Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 07_ Conviction - Aaron Allston [139]
Han nodded. “So you’re leaning toward Padnel, but only if he decides to grow a brain stem.”
“Elegantly put … yes.”
“Well, I can fix this.”
She gave him a suspicious look. “Dropping a concussion bomb on the camp doesn’t constitute fixing the problem.”
“No, I mean, I can persuade Padnel to condemn the Fireborn thing, making him a viable candidate. Or maybe he’ll go berserk and kill everyone here. Either way, the stalemate will be broken.”
She looked at him more closely. “How would you do that?”
“Well, if I explained, you wouldn’t believe me. Or I can just do it. It’ll take less than five minutes.”
“Han—”
“Trust me, Leia.”
“Oh, you womp rat. How can you throw out that ‘trust me’ skifter at a time like this?”
“I’m serious. Trust me.” He batted his eyes at her.
“Stop doing that.” She scowled at him, the bad-mood-Leia look that had so suited her during imprisonment on and escape from the first Death Star, so many, many years before. Then she relented. “All right. Do it.”
He stood, gave her a cocky grin, and moved over to the buffet table. He picked up a particularly lush-looking round fruit and walked over to Padnel’s party.
Padnel, Reni, and Nialle looked up.
Han bit into the fruit, made a pleased expression at its tartness, and swallowed. “Not going well, huh?”
Padnel grunted a barely polite reply.
“I think I’ve got the problem figured out.”
Reni cocked an eyebrow at him. “And what is the problem?”
“It’s that Padnel here has the brains of a sand flea.”
Padnel stood. Though he was no taller than Han, he was far burlier, an intimidating, looming presence. “What did you say?”
“Work with me, Padnel, I’m giving you words of all one syllable. Sand flea. Brains of a sand flea. Which is how you’ll go down in the historical records. Doomed the Klatooinians to another twenty-five centuries of slavery because he had the brains of a sand flea.”
Padnel nodded as if considering that possibility for the first time. “I am going to kill you now. Unless you apologize.”
“Sand fleas don’t kill people. Smugglers kill people.”
“That’s it.” Padnel reached toward his holster.
And froze as Han’s blaster jammed into his snout, pushing it out of shape. Han put about a kilo of pressure on the trigger. He heard the thump as his dropped fruit hit the floor of the tent. In his peripheral vision, he could see the eyes of Reni and Nialle widen, but he didn’t know whether it was because of the danger the blaster posed or because of the speed of his draw.
He also heard several other noises. A creak from Leia’s chair as she rose. Scrapes of metal on leather as Klatooinian guards drew their blasters. One of them spoke harsh words in Basic: “Drop your weapon or I will open fire.”
Han breathed a sigh of relief that he hadn’t heard Leia’s lightsaber activate.
He ignored the speaker. “Now we have a situation where you can prove that you have more brains than a sand flea. Consider this. Your political rival, Reni Coll, is standing next to you. All she has to do is sneeze. That big jowly fellow over there with the blaster rifle twitches and fires. I die. In my death spasm, I pull this trigger and blow your head off, and you die. Reni can accomplish the perfect murder—and she’ll never be blamed for any crime, and she’ll be the uncontested candidate for Klatooinian rebellion leader.”
Padnel, his hand frozen partway to his own blaster pistol, scowled. “You draw very fast for an aging human.”
“Don’t I, though? But I have a simple answer for that. I’m a wily old veteran, and you’re nothing but a slave.”
“Another insult I will have to kill you for.”
Han grinned. “I think that sneeze is starting to overwhelm Reni.”
Reni shook her head. “I would not do that. It would be dishonorable.”
Padnel did not turn his head—to do