“Well—yes,” Han floundered. “I mean, everyone thought you died on Anchoron.”
“In a very real sense, I did,” the other said quietly, the smile fading from his face. Closer now, Han was struck with just how lined with age and stress the Senator’s face was. “The Emperor wasn’t quite able to kill me at Anchoron, but he might just as well have done so. He took everything I had except my life: my family, my profession, even all future contacts with mainstream Corellian society. He forced me outside the law I’d worked so hard to create and maintain.” The smile returned, like a hint of sunshine around the edge of a dark cloud. “Forced me to become a rebel. I imagine you understand the feeling.”
“Pretty well, yeah,” Han said, grinning lopsidedly in return. He’d read in school about the legendary presence of the equally legendary Senator Garm Bel Iblis; now, he was getting to see that charm up close. It made him feel like a schoolkid again. “I still can’t believe this. I wish we’d known sooner—we could really have used this army of yours during the war.”
For just a second a shadow seemed to cross Bel Iblis’s face. “We probably couldn’t have done much to help,” he said. “It’s taken us a good deal of time to build up to what you see here.” His smile returned. “But there’ll be time to talk about that later. Right now, I see you standing there trying to figure out exactly when it was we met.”
Actually, Han had forgotten about Sena’s references to a previous meeting. “Tell you the truth, I haven’t got a clue,” he confessed. “Unless it was after Anchoron and you were in disguise or something.”
Bel Iblis shook his head. “No disguise; but it wasn’t something I’d really expect you to remember. I’ll give you a hint: you were all of eleven at the time.”
Han blinked. “Eleven?” he echoed. “You mean in school?”
“Correct,” Bel Iblis nodded. “Literally correct, in fact. It was at a convocation at your school, where you were being forced to listen to a group of us old fossils talk about politics.”
Han felt his face warming. The specific memory was still a blank, but that was how he’d felt about politicians at that time in his life. Though come to think of it, the opinion hadn’t changed all that much over the years. “I’m sorry, but I still don’t remember.”
“As I said, I didn’t expect you to,” Bel Iblis said. “I, on the other hand, remember the incident quite well. During the question period after the talk you asked two irreverently phrased yet highly pointed questions: the first regarding the ethics of the anti-alien bias starting to creep into the legal structure of the Republic, the second about some very specific instances of corruption involving my colleagues in the Senate.”
It was starting to come back, at least in a vague sort of way. “Yeah, I remember now,” Hah said slowly. “I think one of my friends dared me to throw those questions at you. He probably figured I’d get in trouble for not being polite. I was in trouble enough that it didn’t bother me.”
“Setting your life pattern early, were you?” Bel Iblis suggested dryly. “At any rate, they weren’t the sort of questions I would have expected from an eleven-year-old, and they intrigued me enough to ask about you. I’ve been keeping a somewhat loose eye on you ever since.”
Han grimaced. “You probably weren’t very impressed by what you saw.”
“There were times,” Bel Iblis agreed. “I’ll admit to having been extremely disappointed when you were dismissed from the Imperial Academy—you’d shown considerable promise there, and I felt at the time that a strongly loyal officer corps was one of the few defenses the Republic still had left against the collapse toward Empire.” He shrugged. “Under the circumstances, it’s just as well that you got out when you did. With your obvious disdain for authority, you’d have been quietly eliminated in the Emperor’s purge of those officers he hadn’t been able to seduce to his side. And then things would have gone quite differently, wouldn’t they?”
“Maybe a little,” Han conceded modestly. He glanced around the war room. “So how long have you been here at—you called it Peregrine’s Nest?”
“Oh, we never stay anywhere for very long,” Bel Iblis said, clapping a hand on Han’s shoulder and gently but firmly turning him toward the door. “Sit still too long and the Imperials will eventually find you. But we can talk business later. Right now, your friend outside is probably getting nervous. Come introduce me to him.”
Lando was indeed looking a little tense as Han and Bel Iblis stepped out into the sunlight again. “It’s all right,” Han assured him. “We’re with friends. Senator, this is Lando Calrissian, one-time general of the Rebel Alliance. Lando; Senator Garm Bel Iblis.”
He hadn’t expected Lando to recognize the name of a long-past Corellian politician. He was right. “Senator Bel Iblis,” Lando nodded, his voice neutral.
“Honored to meet you, General Calrissian,” Bel Iblis said. “I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
Lando glanced at Han. “Just Calrissian,” he said. “The General is more a courtesy title now.”
“Then we’re even,” Bel Iblis smiled. “I’m not a Senator anymore, either.” He waved a hand at Sena. “You’ve met my chief adviser and unofficial ambassador-at-large, Sena Leikvold Midanyl. And—” He paused, looking around. “I understood Irenez was with you.”
“She was needed back at the ship, sir,” Sena told him. “Our other guest required some soothing.”
“Yes; Council-Aide Breil’lya,” Bel Iblis said, glancing in the direction of the landing pad. “This could prove somewhat awkward.”
“Yes, sir,” Sena said. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have brought him here, but at the time I didn’t see any other reasonable course of action.”
“Oh, I agree,” Bel Iblis assured her. “Leaving him in the middle of an Imperial raid would have been more than simply awkward.”
Han felt a slight chill run through him. In the flush of excitement over meeting Bel Iblis, he’d completely forgotten what had taken them to New Cov in the first place. “You seem to be on good terms with Breil’lya, Senator,” he said carefully.
Bel Iblis eyed him. “And you’d like to know just what those good terms entail?”
Han steeled himself. “As a matter of fact, sir … yes, I would.”
The other smiled slightly. “You still have that underlying refusal to flinch before authority, don’t you. Good. Come on over to the headquarters lounge and I’ll tell you anything you want to know.” His smile hardened, just a little. “And after that, I’ll have some questions to ask you, as well.”
The door slid open, and Pellaeon stepped into the darkened antechamber of Thrawn’s private command room. Darkened and apparently empty; but Pellaeon knew better than that. “I have important information for the Grand Admiral,” he said loudly. “I don’t have time for these little games of yours.”
“They are not games,” Rukh’s gravelly voice mewed right in Pellaeon’s ear, making him jump despite his best efforts not to. “Stalking skills must be practiced or lost.”
“Practice on someone else,” Pellaeon growled. “I have work to do.”
He stepped forward to the inner door, silently cursing Rukh and the whole Noghri race. Useful tools of the Empire they might well be; but he’d dealt with this kind of close-knit clan structure before, and he’d never found such primitives to be anything but trouble in the long run. The door to the command room slid open—
Revealing a darkness lit only by softly glowing candles.
Pellaeon stopped abruptly, his mind flashing back to that eerie crypt on Wayland, where a thousand candles marked the graves of offworlders who had come there over the past few years, only to be slaughtered by Joruus C’baoth. For Thrawn to have turned his command room into a duplicate of that …
“No, I haven’t come under the influence of our unstable Jedi Master,” Thrawn’s voice came dryly across the room. Over the candles, Pellaeon could just see the Grand Admiral’s glowing red eyes. “Look closer.”