Star Wars_ The Black Fleet Crisis 03_ Tyrant's Test - Michael P. Kube-McDowell [11]
Pursing his lips, Barth swallowed hard, then shook his head.
“All right, then. From here on out, try to remember where we are, what our purpose is—and that we have an audience, and what their purpose is. We had to have this conversation, but I only want to have it once. And some other conversations are going to have to wait for another time and place.”
“I know a little nightspot in Imperial City,” Barth said. “Good food, sometimes a slava dancer worth overtipping. We’ll save ’em for there.”
An affable, approving grin creased Han’s face. “Done. I’ll buy the first round.”
The Beruss clan estate in Imperial City was almost large enough to be a city in its own right. Within Exmoor’s walls were two parks, one forest, one meadow; a small lake stocked with game fish from Illodia and plied by graceful wind-driven boats; and twenty-one structures, including the hundred-meter-tall Illodia Tower with its external spiral staircase.
Located more than three hundred kilometers south-west of the Palace, the estate was a testament to the long tenure of the Beruss clan on Coruscant. A Beruss had represented Illodia in the Senate for almost as long as there had been a Senate. Doman’s first father, first and second uncles, sixth grandfather, and ninth great-grandmother were just part of the long line connecting Exmoor with Coruscant history. Illodia had no royal house, no hereditary rulers, but its oligarchy of five clans had proved longer-lived than many blood dynasties. And the Beruss had survived the various plots, crises, and political tides of Illodia in large part by being content to make Coruscant their home.
Exmoor was likewise a monument to the onetime grandeur of Illodian ambitions. Taxes on Illodia’s twenty colonies had paid for the construction, and the skilled hands of colony artisans had decorated and filled the houses named after their worlds. Even the size and spacing of the structures echoed the map of Illodian territories, and each colony house had once borne a brilliant planetary emblem which could be seen only from the lookout lounge at the top of Illodia Tower.
The emblems were gone now, the colony houses largely vacant, the colonies themselves only a memory. When the Emperor had annexed Illodia Sector, he had ordered the colonies “liberated” from the oligarchy’s “tyranny”—and then levied assessments on the former colonies that were more than double the taxes imposed by Illodia.
But the old glories were preserved in the approach and facade of the tower itself. The walks were swept and lined with smartly trimmed, bright-leaved plants. The metal and stone gleamed as it had when Bail Organa had brought his young daughter to play in the meadow park with the clan’s many children while he and the senator spoke of adult things. And the seventy rooms inside were still a curious mixture of museum and clan commune, with the eleven adults and nearly twenty children who made up Doman’s circle sharing and occasionally overwhelming those spaces.
Doman received Leia in a room she had never before been privileged to enter—the clan counsel room on the top level of the tower, where the bonded adults met to discuss and decide family issues. Eleven identical chairs, each bearing the Beruss emblem in silver and blue, were arranged facing each other in a circle. An augmented skylight lit the circle warmly from the center.
Doman’s welcoming smile was equally warm. “Little Princess,” he said, standing as though he expected her to come to him with a hug and a cheek kiss, as in the old days. “Is there any further news?”
“No,” Leia said, entering the circle but coming no farther. “There’s been no word from the Yevetha. The viceroy has ignored my messages.”
“Perhaps this was not the Yevetha’s doing?”
“We now have the flight recorders from several of the recon-X escorts. There’s no mistaking the Yevethan thrustship. And Nylykerka has identified the Interdictor