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“Han Solo! Princess Leia!” called one, a Devaronian male, his ruddy red skin and white horns somehow out of place in this brightly sunlit spot. “Can we get a holo with you?”

“Our public,” Han muttered.

“You love it, you know you do.”

He flashed her a smile, stood, and offered her his hand, a gallant gesture, to help her rise. “Sure,” he called back. Then he whispered to his wife, “I hope there are no lip-readers in this crowd.”

KUAT SYSTEM, TORYAZ STATION

Five days later, an odd collection of ships converged on a space station in the Kuat star system.

The station itself was of unusual design. At its core was a disc two kilometers across, three hundred meters thick, its edges beveled and smoothed like an ancient, polished credcoin, its surface thick with glowing viewports in every imaginable color, blue predominating. From the edge of the disc, at regularly spaced intervals, radiated a dozen narrow spokes a quarter kilometer in length. At the end of each spoke was a pod a quarter kilometer across, forty meters high at its thickest point; six of the pods were discs, resembling the central core, and six were triangular, affixed to the spokes on one point of the triangle. The discs alternated with the triangles, giving the station symmetry of design.

Toryaz Station was a place of recreation and competition, negotiation and romance, cold-blooded calculation and hot-blooded rage. Its core disc was an environment of hotels and shops, gardens and waterfalls. By dictate of the trade families that ran the station, hotels did not offer single-room accommodations; the lowliest quarters available for rent were lavish suites whose daily rent was equivalent to the yearly earnings of a middle-class family. Here corporations and merchant clans leased or maintained suites, entertained holodrama stars, made business deals that dictated the fates of thousands of occupations and lives.

The twelve pods were somewhat less glamorous, at least on initial inspection. Each would have been a fully self-contained space station but for the spoke, a sturdy, broad traffic conduit, connecting it to the main station—and in fact, in times of crisis, any of the pods could separate from the station’s main body, thrust free through use of a slow but serviceable drive unit, and maintain itself in space for days or weeks until rescue arrived.

Each pod, which included hundreds of sets of quarters, conference chambers, exercise and recreation facilities, theaters, kitchens, vehicle hangars, security chambers, cell blocks for rowdy celebrants, and vast atria, could be rented as a single unit for any sort of corporate event. Merchant princes brought in several hundred of their closest friends to celebrate their hundredth birthdays in these pods; Kuat Drive Yards, the single greatest manufacturer in the system, had its trade shows in these pods.

And now one of them, a triangular pod known as Narsacc Habitat, had been hired—at the last minute and for an unspecified duration, displacing a suddenly very unhappy convention of airspeeder and swoop manufacturers from around the galaxy—by the government of the Galactic Alliance. The Narsacc Habitat’s crew of stewards, cooks, wait staff, cleaning and maintenance droids, valets, and dressing consultants had been dismissed on full pay for the duration of the GA stay, replaced by carefully screened government employees. The only Toryaz Station employees left were a skeleton crew of security officers, amply reinforced and overseen by GA security specialists.

The first ships to dock with Narsacc Habitat, one large transport each from Coruscant and Corellia, discharged hordes of soldiers and security personnel who immediately began scouring the pod for listening devices, booby traps, and hidden weapons. They found plenty, many of them years or decades old, all apparently left from previous events—the forgotten residue of attempted espionage and treachery in the past. After two days of examination, both sides