Ambush at Corellia

by Roger MacBride Allen

  “Great, great,” Lando said. He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “This is where the Lady Luck is berthed. It’s just south of the Windward docks. Know where that is?”

  “Of course,” Luke said, taking the paper. “I’ve flown in and out of Coruscant enough times.”

  “Good. See you there after breakfast?”

  Luke was almost tempted to haggle over the departure time as well, just on general principle, but there wasn’t much point. Lando had him, had his word as a Jedi Knight that he would go along. Lando wouldn’t care about departure time. Tomorrow or the next day or the next week would suit him just as well as tonight. No doubt Lando had the Lady Luck being held ready to go right now, just in case Luke had been willing to leave at once. No, Lando had rolled over him already. No purpose would be served by any further game playing. “See you then,” Luke said, and offered his hand again.

  Lando grinned and shook hands with even greater vigor. “You’ve got yourself a deal,” he said.

  * * *

  Lando gave Luke detailed instructions on how to get back to the higher levels of the city, and of course Luke had them memorized on first hearing, but he didn’t bother to follow them. He chose instead to wander the city on his own, moving now through the sordid byways of the un-dercity, built by long-forgotten workers in days lost to memory, now through the magnificent upper city, with its mighty castles and grand promenades and gleaming towers. Even in the darkest ways of the city, Luke Skywalker had nothing to fear. There were few on Coruscant with so little sense as to disturb a Jedi Master, and fewer still that Luke could not sense long before they could attack. He could walk where he would without fear of molestation.

  But Luke paid little attention to his route. Fetid tunnel and grand esplanade were all the same to him that night. His mind was elsewhere. He walked for hours, thinking of Mon Mothma’s advice, of his sister and her family off on their holiday, of Lando’s amazing gall, of the hugeness of the city, and of the galaxy beyond.

  But his thoughts kept returning to Lando. He was a piece of work, that was for certain. Lando had had absolutely nothing that Luke needed, and yet he had managed to convince Luke to do exactly what he wanted.

  Amazing, really. Luke had the power to look into the minds of others, to manipulate their thoughts. He could lift a whole spacecraft with the power of his mind. And yet Lando had managed to play him like a windblower.

  Luke smiled to himself as he reached his front door. No two ways around it. Some people managed just fine without the least little bit of help from the Force.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Homeward Bound

  Peace and quiet were rare commodities in Han Solo’s family, and they should have been rarer still when the family was cooped up in a small ship. And yet, two days out from Coruscant, things seemed to be going remarkably well. Oh, there had been one or two minor scuffles, and a bit more fussing than normal at bedtime the first night, but all in all, there was far less trouble than Leia had expected from her husband’s children.

  She smiled to herself. No doubt she had that habit in common with every mother in history. When they were good, they were her children. When they were bad, or when she feared they might be bad, they were Han’s.

  Well, just at the moment she was more than happy to admit to mothering this brood. It would be hard to imagine any children behaving better than Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin were right now.

  It was just after dinner on the first night out from Coruscant, with the Falcon due at Corellia in two days. The Falcon could have made the trip in far less time, of course, but just this once blind speed was not the only consideration. Leia had urged Han not to try to set any records. Better they got there a day or two later rather than not getting there at all because they had run the hyperdrive at max and blown out a coil or something. For once, Han had been easy to persuade. Maybe he felt it would be no bad thing to baby his ship, just this once.

  Things seemed so calm that Leia wondered if she was with the right family. The remains of dinner had been cleared up, Chewie was sitting at the table with his tools spread out, tinkering with some broken bit of machinery. Anakin was watching Chewie with rapt attention, offering his own advice now and again, speaking in a low voice, and pointing here and there at the gizmo’s interior. Chewie was either taking the advice seriously, which seemed unlikely, or else displaying a degree of patience that seemed more unlikely still.

  The twins were sprawled out on the floor—except, Leia reminded herself, she ought to call it a deck now that they were on a ship—both of them reading. Han was at the auxiliary control station at the aft end of the lounge, doing some sort of check or another on the Falcon’s systems. Probably it was something that didn’t really need doing, just some bit of fiddling with part of the biggest, best toy in the universe—a starship. Han looked happy, at ease, in a way that Leia had not seen in quite a while.

  Leia was seated at the far end of the table from Chewbacca and Anakin. In theory, she, too, was reading, giving herself the rare treat of curling up with a good book instead of slogging through some bureaucratic report. She had been looking forward to this for a long time. Instead she found herself doing little more than sit there in a maternal glow. She was basking in the moment of family, with her children and her husband around her, all safe, all well, and all happy to be together.

  “What’s it like, Daddy?” Jaina asked, looking up from her book. There hadn’t been much in the way of conversation for a while, but it would seem that Jaina had something on her mind.

  “What’s what like, Princess?” Han asked, turning around in his swivel seat.

  “Corellia. What’s it like? I keep hearing everyone being so excited that we’re going there, but no one ever says much about the place.” Jaina stood up and walked over to her father.

  Han seemed flustered for a moment, and Leia looked at him intently. Han had hardly spoken about his homeworld, and had said even less about his life in the Corellian Sector. For years, she had forced herself to restrain her curiosity. But now. Now he would surely have to say something.

  “Well,” Han said thoughtfully, “it’s a very interesting place.”

  “And you lived there when you were a kid?” Jaina asked as she climbed up into her father’s lap. Jacen stayed where he was, sitting crossed-legged on the floor, but Anakin took his cue from Jaina. He hopped down from where he was sitting next to Chewie, went around the table, and climbed up into his mother’s lap. He could tell when it was story time.

  “That’s right, I lived there,” Han said, putting on his best storytelling voice. “And it’s a beautiful place. The only trouble with it is that a lot of the names sound the same, so that sometimes outsiders get a little confused by them. Corellians never do. And if I’m a Corellian, and you’re my children, that makes you Corellians. So listen very carefully, and don’t make any mistakes, or you’ll make me look bad. All right?”

  Jaina giggled, and Jacen smiled. Anakin nodded solemnly.

  “Well, the Corellian Sector is made up of a couple of dozen star systems, but the most important star system in the sector is the Corellian star system. And the most important planet in the Corellian star system in the Corellian Sector is Corellia, and the capital city is Coronet. The star that the planet Corellia goes around is called Corell, and that’s where all the other things with the word ‘Corell’ in them get their name. But no one ever calls the star ‘Corell.’ Everyone does what everyone does everywhere else and just calls it ‘the sun.’ Everyone always does that.”

  “Uh-huh,” Jaina said.

  “Good. Now, I’ll tell you all about the planet Corellia in a minute, but one of the most interesting things about the Corellian star system is that it has so many inhabited planets. It’s rare for a star to have even one planet that people can live on, but it’s even rarer for a star to have more than one. That’s one of the things that makes the Corellian system so special. It has five habitable planets. The Five Brothers, we call them. The five of t
hem have had so much to do with each other over the generations that we never really thought of them as five different places. They were together, the way you and Jacen and Anakin are. But Corellia has the most people and the biggest cities, and so they call it the Elder Brother, or sometimes just the Eldest.”

  “But why are there five habitable planets?” Jacen asked. “Does anyone know how that happened?”

  “Good question,” Han said. “The scientists are very confused by the Corellian system. The planets’ orbits are so close to each other, and are so strange, that some of the scientists think the whole star system is artificial. They think somebody built it, a long, long time ago.”

  “Wow,” said Jacen. “Someone built a whole star system?”

  “Well, that’s one idea. Other scientists say that’s crazy. They’ve worked out a way that it all could have happened by itself. But one thing is for sure. If the Five Brothers were put in their current orbits on purpose, it must have happened in the dimmest mists of time, even before the dawn of the Old Republic, more than a thousand generations ago.

  “But the next thing you need to know is that there are more than just humans in the Corellian Sector. There are the Selonians and the Drall, lots of them, and a few of all sorts of other kinds of beings. At least there used to be. We don’t really know what things are like now.”

  “Why not?” Jaina asked.

  “Well, it’s tricky,” Leia said. “We have a lot of general information about what’s going on in Corellia, but it’s very hard to get solid details on a lot of things. It makes a big difference. It’s like if someone who knew you twins loved each other, and that’s all they knew. They wouldn’t understand if they saw you fighting with each other—and then saw you playing nicely together two minutes later. We sort of know the broad outlines of what’s been going on in the Corellian Sector, but we don’t really know the background to it all. And we don’t know what details are really important and which don’t matter.”

  “Even in the old days, you had to do a lot of guessing if you were studying Corellia,” said Han. “It’s always been sort of inward looking, not much worried about the outside. And don’t forget that half the galaxy is still recovering from the Imperial-Alliance war. Corellia has probably taken its lumps along with everyone else. But Corellians don’t like to show their dirty laundry in public. So we might find out it’s the beautiful, well-run planet we hear about, the kind of place it was when I lived there. Or we might discover it’s a hardscrabble sort of place, with lots of problems and lots of things not working very well.”

  “I don’t want to go to any place that’s all crummy,” Jacen said.

  “But it might do you some good if you did,” Han said. “Your mother and I both feel it’ll be good for you to see something of life besides the cushy deal you have on Coruscant. You should see how the other half lives. After all, it’s how your parents lived, not all that long ago.”

  “Were you guys poor and stuff?”

  “Well, I always was,” Han said. “And your mother—well, she lost everything she ever had in the war.”

  That was an understatement, Leia thought. The Empire had destroyed her entire planet, for no better reason than to terrify the rest of the galaxy.

  “Anyway,” Han went on, “let me tell you about the Drall and the Selonians. An adult Drall is about as tall as you are, Jacen, but a lot heavier set. They have two short legs and two short arms in the usual places. They have short brown or black or gray fur—or sometimes red. Their bodies look a little like taller, thinner Ewoks with shorter fur, but their heads are completely different. Rounder, more, ah, intelligent looking to human eyes, with a bit more pronounced muzzle, and with their ears flat to the head instead of sticking up. They are very dignified, very sensible beings, and they expect to be treated with respect. Is that clear?” Han looked around and made sure he got a nod out of all three kids.

  “Good,” he went on. “I won’t have to warn you to take the Selonians seriously, because you’ll know to do that five seconds after you see one. They are big and strong and quick, the average adult a bit taller than me. Most humans think they are a very refined-looking species. They’re bipeds like humans and Drall, but they have long, slender bodies, and they can go on all fours if they want to. They probably evolved from some sort of active, nimble, swimming mammals. They have sleek, short fur and long, pointed faces with bristly whiskers. And very sharp teeth, and long tails just right for whapping you if you don’t behave. They live underground mostly, and they are very good swimmers. But there’s one other thing you should know about them. Chances are the only ones you’ll ever see are going to be sterile females, and it’s always a sterile female who’s the boss. All their males, and all the females who can have children, have to stay at home, in the dens, all the time.”

  “That doesn’t sound very fair,” Jaina said.

  “No, it doesn’t—to a human,” Han said. “Maybe it doesn’t even sound that fair to some of the Selonians. But that’s the way their society works. Lots of humans have tried to barge in and tell them to change their ways, but it just doesn’t work.”

  “Why not?” Jacen asked.

  Han laughed. “Oh no, you don’t. Some other time. Ask me in about ten years or so—”

  “When I’m old enough to understand,” Jacen said, rolling his eyes.

  “Exactly. Anyway, there are the three main Corellian species. Every now and then a group from one world decides to move to one of the other worlds. So they pack up and off they go. Then, the next day, or a thousand years later, another group on another of the Brothers will decide to move, and off they go.

  “Now all that’s been going on for thousands of years. Nowadays, all of the worlds are all scrambled up, with all the species on all of them. Sometimes, it’s just one kind of people—humans or Selonians or Drall—in one town. Other places, like in Coronet, all three of the species live there. Not only them, but species from a hundred other star systems besides. They all came to Coronet to buy and sell and trade.” Han hesitated a moment, and a look of sadness came over his face. “At least there used to be that many traders from the outside,” he said. “Things have changed, because of the war, and a lot of the traders left Coronet a long time ago.”

  “How did the war make it change?” Anakin asked.

  Han thought for a moment before he answered. “It was sort of like those games where you set up a whole line of little tiles and then knock over the first one in line. The first one knocks over the second, and the second knocks over the third, and so on, until they all fall over, one after another. Even before the war really got started, the navy found it harder and harder to keep enough patrol craft out in the space lanes. They kept getting called away to chase this bunch of Rebel raiders, or to show the flag in that outpost, or to deal with those crises. The more the navy wasn’t there, the more the raiders and pirates showed up. The more the pirates chased the traders, the less worthwhile it was for the traders to do business. And when the traders went away, the trading went away, too, and lots of people in the Corellian Sector got poorer and poorer.”

  “And then the war itself came,” Leia said. “And the whole Corellian Sector might as well have built a wall around itself. The Emperor’s Corellian government got scared,” she said at last. “Not just scared of the Rebellion, but scared of everyone. They decided the safest thing to do was not to trust anyone at all. They decided they didn’t want the traders. In fact, they didn’t want any outsiders. The sector’s government stayed more and more to themselves. They didn’t trust anyone else. The government started making up all sorts of rules to keep more and more things hidden and private. It got harder and harder to get the most ordinary sort of information, harder and harder for outsiders to send messages or visit any of the Corellian planets. And the Corellian leaders stopped trusting their own people, and put more and more of the same sort of restrictions on them. And with the Imperial government propping up the Corellian Diktat—that’s what they called
their chief of state—the Diktat could do whatever he wanted without any fear of the people protesting.”

  “But you guys won the war a long time ago,” Jacen said. “Without the Empire, didn’t the Diktat guy have to quit?”

  Leia smiled at that. If only the universe were that tidy, that sensible, so that the losers knew when it was time to quit, and gave up once it was over.

  “The Diktat never did quit,” Leia said. “Not in the way you mean. There wasn’t a day when the Diktat got up in front of the cameras and announced his resignation. But once there was no more Empire to provide outside support, people started to be less and less afraid. They started doing what they wanted, instead of what the rules said they should do. The more people got away with breaking the rules, the braver they got, and the more rules they broke. The security forces didn’t feel brave enough to stop it all—and they didn’t want to go on shooting their own people. It all just sort of collapsed. The Diktat was still there in his palace giving out orders and demanding that people be executed, but no one listened anymore, and no one obeyed his orders.”

  “But what happened to him?” Jacen asked.

  “Nothing much, really,” Leia said. “The New Republic didn’t want to arrest him. After all, the Diktat was the legal head of government. Even if we had thrown him in jail, we would have angered a lot of the old loyalists we were trying to win over. We were still trying to decide what to do with him when he disappeared. We think he was taken off to one of the Outlier systems.”

  “What are Outliers?” Anakin asked.

  “That’s just the name for the star systems in the Corellian Sector that are sort of small and far away from Corell itself,” Leia said. “The Outlier systems are so secretive they make Corellia look wide open. Lots of people from the sector’s Imperial government ran off to them and just dropped out of sight. The Republic installed a new sector governor-general,” Leia said, “a Frozian by the name of Micamberlecto, but when the Corellians held local elections, a lot of the old Imperial types got back into office.”