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From the direction they had been looking, Wedge Antilles, again in Corellian uniform, walked into the room, without retinue.

Admiral Karathas gave Wedge a wan smile. “Cutting it rather close, aren’t you, Antilles?” She projected her voice sufficiently that it was clearly audible in Teppler’s box—that, and perhaps the microphones that fed Teppler’s speakers were oriented more toward the main table than other portions of the chamber.

Wedge nodded and moved up to the table beside Karathas. “Admiral, if I had a credit for every time someone told me that…”

“Yes, you could probably buy our way out of this situation.” Karathas looked up, in a direction disconcertingly close to where Han and Leia sat, but her eyes seemed to be focused on a point to their left, beyond the wall that separated them from the next room. “Are we all ready? Yes? Then let’s begin. Please sit.” She did as she suggested, and there was a momentary delay as some officers fled the main table and others trotted up to it, seating themselves.

“All right,” Karathas said. “We find ourselves in the unenviable—unacceptable, but unavoidable—position of having to wage a battle against enemy forces occupying the center of one of our own cities. We cannot do this without a gruesome toll in the lives of our own people, which could very well swing public opinion against us…which would be increasingly harmful to our defense of the Corellian system. Nor can we just ignore the enemy beachhead, as leaving it intact will allow them to reinforce it, expand it, and begin bringing more and more potent offenses against our insystem positions. Their command post in Rellidir on Tralus has to be obliterated…and so Operation Noble Savage has been designed to obliterate it. And to turn what would be a public opinion disaster into an asset.” Her voice did not convey military confidence. If anything, it carried more than a hint of regret, and even resentment.

Han saw Leia shiver. He gave her a questioning look.

“She didn’t say anything about minimizing expected civilian deaths,” she said.

Han leaned forward to give Karathas a closer look. “Maybe she’s getting to that.”

“Maybe.”

Below, Karathas gestured to someone out in the shadows along the big room’s walls. A hologram sprang into existence above the center of the table—a view of the center of the city of Rellidir, inverted so that those at the table, looking up, were actually looking down into the monolithic block of spacescrapers as if from a great height. Some wavered at the unsettling perspective, but most were or had been pilots—amateur, professional, or military—and had no problem with the view.

The disc-shaped hologram began a slow rotation, and then a large region at the center of it—a massive, circular white building with eight narrowing points around its rim, giving it the appearance of a royal crown—began blinking, red–white–red–white. The building was easy to make out among all the spacescrapers, as it was surrounded by a broad belt of green occasionally decorated with narrow gray lines—a large city park with foot trails tracing through it. Small wire-frame objects in blinking red were scattered around the building, arrayed in rows and columns, but they were too small for Han to make out; a few larger wire frames in the same color scheme appeared to be troop transports and corvettes.

“This,” Karathas continued, “is their command post; they have occupied the Navos Center for the Performing Arts. This was a very good choice, speaking from a military point of view. It’s commodious, has an extensive underground storage area not accessible through any of the city’s normal underground infrastructure, and commands a good view of the surrounding airspace. Shield generators have been set up inside, powering a two-level shield defensive system.” On cue, a hologram wire grid of defensive energy shields appeared, blinking on and off in orange, just outside the green park areas surrounding the command post, and another wire grid, this one in red, began blinking several blocks out in all directions,