Part 19 (1/2)

”Oh yeah,” Lando growled. ”Beautiful, young-if you don't think of three hundred years old as old-rich, kind, gentle. But by the time you really get to know her, you're dead and she's on to the next lucky victim. No, the life-witch was bad enough. But this business with Condren Foreck on top of it-I grant it's not as bad, but it is embarra.s.sing.”

”Come on,” Luke said. ”How were you to know? It could happen to anyone. She's the one who failed to recontact you when that Frang Colgter character popped the question. Not your fault.” Lando rolled his eyes. ”Sure. Anyone could land on the planet, meet with a rich young heiress to discuss the prospect of matrimony, and then find out she's just back from her honeymoon. Right. No way. i'm the only one with that kind of luck.”

Luke laughed. ”Well, you might have a point at that,” he said.

”But you're not giving up, are you?”

”Of course not,” Lando replied, trying to achieve just the note of wounded pride. ”It'd take a lot more than this to make me quit.” He thought for a moment and then shrugged philosophically. ”On the bright side, I'm not exactly sure how much of a prize Condren would be. I'm not sure I could have lived with that squeaky voice. Anyway, we ve got to press on. We're expected.”

”On Sacorria, right?”

”Sacorria it is,” Lando said. ”We pay a call on the Outlier planet Saconria in the Corellian Sector, and visit a young lady by the name Tendra Risant. a.s.suming she doesn't turn out to have six kids, three husbands, and a beard down to here.

”That doesn't sound like a likely combination,” Luke said with a smile.

”Give it a chance,” Lando growled. ”In this universe, absurdity tends to a maximum. Especially when I'm around.”

”You know, there is a way you could avoid a lot of these problems, if you don't mind spending a bit of time and money,” Luke said.

”What way?” Lando asked.

”You could try calling ahead. People don't expect each other to call ahead from interstellar range because it's so expensive, but think about it. You've come in cold twice, and it's turned out wrong twice because your information was bad or out-of-date. You could try calling this Tendra Risant via holocom. It'd cost you, yes-but it might save you a lot of time and embarra.s.sment in the long run.”

Lando frowned thoughtfully.

”And besides,” Luke said mischievously, ”think of how much it will impress the lady to get such expensive holocom calls.”

That was all it took to convince Lando. He reached for his data reader and started hunting for Tendra Risant's call code.

* * * Lieutenant Belindi Kalenda knew she had done the best she could. She had taken advantage of the fact that times were bad, and found an unused villa a few hundred meters up the road from where the villa the Chief of State was lodged.

It had been a simple enough matter to break into the villa and conceal her stolen landspeeder and other equipment, and the upper bedroom of the empty villa made for an ideal observation post.

Almost too good a post. It was no good thing that the CDF security team, the uniformed officers she could see so busily marching about on patrol around the Chief of State's villa, had not thought to check out her watch post. Either they weren't good at their job, or someone was telling them not to be very good.

In any event, she would be able to watch everything from here, so long as she didn't bother with eating or sleeping or other such trifles.

But that was absurd, of course. It was time to accept the limits on what she could do, and they were extreme. She could not protect the Chief of State or her family if the CDF decided to move in. She could not tail every member of the entire party. Nor could she be in more than one place if they decided to split up. And if they traveled by hover car, she was out of luck as well. There was no way she could stay unnoticed flying along behind them-a.s.suming she could get her hands on a hover car that could stay in the air for more than five minutes at a time.

But there was one thing that gave her comfort. Outfits like the CDF rarely used their own uniformed agents and officers to do the dirty work. If they decided to make a try for the Chief of State, they would send in covert operatives of one sort or another, quite possibly without the knowledge of the uniformed officers. In fact, if the uniforms actually were trying to protect Organa Solo, or maybe even died in the attempt, that would be all to the good, from the conspiracy's point of view. It would give them deniability.

It was that sort of attack she could be at least some defense against. From her vantage point, Kalenda could watch all the approaches to the house. If the security detail changed its routine, for example in some way that would open a hole in the patrol pattern, that would be a sign to Kalenda to go on the alert. The most likely attack scenario would be for an a.s.sault team to come through just such a hole in the security, kill a few uniformed guards for the sake of versimilitude, and then wipe out the family.

She could be ready for that, ready to shoot up the a.s.sault force, or at least fire a few rounds that would attract the attention of the uniformed guards.

Such a hit was most likely to come at night, in bad weather if possible. She could catch quick naps during the middle of the day, if she put the macrobinoculars on a tripod, pointed them out the window, and set them to go off if they detected abrupt motion. She would get roused out of bed every time one of the kids ran across the yard, or a sea skimmer flew past the window, but at least she would be able to get some rest.

”No one said anything about a tutor,” Jaina said, staring up at the darkened ceiling of the room the children were sharing. ”Why do we have to have a tutor?”

”So we can learn stuff, dummy,” her brother Jacen replied, his voice coming from the bed next to her. ”Why else would they be picking one out for us?”

Jaina shrugged, although she knew her brother could not see her in the dark. ”I guess. But it's supposed to be our vacation.”

”So what?”

Jacen said. ”We're the leaders of tomorrow, or something, whether we like it or not. You think Mom and Dad would give up a chance this big to teach us stuff we might need to help run the galaxy?”

Jaina giggled. She liked it when Jacen talked that way, making fun of how seriously the grown-ups seemed to take everything.

She sighed contentedly and rolled over in her nice big bed. Those bunks...o...b..ard s.h.i.+p had been awfully small. It was nice to be planet-side again. It was the end of their first day on Corellia, but they had barely seen anything of the planet yet. The whole day had been given over to getting through the s.p.a.ceport, getting to the villa on the edge of town, unpacking, and getting organized. That didn't matter.

Jaina was glad to have arrived, even if they hadn't done much yet.

The trip on the Falcon had been fun, of course, but it had been getting a bit cramped onboard. Besides, there had been that strange trouble at the end of the trip that neither of their parents was willing to talk about. Jacen insisted that some other s.h.i.+p had been shooting at them, but that didn't make sense to Jaina. Mom was the Chief of State.

Why would anyone want to shoot at her?

There was a quiet murmur from Anakin, sound asleep in his bed on the other side of the room. It was good to have them all sharing a proper room again, the way they did at home. Yes, indeed, it was good to be off the s.h.i.+p.

”So what do you think the tutor's going to teach us?” she asked. ”I mean, besides how to run the universe.”

Jacen laughed. ”Well, that right there will probably take most of the first day. I guess we'll just have to wait and find out about everything else.”

The villa they had rented had a fine view of the city from the one side, and an even better view of the eastern ocean from the other. It sat on a low bluff, with a pathway affording easy access to the white sandy beach below.

Han was on the patio to the rear of the villa, leaning on the railing and staring out to sea. The skies were clear, the air was clean, and a gentle breeze was blowing. He was on his homeworld on a beautiful morning. The three kids were down on the beach, under Chewbacca's watchful eye. Good of him to do it, Han told himself. No one with that much fur could enjoy getting sandy-to say nothing of getting wet.

Everything should have been fine. All the folklore of the s.p.a.ceways said you were never more comfortable than on your own homeworld, where the gravity, the air-pressureand-atmospheric-gas mix, and language and accent and cuisine and everything else were precisely the ones that your body had been born into.

But it just wasn't true for Han. Not this morning. And it was more than the incident with the PPBs and the Uglies.

That was worrisome, but not as much as it might have seemed at first. After all, they plainly could have killed them all, and yet did not. That meant that some powerful someone definitely wanted them alive, at least for the m ment. It wasn't much of a comfort, but it sure beat knowing with absolute certainty that someone wanted you dead.

But there was more. Much more. Leia had told Han that she had the very clear sense of being watched at the s.p.a.ceport, by someone outside the official security net. When a Force adept, even a half-trained one, told you that something like that, it was probably smart if you believed it.

It was the way the countryside and the city had looked as they had driven through them. Han had expected a certain amount of change, and even a certain amount of decline.

He had followed the news from Corellia as well as anyone outside the sector could.

But the unkempt fields, the unpainted houses, the lines of boarded-up stores a half kilometer long, the worn look of the people. It was bad, worse than he had thought. Han felt a strange, irrational guilt for not having been here, with his people, to experience the suffering with them.

And suddenly he was taken with an impulse to do exactly that. Be with them. Standing in a villa at the edge of the city was no way to see what was going on here on his home planet, in the capital city. He turned and went inside, and found Leia still at the breakfast table.

”Listen,” he said.

”Do you think you can handle this tutor thing on your own?”

Leia looked up at him in mild surprise. ”I suppose so,” she said.

”Why? What's up?”