month. I’m here to gamble.”

  “Gamble—sir, what’s your planet of origin?”

  “That would be Coruscant.”

  “Then you have to be aware that the Galactic Alliance and the Corellian system are currently in a state of war.”

  “You don’t say. What has that got to do with gambling?”

  “It means you can’t visit.”

  “Son, I don’t see that gambling has anything to do with anything. My gambling in Corellia won’t alter the course of the war one millimeter. I mean, it’s not as though I had a bunch of smuggling compartments filled with bacta or offers of aid from Commenor, is it?”

  The lieutenant’s mouth worked for a moment. Then he said, “Love Commander, prepare to be boarded and inspected.”

  Lando smiled agreeably. “Now, that’s the kind of thing I like to hear. Decisiveness. Crew, activate the top air lock and prepare to be boarded.”

  The lieutenant and two security officers came aboard. Han took the security men on a tour of the yacht while the lieutenant came to the control cabin, his datapad in hand and questions on his mind. He sat in the navigator’s seat while Leia pretended to ignore him.

  “Captain Offdurmin, do you know what the penalties are for offering aid and comfort to the enemy in a time of war?”

  “I imagine they’re pretty harsh,” Lando said. “Good thing we’re not doing that.”

  “Good thing we’re not doing that,” Leia quietly echoed, making a small gesture with two outstretched fingers.

  “So it’s a good thing you’re not doing that,” the lieutenant said. He checked an item off on his datapad.

  “No,” Lando continued, “what we’re actually doing is something else. Something vital to the Alliance’s war effort.”

  “Vital,” Leia said.

  The lieutenant nodded, earnest, interested. “Vital.”

  “So we have to get to Corellia.”

  “So we have to get to Corellia.”

  “Well, you obviously have to get to Corellia, then.”

  Lando shrugged. “But how?”

  The lieutenant thought about it. “Well, it’s a pity you don’t have any of the access codes provided by Intelligence. That would allow you to fly right in.”

  “Oh, that would be handy.” Lando fixed the lieutenant with what he hoped was an honest look. “Do you have a lot of those recorded on your shuttle, son?”

  The lieutenant laughed. “I can’t tell you, sir.”

  “Of course you can,” Leia said.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Why don’t you just give us one, then?”

  “Why don’t you just give us one, then?”

  The lieutenant nodded. “That would solve everyone’s problem, wouldn’t it?”

  Lando smiled. “It sure would.”

  The lieutenant rose. “I can’t just transmit that sort of information. I’ll go download it from our bridge computer and give you a datachip. How does that sound?”

  “Sounds wonderful.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  When he was gone, Lando looked at Leia. “That wasn’t really fair, was it?”

  She shook her head, smiling. “He was even more weak-minded than I’m used to. I don’t think he’s going to progress far in the service. But I still prefer this sort of thing to cutting people’s arms off.”

  “And what’s your plan for when we’re past the Alliance blockade and dropping down into Corellia’s atmosphere, with starfighters coming up to blast us out of the sky?”

  “Well, we can either transmit who we really are and that we want to see Dur Gejjen, which will either get us an audience or get us assassinated. Or we can try the Jedi mind tricks again, but it’ll be harder to cover up because lots of planetary sensor sites will have picked up our presence. Or we can orbit until we detect a distraction and try to go to ground near that spot, using it for cover.”

  Lando dithered for a few seconds. “I say Number Three. And we can resort to Number One if it starts to go bad on us.”

  Leia smiled. “You always did like to have a skifter in reserve.”

  chapter seven

  STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL

  Today it was to be makeup—good old-fashioned powders and pigments and pseudo-skin appliances. Lumiya sat before a brightly lit mirror and got to work.

  It was painful, of course. Not long ago, Luke Skywalker had shot her five times with a blaster. Two of those shots had hit prosthetic limbs, with simulated pain that could be switched off instantly and damage that could be repaired within minutes. But three of those shots had found meat, and despite the fact that she healed at an unnaturally high rate—both from Force-based healing trances and from the alterations made to her body decades earlier by the science of Emperor Palpatine—she was far from recovered. She hurt.

  And that was why it was to be makeup today. When trying merely to hide her scarred features, she normally wore an identity-
concealing scarf wrapped around her lower face; she could bring up the Force illusion of normal features if obliged to reveal herself. But distracted as she now was by injuries, her control might slip, allowing viewers a glimpse of the real features beneath.

  Properly applied pseudo-skin didn’t slip.

  Paint-on pseudo-skin eliminated the web of age lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. Little pads affixed to the insides of her cheeks gave her face a rounder appearance. A dot of fluid that caused flesh to contract or even wither convincingly provided her with dimples. Pseudo-skin appliances covered her scars and gave her jaw a softer, less angular line. An application of foundation smoothed out all discrepancies of texture or tone … and on top of that she added blush, a striking red lip color, eyeliner. She donned the wig at the end, covering her graying red hair with a tumbling mass of long golden curls.

  When she was done, she appeared to be a woman of thirty, roughly half her true age, and to possess the beauty and many of the racial stock characteristics of a woman of the Hapes Consortium.

  She drew on the Force to dull her pain while she rose and dressed in a green gown and matching neck scarf, both overlaid with a webwork of gold thread, and altogether too much sapphire jewelry, all appropriate to a wealthy Hapan woman.

  It was important to dull the pain. If she hurt too much, she’d perspire, and her makeup would be undone.

  Dressed, she looked at herself in the mirror again, ensuring that the makeup had endured. “The decorator is through with my Battle Dragon,” she said. A mnemonic, the phrase allowed her to recapture the Hapan accent quickly. “The decorator is through with my Battle Dragon.”

  Ready and confident, she gave herself a nod and then marched into the next room.

  It was a hemispherical holocomm chamber. The central area, essentially a studio-quality stage, was surrounded by a ring of holocams that together would sample a three-dimensional image. Carefully programmed and adjusted for depth of field, they would only record images from that central area; they could not read objects farther away. That meant there was a safe zone around the central area, a ring where observers could stand and not be captured by the holocams. The walls were covered to a height of three meters by the broadcasting equipment, which transmitted via hyperspace, allowing instantaneous communications with targets half a galaxy away.

  Lumiya’s servant-droids had set up the central area with a chair that plausibly looked like a marble throne—Lumiya knew it to be foamplas covered in a beautiful mottled green-and-white veneer—and a matching side table. On the table was a bowl of peeled oversized grapes.

  She sat carefully on the throne and sampled one of the grapes. It was gummy, nasty—not a true grape at all, but a candy-like material produced by an ancient food fabricator that had been new when this station was built. She smiled as though the grape were the best she’d ever tasted, and the pang of pain from her stomach wound would only add to an observer’s impression that it was delightful.

  The chrono above the main comm board counted down the last few seconds remaining to her. As it neared zero, she said, “Contact three three nine.”

  Lights above the holocams flared up, bathing her in brightness, and the holocomm unit activated with a surge of noise resembling the engine start-up sound of a well-tuned high-performance speeder.

  The disembodied voice of the system computer, male and pleasant, said “Contact.” A moment later it added, “The target system is acknowledging. They are receiving.” The computer’s voice would be electronically scrubbed from the audio signal being sent.

  No return hologram appeared before Lumiya. The target was receiving but not yet responding. Lumiya ignored the fact, presenting an appearance of unconcern while devoting herself to the bowl of repulsive grapes.

  After nearly thirty seconds, a hologram materialized before her—the image of a Bothan male, his fur mostly black with patches of tan, including one patch surrounding his eyes that gave him the appearance of a mask wearer being broadcast in negative. He wore informal attire: gray pants and a matching loose tunic that bared much of the fur of his chest and neck. “Who are you, and how did you get this frequency and access code?”

  Lumiya finished her grape before turning her attention to the hologram. “I am a humble daughter of a noble house, and I obtained these things by paying a fortune to the correct people. And you are Tathak K’roylan, deputy intelligence leader for the esteemed world of Bothawui.”

  Esteemed was perhaps too strong a word, but it was true that there was a certain amount of respect between the Hapans and Bothans. They did not have much contact, but each recognized in the other a mastery of political maneuvering, manipulation, and conspiracy.

  K’roylan didn’t bother to insist on her name. She hadn’t offered it when asked; she wouldn’t volunteer it. “So,” he said, “you have my attention. Briefly.”

  Lumiya smiled. “I will say things. You do not have to confirm or deny them. Then I will give you my frequency and access code. After this message ends, I suspect you will speak with your superiors and then, eventually, initiate a return communication.”

  “Go ahead.” K’roylan was professionally civil. Even if he was outraged by this intrusion into his personal time and by the fact that his security had been at least partially compromised, it wasn’t smart to insult someone who could reach him this way … and it always helped to have very wealthy contacts.

  “The Bothans are preparing three fleets for an assault on Galactic Alliance forces,” Lumiya said. “A just response to what you have suffered at their hands, including a series of assassinations of key Bothan personnel on Coruscant. But your planners are impeded because it will be impossible to launch the fleets from the Bothawui system and other origin points without being detected, and probably shadowed, by Galactic Alliance forces. This eliminates your ability to perform surprise attacks.”

  The Bothan shrugged, looking at her as though he hadn’t recognized a single term she’d used.

  “So,” she continued, “I am communicating to inform you that I can blind the GA observers and give you an opportunity of, oh, ten to twenty standard hours in which to deploy your forces without being detected. Of course, to do this, I would have to have information sources planted deep within the GA government, and I do. I shall prove this by providing you with some information. Free, useful information.” She modulated her voice, making it lower, more sultry. “Favvio, transmit the package.”

  The computer’s voice responded, “At once, Mistress.”

  “The files now coming up on your displays,” Lumiya continued, “are from the internal records of the Galactic Alliance Guard. They include details on the assassinations I mentioned a moment ago. By details, I mean details that the holonews services never had. Exact times, places, and methods of assassination. Personal items the victims were carrying. What the victims were doing before they were killed, including recordings of their conversations and transmissions. Things that only the killers and their superiors could possess.”

  The fur rippled on K’roylan’s snout, just for a moment. It could have been nothing more than an itch. Lumiya admired his self-control. As cold-blooded as the Bothans could be about such matters, K’roylan could well have lost friends to this spree of assassination, and probably had.

  “Irrespective of your earlier statements about imagined Bothan military activity,” he said, “if these files turn out to be accurate, you will earn our thanks. They will be most useful when we prosecute the killer or killers.”

  “You are welcome.” Lumiya gave him a nod, pure Hapan condescension. “Now I will go about other duties. The last file transmitted has information on how and when to reach me … should you need to.”

  The Bothan opened his mouth to reply, but his hologram suddenly disappeared—Lumiya’s computer, primed to end the transmission when she made a specific statement, had done so.

  Lumiya sagged in her chair. Her upright posture had put pressure on her abdomen, and it had been a drain through th
e second half of the conversation to keep the pain at bay. Now she could assume a more comfortable pose and concentrate on managing it.

  But she didn’t have forever. The Bothans would check out her files, which would be verified. After all, she’d killed or arranged for the deaths of most of those Bothans—the details she had about those murders were accurate.

  And the Bothans would accept her further help. They had to.

  Now it was time to offer Jacen a little aid. “Transmit the Syo package to Coruscant and to Jacen,” she said.

  “At once, Mistress.”

  ELMAS PRIVATE SPACEPORT, CORONET, CORELLIA LOUNGE OF THE LOVE COMMANDER

  The insertion onto Corellia had not been as difficult a task as Leia and the others had feared.

  They’d maintained a high orbit near a cluster of Alliance vessels, nervously waiting for their intelligence authorization to be revealed as a fake, until they had detected a small task force forming up. It consisted of a sensor-heavy shuttle, several starfighters, and a couple of bombers—obviously intended to make one or more reconnaissance passes over the planet’s surface. Playing on their intelligence authorization, Han had commed in, requesting permission to accompany the task force down into the atmosphere.

  “Sure,” had come the mission commander’s reply. “But if you get blown up, you can’t expect us to come back and pick up the pieces.”

  So they had flown down at the tail end of the task force, had waited until a squadron of Corellian TIE fighters had fallen on the force, and had broken away, using terrain-following flying—as terrifying with Leia at the controls as it would have been with Han doing the honors—until they were well clear of the engagement zone and pursuit.

  Now, hours later, they waited in a hangar that cost a fortune to rent but came with the scant protection offered by one smuggler when renting to another. Han’s old contacts continued to pay off—so long as Lando was willing to pay out.