Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [150]
Ship? thought Leia uneasily.
The Sullustan turned toward the buffet again and paused, the enhanced visual receptors he wore—probably to compensate for the corneal defects many Sullustans developed after the age of thirty—turned in Leia’s direction.
She wasn’t sure what he saw—how, or if, the psychic residue of the drug made her register on the pickup—but with a little shrug he went on toward the food. But it was enough to make her move off, drifting like a ghost among the other, fainter ghosts that flickered in this room, dim echoes of children playing obliviously on the floor between the cool aristocrats and the watchful bureaucrats, secretaries, and corporate scouts.
Irek, Leia noticed, was working the room with the adeptness of a candidate for the Senate, deferring politely to the Lords and Ladies of the great Houses, condescending with just unnoticeable noblesse oblige to the corporates and to the secretaries of the Lords. As Drost Elegin had remarked, he had beautiful manners. Since formal dueling was one of the accomplishments valued by the Lords among their own class, the boy was able to discuss this with the younger aristocrats.
“We’ve heard all about this ship,” said Lord Vensell Picutorion, who had been one of those presented at the same time as Leia’s Senatorial debut. “What is it? Where is it coming from? Are you sure it’s large enough to give us the power, the armament, to create our own Allied Fleet?”
Irek inclined his head respectfully, and the other Senex Lords gathered around. “It is, quite simply, the largest and most heavily armored battlemoon still in existence from the heyday of the Imperial Fleet,” he said in his clear, carrying boy’s voice. “It was the prototype transition between the torpedo platforms and the original Death Star. It doesn’t have the focused power of the destructor beams,” he added, and Leia detected a note of apology in his voice, “but it has almost the power capacity of the Death Star …”
“I think we’re all agreed,” put in Lord Garonnin, “that planet-killer technology is wasteful, to put it mildly.”
“But you must admit,” said Irek, a gleeful glitter far back in his blue eyes, “it makes a wonderful deterrent.”
“In fact, it doesn’t,” said His Lordship bluntly. “As events leading to the breakup of the Empire can attest.” And, when Irek opened his mouth to protest, he went on. “But be that as it may.” He turned to the other Lords. “The battlemoon Eye of Palpatine was originally constructed for a mission thirty years ago,” he said. “It was built and armed in absolute secrecy, so that when the mission itself was aborted unfulfilled, almost no one knew of the battlemoon itself, and all record of its hiding place—in an asteroid field in the Moonflower Nebula—was lost.”
“Careless of them,” commented a younger Lady, whose tanned muscles spoke of a lifetime in the hunting field.
Several laughed.
Garonnin looked annoyed, but Roganda said smoothly, “Anyone who’s dealt with a really large ancestral library will know that one small defect in the computer can result in the disappearance of, for instance, an entire set of wafers, or a good-size book … and the size ratio between one book and, say, four or five rooms is much smaller than between even the largest battlemoon and twenty parsecs of the Outer Rim.”
She would know, thought Leia, remembering Nasdra Magrody’s despairing words.
A battlemoon!
“And it’s on its way here?” asked Lord Picutorion.
Irek smiled, smug. “On its way here,” he said. “And at our service.”
Roganda put her hand on his shoulder and smiled again, that proud smile. “Our guests are thirsty, my son,” she said in her soft voice. “Would you go see