Star Wars_ The New Rebellion - Kristine Kathryn Rusch [23]
The Lady Luck’s computer beeped at Lando. The Spicy Lady not only had slave circuits, she had fully rigged slave circuits.
“First break I’ve had all day,” Lando said.
He linked the Spicy Lady’s internal holocams to the Lady Luck’s and surveyed the interior of the ship.
It looked like an Imerria Windstorm had gone through the public sections. Supplies floated in the zero-gravity environment. Blaster scars seared the couches in the rec area. The oxygen masks were broken, the emergency equipment destroyed.
Lando panned through the public areas. He knew that Jarril wouldn’t allow holocams in the storage compartments. Lando’s mouth was dry. The discomfort he had felt when he first saw the ship was growing.
Except for the blaster scars in the rec room, he saw no signs of battle. No real destruction, only the kind made when someone—or several someones—searched a ship. Still, the tension in Lando’s shoulders was growing.
Finally he brought the Spicy Lady’s cockpit up on his screen. And then he let out the breath he had been holding.
Jarril floated, his body bumping against the controls, the viewport, the ceiling, the floor. Judging from the hole in his chest, he had been hit with a weapon at very close range.
Lando closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. An old friend shouldn’t die like that. Especially not in the rear-end of nowhere with no one to guard his back.
Then Lando frowned. Jarril usually had a Sullustan with him. Seluss. Had Seluss taken the A-wing? For help? That made no sense. He would have been back.
Unless he was followed.
But Lando had seen no other vessels in this corner of space. Very few ships went back and forth here. There was nothing to smuggle. Lando himself wouldn’t have been here if Mara hadn’t had to meet Karrde. The Republic had little interest in the primitive planets nearby and the Empire had abandoned hope of uniting such diverse peoples.
The Empire had long ago abandoned hope of anything.
Something nagged at the back of Lando’s mind. He had seen something in that debris. Something that didn’t belong.
He opened his eyes as he panned away from the cockpit, searching, searching, scanning the debris at close range until he found what he was looking for.
In the galley, banging off one wall and ricocheting into another like a puck in null hockey, a stormtrooper helmet floated.
A helmet so clean it reflected the emergency glow panels.
Stormtroopers. This far out. Perhaps Lando had been wrong about the Empire.
With a flurry of movements, he rigged up the rest of the slave circuitry. He’d tow the Spicy Lady to his mining operation on Kessel and then inspect the interior himself. Maybe he could see what Jarril had been into.
Lando had a hunch he wouldn’t like what he was about to find.
Eight
The surviving senators filled the Emperor’s Audience Room in the Imperial Palace. The senior senators, the ones who clearly supported the Republic, were mingling with one another, and talking about substantive issues. Leia stood beside the buffet table that lined one wall. She wasn’t interested in her colleagues. She was watching the junior senators, many of them former Imperials, argue. Her hands still hurt from the burns she had sustained in the blast, but otherwise she felt fine.
Except for her hearing.
She wished it hadn’t returned.
The arguments rose around her, so loud that one voice would quickly cover another.
“… decide who’s in charge now that …”
“… never would have allowed such chaos …”
“… glad we’re here. The New Republic can’t afford such lax …”
She didn’t need to hear more than a few snatches of conversation to know what was happening. Here, at least among the junior senators, the blame for the destruction of the Senate Hall was going to fall on her government. She shouldn’t have listened to Han. She should have been up and around the day of the explosion. Two days away had allowed this