Ambush at Corellia

by Roger MacBride Allen

  * * *

  Lieutenant Belindi Kalenda, long-term operative of New Republic Intelligence and recent shoot-down and shipwreck victim, lay on her stomach on a low hill and watched the sky. She was doing her best to be inconspicuous as she hunkered down on a piece of land just to the east of Coronet Spaceport.

  The gleaming towers and graceful domes of the city were plainly visible in the middle distance, a splendid sight on a clear morning. But Kalenda paid them no mind. The waters of the eastern ocean were there at her back, the whitecaps almost painfully bright against the deep blue of the sea. The sun danced on the water, a shimmering, endlessly changing constellation that flashed and glimmered across the face of the deep. The surf was an endless low roar, and the air was flavored with the salty scent of sunbaked sand and clean ocean.

  But Kalenda had no interest in any such things. She pulled herself in lower against the short rise of land, and wished she could have found something more substantia] to hide under than a threadbare clump of razor grass that drooped down two or three feet over her head. If it had been a more robust sample of the species, it would have sliced her clothes to ribbons if it so much as brushed against her, but she would have gladly traded that for better cover.

  She was wearing a nondescript coverall, taken from a landspeeder garage on the other side of the continent. The landspeeder she had obtained at the same time and by the same means she had abandoned in a ditch just outside Bela Vistal, a midsize town two hundred kilometers from Coronet. With any luck, if anyone had managed to trace her that far, they would think she was headed for Bela Vistal and not the capital.

  It had taken all of her skills as a pickpocket to obtain a sufficient supply of credits to finance her trip the rest of the way, and even then she had been forced to economize.

  Fortunately, she had been waylaid by a gang of rather incompetent bandits shortly after she got off the monorail from Bela Vistal. The results of that encounter were doubly satisfying. Not only did she gain the use of their landspeeder and guns and other gear—none of which they were likely to have much use for in the hereafter—but all of it was quite untraceable.

  Kalenda readjusted the macrobinoculars she had inherited from the bandits for the hundredth time. The contrast enhancers just wouldn’t stay aligned. Well, you couldn’t expect the likes of those thugs to keep their equipment up properly. Not that it mattered. The macrobinoculars were working quite well enough for her present needs. She didn’t need to see well when there was nothing to see. She took another scan of the patch of sky they should have come through already and let out a sigh. There was no need to worry. Not really. They were still only a few hours late.

  A thousand things could have delayed the Millennium Falcon. She could have suffered a mechanical problem—not for the first time, if the stories about that ship were true. Some political dustup could have forced the Chief of State to delay her departure. They could have arrived in the Corellian System exactly on time, but then made a spur-of-the-moment decision to visit Drall or Selonia, or Talus and Tralus before flying to Corellia itself. Or her given schedule could have changed since Kalenda left Coruscant.

  Or the ship carrying the New Republic’s Chief of State could have been violently converted into an expanding cloud of disassociated atomic particles. No matter how much Organa Solo had insisted, they should never have let her go wandering off in a windup toy like the Millennium Falcon. Private family trip or not, the Chief of State shouldn’t have flown on anything smaller than a corvette.

  Too late to worry about that. But if the Falcon turned up missing, there was going to be a galaxy’s worth of trouble to pay, and no mistake. The fact that Corellia would almost certainly be the focal point of the aforementioned trouble was not lost on Kalenda. She was not looking forward to being in the middle of it all. But no sense borrowing trouble from the future when there was so much immediately available. The Corellian Defense Force’s Public Security Service tended to take an understandably dim view of people who staked out spaceports. But since she had to assume that the PSS had been on her tail from the moment she swam ashore, it might simply be a question of who got her first—PSS spaceport perimeter guards, or a PSS counterintelligence team.

  Or maybe, just maybe, things were actually as they seemed, Kalenda told herself. Maybe she had gotten this far completely undetected, and faced no immediate danger worse than getting cut by the razor grass. Well, she could hope for it, but she did not dare let herself believe it. Not in her line of work.

  Come on. Where were they? Kalenda did not know exactly what she would do if they turned up and were all right, or what she would—or could—do if they never turned up at all. She would have to play that part of it by ear. What she did know was that the Chief of State and her family were about to walk into a planet on the verge of chaos. On the surface, all still seemed calm and controlled on Corellia. But Belindi Kalenda had spent the last handful of days hunkered down, struggling to stay out of sight in the dark corners of a foreign culture. She was not the sort of person who could do that without noticing that things were very, very wrong. The proliferation of competing security forces was not a good sign, to put it mildly. The CDF and its offspring, the PSS, seemed to be at loggerheads as often as they cooperated with each other.

  But there were at least three other official security forces stepping on each other’s jurisdictional toes, to say nothing of the various private militias that seemed to be popping up everywhere. The Human League was the biggest, but by no means the only such group. And of course none of the private militias, not even the League, could have survived ten minutes without some sort of sponsorship or support from someone in power somewhere. Kalenda had no doubt whatsoever that the League’s Hidden Leader had lots of friends in high—and low—places. But, more importantly, things were not going well when so many of the higher-ups wanted their own private armies.

  Governor-General Micamberlecto’s Republic-installed government might as well have been in another sector of the galaxy for all the control it had over events. It was quite obvious that it was all but completely disconnected from the day-to-day management of the planet. Graft, corruption, hidebound tradition, and sheer cussedness on the part of the bureaucracy seemed set to prevent any chance of reform.

  And if the capital planet was in this sort of shape, what was the rest of the sector likely to be?

  Worse, the economic situation made the political climate look promising. The cities of Corellia were falling apart. There was no work anywhere, and no prospect of work—hardly helpful for a trade-based economy that had cut itself off from most of the outside universe for half a generation or more. And it was, of course, the economic misery that made the place such a fertile breeding ground for discontent.

  But none of that mattered just now. There was something else. Nothing that Kalenda could put her finger on just yet, but something was about to happen. Something big. She could sense it, feel it, almost taste it. She had never been wrong when she had had such feelings in the past. Who knows, maybe she had some small ability in the Force that let her know when something was up. Whatever it was didn’t matter just now.

  What mattered was that the Chief of State—if she was still alive—was about to wander into the middle of chaos—and Kalenda had to assume that she was the only surviving NRI agent, the only New Republic security force of any kind on the planet. Kalenda knew that the NRI had been planning to insert any number of agents into Corellia. Maybe all of them had gotten through, or maybe none. It was, for obvious reasons, best that she know nothing. That way, there was nothing she could tell either.

  It had crossed her mind that there weren’t really any other NRI coming in, but that her higher-ups had told her there were in order to provide a headache for the opposition in the event that she, Kalenda, was captured. Best not to worry too hard about such things. Life in her line of work was enough of a wilderness of mirrors without her erecting new ones on her own. It was safest to assume she was the only one who had made it.
That left her with the question of what she should do, and that question was easy.

  She had been sent here to gather intelligence, but Kalenda had decided she knew more than enough already. She had to concentrate on keeping the Chief of State alive until the trade summit, when her official entourage—and security team—would arrive.

  But to keep Leia Organa Solo alive, Kalenda would have to keep herself alive as well. That was the tricky part. She had to assume that the CDF or PSS were smart enough not to assume that she had died in the crash, and were on the lookout for her specifically, and for NRI agents generally. Presumably, they would also have the sense to be keeping a watch on Organa Solo’s family, in order to monitor their activities, if nothing else. Whether or not they would interfere if someone else took a potshot at the Chief of State—or whether they would make a try for her themselves—was impossible to say.

  In any event, they would not be likely to welcome an NRI agent popping up in their midst. They might even decide she was a good excuse for a provocation, and grant themselves the license to stir up trouble. All of which meant that Kalenda did not dare make an approach to Organa Solo’s party.

  So all she could do was watch from a distance, try not to get caught herself, and hope that some way to contact them would present itself. Maybe, just maybe, she could even do some good from a distance, though she could not imagine what, just at the moment.

  But for now, all she could do was wait. Wait and watch, and hope they showed up soon.

  * * *

  Long hours later Kalenda was starting to worry in earnest. Night was coming on, and no matter how good infrared systems got, they were never as good as visible light. And the IR system on her purloined macrobinoculars wasn’t that good to start with.

  Over and over again, she would spot spacecraft on approach, feel her heart start to race, zoom in with the macrobinoculars—and spot a craft that looked nothing like the Falcon. She was starting to wonder exactly how she was going to manage overnight surveillance, when one more ship came into view. Kalenda lifted her macrobinoculars to her eyes one more time, expecting to be disappointed again—and suddenly her heart was racing.

  It was not one ship, it was six. There was the Millennium Falcon, quite unmistakable, in the center of the formation, with five Pocket Patrol Boats flying in a standard six-boat escort formation. The aft portside boat wasn’t there. Or maybe it was just hidden from view by the Falcon. Kalenda fumbled a bit with the controls to get a better view. She belatedly thought to hit the record button on the macrobinoculars. She might well want to review this imagery later on. No, the sixth boat was definitely not there.

  Kalenda instantly jumped to a dozen conclusions, and then forced herself to stay focused on what she was seeing. There would be plenty of time for guessing later.

  The Falcon and her escorts swept past the public landing bays, lit their repulsors, and came to a stop in midair over the military part of the field—by chance, the part Kalenda was closest to. Three of the escorts broke formation and landed, each boat at the point of a tidy isosceles triangle, while the two other PPBs remained on station in midair. The Falcon eased downward on her repulsors, coming to a smooth landing at the exact center of the triangle formed by the grounded boats. That was not the way a ceremonial escort acted. Something had happened. But what?

  Kalenda shifted herself about a bit to get a better look at the Falcon, and was rewarded with a rather nasty cut on her forearm from a bit of razor grass she hadn’t noticed before. She cursed absentmindedly and zoomed in as tight as she could on the Falcon. She seemed undamaged, as best Kalenda could tell from rather extreme range. She could see no sign that the modified freighter had been in a recent fight. But she could not know for sure. Maybe she would be able to tell more when they all disembarked. She focused her attention on the ship’s gangway.

  At last it swung down, and she could see the tiny figure of Han Solo and the rather less tiny figure, even at this distance, of Chewbacca the Wookiee, coming down the gangway, each carrying a fair-sized piece of luggage. There was something cautious, even edgy, about their body language, as if they had had one nasty surprise already and were expecting another. Kalenda chided herself anew for reading too much into the situation. Maybe the only thing worrying them was the astronomical fees the spaceport charged.

  Almost before the two of them reached the ground, the three children hurtled down the gangway and onto the surface of Corellia. It was plain to see they were glad not to be cooped up anymore. Then, last of all, came the Chief of State of the New Republic, Leia Organa Solo, carrying a medium-sized bag. Kalenda let out a sigh of relief, feeling tension ebb away that she hadn’t even been aware of. Organa Solo was alive and well. That was the main thing. Now if only Kalenda could make sure Organa Solo stayed that way. She kept watching.

  Han Solo waited until his wife was off the ship, and then punched in the lock controls. The gangway swung shut, and the Falcon switched herself into standby mode. Kalenda watched as an open ground car rolled up.

  Organa Solo stepped away from the ship—and then hesitated a moment. She stopped walking, and frowned, a bit uncertainly. She looked around, apparently scanning the horizon—and then stopped, staring straight at Kalenda. For a terrible moment Kalenda was certain that Organa Solo had spotted her, decided she was a sniper or a terrorist, was going to shout a warning to her family, alert the local security forces. Kalenda wanted to dive for cover, run for it, but she knew better. Staying absolutely still was much more likely to keep her alive. And besides, what were the odds that even a Jedi adept would be able to see—or sense—a single watcher from that sort of range?

  Especially since all that Organa Solo did next was shrug, frown again, and head for the ground car. Kalenda let out a sigh of relief.

  The rest of the party started following Organa Solo toward the groundcar. They all seemed calm enough. Kalenda began to decide that she was wrong, that she had been imagining signs of trouble.

  But then she noticed Solo talking with the Wookiee.

  Or, more accurately, the way he was talking with the Wookiee.

  Kalenda was a pretty fair lip-reader, but she knew better than to trust her skills at this extreme range. Besides, even if she could manage to catch what Solo was saying, there was not the slightest hope of understanding the Wookiee. But it is a truism that throughout history, no pilot has ever talked flying to a colleague without using his hands. There was something very close to a conventional nomenclature and grammar of hand movements used to describe flight and encounters with other craft.

  And Han Solo was, beyond question, using his hands to help describe a spaceside dogfight. He might not be sending Kalenda a message, but she was certainly intercepting one. A most important one.

  Kalenda watched in fascination as Solo’s hands bobbed and weaved through the air, following each other, then breaking off to show two craft—or two sets of craft—on a collision course with each other. He pointed up into the sky, at the PPBs still hovering overhead on point guard, then put his hands together in a ball before pulling them apart with his fingers spread. So. A PPB had blown up. The Wookiee was shaking his head no, disagreeing on some point, making his own gestures.

  Then Organa Solo managed to round up the last of the children. Solo and the Wookiee stopped their conversation, plainly not wishing the children to hear. Organa Solo got the kids onto the ground car, and signaled the driver to start moving.

  The ground car pulled away, and Kalenda scrambled to her feet, nearly beheading herself on the stand of razor grass before she remembered and ducked. If she was to have any chance of following them, she was going to have to get back to her own landspeeder on the double and position herself on the road leading out of the spaceport, where she could pick them up as they headed into town. It would be a hell of a note if she had managed to spot them there and then lost them. She scrambled back toward her landspeeder, feeling more worried than ever.

  Someone had already made a try for the Chief of State.
She was in no doubt about that. Things were going to blow. Things were going to blow on this planet, and the Chief of State of the New Republic was going to be standing right at ground zero when they did.

  And there was not a bloody thing Belindi Kalenda could do about it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Learning Curve

  Lando Calrissian stepped out of the hatch of the Lady Luck onto the surface of the planet Azbrian feeling a lot less cocky than he had back on Leria Kerlsil. The encounter with the life-witch had done a first-rate job of focusing his attention on the number of things that could go wrong with his marriage scheme. Luke was right behind him, and this time both of them were carrying comlinks, and the droids were not locked up on the ship. Lando knew how lucky he had been on Leria Kerlsil. He had no desire to push his luck a second time.

  He stepped out of the ship and looked around. The Lady Luck sat in the middle of a gently sloping pasture of some sort. There was a herd of placid-looking black-and-white, eight-legged beasts a few hundred meters away. They were munching on the low, bushy green plants that filled the field, and every now and then one of them would raise its head and make a long, low thrumming noise for no apparent reason. A fence separated them from the field in which the Lady stood, and though they did not look like the sort of creatures made for jumping or attacking, none of that fooled Lando. The way his luck was going, they would all leap over the fence and savagely attack Luke and him in the next moment.

  Hold it, Lando told himself as he picked his way through the bushy ankle-high plants. Get a grip. It wasn’t that bad. It couldn’t be.

  “Hey, Lando, snap out of it!”

  Lando turned and looked back toward Luke. “What is it?” he asked.

  Luke nodded in the direction of the farmhouse at the bottom of the gentle hillside. “Here comes the reception committee.”

  “Oh, boy,” Lando said, forcing a smile onto his face. “All right, here we go.” He waved toward the two white-clad figures coming toward them, and headed downhill toward them. A young man and a young woman. “Hello!” he called out.