Leia nodded, feeling a fresh surge of frustration. To her, the Empire's scheme was as blatant as it was cynical: with careful tuning of the whole decontamination process, they could keep the Noghri on the verge of independence indefinitely without ever letting them quite make it over that line. She knew it; the maitrakh herself suspected it. But as for proving it...
'Chewie, are you familiar at all with decon droids?' she asked suddenly. This thought had occurred to her once before, but she'd never gotten around to following up on it. 'Enough that you could figure out how long it would take the number of droids they have on Honoghr to decontaminate this much land?'
The Wookiee growled an affirmative, and launched into a rundown of the relevant numbers clearly, the question had occurred to him, too. 'I don't need the complete analysis right now,' Leia interrupted the stream of estimates and extrapolations and rules of thumb. 'Have you got a bottom line?' He did. Eight years.
'I see,' Leia murmured, the brief flicker of hope fading back into the overall gloom. 'That would have put it right about the height of the war, wouldn't it?'
'You still believe the Grand Admiral has deceived us?' the maitrakh accused.
'I know he's deceiving you,' Leia retorted. 'I just can't prove it.' The maitrakh was silent for a minute. 'What then will you do?' Leia took a deep breath, exhaled it quietly. 'We have to leave Honoghr. That means breaking into the spaceport at Nystao and stealing a ship.'
'There should be no difficulty in that for a daughter of the Lord Darth Vader.'
Leia grimaced, thinking of how the maitrakh had effortlessly sneaked up on them a minute ago. The guards at the spaceport would be younger and far better trained. These people must have been fantastic hunters before the Emperor turned them into his private killing machines. 'Stealing a ship won't be too hard,' she told the maitrakh, aware of just how far she was stretching the truth here. 'The difficulty arises from the fact that we have to take Khabarakh with us.'
The maitrakh stopped short. 'What is that you say?' she hissed.
'It's the only way,' Leia said. 'If Khabarakh is left to the Empire, they'll make him tell everything that's occurred here. And when that happens, he and you will both die. Perhaps your whole family with you. We can't allow that.'
'Then you face death yourselves,' the maitrakh said. 'The guards will not easily allow Khabarakh to be freed.'
'I know,' Leia said, acutely aware of the two small lives she carried within her. 'We'll have to take that risk.'
'There will be no honor in such a sacrifice,' the old Noghri all but snarled. 'The clan Kihm'bar will not carve it into history. Neither will the Noghri people long remember.'
'I'm not doing it for the praise of the Noghri people,' Leia sighed, suddenly weary of banging her head against alien misunderstandings. She'd been doing it in one form or another, it seemed, for the whole of her life. 'I'm doing it because I'm tired of people dying for my mistakes. I asked Khabarakh to bring me to Honoghr-what's happened is my responsibility. I can't just run off and leave you to the Grand Admiral's vengeance.'
'Our lord the Grand Admiral would not deal so harshly with us.' Leia turned to look the maitrakh straight in the eye. 'The Empire once destroyed an entire world because of me,' she said quietly. 'I don't ever want that to happen again.'
She held the maitrakh's gaze a moment longer, then turned away, her mind twisted in a tangle of conflicting thoughts and emotions. Was she doing the right thing?
She'd risked her life countless times before, but always for her comrades in the Rebellion and for a cause she believed in. To do the same for servants of the Empire-even servants who'd been duped into that role-was something else entirely. Chewbacca didn't like any of this; she could tell that much from his sense and the stiff way he stood at her side. But he would go along, driven by his own sense of honor and the life-debt he had sworn to Han.
She blinked back sudden tears, her hand going to the bulge of her belly. Han would understand. He would argue against such a risk, but down deep he would understand. Otherwise, he wouldn't have let her come here in the first place.
If she didn't return, he would almost certainly blame himself.
'The humiliation period has been extended for four more days,' the maitrakh murmured beside her. 'In two days' time the moons will give their least light. It would be best to wait until then.'
Leia frowned at her. The maitrakh met her gaze steadily, her alien face unreadable. 'Are you offering me your help?' Leia asked.
'There is honor in you, Lady Vader,' the maitrakh said, her voice quiet. 'For the life and honor of my thirdson, I
