1
The first to die was a midshipman named Koth Barak.
One of his fellow crewmembers on the New Republic escort cruiser Adamantine found him slumped across the table in the deck-nine break room, where he’d repaired half an hour previously for a cup of Coffeine. Twenty minutes after Barak should have been back to post, Gunnery Sergeant Gallie Wover went looking for him, exasperatedly certain that he’d clicked into the infolog banks “just to see if anybody mentions the mission.”
Of course, nobody was going to mention the mission. Though accompanied by the Adamantine, Chief of State Leia Organa Solo’s journey to the Meridian sector was an entirely unofficial one. The Rights of Sentience Party would have argued—quite correctly—that Seti Ashgad, the man she was to meet at the rendezvous point just outside the Chorios systems, held no official position on his homeworld of Nam Chorios. To arrange an official conference would be to give tacit approval of his, and the Rationalist Party’s, demands.
Which was, when it came down to it, the reason for the talks.
When she entered the deck-nine break room, Sergeant Wover’s first sight was of the palely flickering blue on blue of the infolog screen. “Blast it, Koth, I told you …”
Then she saw the young man stretched unmoving on the far side of the screen, head on the break table, eyes shut. Even at a distance of three meters Wover didn’t like the way he was breathing.
“Koth!” She rounded the table in two strides, sending the other chairs clattering into a corner. She thought his eyelids moved a little when she yelled his name. “Koth!”
Wover hit the emergency call almost without conscious decision. In the few moments before the med droids arrived she sniffed the coffeine in the gray plastene cup a few centimeters from his limp fingers. It wasn’t even cold. A thin film of it adhered to the peach fuzz beginnings of what Koth optimistically referred to as his mustache. The stuff in the cup smelled okay—at least as okay as fleet coffeine ever smelled—and there was no question of alcohol or drugs. Not on a Republic escort. Not where Koth was concerned. He was a good kid.
Wover was an engine room regular who’d done fifteen years in merchant planet-hoppers rather than stay in the regular fleet after Palpatine’s goons gained power: She looked after “her” midshipmen as if they were the sons she’d lost to the Rebellion. She would have known if there had been trouble with booze or spice or giggle-dust.
Disease?
It was any longtime spacer’s nightmare. But the “good-faith” team that had come onboard yesterday from Seti Ashgad’s small vessel had passed through the medical scan; and in any case, the planet Nam Chorios had been on the books for four centuries without any mention of an endemic planetary virus. Everyone on the Light of Reason had come straight from the planet.
Still, Wover pecked the Commander’s code on the wall panel.
“Sir? Wover here. One of the midshipmen’s down. The meds haven’t gotten here yet but …” Behind her the break room door swooshed open. She glanced over her shoulder to see a couple of Two-Onebees enter with a table, which was already unfurling scanners and life-support lines like a monster in a bad holovid. “It looks serious. No, sir, I don’t know what it is, but you might want to check with Her Excellency’s flagship, and the Light, and let them know. Okay, okay,” she added, turning as a Two-Onebee posted itself politely in front of her. “My heart is yours,” she declared jocularly, and the droid paused for a moment, data bytes cascading with a faint clickety-click as it laboriously assembled the eighty-five percent probability that the remark was a jest.
“Many thanks, Sergeant Wover,” it said politely, “but the organ itself will not be necessary. A function reading will suffice.”
The next instant Wover turned, aghast, as the remaining Two-Onebee shifted Barak onto the table and hooked him up. Every line of the readouts plunged, and soft, tinny alarms began to sound. “Festering groats!” Wover yanked free of her examiner to stride to the boy’s side. “What in the name of daylight …?”
Barak’s face had gone a waxen gray. The table was already pumping stimulants and antishock into the boy’s veins, and the Two-Onebee plugged into the other side had the blank-eyed look of a droid transmitting to other stations within the ship. Wover could see the initial diagnostic lines on the screens that ringed the antigrav personnel transport unit’s sides.
No virus. No bacteria. No poison.
No foreign material in Koth Barak’s body at all.
The lines dipped steadily toward zero, then went flat.
“We have a complicated situation on Nam Chorios, Your Excellency.” Seti Ashgad turned from the four-meter bubble of the observation viewport, to regard the woman who sat, slender and coolly watchful, in one of the lounge’s gray leather chairs.
“We meaning whom, Master Ashgad?” Leia Organa Solo, Chief of State of the New Republic, had a surprising voice, deeper than one might expect. A petite, almost fragile-looking woman, her relative youth would have surprised anyone who didn’t know that from the age of seventeen she’d been heavily involved in the Rebellion spearheaded by her father and the great stateswoman Mon Mothma: With her father’s death, she was virtually its core. She’d commanded troops, dodged death, and fled halfway across the galaxy with a price on her head before she was twenty-three. She was thirty-one now and didn’t look it, except for her eyes. “The inhabitants of Nam Chorios? Or only some of them?”
“All of them.” Ashgad strode back to her, standing too close, trying to dominate her with his height and the fact that he was standing and she remained in her chair. But she looked up at him with an expression in her brown eyes that told him she knew exactly what he was doing, or trying to do, and he stepped back. “All of us,” he corrected himself. “Newcomers and Therans alike.”
Leia folded her hands on her knee, the wide velvet sleeves and voluminous skirt of her crimson ceremonial robe picking up the soft sheen of the hidden lamps overhead and of the distant stars hanging in darkness beyond the curved bubble of the port. Even five years ago she would have remarked tartly on the fact that he was omitting mention of the largest segment of the planet’s population, those who were neither the technological post–Imperial Newcomers nor the ragged Theran cultists who haunted the cold and waterless wastes, but ordinary farmers. Now she gave him silence, waiting to see what else he would say.
“I should explain,” Ashgad went on, in the rich baritone that so closely resembled the recordings she had heard of his father’s, “that Nam Chorios is a barren and hostile world. Without massive technology it is literally not possible to make a living there.”
“The prisoners sent to Nam Chorios by the Grissmath Dynasty seem to have managed for the past seven hundred years.”
The man looked momentarily nonplussed. Then he smiled, big and wide and white. “Ah, I see Your Excellency has studied the history of the sector.” He tried to sound pleased about it.
“Enough to know the background of the situation,” replied Leia pleasantly. “I know that the Grissmaths shipped their political prisoners there, in the hopes that they’d starve to death, and set automated gun stations all over the planet to keep them from being rescued. I know that the prisoners not only didn’t oblige them by dying but that their descendants—and the descendants of the guards—are still farming the water seams while the Grissmath homeworld of Meridian itself is just a ball of charred radioactive waste.”
There was, in fact, very little else in the Registry concerning Nam Chorios. The place had been an absolute backwater for centuries. The only reason Leia had ever heard of it at all before the current crisis was that her father had once observed that the old Emperor Palpatine seemed to be using Nam Chorios for its original purpose: as a prison world. Forty years ago it had been rumored that the elder Seti Ashgad had been kidnapped and stranded on that isolated and unapproachable planet by agents of his political foe, the then-Senator Palpatine. Those rumors had remained unproven until this second Ashgad, like a black-haired duplicate of the graying old power broker who had disappeared, had made contact with the Council in the wake of the squabbling on the planet and asked to be heard.
Though there was no reason, Leia thought, to make this man aware of how little she or anyone knew about the planet or the situation.
Do not meet with Ashgad, the message had said, that had reached her, literally as she was preparing to board the shuttle to take her to her flagship. Do not trust him or accede to any demand that he makes. Above all, do not go to the Meridian sector.
“Very good!” He passed the compliment like a kidney stone, though he managed a droll and completely automatic little chuckle as a chaser. “But the situation isn’t as simple as that, of course.”
From a corner of the lounge, where a dark-leaved dyanthis vine shadowed the area near the observation port, a soft voice whispered, “They never are, are they?”
“Well, I was given to understand that the only inhabitants of the planet before colonization recommenced after the fall of the Empire were descendants of the original Meridian prisoners and guards.”
In the shadow of the vine, Ashgad’s secretary, Dzym, smiled.
Leia wasn’t sure what to make of her irrational aversion to Dzym. There were alien species whom the humans of the galaxy—the Corellians, Alderaanians, and others—found repulsive, usually for reasons involving subliminal cues like pheromones or subconscious cultural programming. But the native Chorians—Oldtimers, they were called, whether they belonged to the Theran cult or not—were descended from the same human rootstock. She wondered whether her aversion had to do with something simple like diet. She was not conscious of any odd smell about the small, brown-skinned man with his black hair drawn up into a smooth topknot. But she knew that frequently one wasn’t conscious of such things. It was quite possible that there could be a pheromonic reaction below the level of consciousness, perhaps the result of inbreeding on a world where communities were widely scattered and had never been large. Or it might be an individual thing, something about the looseness of that neutral, unexceptional mouth or having to do with the flattened-looking tan eyes that never seemed to blink.
“Are you one of the original Chorians, Master Dzym?”
He was without gesture. Leia realized she had subconsciously been expecting him to move in an unpleasing, perhaps a shocking, way. He didn’t nod, but only said, “My ancestors were among those sent to Nam Chorios by the Grissmaths, yes, Your Excellency.” Something changed in his eyes, not quite glazing over but becoming preoccupied, as if all his attention were suddenly directed elsewhere.
Ashgad went on hastily, as if covering the other man’s lapse, “The problem is, Your Excellency, that seven hundred and fifty years of complete isolation has made the Oldtimer population of Nam Chorios into, if you will excuse my frankness, the most iron-bound set of fanatical conservatives this side of an academic licensing board. They’re dirt farmers—I understand. They’ve had centuries of minimal technology and impossibly difficult weather and soil conditions, and you and I both know how that makes for conservatism and, to put it bluntly, superstition. One of the things my father tried to institute on the planet was a modern clinic in Hweg Shul. The place can’t make enough to keep the med droids up and running. The farmers would rather take their sick to some Theran cult Listener to be healed with ‘power sucked down out of the air.’ ” His hands fluttered in a sarcastic, hocus-pocus mime.
He took a seat in the other gray leather chair, a blocky man in a very plain brown tunic and trousers obviously cut and fitted by a standard patterning-droid and dressed up with add-ons—gold collar pin, gold-buckled belt, pectoral chain—that Leia had seen in old holos of his father. He leaned his elbows on his knees, bent forward confidingly.
“It isn’t only the Newcomers that the Rationalist Party is trying to help, Your Excellency,” he said. “It’s the farmers themselves. The Oldtimers who aren’t Therans, who just want to survive. Unless something is done to wrest control of the old gun stations away from the Theran cultists, who forbid any kind of interplanetary trade, these people are going to continue to live like … like the agricultural slaves they once were. There’s a strong Rationalist Party on Nam Chorios, and it’s growing stronger. We want planetary trade with the New Republic. We want technology and proper exploitation of the planet’s resources. Is that so harmful?”
“The majority of the planet’s inhabitants think it is.”
Ashgad gestured furiously. “The majority of the planet’s inhabitants have been brainwashed by half a dozen lunatics who get loaded on brachniel root and wander around the wasteland having conversations with rocks! If they want their crops to fail and their children to die because they refuse to come into the modern world, that’s their business, I suppose, though it breaks my heart to see it. But they’re forbidding Newcomers entrance into the modern world as well!”
Though she knew that Dzym would undoubtedly back up anything Ashgad said—as the man’s secretary he could scarcely do otherwise—Leia turned to the Chorian. He was still sitting without a word, staring into space, as if concentrating on some other matter entirely, though now and then he would glance at the chronometer on the wall. Beside him, the port offered a spectacular view of the ice green and lavender curve of Brachnis Chorios, the farthest-flung planet of the several systems that went by that name, whose largest moon had been designated as the orbital rendezvous of the secret meeting.
The escort cruiser Adamantine was just visible at the edge of the view, a blunt-nosed silvery shape, unreal in the starlight. Below it, close to the bright triangle of colored stars that were the primaries of Brachnis, Nam, and Pedducis Chorii and pathetically tiny against the cruiser’s bulk, hung the cluster of linked bronze hulls that was Seti Ashgad’s vessel, the Light of Reason. Even Leia’s flagship, the Borealis, dwarfed it. Assembled of such small craft as could slip singly through the watchful screens of Nam Chorios’s ancient defensive installations, the Light would barely have served as a planet-hopper; it could never have taken a hyperspace jump.
Hence, thought Leia uneasily, this mission. Even before she’d had the surreptitious message, their distance from the nearest bases of the New Republic’s power on Durren and their proximity to the onetime Imperial satrapy of the Antemeridian sector, made her nervous.
Was that all that note had meant? Or was there something more?
“The Theran cultists are not anyone into whose hands I would be willing to place my destiny, Your Excellency,” murmured Dzym. He seemed to draw himself back into the conversation with an effort, folding his small hands in their violet leather gloves. “They hold an astonishing amount of power in the Oldtimer settlements along the water seams. How could it be otherwise when they are armed, mobile, and have for generations been the only source of healing that these people have known?”
Beyond the dyanthis leaves that masked the edges of the observation port, Leia’s eye was caught by a flickering of the lights along the Adamantine’s gleaming sides. She saw that in the rear quarter of the escort ship, a number of them had blinked out.
“What do you mean, you can’t get through?” Commander Zoalin turned, harried, from the comm board, which had blazed into life like a festival lamp, to stab yet another flashing switch. “Are you not getting an answer from the Borealis, or what?”
“It seems to be a simple signal block, sir.” Communications Chief Oran touched her forehead in a nervous salute. “Legassi is running a scan for it.”
In the small screen, Oran turned in her chair, granting the Commander a glimpse of the comm center, on whose main board a huge readout of the Adamantine’s comm circuits was illuminated in glowing yellow lines. Red lights flowed along them, synaptic testing for a blockage or interference in the power transmission, easy enough to find and correct under ordinary circumstances.
But the circumstances had gone from ordinary to hideous in just under ten minutes. And by the red lights flaring all over his comm board; by the hastily gasped message from the infirmary; and by the sudden absence of anyone replying or reporting from maintenance, shuttles, power, and several other ship sections, things were plunging from bad to worse with the speed of a decaying orbit.
“Legassi?” Oran rose from her chair. Zoalin saw past her that the chair he had thought empty in front of the scan console was, in fact, occupied. Yeoman Legassi had collapsed forward over his console, squamous salmon-colored hands clutching the edge of the board spasmodically, in time to the dreadful shudders that ran like waves through his frame.
Zoalin thought, Calamari aren’t supposed to be affected by human viruses …
If this was a virus.
Neither, of course, were Sullustans or Nalroni, both of which species were represented by crewmembers who had reported ill in the past five minutes. Zoalin seemed to recall from his xenobiology courses that Nalroni and Mon Calamari were a textbook example of mutually exclusive immune systems. What a Nalroni could get, a Calamari literally couldn’t.
“Legassi?” Oran bent over the Mon Calamari’s shivering body. “Legassi, what … ?” She staggered a little, almost as if she had been struck, and put a hand to her chest. Groping, as if trying to massage away some numbness or pain.
“Commander Zoalin,” stated the calm voice of Two-Onebee, the head of the infirmary section, on the channel that he had left open, “I regret to report that bacta tank therapy appears to accelerate rather than retard dissolution of subjects, by a factor of nearly thirty-five percent, as far as can be analyzed.”
With the measured tones sounding in his earclip, Zoalin flicked the central console screen from image to image, keying through to corridors where the search teams in quest of the signal block device turned toward the infirmary as first one, then another of their number would stop, lean against the wall, knead and rub at the chest or head or side. The view cut to sick bay, where the calm and tireless droids operated mechanical lifts to remove Sergeant Wover’s lifeless, dripping body from the bacta tank; to the shuttle bay control room where the last yeoman on duty lay dying alone in a corner by the door.
Fifteen minutes, thought Zoalin blankly. Fifteen minutes since Wover signaled from the deck-nine break room.
He hadn’t even severed the connection when the other calls had started pouring in. Midshipman Gasto down. Engineering Chief Cho P’qun down. Sir, we can’t get any signal from maintenance …
“Foursi.” He clicked through a channel to the Central Computer’s Operating Signal Division—Division 4C. “Emergency reprogramming request. All maintenance droids of the …” His head was aching—his chest, too. He found it difficult to breathe. Stress, he told himself. And no wonder. He had to find the signal block, had to get in touch with the Chief of State’s flagship. Had to get a signal out to the Sector Medical Facility on Nim Drovis.
“All maintenance droids of the See-Three category. Search for nonstandard equipment in …” What color would the lines be, that a signal blocker would be cut into? “Nonstandard equipment in the green lines.” He hoped that was right. His head was throbbing. “Implement immediately.”
Not that it would do much good, he thought. Droids were systematic. Their method of hunting for nonstandard equipment would be to start at the Adamantine’s nose and work to the stern, investigating every hatch and relay, rather than checking the most obvious places first, the places where some member of Seti Ashgad’s small good-faith party might have made a few moments for himself alone.
Not that it had to be Ashgad. A signal blocker could have been set with a timer. The thing could have been planted in the Adamantine before their inconspicuous departure from Hesperidium.
Zoalin found that without thinking about it, he had slumped back into his chair. His hands and feet felt cold. He cut into the image of the flagship Borealis, distant against the blackness of the stars. So close, but kilometers away in the palely shimmering green glow of the planet beneath.
Had this, whatever it was, broken out there, too? Was Captain Ioa trying to reach him?
He leaned his head back. Twenty minutes, he thought. Twenty minutes. He felt as if he were in a turbolift, plunging into long darkness.
“I realize there’s been a great deal of ill said about the Rationalist Party over the past few years.” Seti Ashgad had risen from his chair as if the sheer importance of his cause drove him to his feet, and paced restlessly back and forth behind it. “But I assure you, Your Excellency, that we’re not the—the strip-mining capitalists we’ve been portrayed. The Newcomers went to Nam Chorios in the hopes of opening new frontiers. Individual entrepreneurs can’t get a foothold in Pedducis Chorios. Places like Nim Drovis and Budpock and Ampliquen have their own civilizations, settled up and locked in. Given the presence of the heavy industry in the Antemeridian sector, the trading opportunities alone should have made the entire colonizing of Nam Chorios self-sufficient!
“But it isn’t just that the Newcomers are forbidden to bring in any ships larger than a personal flitter—or to let any out. The Theran habit of opening fire on any vessel over a certain size means that when equipment wears out, it can’t be replaced except for an exorbitant fee. It means there’s no export to support anything but the barest subsistence livelihood. It means we have to pay smugglers’ prices for everything. It means that because the Registry didn’t give sufficient information about conditions, these people have condemned themselves to exile in a cultural backwater. You can’t pretend that’s fair.”
“No, I can’t,” said Leia slowly. “But isn’t that what colonization is about? Gambling on what conditions are going to be when you get there? I’m not saying that the Therans are right,” she added, holding up a hand as the man before her drew breath for an indignant protest. “What I am saying is that they are supported by the majority of the population of the planet.”
“Who are kept as their slaves by superstition and lies!”
That isn’t the Republic’s business. Leia straightened her shoulders under the velvet weight of her robe, seeing, in the flare of Ashgad’s anger, the reflection of what her own reactions would have been at eighteen. But it shouldn’t be that way! She remembered crying to her father, when after a complicated and emotional court case concerning vampiric Garhoons and their prey, the prey had elected to return to their vampires. It had taken her a long time to understand and respect her father’s decision to pursue the matter no further.
“Nam Chorios is not a part of the Republic. Legally, we have no right to interfere in their affairs.”
“Not even to protect the rights of the colonists? The rights of men and women who …?”
“Who left the Republic,” said Leia, “to go live on a world that was not part of it. Who decided to take a chance on a world about which they knew almost nothing. Everyone knows the deficiencies in the Registry’s information. And the Empire ‘protected the rights’ of Alzoc III, of Garnib, of Trosh.”
Ashgad’s broad face reddened. “The cases are nothing alike! We certainly aren’t asking you to enslave a native population! Just to ensure those who wish it the right to a decent livelihood.”
“The majority of Nam Chorios’s population voted not to affiliate with the Republic,” said Leia. “And that, the colonists did know. We have no right to disregard the wishes of the majority. I have no wish to sound hardhearted, Master Ashgad, but the Newcomers are not being constrained in any fashion that I have heard of.”
“Except that their lives are there. All their assets, which with the gun stations in operation they can’t even take with them should they leave. Their stake in the future is on that planet.”
“So is the stake of the original inhabitants, Master Ashgad.”
The big man stood for a moment, one hand on his hip, the other on the back of his chair, head down, one dark lock of his thick hair hanging over a forehead furrowed with frustration and thought. Among the dusky leaves of his miniature bower, Dzym had fallen silent again, gloved hands folded, a small frown of concentration furrowing his smooth forehead. He hadn’t, as far as Leia could discover, even made secretarial notes to himself in a hide-out mike to supplement a recorded transcript of the interview.
“What I will do is this,” said Leia, after a moment’s silence. “When I return to Coruscant, I’ll authorize an investigation team to see what’s really going on down on the planet and to explore other options, if possible. We may be able to negotiate with the Therans who control the gun stations.”
“No one negotiates with the Therans.” Fierce bitterness flashed like a dagger in Ashgad’s voice and glinted in his green eyes. “They’re fanatical lunatics who’ve had that entire population of credulous fools under their spell for generations.”
There was a small movement among the dyanthis leaves. Leia glanced quickly across at Dzym, in time to see the secretary sit back, strangely misshapen-looking in his granite-colored robes, an expression of satiated ecstasy flowing across his face. He sighed deeply, savoringly, and was still.
“I had hoped to convince you to come to our aid, Your Excellency.” Ashgad’s voice again drew her mind away from the curiously nonworking secretary. “And I very much appreciate your sending a commission. I’ll certainly use all the influence I possess in the Newcomer community to help them with their findings.”
Leia rose, and extended her hand. “I know you will.” She spoke with genuine warmth, though the cynical rebel who still lived in the back of her mind added, I just bet you will.
Ashgad bowed low over her hand, an old-fashioned courtesy she hadn’t encountered since she’d left Palpatine’s court. The man seemed completely sincere, and Leia’s own instinct to help and protect embattled minorities sympathized with his frustration. From having contended with such factions as the Agro-Militants and the United Separatists, she did genuinely wish that she could do something for modern, intelligent people struggling to free themselves from irrational tyranny.
If that was what was actually going on.
“See that Master Ashgad finds his way back to the shuttle bay all right, would you, Ssyrmik?”
Leia’s small honor guard sprang to their feet as the Chief of State and her guests stepped through the doors to the conference chamber’s anteroom. The lieutenant bowed, and shouldered her sleek white-and-silver ceremonial blaster rifle. “This way, Master Ashgad, Master Dzym.”
Looking at the youthful faces and earnest demeanor of those half dozen young graduates of the New Republic’s Space Academy made Leia feel a hundred years old.
The trio of bodyguards Ashgad had brought with him bowed to her as well: Handsome androgynes in close-fitting, light blue uniforms with the oddly dead-looking hair of very expensive dolls.
As she watched the bronze-embossed doors of the corridor shut behind them, Leia heard a soft, gravelly whisper behind her say, “Those three smell wrong, Lady. They are no living flesh.”
Leia glanced behind her at the four small, gray, wrinkled humanoids who seemed to have melted from the antechamber’s walls. The smallest, who barely topped Leia’s elbow, regarded the bronze doors with narrowed yellow eyes.
Several years had passed since, in the face of mounting pressure from the Council, Leia had eliminated her bodyguard of Noghri hunter-killers. Leia understood it; even before the unfortunate incident of the Barabel ambassador, there were those who said it ill behooved her to wield a weapon that had been Palpatine’s. Bringing them on this mission had been a terrible risk.
Do not trust Ashgad, the message had said.
She had sent for them, secretly, just before departure. There were some risks greater than schism in the Council.
“Technically, it is living flesh, though,” said Leia thoughtfully. “They’re synthdroids, Ezrakh. I’ve seen them in the pleasure domes on Hesperidium and Carosi. Sculpted synthflesh over metal armatures. They have only minimal internal computers; their actions are centrally controlled, probably from Ashgad’s ship, because I don’t know of any technology that would transmit from as for away as Chorios itself.”
She folded her arms, and a small dark line appeared between the sharp brushstrokes of her brow. “And as far as I know, they’re very, very expensive. Would you just make sure for me that they do get on their vessel?”
The Noghri inclined his head, but not before she saw the twinkle of amused comprehension in his eyes. “Gshkaath already sees to it, Lady.”
Maybe the message she had received had prejudiced her, she thought, shaking her head. It was something she tried daily to guard herself against, but personal prejudice could never entirely be discounted.
The Noghri started to withdraw—they tended to keep themselves separate from the Academy honor guard, who were among the few even aware of their presence on the ship—but Leia raised her hand impulsively. “What about Master Dzym?” she asked. “How does he smell to you?”
Ezrakh hesitated a moment, weighing the question, the folds of his leathery gray face tightening. Then he made a sign of negation. “His smell is a human smell. I do not like him either, Lady—I do not like his eyes—but he smells as other humans do.”
Leia nodded, a little comforted. “Will you come with me?” she asked. “And you, Marcopius, if you would.” She smiled to one of the young Academy guards. It wasn’t their fault, she knew, that the hunter-killers of Honoghr could slice a potential assassin to pieces before a human—particularly these youths—could unlimber a blaster rifle, nor was it the fault of the Academy guards that she could not risk any possibility of threat while on this mission. Throughout the trip she had been very careful to keep the Academy guards in their usual position at her side, and to emphasize to them that the Noghri were only a backup, a holdout weapon against unexpected catastrophe.
And as Luke would say, there was no way of telling which group might be her salvation in a crisis.
At the turbolifts she touched the summon switch, and when she and her two guards were within the car, toggled the controls for the shuttlecraft hangar deck.