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“In consultation with Admiral Ackbar and the Fleet Office, I have ordered additional forces to Koornacht to strengthen our position there. I have charged General A’baht, the sector commander, with the task of eliminating the Yevethan threat and reclaiming the conquered worlds of Koornacht. He has the necessary command authority to do so, and he has my full confidence.

“We will take away the Yevetha’s ability to make war on what they call the vermin. Not only because we, too, are vermin in their eyes, but because they have shown us an evil heart, and evil must be challenged, even though the cost may be great.

“Any government that objects to this decision is free to withdraw from this body. And this body is welcome to choose a new President—the day after Nil Spaar is defeated and the Yevetha disarmed.”

Leia fully expected the silence to follow her away from the podium. But she had not gone two steps before a tumultuous roar of approval washed over her from the floor below and the galleries above. Turning, she saw virtually the entire Senate on its feet, affirming her decision by acclaim.

The acclaim was not unanimous—dozens of dissenting senators had remained in their seats or headed for the exits in disgust. But they were a startlingly tiny minority of the whole. Leia stared, barely comprehending the miracle she had wrought. Her words had reached them, and moved them, and united them—for a moment, at least, a moment of principle over politics.

She would have been moved to joy, but for the fact that at the end of the straight line she had drawn, Leia saw Han’s death.

INTERLUDE IV:

Maltha Obex

It was a cold day on Maltha Obex, even by the standards of a planet locked in the grip of a century-long ice age. A brutal storm half a continent wide was scouring the northern latitudes with driving winds and sheets of tiny, hard snowflakes as coarse as sand. The storm had forced Team Alpha to abandon its excavation site on the ice field east of Ridge 80.

Team Alpha’s cold shelters had been fighting their tie-downs all night, as though eager to take flight and tumble headlong across the wastes. When team leader Bogo Tragett suited up to check the status of the excavation dome, he found the rip-proof tunnel connecting his shelter to the dome torn lengthwise and shredded to tiny yellow flags whipping from the tension cables. Visibility fell to near whiteout with the gusts, hiding a bright blue work dome that was no more than five meters away from Tragett.

Inside the dome Tragett found an ice-cold heater, a massive drift of crystalline white, and a continuing swirl of snow particles blowing in from under the dome’s partial floor. The heater had chewed through a three-day fuel supply in something less than ten hours and then quit, surrendering.

Tragett did likewise. Crossing to the supply shelter through a still intact connecting tunnel, he hailed Penga Rift and asked for a pickup, then paged the rest of the team and told them to pack whatever personal and team gear they could backpack or carry. Then it was a matter of waiting for conditions to ease enough for the expedition’s weather-rated shuttle to fight its way through to them.

That wait stretched to three hours, in the course of which Tragett’s shelter broke loose from its tie-downs and was thrown against the upwind side of the excavation dome. Before the shelter itself had collapsed and torn free, it had caved in a third of the dome and turned the faces of two team members as white as the landscape.

But Dr. Joto Eckels never gave as much as a passing thought to offering Team Alpha a respite aboard Penga Rift. He regretted the loss of equipment and the investment of time at N3, with no return on either—but there were many more sites, and far too little time. Trusting that Tragett would see to the motivational needs of his team, Eckels had dispatched the shuttle to the relatively balmy coastal site S9, where the dawn temperature had been twenty-six degrees below freezing under quiet skies.

“We preloaded the