desk and keep his loose change out of the discussion. It was a marked improvement over his usual behavior, Han decided. Maybe he ought to let Chewbacca get angry more often.
'I want you to come with me, too,' Leia told the droid. 'Khabarakh spoke Basic well enough, but the other Noghri may not, and I don't want to have to depend on their translators to make myself understood.'
'Of course, Your Highness,' Threepio said, tilting his head slightly to the side.
'Good.' Leia turned to look up at Han, licked her lips. 'I guess we'd better get going.'
There were a million things he could have said to her. A million things he wanted to say. 'I guess,' he said instead, 'you'd better.'
CHAPTER
5
'You'll forgive me,' Mara said conversationally as she finished the last bit of wiring on her comm board, 'if I say that as a hideout, this place stinks.'
Karrde shrugged as he hefted a sensor pack out of its box and set it down on the side table with an assortment of other equipment. 'I agree it's not Myrkr,' he said. 'On the other hand, it has its compensations. Who'd ever think of looking for a smuggler's nest in the middle of a swamp?'
'I'm not referring to the ship drop,' Mara told him, reaching beneath her loose-flowing tunic sleeve to readjust the tiny blaster sheathed to her left forearm. 'I mean this place.'
'Ah. This place.' Karrde glanced out the window. 'I don't know. A bit public, perhaps, but that, too, has its compensations.'
'A little public?' Mara echoed, looking out the window herself at the neat row of cream-white buildings barely five meters away and the crowds of brightly clad humans and aliens hurrying along just outside. 'You call this a liulc public?'
'Calm down, Mara,' Karrde said. 'When the only viable places to live on a planet are a handful of deep valleys, of course things are going to get a bit crowded. The people here are used to it, and they've learned how to give each other a reasonable degree of privacy. Anyway, even if they wanted to snoop, it wouldn't do them much good.'
'Mirror glass won't stop a good sensor probe,' Mara countered. 'And crowds mean cover for Imperial spies.'
'The Imperials have no idea where we are. He paused and threw her an odd look. 'Unless you know differently.'
Mara turned away. So that was how it was going to be this time. Previous employers had reacted to her strange hunches with fear, or anger, or simple bald-faced hatred. Karrde, apparently, was going to go for polite exploitation. 'I can't turn it on and off like a sensor pack,' she growled over her shoulder. 'Not anymore.
'Ah,' Karrde said. The word implied he understood; the tone indicated otherwise. 'Interesting. Is this a remnant of some previous Jedi training?' She turned to look at him. 'Tell me about the ships.' He frowned. 'Excuse me?'
'The ships,' she repeated. 'The capital warships that you were very careful not to tell Grand Admiral Thrawn about, back when he visited us on Myrkr. You promised to give me the details later. This is later.' He studied her, a slight smile creasing his lips. 'All right,' he said. 'Have you ever heard of the Katana fleet?' She had to search her memory. 'That was the group also called the Dark Force, wasn't it? Something like two hundred Dreadnaught-class Heavy Cruisers that were lost about ten years before the Clone Wars broke out. All the ships were fitted with some kind of new-style full-rig slave circuitry, and when the system malfunctioned, the whole fleet jumped to lightspeed together and disappeared.'
'Nearly right,' Karrde said. 'The Dreadnaughts of that era in particular were ridiculously crew-intensive ships, requiring upwards of sixteen thousand men each. The full-rig slave circuitry on the Katana ships cut that complement down to around two thousand.'
Mara thought about the handful of Dreadnaught cruisers she'd known.
'Must have been an expensive conversion.'
'It was,' Karrde nodded. 'Particularly since they played it as much for public relations as they did for pure military purposes. They redesigned the entire Dreadnaught interior for the occasion, from the equipment and interior decor right down to the dark gray hull surfacing. That last was the origin of the nickname 'Dark Force,' incidentally, though there was some suggestion that it referred to the smaller number of interior lights a two- thousand-crewer ship would need. At any rate, it was the Old Republic's grand demonstration of how effective a slave-rigged fleet could be.' Mara snorted. 'Some demonstration.'
