Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 01_ Betrayal - Aaron Allston [90]
Han pointed at her, an I’ll-get-you-for-this gesture, then felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned. Before him stood a young woman with short blond hair; she wore the uniform of a junior officer of the GA security team. “General Solo?” she asked. “I’m Lieutenant Elsen Barthis. Could I have this dance?”
“Of course.” Han put on a smile he didn’t feel and glanced briefly to where Wedge danced with his wife. He’d heard the story of Wedge’s escape from Coruscant and knew Barthis to be one of his captors. He decided that discussing her recent demotion wouldn’t benefit the cause of détente. “Your accent—you’re Corellian?”
“Yes, originally. I’m surprised you can hear an accent. I’ve worked for several years to get rid of it.”
“Oh, some things never fade away completely…”
Four hours after it began, the party ended. A handful of delegates and advisers moved to a much smaller adjoining chamber set up with a long conference table. Prime Minister Aidel Saxan sat at one end, Admiral Gilad Pellaeon at the other, and their respective parties occupied the seats between them.
“So,” Pellaeon said. “Rules of order?”
“Let’s dispense with them,” Saxan said. She looked weary but not ill tempered.
“In that case,” Han said, “I’m taking off my boots. Nobody can make good decisions when his feet hurt.”
The experienced politicians, except Leia, looked at him in surprise, but Han followed words with action, reaching down under the table to yank his boots free. A security officer knelt to peer under the opposite side of the table, doubtless to make sure Han wasn’t securing a hideaway blaster…and then the officer had a lot to do as other attendees followed Han’s lead and discarded footwear that had been binding and pinching for hours. Pellaeon didn’t join in; Han, with a twinge of envy, suspected that the old admiral had enough experience and sense to equip himself with perfectly fitted, comfortable boots.
“Let’s get to it,” Pellaeon said. “Prime Minister—may I call you Aidel?”
“Please.”
“Gilad. I’ll stipulate that the arrival of a GA naval task force in the Corellian system was an unfriendly act if you’d be so kind as to make the same admission about the secret reactivation of Centerpoint Station. Let’s get that out of the way. Let’s neither of us pretend that one side or the other is blameless.”
Saxan smiled in mock sweetness. “We can still argue over which is the greater offense.”
Pellaeon nodded. “We can. Which is to your advantage.”
Saxan looked surprised. “You admit that?”
“Of course. I’m a very old man. Any protracted argument—well, I could die at any moment.” The old strategist smiled to put the lie to his words.
Saxan, caught out, smiled despite herself. “All right. Let’s prioritize, then. I won’t pretend that the only possible outcome of this gathering is Corellian independence. Corellia has, at times, thrived as part of a wider government. She has also thrived as an independent state. But she can’t thrive as a disarmed state dependent on GA forces for protection of the system. Corellian pride won’t allow for that. Insist on that, impose it, and you transform us into something other than Corellians.” She pointed, in turn, to Han and Wedge. “Think how things would be in the GA today if not for Corellians like these. There would be no Galactic Alliance. No New Republic. It would still be the Empire.”
A silence fell across the gathering as all present remembered that Pellaeon had been an officer of the Empire at the time of its inception, had served the Empire faithfully—through the years of its wars with the Rebel Alliance and New Republic, through the decades of its existence as a remnant government, to the time in recent years when it and the rest of the galaxy had changed and the Imperial Remnant had become a part of the Galactic Alliance. Those capable of saying anything admiring about the Empire always said that Pellaeon and