“Never been here before, and I don’t aim to stay here long. It’s just not the Core.”
The rickshaw driver, a Dressellian with a dark green lesion above his left eye, nodded to them and snapped the leather lead of his draft lizard. “Where to?” he asked.
“Same place everyone else has been going,” Han said, hauling himself up to the rickshaw’s seat. He put his hand down to help Scarlet up, but she was already on the other side, clambering aboard without aid.
“The conclave hive,” the driver said. “You with the Arthos House?”
“The who?”
“Arthos House,” the driver said, sliding onto the lizard’s thin, anxiously shifting back. “Are you missionaries?”
“No,” Han said.
“Good,” the driver said and spat. “Can’t stand the blasted religious.”
The lizard started off, going from dead stop to full speed without any transition in between. The streets of the city were narrow, dark, and crowded. Speeders crowded against the lizard rickshaws. Barge droids lumbered through intersections without bothering to check whether traffic on either side looked like it would stop for them. The cushions in the rickshaw were old and stained and sank in at the middle so that Han and Scarlet Hark drifted toward each other, pulled into contact by gravity. Her gaze flickered over the streets, up into the stone-and-ivy terraces they passed, but her attention seemed turned inward. The voices of street vendors called out in a dozen different languages, offering everything from fresh-picked fruit to computer hardware to weapons.
“I have a question,” she said. “What you said before about how, if the rebels win, they’ll just turn into another thing to rebel against? Did you really mean that, or were you just trying to sound impressive?”
Han smirked. “I can say what I mean and still be impressive.” Her eyes weren’t hard, but they weren’t soft, either. A beggar ran out into the street, and the lizard lurched around her. Han shrugged. “Sure, I meant it.”
“So if we win, you’ll turn against us?”
“I’m very consistent,” he said. “If we wind up on opposite sides of this, it won’t be me that changed.”
Scarlet thought about that for a moment. “You think all governments are the same.”
“I think anyone who’s telling me what I can and can’t do is the same. I take it you don’t.”
“I think you can hold water in a cupped hand and you can’t in a fist,” she said. Then, “That’s a metaphor.”
“I know it’s a metaphor.”
“I wasn’t sure, because—”
“I know what a metaphor is.”
The driver twisted around on the lizard to look back at them. “You two sure you ain’t missionaries?” he asked.
“I’m positive,” Han said.
The conclave hive was a single, massive dome that stretched from the mountain face at one side of the valley all the way to the other. It was the color of the mountains, with tier after tier of arches rising one above the other until the pale smooth stone of the dome began. At the structure’s base, dozens of small fliers and speeders, rickshaws and transports clogged the streets and alleyways. At a glance, Han could see members of a dozen different species, mostly clumped together and eyeing one another warily. Across from the massive worked metal doors, a Gran was focusing all three of its stalked eyes politely on three black-robed Roonans as they gesticulated angrily. Scarlet leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder.
“We’ll walk from here,” she said.
“Damned right,” the old Dressellian said. “Can’t park any closer than this anyway.”
Han paid the man as Scarlet dropped to the street and made her way toward the Gran. From where he stood, Han could see the interest of the aliens on the street follow her. A new player had arrived, and everyone there was immediately curious about who she was, who she represented, and how she would change the balance of whatever conversations were going on inside the dome.
By the time he reached her, she was thanking the Gran and bowing a formal farewell to the three Roonans. She took Han by the elbow before he could speak and steered him gently but firmly toward the open doors.
“We need to get to the arcade on the third level,” Scarlet said. “The Alliance delegation’s in the middle of a conference.”
“Let’s go.”
The interior of the conclave hive was as ornate as the outside. Maybe more. Terraced gardens alternated with structures that seemed to grow from the walls. Near the top of the massive dome above them, a circle of twelve brilliant lights glowed and rotated slowly, bathing the interior in a permanent high noon. Everywhere, people were talking or arguing or watching with sullen anger and sly curiosity. Han knew that every extra side that came into a negotiation raised the complexity of the deal exponentially. Just walking across the broad courtyard, he could feel the density of attention like radiant heat. It was the pressure of people trying to play an angle. He was a little surprised that no one had asked him to leave his blaster outside.
Wide, stone stairs led up from the courtyard and around a massive pillar carved with the faces of an alien species Han didn’t recognize. Then an open garden where two lines of Gamorreans in different-colored uniforms were squealing and grunting at one another, while a pair of recording droids zipped among them, trying to catch everything that was being said and screamed and muttered. Another set of stairs led to the left, rising to another tier.
“You sure this is the right way?” Han asked as they started up.
“No.”
They walked along a wide terrace with a stone railing that looked down over a walled garden. Two men in bright yellow robes with shaved heads and cranial implants stood at the rail, their eyes locked and their implants flickering wildly. Scarlet started to steer Han around them, but he pulled her back.
“Down there,” he said, pointing over the rail.
In the walled garden below them, three humans sat across a stone table from a pair of Rodians. The two human men wore the uniforms of Alliance High Command, and between them Leia was in a white gown with a bright blue brooch. Her hair was pulled back, and her face had a pleasant, amused, almost generous expression that he knew at a glance was as fake as a Merian tricorn hoof.
“This way,” Scarlet said, ducking into the archway at the terrace’s edge. A thinner stairway led down, and they took it three steps at a time. When they reached the alcove at the garden’s edge, the Rodians were standing and making small, insincere bows to the humans. Leia’s smile gave away nothing. She held herself with the grace and ease of a Twi’lek dancer. Han paused. Another few seconds and they wouldn’t be interrupting her meeting.