"So it's either an official mission, or it isn't, and the military and government might be behind it, or they might not," Leia said. "That's very helpful."
"Well, look on the bright side," Han said. "For the moment at least, we have at least one advantage. We know someone's playing games, but they don't know we know."
Chewie had been unusually quiet for a long time. Now he let out a low edgy-sounding bellow.
"I don't know why," Han replied in an irritable voice. "I can make guesses why they did it. Someone in the Corellian Defense Forces wanted to throw a scare into us-and make us trust the CDF."
"If they think we fell for it", Ieia said.
"Well, it's good to have things nice and clear," Han said. "But just for the moment I don't think there's much we can do besides follow these guys in and keep our eyes open. -open, leia said.
Take us in Han Han set to work laying in a course, but then looked up at the PPBs still holding formation. Well, it wouldn't be the first time he had tangled with the heavy hitters in this part of the sky. "Just like old times," he said to Chewie, who replied with a noncommittal yawp. Han nodded.
"You've got that right," he said as he went back to his work. "Welcome to Corellia."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Message Intercepted ara Jade stared at the message cube, wishing she could send it to someone else, or make it cease to exist altogether Or discard it ignore it pretend it had never arrived. But she couldn't. Not under the circum'stances.
Well, no sense staring at the miserable thing. She wouldn't learn anything further by looking at it. In fact, that was the whole point. She sighed, stood up, crossed her cabin, put the cube back in the safe, and sealed the safe's door. She stepped out into the corridor of her ship, the Jade's Fire, turned, and headed toward the sloop's bridge.
Might as well give the orders in person.
Once she had decided what orders to give.
Long years ago, so long ago that it seemed another lifetime, back when there had still been an Empire and an Emperor, Mara Jade had been the Emperor's Hand, doing his bidding on a hundred missions, carrying out his will in secret. She had been his courier, his courtier, his envoy, his assassin, on more occasions than she could count. The Emperor had sensed her power in the Force and made use Iof it. He had commanded her, ruled her, owned her, body and soul.
And then, out of nowhere, had come crashing, headlong, sudden destruction. The Rebellion, the Alliance, had defeated the Empire and killed the Emperor.
Mara had landed on her feet, more or less, working for the smuggler and trader Talon Karede, and keeping her past life as secret as she could. She had never developed any deep or abiding love for the New Republic, to put it mildly, but being able to recognize and accept the reality of a situation was a survival skill. And if there was one thing Mara was good at, it was surviving.
For that matter, she was no slacker when it came to prospering, if current evidence were any sign. She had made a-reasonably-amicable split with Karede sometime ago, and set up in business for herself. It was a different universe out there, one that didn't have quite so much use for smugglers anymore. She established herself as a trader in her own right, running a small, quiet, but highly profitable trading company. Like a number of others who had been active in the wars, she had found the return to civilian life more than a little difficult. It was hard to find much excitement in getting a good price on habbis-root after fighting for the future of the galaxy. Still, she was out in space, the master of her own fate, able to go where she wanted and do what she wanted.
She paused at the sealed hatch leading to the bridge, smoothed her tunic, and set her face into its usual stern expression.
There might be other captains who tried to set their crews at ease, strove for a relaxed atmosphere on the bridge. Not on Mara Jade's ship, thank you very much. Her style of ship management carried over directly from her personal style, which was to say it was more than a little severe.
Mara Jade was a strikingly lovely woman, her pale skin accentuating her high cheekbones. Her red-gold hair ran down her back in a thick, heavy, luxuriant braid. Her body and her graceful movements were more in keeping with those of a professional dancer than a captain.
On the rare occasion when a formal reception or other social event required her to dress in something less utilitarian than her customary one-piece jumpsuit, the effect could be startling. People would take one look at her and instantly assume her to be some carefully bred member of the aristocracy. They expected her to behave with demure refinement.
However, Mara had never been one to let the expectations of others get in her way, and she had never been one for honeyed words either. She could play that part when it suited her, but it rarely did.
What she did best was crack the whip, enforce discipline, command-and earn-respect. Nor would she employ anyone who could not earn her respect. That was the way she handled her ship, and more or less everything else in her life as well. It behooved her, therefore, to appear in front of her crew in a cool, calm, and collected state. Never mind that she was actually more agitated than she had been in a long time.
An Imperial code. The courier had used an Imperial code.
One that had been obsolete years before the first Death Star had become operational, but an Imperial code nonetheless.
What could it mean?
Never mind. One step at a time. Take it one step at a time.
Mara hit the switch and the hatch slid open. She stepped into the bridge of the ship and took her accustomed place at the command station. The navigator, a goggle-eyed Mon Calamari, swiveled one eye toward his captain and then back to his console, but did not otherwise acknowledge her.
The pilot, a human male, looked over at her and gave a solemn nod.
Good. That was the way she liked it. Discipline Mara insisted upon, but she had no use for people jumping around saluting everything that moved.
To be opened in the presence of Leia Organa Solo, self styled Chief of State of the so-called New Republic, Han Solo, and the de facto governor-general of the Corellian Sector, Code Rogue Angel Seven.
The message had been there, in old-style Imperial code, written in neat lettering on the side of the message cube.
Mara had unbuttoned the code almost without thinking, but knowing what the words said told her precious little about what the cube meant.
Clearly the cube was from someone who had no great love for the New Republic, but beyond that it was difficult to comprehend. There was another label on the cube, but the writing on it was in a script Mara did not recognize. By the look of it, the Imperialode label had been slapped on the package quickly, and one edge of it overlapped a corner of the unreadable one. Either the Imperial one had been put on second, in some haste, or else it was meant to look as if it had.
The cube had been aboard a message drone that had intercepted the Jade's Fire a day or two after she arrived in the Talfaglio System, in the hinterlands of the Corellian Sector. Not that the intercept location told her much. The drone had been equipped with lightspeed engines, and could have come from absolutely anywhere.
But no matter where it had come from, Mara could not understand why in space it should follow her. And follow her it had. There was no chance of the Jade's Fire finding the drone by chance. The drone had horned in on the Fire's ID beacon, and the message cube itself had been wrapped up in a package with Mara's name scrawled on it.
But who had sent it? And why? And why had they sent it to Mara? Presumably the reference to "Code Rogue Angel Seven" would mean something to Organa Solo or one of the others, and let them know how to open the cube without destroying its contents. But if it was to be opened in their presence, why send it care of Mara Jade?
And why use the Imperial code? It certainly wasn't there to hide information. Surely the New Republic's people could read it, given a very linle bit of time. Was it there to inspire Mara's Imperial sympathies? Certainty the wording of the coded message was not meant to make anyone
in the New Republic happy. Could there actually be some Imperial remnant still remaining? It seemed utterly implausible. Or was the whole affair some elaborate attempt of her business rivals to tag her as pro-Imperial and ruin her business?
But that was absurd as well. The Empire was as dead as an embalmed corpse. There were no remnants left. There was nothing left to be pro-Imperial about. Besides, even if she had managed to keep the details of who and what she had been in the old days secret, everyone in the business knew that she had worked for the Empire. There were times when that didn't make business any easier, but it was no grand secret. There wasn't much point in trying to wreck her reputation by telling people what they already knew.
So what was it about? Mara knew enough about message cubes to know that she would not be able to find out by any amount of computer slicing. The message on the outside might have been in an easy-to-read code, but she knew that make of message cube, and knew that it would take years of work to slice it-and even then it might go wrong, erasing the contents just as she finally got it open.
No. There was only one way to find out what it was all about. And that decided her. Mara had a lot of personality traits that had stood her in good stead over the years, but plain old-fashioned curiosity was the one she had been least able to indulge. Smugglers and Imperial agents couldn't afford to stick their noses wherever they wanted.
But well-todo traders could, if they had what others wanted. And Mara had the cube. She could trade physical possession of the cube for knowledge of its contents. And there was always profit in knowledge.
"Mr. Tralkpha," she said to her Mon Calamari navigator. "Turn us around, if you please. provide Mr. Nesdin with a direct course for the Corellian System, and let's put speed ahead of fuel economy just this once."
"Very good, Captain," said the taciturn Tralkpha.
"Mr. Nesdin," she said, addressing the pilot. "While Mr. Tralkpha is so engaged please contact our next scheduled stop and advise that we will be delayed by a priority courier mission." If whoever had sent the drone had the sense to monitor transmissions from the Jade's Fire, that would tell them she was taking the bait, delivering the cube.
"Then get us moving to Corellia."
"Yes, ma'am," said Nesdin. No questions, no raised eyebrows, no reminders that they had a schedule to keep.
Just calm, competent obedience to orders. That was the sort of crew she liked.
But something else, a turn of phrase she had just used in her thoughts, was trying to tell her something. What was it? Ah! of course. Taking the bait. Bait was what you put in traps. Was that the plan here? Was someone planning to draw her into an ambush?
Mara Jade smiled to herself, and knew it was not a pleasant expression. Those who wished to entrap Mara Jade were welcome to try. She doubted they would wish to repeat the experiment.
"I'll be in my cabin," she said, standing up. It would be completely useless, of course. But she hadto take another look at that cube.
* * * 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 substantial 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 mid-size 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 problemnot 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 counter intelligence 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 )n. 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. Sh
e 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.
Star Wars - Ambush At Corellia Page 19
