Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [31]
“… personally,” Leia concluded.
The admiral gave her a closer look. “And professionally? Politically?”
“Professionally, I favor the harshest possible resistance to the Yuuzhan Vong.”
“Really.” The admiral suddenly did not look as forbidding. “I have no talent for deception, so I’ll ask straight out. What would it take to persuade you to lend me your support in this campaign? To help swing the population’s vote toward defense and away from appeasement?”
That was, in fact, exactly what Han and Leia had come to offer—a present of public support from the famous Solos.
Leia opened her mouth to make that statement, but Han cut her off. “That’s what I’d like to ask you. What would it take? What do you have?”
The admiral smiled. It was the expression of an experienced bantha trader. “Are you looking for weapons? Vehicles? I suspect that Borleias is already far better supplied than I am.”
“We’re looking for surprises,” Han said. “The Vong are going to hit us like an asteroid bombardment. Ultimately they’re going to take Borleias and then begin swarming out in all directions again. What can you give us to make their conquest of Borleias worse for them? What can you give us that they won’t expect?”
Leia kept her mouth shut. She gave Han a sidelong look. He expected it to be an angry one, but he was wrong; she was curious, evaluating.
“How are the Yuuzhan Vong fixed for naval warfare?” the admiral asked.
Han frowned. “Space navy?”
“Water navy.”
“Umm, I know they have some aquatic creatures—transports. And creatures that allow someone to breathe underwater. But we haven’t been faced with any significant water-based assaults.”
“Meaning they might not have any, or they might still have them in reserve.” The admiral leaned back. She rested her elbows on the arms of her padded chair, placing her fingertips together before her as if to suggest a sharply sloped roof. “I’ve spent the better part of my military career upgrading our armed forces to deal with external threats rather than internal ones. Meaning that I have access to a large number of water navy vessels, surface and submersible, most of them currently decommissioned and crewed by droids. They’re antiques … but an antique exploding shell can still kill an enemy if it’s placed correctly. I could give you several submersibles, large ones for oceans and small ones for rivers, if you can bring me a transport to carry them. And then you’d have weapons, however unlikely, that the Yuuzhan Vong have not encountered on Borleias.”
“Are they fully armed and operational?” Leia asked.
“Fully armed and operational.”
“How many?”
“I can give you two of the larger submersibles, about the size of Carrack cruisers, and four smaller units suited to river traffic.”
“Make it four and four and you have a deal,” Han said.
The admiral’s bantha-trader grin widened. “What deal? You haven’t offered anything specific.”
“We’re offering a guarantee,” Leia said. “We guarantee that you win the election. You’ll see the vote turn your way, and you’ll be able to see our hand in the turnaround.”
“Done,” the admiral said. “The day after I’m installed in the office of the Presider, you receive your eight submersibles.” She extended her hand, and Leia and Han took it in turn.
Once they were out of the admiral’s office, and off the military base she used as her headquarters, Leia asked, “All right. So you got us something for our help when we were expecting nothing. What, precisely, do we do with eight submersibles we don’t need? Which won’t do us any good against the Yuuzhan Vong?”
Han gave her his crookedest this-time-I’ve-got-you-my-dear smile. “Plenty.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“First, when we get the transport for the submersibles here, without informing Admiral Earnest back there, we leave one of the big submersibles and one of the small ones behind, in the nearest large body of water.”
“For what purpose?”
“You’ve been thinking of the resistance cells as being set up in the