“… do not use your water supply.” The vessel was almost level with him now and the disembodied voice filled the narrow skylane, reverberating off the walls of buildings. “I repeat, contamination has been found in the water supply, and as a precaution all water has been cut off. Do not use your supply, because water standing in the pipes may be contaminated … please listen to your news station for updates …”
The ship passed, repeating its emergency message as it advanced, and Ben saw four blue-uniformed CSF officers standing inside the crew bay, one with a voice projector clutched in his hand.
“Contaminated with what?” said Ben. But he was talking to himself. People had come out of their homes and businesses to stand on the walkway and stare after the assault ship. One woman came out of a tapcaf with a holonews receiver and set it on one of the tables outside, and customers crowded around. Ben paused to watch.
The news channel was running a live report from someone at one of the water company’s pumping stations. Problems with utilities were rare on Coruscant, but it still seemed to Ben like a lot of fuss for a routine problem. Then he heard the reporter use the word sabotage.
“What’s he saying?” Ben asked, trying to peer between the customers for a better look.
“Someone put toxic chemicals in the water supply,” said the tapcaf woman. “They’ve had to shut down ten pumping stations, and that means half of central Galactic City hasn’t got any water.” She slapped a cleaning cloth down on the table, clearly angry. “Which means I have to shut the ’caf until they sort it out.”
“If it’s sabotage, you know who’ll get the blame,” said a man clutching a small boy by the hand. “Us.”
“Could be anybody.”
“Disgruntled water employee,” the tapcaf woman muttered.
“Maybe the water company screwed up and put the wrong chemical into the treatment plant,” said another customer.
“And maybe it is us, because the government was asking for it.”
The debate raged. Ben interrupted. “Who’s us?” he asked. Identity was beginning to concern him. “Why would anyone living here want to poison their own water supply?”
The group turned away from the holoscreen for a moment as if they’d just noticed Ben, and the tapcaf woman gave him a sympathetic look. “People do stupid things when there’s a war on,” she said. “Don’t they teach you that at the academy?”
“But there isn’t a war,” said Ben, and didn’t admit he’d never been to any academy. He knew what a war was. War had to be declared: politicians had to get involved. “Not yet.”
“Well, there is now …” The man picked up his son in his arms and began walking away. “Whether we want one or not.”
Ben leaned over the edge of the safety rail on the walkway to see what was happening on the levels above and below him. People had done exactly what the tapcaf customers had: they gathered outside their shops and homes, talking and arguing. He could hear voices carrying. Traffic had slowed to a crawl. The police public address system boomed in the distance.
“Jacen?” Ben spoke quietly into his comlink, but Jacen wasn’t receiving. The message service clicked in. “Jacen, I’m in the Corellian quarter and—” He searched for the words. But there was no point alarming Jacen. “I’m heading home.”
Ben’s sense of danger was becoming acute now. There was anger and violence building up exactly like the pressure before a thunderstorm; he could feel it pressing on his temples, making his sinuses ache, telling him to get away, run, hide at an instinctive level. He hoped he’d learn to read it better one day. Right now it was uncontrolled and animal. He ran back the way he had come, two hundred meters to the nearest taxi platform.
An air taxi was sitting on its repulsors, hovering silently over a dark pool of shadow. The pilot, a thin-faced human with a shaved head, glanced up from his holozine and opened the hatch.
“Senate District, please,” said Ben.
“Where, exactly?”
“Rotunda Zone.”
“Nah, I’m avoiding the center.” The pilot looked at Ben as if he’d just arrived from Tatooine. “There’s a riot going on over the water contamination. Should you be out on your own, lad?”
Ben was beginning to wonder the same thing himself. “How close can you take me to the zone, then?”
The pilot sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “The intersection of skylanes four-seven-two and twenty-three. Two blocks away. Will that do?”
“Okay.”
Ben sat in the backseat of the taxi with one hand on the hilt of his lightsaber, fidgeting. He hadn’t been worried when he’d infiltrated Centerpoint Station: that had been exciting in an unthinking, reflex kind of way, even though he stood a good chance of getting killed. It seemed impossible that anything could happen to him. But now he was among crowds that seemed ready to explode into violence, and although he was home in Galactic City, he was scared. There was something … animal about it all, something wild and unpredictable.
The taxi slowed and pulled in at a landing platform. Ben could see police speeders ahead at the intersection of the two skylanes, diverting traffic the hard way. A CSF assault ship swept overhead as he stepped out onto the walkway, and his instinct was to follow its path.
So what are you going to do when you get there?
It was a good question, but instead of answering it rationally, Ben just headed for where his Force-senses told him he was needed. Jacen always encouraged him to trust his feelings; and this was as good a time as any. He raced down the walkway in the opposite direction from the rest of the pedestrians, who were doing the sensible thing and moving away from the riot area.
When he rounded the corner, he found himself at the back of a mob facing the Corellian embassy. The building was under siege; there was no other way to describe the barrage of missiles smashing against the permaglass front of the building and piling up in its marble forecourt. The embassy was in a plaza, not on a broad skylane with a thousand-meter drop beneath, making it an easy, close target for anyone hurling missiles. The CSF assault ship hovered overhead. Ben could see officers taking aim with rifles and then lowering them again.
Nobody on the ground seemed to have drawn weapons yet. But the crowd was screaming abuse.
“You scum! You poisoned the water!”
Ben dodged a lump of masonry that cleared the heads of the mob in front of him and landed at his feet, sending fragments flying.
“They should’ve pulverized your whole planet, not just stinking Centerpoint!”
The crowd roared and surged forward before falling back again, nearly knocking Ben flat. He was responsible for what was happening. He’d started this with the raid on Centerpoint. The falling sensation in the pit of his stomach stopped him in his tracks. He’d never seen people behave like this, but it was all his fault. He had to do something.
Another volley of permacrete shattered on the marble forecourt of the embassy, and CSF officers piled into the crowd with riot batons. But the more they tried to break it up, the more people seemed to press forward. The riot had a life of its own. Ben tasted a communal reflex rage, and it scared him more than anything he had ever experienced. For a split second he almost pitched in, too, his body very nearly overriding his brain.
In front of the embassy, a dozen Corellians—Ben assumed that was who they were—braved the hail of permacrete and snatched the lumps up to hurl them back over the heads of the CSF line. One of the men had a blood-smeared gash across his forehead, but he seemed oblivious to it. A CSF captain moved forward with a squad of officers, and Ben heard the Corellian tell him that they were supposed to be protected here, they were supposed to be safe—and then there was a volley of shots from above like projectile weapons firing and the air filled with acrid smoke.
It burned Ben’s eyes and mouth. Dispersal gas: the CSF must have fired canisters from the assault ship hovering overhead. The crowd should have scattered, but instead people seemed to close in on one another and Ben was caught up in the
panic. He fell. He was being trampled. Legs filled his field of vision and just as he curled instinctively to shield his head, a gloved blue arm reached out and grabbed him by the front of his tunic, pulling him free.
“Stupid kid—”
It was a CSF officer. The man had rescued him. Ben struggled to his knees, eyes streaming. “Come on, get out of here—”
Ben’s attention snapped suddenly from his own predicament to a point behind the officer. He focused on a face he knew, a boy with short blond hair, Barit Saiy, and Ben was staring at a blaster aimed not at him but at the officer’s back. He didn’t think; he just pulled out his lightsaber with his free hand and saw the bright blue blade collide with a stream of white energy, deflecting it. It took a second, and when he blinked again to clear his streaming eyes he saw Barit disappearing into the mêlée.
The police officer stared at his lightsaber for a moment, one hand on his own blaster.
“It was a rock,” Ben lied. “Someone threw something at you.”
The officer pulled him to his feet. His face was streaked with gas-induced tears, too; he hadn’t put on his respirator in time. “You’re fast, kid. Let’s get you back to the Temple, shall we?”
“I’ll call my Master. He’ll collect me.” Jacen wasn’t a Master, but the small detail of Jedi life wasn’t important right then. Ben wanted to get away and follow Barit. “Thank you, Officer.”
“Thank you, Jedi.” The officer wiped his nose on the back of his hand and coughed painfully. “You saved me from a pounding, too.”
Ben knew he had saved someone from something, but it was more than a man’s life. However little he understood of politics, he was sure that a Corellian shooting a CSF officer would turn a bad situation into a disastrous one. Barit was in deep; Ben now felt a personal connection to the widening gulf between Corellian and Coruscanti, and sensed that Barit would play a part in something awful.
He wiped his face on the sleeve of his robe, nose streaming, and opened his comlink again. “Jacen? Can you hear me?” There was just the usual quiet hiss of a link that wasn’t being answered, and the click of the message recorder. “Jacen, something terrible is happening.”
chapter six
The bigger the galaxy, the sweeter the homecoming.
—Corellian proverb
JEDI TEMPLE PRECINCTS, CORUSCANT.
Ben was trying to contact him, but Jacen had his own problems at that moment. He sensed they were more critical: his mother was in trouble.
He felt her reach out to him. He felt both her fear and her determination, and the latter was winning.
Where is she? What’s happening?
Jacen slipped into an alcove flanked by bushes in square ceramic pots and sat down to concentrate. Eyes closed, he could sense where she was, and she wasn’t on Coruscant, but very near. It took him a few moments to realize she might be in a vessel.
Listen. Listen.
During his studies, Jacen had mastered a Theran technique that let him use the Force to hear remotely. He slowed his breathing and felt the buzz in his sinuses as if he were being woken too soon from an exhausted sleep. The buzzing filled his head, and then behind it, within it, he could pick out words and sounds.
He heard his mother’s voice; and then he heard his father’s.
“… try another braking burn.”
“Five seconds …”
Metal groaned. An engine boomed and sighed, a rhythmic rising and falling note, and it wasn’t a reassuring sound. Jacen reached out with one word, the most that even he could send through the Force.
Together.
He visualized the Millennium Falcon. In his mind, he could see the plates of her underside and the transparisteel of the cockpit mounted on the starboard flank. He saw her as she should have been, whole and sound. He could feel Leia straining to use Force telekinesis, but he couldn’t sense exactly where she was trying to apply it. He could only hear the tension in her voice and taste her growing anxiety.
And he could feel another presence, too: his sister, Jaina.
They hardly spoke these days, but twins could never cut themselves off from each other for long. She must have sensed their parents’ crisis, too.
Whatever his mother was trying to do, Jacen could only guess. And guessing wasn’t good enough when one was using the physical might of the Force.
Still in his Theran sound trance, he heard the bip-bip-bip of a sensor alarm, the kind that announced that a hull had been breached—or worse.
“… drive’s shaking loose and it’s going to take the plates with it …”
That was what he needed to know. He was certain now that his mother was using the Force to stop the cracks in the drive housing from spreading and ripping the Falcon apart as the ship reentered the atmosphere. It was a massive task. She needed help.
Jacen filled his lungs with a long, slow breath and centered himself to try something he had never attempted before.
Mom, I hope you can handle this.
He pictured Leia sitting in the copilot’s seat. Her emotions and her presence in the Force washed over him and he visualized himself in her place, behind her eyes, seeing what she saw. For a moment he was simply observing; but then a feeling like a sigh drained out of him and it was as if he were exhaling an infinite breath into his mother—no, through his mother. Now he was no longer sitting in the alcove between two topiary bushes, but staring at an array of lights and readouts and at hands that weren’t his. Beyond the console, Coruscant loomed in the viewport.
If Jaina had joined the effort, she was hardly detectable. He had drowned out her presence in his own mind with the sheer strength of the telekinesis he was projecting.
Take this, Mom. Use me. Use the Force I’m channeling through you.
He heard her say “Uh!” as if something had startled her. Then he could feel pressure in his lungs as if he were running hard and fighting for breath. He had no idea how long it lasted. But he had the sense of clutching something tight to his chest, and an awareness somewhere outside his mind and yet at its core showed him the Falcon enveloped in the Force, the hull around her drive assembly compressed instead of expanding catastrophically.
He was sure he wasn’t seeing what his mother was actually looking at, because he had none of the images of entering the atmosphere or landing. The scenes inside the Falcon’s cockpit were being supplied by his memory. He was simultaneously aware both of that rational fact and that his Force power was being funneled through his mother, helping her hold the drive assembly in place by telekinesis.
Then relief swept over him like a wave, making his scalp tingle and his heart pound. The Falcon was down safely. He knew it. Now he could open his eyes. When he did, he was almost surprised to find himself still in the grounds of the Temple in broad daylight.
Jacen opened his comlink. He felt Jaina briefly, but his mind was on his parents. “Mom? Mom, are you okay?”
Leia sounded breathless. “So much for sneaking in discreetly.”
“Everything’s all right, isn’t it?” Jacen could hear his father muttering in the background. “I have to see you both. Stay where you are. I’m coming.”
Jedi seldom ran flat-out in public, so Jacen avoided an undignified sprint with robes flapping and limited himself to a slow jog to the nearest taxi platform instead.
He was the new heir to the Sith legacy and he had seen his grandfather behave in a way that had almost shattered his world. But at that moment he was just a son who was more worried about his parents’ welfare than the affairs of the galaxy.
Attachment had its place. Jacen let himself succumb to it and put aside his growing dispute with both his father and Jaina.
But sooner or later, he knew that a permanent rift in the family was a price he might have to pay.
SLAVE I, PREFLIGHT PANEL CHECK FOR ROONADAN.
Boba Fett had rarely carried passengers—not live or voluntary ones, anyway. The presence of this strange girl in his ship, which was more of a home than anything
he owned made of stone and permacrete, bothered him. And yet he simply couldn’t walk away from her.
Mirta Gev had a piece of his past. That mattered a lot when he was running out of future.
“You normally board ships with total strangers?” asked Fett.
Mirta slung her bag over one shoulder. “Are you going to kill me?”
“Nobody’s paying me to.”
“That’s what I thought.”
She boarded Slave I via the cargo hatch and went to follow him through to the cockpit, but he turned to block her path and gestured aft. “I don’t like copilots. Stay put or I’ll lock you in one of the cells.”
Mirta didn’t show the slightest dissent. She just paused and looked around, then sat down on a crate that was secured to the port bulkhead. She opened her bag and rummaged in it before pulling out a chunk of something that she unwrapped and began gnawing.
Fett stared at her.
“Dinner,” she said. “I always carry rations. Just in case.”
Fett fought back a reflex; his instinct was to tell her she was a smart kid. “Yeah, I don’t do in-flight catering,” he said, and swung through the hatch into the main section of the ship. The internal bulkhead shut behind him, because smart kid or not, he wasn’t taking any chances with her.
He wasn’t quite as agile as he’d been a year before. Just moving around in Slave I’s awkward spaces was uncomfortable now. It wasn’t pure pain, but he felt that before long it would be.
Don’t forget you’re dying, Fett.
He settled into his seat and fired up the ship’s drives. Checking the internal cam circuit that gave him a view of each of Slave I’s compartments, he caught a shot of Mirta leaning back against the bulkhead, eyes closed, arms folded across her chest, apparently dozing. Nothing seemed to faze her. He approved of that. There were always women in the galaxy—and men, come to that—who reckoned they were tough but seemed to think that was about a smart mouth and a fancy weapon. The truly tough ones, Fett thought, were the ones who could take anything in their stride and finish the job. Mirta Gev showed every sign of being genuinely, quietly tough.
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