Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [52]
She enjoyed watching Han work. Clothed in a dress that he’d picked out for her, of the “not-to-diplomatic-events” variety, she lounged on barstools consuming drinks with paper spaceships in them and listened to him trade trivialities with various barkeeps, watching game transmissions in the seemingly depthless black boxes in the corners—in eight years of close association with Han Solo she had acquired a vivid working knowledge of the rules and strategies of smashball—listening to extremely bad music and getting into marginal conversations with packers, stokers, small-time traders, and smaller-time hustlers and bums. Even in the Core Worlds most people didn’t recognize Leia or Han if they didn’t know them or know who they were. To ninety percent of the species in the galaxy, all members of other races looked alike anyway, and most humans wouldn’t have recognized the Senators from their own planets.
There was something to be said, Leia reflected, for the planets still ruled by the Ancient Houses. On Alderaan, everyone had known her: grocery clerks and subspace mechanics had studied the home lives of the House Organa on a day-to-day basis over the tabvids, watched them marry and divorce and squabble over property settlements and put their children through private academies, tsk’ed over the unsuitable attachments of Cousin Nial and recalled that long-ago scandal that had broken off Aunt Tia’s engagement to … What had his name been? … from House Vandron.
Her onetime suitor Isolder had told her it was the same in the Hapes Consortium, whose ruling House had been in power for centuries.
Here they were just a lanky man with a scar on his chin and a smuggler’s habit of watching the doors, and a cinnabar-haired woman in a dress that Aunt Rouge would have locked her in her room before permitting her to wear in public.
Leia listened, with increasing respect, to Han discussing puttie, which had to be the most boring sport in the entire Universe, for thirty minutes with a wizened Durosian before bringing up the subject of the local action. She didn’t quite know how he’d come to the conclusion that this was the bar where such a question might be asked.
The reward was that the Durosian—whose name was Oso Nim—remembered Drub McKumb, and recalled his disappearance six years ago. “You sure he didn’t just skin out ahead of trouble?” asked Han, and the aged one shook her head.
“Fester it, no. Skin out how, without his ship? Thing musta sat in the impound for ten months, with every tramp skipper and planet hopper that came through trying to bribe the yard captain to let ’em strip parts. Finally sold the whole shebang to a bunch of Rodians for gate fees.” She chuckled, displaying several rows of tiny, sharp, brown teeth. “First-timers, they were. Took off with a load of cut-rate silk trying to run the tariff barriers into the Core Worlds and got themselves blistered out of existence first revenue cutter they met. Waste of a good ship, not to speak of all that silk.”
She shook her head regretfully. The Smoking Jets, like every other bar on the Row, consisted of three prefab white plastene room units fixed together and opened into a single long chamber, mounted on a broken foundation of some older rock structure and cantilevered awkwardly to fit. The factories on Sullust turned out interlocking room units by the millions and there wasn’t a commercial colony from Elrood to the Outer Rim that didn’t have at least some buildings—towns, even—that consisted entirely of three-by-three white cubes.
Down in this part of town, near the segment of the cliff where the Port Offices formed a kind of gateway into the tunnels that led to the docking silos themselves, most