Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [28]
She was not only beautiful but brilliant and fiercely courageous, and she had done only one really foolish thing in her life: a couple of years ago, she had let herself fall in love with a dashing-but-impoverished tramp-freighter captain—well, okay, a disreputable smuggler on the run from Imperial authorities and various bounty hunters and crime lords, but who was counting?—and Han could never shake this lurking dread that if he, say, did something nasty to C-3PO, who, after all, usually meant well, Leia might suddenly wake up and realize what an awful mistake she’d made.
Not that he would ever admit this, not even to Chewbacca. Not even to himself, most days—his ego was nigh-invulnerable to self-doubt—but on those rare occasions when he found himself getting irritable and depressed because he was stuck somewhere with way too much time to think and not nearly enough to do, these little whispers would start hissing around the back of his head. He could quiet them only by privately reaffirming his personal blood oath that he would never—never ever ever—give the woman he loved a reason to regret falling for him.
Which left him sitting in a conference room in a pressure dome on an unnamed asteroid in some Inner Rim system so obscure he couldn’t remember its name, pretending to give a damn while C-3PO translated yet another string of Mandalorian gabble. “The commander repeats that surrender simply is not possible, and reiterates that the only peaceful solution to this unfortunate situation is for all Rebel—that is, New Republic, of course; he doesn’t seem to understand the distinction, or else is being deliberately obtuse, but no matter—is for all Rebel forces to depart the system forthwith. Of course, this is not his exact phraseology; the literal translation—stripped of vulgarity—is roughly along the lines of You Rebels stay, everybody dies, you Rebels leave, everybody’s happy, which wholly fails to capture the entirely savage brutality of his vocabulary. Really, Princess, having to process such coarse language—my vulgarity-filter capacitors are on the brink of overload!”
Han didn’t even entirely understand what the negotiation was all about; he’d missed the battle completely, as he and Leia had been off somewhere on the far side of nowhere, hammering out the details of bringing into the New Republic a minor star cluster inhabited mainly by hairy spider-looking critters who had thoroughly creeped him out, not least because these, unlike most of the arachnoid races, had very humanoid-looking faces, including mouthfuls of gleaming white, entirely human-looking teeth.
Anyway, by the time he’d brought Leia here at the urgent summons of the local system authority, the Imperial forces had been thoroughly defeated and scattered to the stars—all except five or six hundred Mandalorian mercenaries, who were dug in around several trineutronium power plants on the system’s main inhabited world; the Mandos had proclaimed themselves ready and willing to detonate these installations at the first touchdown of a Republic ship, which would sterilize the planet and kill all three and a half billion people who lived there.
They’d taken the world hostage.
Han had been able to gather, through the endless hours of tense negotiations, that the final order from the fleeing Imperial commander had been for the Mandos to deny the planet to Republic forces “by any and all necessary means.” The Mando commander had interpreted that to mean “Even if you have to kill everybody, including yourselves.” But the New Republic wasn’t about to give back a system that was not only rich in natural resources and manufacturing capacity but had also, in a system-wide referendum, voted overwhelmingly in favor of Republic membership, with something like ninety-seven percent recommending union. Han privately hoped that the three percent diehard ImpSymps all lived right next door to one of those trineutronium plants.
Anyway, the negotiation had disintegrated into a standoff: Leia’s rationality and persuasive powers matched against the rock-ribbed