by Troy Denning
Leia’s mouth opened as though she were going to yell back, then she saw where he was looking, and all of the emotion left her face. Han felt her watching him watch the gauge. He said nothing. The gauge ticked up another bar.
“You’re bluffing,” Leia said.
“I’m betting,” Han said. Jaina and Jacen were still alive, and she would not let her grief make her give up on them.
Leia watched the temperature rise another bar, then said, “Imperial City.”
Han let out his breath. “Calocour’s closer.”
“Han!”
Han swung the Falcon around and began a silent countdown.
“Go to the chief of state’s landing pad,” Leia said. “We need to see Borsk.”
“You think Borsk is still on Coruscant?” Han gasped.
“Where else? He certainly won’t be going to Bothawui.” Leia pulled a datapad out of the stowage slot on her seat and, with the ease of a practiced statesperson, began to make speech notes. “There’s something I need to do for him.”
FIFTY-THREE
With the Orbital Defense Headquarters burning like a second sun as it plummeted across Coruscant’s opalescent sky, the tapered spires and delicate towers of the Imperial Palace were bathed in scintillating orange light. As they descended toward the chief of state’s private landing pad, Leia felt like they were dropping into a forest ablaze. Han brought them down less than a meter behind the tailfins of Fey’lya’s garish Kothlis Systems Luxuflier and shut down the fusion unit even before the Falcon settled onto its struts. Leaving Anakin’s look-alike—his true name was Dab Hantaq—aboard under Meewalh’s care, they lowered the boarding ramp and found themselves looking down the barrel of a tripod-mounted G-40 portable cannon.
“Something wrong with the Falcon’s transponder, Garv?” Leia asked, not all that surprised by the cautious reception. “We tried to comm, but couldn’t get through.”
“Just being careful, Princess.” A thin man in the uniform of a New Republic general stepped into view. “Sorry about the comm problem. The Yuuzhan Vong are starting to take out the satellite web, so Chief of State Fey’lya has ordered a blackout on all nonmilitary communications.”
“That’s sure to help the evacuation,” Han said.
Garv—General Tomas to everyone except his superiors and former superiors—responded with an enigmatic half nod. Leia had personally named Garv the commander of palace security, and in all the time she had known him, that was as close to a comment on a superior as she had ever seen from him.
“Garv, we ran into a little sabotage problem with Viqi Shesh,” Leia explained. “Would it be too much to have someone recharge our containment fluid? And I’d like to speak with Chief of State Fey’lya.”
“We can arrange both.” Garv sent a furry-cheeked Bothan aide off to fetch the maintenance crew, then turned back to Leia looking uncharacteristically doubtful. “Forgive me if I’m intruding, but I’ve heard rumors about Anakin. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”
“Thank you,” Leia said. Knowing she would need to accustom herself to people offering condolences, she laid a hand on Garv’s arm. “That means a great deal to us.”
Han nodded. “We’re going to miss him.”
“As will the New Republic,” Garv said.
“And speaking of the New Republic,” Leia said, glad for an excuse to change the subject, “I noticed the data towers are still intact. Shouldn’t someone be destroying those records?”
“Someone should be,” Garv said. “But Fey’lya refuses to give the order.”
“He thinks he can hold the planet?” Han asked, disbelieving. “The idiot! If the scarheads capture those survey abstracts, there won’t be a safe place in the galaxy to put a base.”
Garv’s expression turned sour. “I have mentioned as much.”
“I’m sure the chief of state will give the order when the time comes,” Leia said. With shafts of turbolaser fire starting to strike at hostile vessels from rooftops all across Coruscant, she felt certain the time had come already—but Garv Tomas was too good an officer to exceed his authority even under these circumstances. “Still, it wouldn’t be improper to arm the charges now, would it, General?”
Garv smiled. “Not improper at all.”
He keyed the order into a datapad and dispatched an officer to see it carried through, then led the way through the hangar to the chief of state’s towertop office suite. After a brief dispute with an agenda droid, which Garv won by virtue of a security override command, the general admitted them to the restricted chambers and withdrew to continue his duties. They found Fey’lya bereft of his usual gaggle of advisers and sycophants, standing alone in the heart of his opulent office, studying a holographic display of Coruscant’s crumbling defenses.
The situation was hopeless. What remained of the New Republic fleets were surrounded or cut off from the planet, sometimes both. Half of the defense platforms were falling out of orbit, the rest blinking with critical damage indicators. The atmospheric security force was fighting fiercely in their V-wings and Howlrunners, but the superiority of their air-dedicated craft could not overcome the enemy’s sheer numbers. Yuuzhan Vong drop ships were already forming up to make their runs, and Leia knew this battle would soon be moving to the rooftops.
It took Fey’lya a minute to notice he had guests. “Come to gloat, Princess?”
Leia forced a warm tone. “Not at all, Chief.” Hoping Han’s face would not betray the opinion of Fey’lya he had expressed earlier, she extended her hands and crossed to the Bothan. “I came to apologize.”
Fey’lya’s ears flattened. “Apologize?”
“For not helping with the military,” she explained. “I’m afraid I was too consumed with grief.”
Fey’lya’s attitude changed instantly, and he took her hands between his paws. “Not at all. I am the one who should apologize—to call upon you at such a time!”
“It must have been important, or you wouldn’t have intruded.” Confident that Fey’lya was already considering how he might use her to bolster his evaporated support, Leia shifted her gaze to the display and let the comment hang. “Our position certainly looks tenuous. Can we hold?”
“We must,” Fey’lya answered. “If Coruscant falls, so does my government.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t that be a shame?” Han said.
Resisting the urge to stomp on his foot, Leia smiled and pretended not to notice the sarcasm. “What my husband means to say, Chief Fey’lya, is that you have our support.” She pulled Han to her side. “Isn’t that right, dear?”
“Of course, dear.” Han sounded sincere—or close enough to draw an accepting nod from Fey’lya. “Chief Fey’lya can count on us.”
Leia put on an earnest look. “If you thought a few words from me would do any good …”
Fey’lya’s smile looked more relieved than appreciative. “What could it hurt? If the military knows you’re with me, they’ll stand firm behind my government. That’s been the problem, you see—all these senators running for home and grabbing a piece of any fleet they can.”
“I know,” Leia said. “I’ve seen the newsvids. Is the comm center still over by the window?”
“That was such an easy place for Baldavian lip-readers to watch.” Fey’lya took her arm and guided her toward what had been, when she occupied the office, a coat closet.
“One body of open water on the whole planet, and you drop our X-wings in it?” Mara said, wrapping an airsplint around her broken ankle. “The only one? What were you thinking, Skywalker?”
“Mara, I really didn’t have a choice,” Luke said. The heat of his engine fires had fused the fibers on the back of his flight suit, and he would need a close cut before his singed hair looked human again. “It was put them here or crash them into a tower.”
Mara and Luke were staring across the firelit waters of the Western Sea, a vast artificial lake and multispecies recreation area spread across thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of rooftops. A
dozen whirlpools marked where crashes less controlled than their own had punctured the durasteel bed and freed the contents to rain down on Coruscant’s underlevels. All in all, it had not been a bad place to push the X-wings after they ejected, but the bottom was so strewn with discarded droids and junked airspeeders that locating their cherished R2 unit was proving difficult even for Luke.
She pulled the airsplint’s inflation tab and did not allow herself to wince as it compressed her broken bones, then took an injector out of the ejection medpac and gave herself a shot of bacta numb. Mara would normally have avoided any kind of painkiller, but they would be moving fast over the next few hours, and she did not want her injury slowing her down. The Yuuzhan Vong were starting to bring their big vessels down to suppress the rooftop turbolasers, and she could sense that the Byrt had not escaped into hyperspace with Ben. They had to find a way back into orbit, and fast.
Luke finally stretched a hand over the water. A distant speck broke the surface and swelled into the shape of a scorched X-wing. A pair of Yuuzhan Vong airskiffs promptly dropped out of the sun to attack, in turn drawing fire from a nearby turbolaser battery. For a few short seconds, the sky above the lake erupted into a gridwork of streaking plasma balls and flashing energy bolts, then one skiff burst into rubble and the other pulled up, vanishing into the sun with a stream of laser shafts chasing its tail.
Mara waved their thanks up to the battery crew, which was so well camouflaged on a nearby rooftop that she had difficulty finding it until she used the Force. Luke brought the X-wing to shore and lifted a wildly chirping R2-D2 from the astromech socket. Other than heat scarring, the droid looked sound, and the fuss he was making confirmed that his hermetic seals remained intact after both fire and submersion.
Something big exploded high above, momentarily outshining the sun and spraying long tongues of white flame across the sky. Mara and Luke watched until the brilliance dimmed enough to reveal individual pieces of debris fluttering planetward, but there was no way to know whether the vessel had been New Republic or Yuuzhan Vong. Suddenly overcome by the desperation of their situation, she looped her arm through Luke’s elbow and allowed him to take the weight off her broken ankle.
“Luke, how are we going to do this?” They had seen from the air that the hoverlanes were either jammed with traffic or blocked by debris, and they both knew that even if they did reach a spaceport, any spacecraft worthy of the name would be long gone. “We’ll be lucky to get ourselves offplanet, much less rescue Ben.”
Luke took her in his arms. “Trust in the Force, Mara.”
“Is that the best you can do?” Mara asked bitterly. “Did trusting the Force save Anakin?”
“Perhaps Anakin was meant to save us,” Luke said gently. He knelt in front of R2-D2 and used his sleeve cuff to dry the droid’s auditory sensors. “We’re not in this alone, Mara. If Artoo can get through on a military channel, maybe someone else can help.”
“Maybe.” Mara looked away and tried to keep the dark emotions from rising inside her. She did not want to blame Han and Leia for their son’s peril, but it had been “help” that had endangered Ben in the first place. “Will you hurry, Skywalker?”
“Got it,” Luke said. “Artoo—”
The droid whistled in excitement.
“You’re sure?” Luke began to dry R2-D2’s speaker grille. “You found Leia?”
“This is not the end,” Leia said. “Two years ago, the Yuuzhan Vong entered our galaxy. They came not as friends and equals, though we would gladly have welcomed them as such, but as thieves and conquerors. They saw a galaxy at peace and mistook the strength of our convictions for frailty of arms, the wisdom of compromise for the timidity of cowards. They attacked without provocation or mercy, slaying billions of our citizens, enslaving entire worlds, and sacrificing millions of beings to appease the bloodlust of their imaginary gods. They believed we would be easily defeated, because they believed we would yield without a fight.
“They were wrong. We have fought at Dubrillion, Ithor, the Black Bantha, Borleias, and Corellia—we have fought them every leg of the way from the Outer Rim into the Core. We have lost untold numbers of loved ones, my own son Anakin and my husband’s dear friend Chewbacca among them, and now we are battling in the skies over Coruscant itself. We are still fighting.
“Soon, the enemy will be on our rooftops, in our homes, roaming the dark underlayers of our city. To those able to evacuate and to those trapped behind, I say the same thing I would tell my twins—were I able to reach them behind enemy lines: Keep fighting.
“This is not the end. Twice already, Jedi-led forces have decimated Yuuzhan Vong fleets, and we enter each battle with new weapons and better tactics. We have prevailed against ruthless enemies before, against Palpatine, against Thrawn, against the Ssi-ruuk. This is a war we know how to win. Keep fighting until you can fight no longer, then exhaust the enemy chasing you, and turn and fight some more. Keep fighting. I promise you, we will prevail.”
The Lady Luck’s flight deck fell as silent as a Noghri with a vibroblade. Lando pretended to adjust the shield power until he knew his eyes would remain dry, then heard an odd half growl from the copilot’s seat. He looked over to find General Ba’tra drying his cheek fur.
“That woman could talk a Hutt onto a diet.” The Bothan spent the next few seconds looking out the forward viewport, where the Byrt’s finger-sized profile was rapidly swelling to arm-sized. A smaller lozenge, black and scabrous, was tentacled to its belly, and Viqi Shesh’s sleek KDY staryacht hovered nearby. Finally, Ba’tra grunted, “General Calrissian, none of those vessels looks like the Errant Venture’ ”
“They’re not,” Lando said, offering no other explanation. As far as he was concerned, his reactivation had ended with the fall of the Orbital Defense Headquarters. Now, Ba’tra and his soldiers were just evacuees hitching a ride. He opened a ship-to-ship channel to his wife. “Has—”
“Where are you?” Tendra demanded. “I’ve been worried sick.”
“Everything’s fine. I was, uh, delayed at the ODH.” As Lando spoke, he was sending her coordinates on a separate data band. “When Booster arrives, ask him to swing by this location. I’m doing a favor for some mutual friends, and it would be good to have a Star Destroyer standing by.”
“What kind of favor?”
“It’s important.” Though the channel was encrypted, Lando hesitated to say more for fear of Peace Brigade slicers. “Just tell Booster. I’ll see you soon.”
“You’d better.”
“Bet on it.”
Not wishing to alarm Tendra, Lando signed off without telling her he loved her. Ba’tra studied him out of the corner of his eye.
“Didn’t figure you for a hero, Calrissian.”
“Me? Not at all.” Lando flashed his salesman’s smile. “But I couldn’t pass on a chance to demonstrate my droids to a captive audience.”
Ba’tra snorted, then half smiled and glanced at the primary display. Even this high in orbit, space was crowded with vehicles. For the most part, the Yuuzhan Vong were too busy with Coruscant’s still-formidable defenses to molest civilian ships, but a dozen skips patrolled the area around the Byrt, chasing off any vessel that came near.
Ba’tra tapped a claw on the display. “Wouldn’t hurt to bring some escort. We could call the Jedi wing off that yammosk.”
“And draw attention to ourselves?” Lando cocked his brow mischievously, then activated the Luck’s intercom. “Tighten your crash webbing back there. One-One-A, is your company ready to go?”
“Affirmative, General.”
“I’m not a general. The reactivation was temporary.”
“A general is always a general, General.”
Lando rolled his eyes and opened a panel on the arm of his pilot’s seat. He pressed a safety-locked button, and a valve in the starboard engine pod began spraying nonsealed Tibanna gas into the ion drives. The Luck sprouted a kilometer-long tail of what looked like white flame, but was actually a h
armless fulgurous discharge caused by the ionization of Tibanna gas. Lando put the yacht into a corkscrew spin and set an oblique course for the Byrt, maintaining enough angle to clear the starferry by a safe margin. The skips scattered, but held their fire. A hit might change the “damaged” yacht’s course and send it careening into the vessels they were guarding.
“Compliments, General.” Ba’tra squeezed his eyes shut against the nauseating star spin outside. “Haven’t seen a Bothan runaway gambit this tight in years.”
Lando continued on a vector that would miss by half a kilometer. The skips wheeled around behind him, but stayed well back from the Tibanna tail. The Byrt swelled to the size of a building, and Lando nosed down toward it and decelerated hard, and then there was nothing but durasteel hull in the forward viewport, and the two ships kissed particle shields hard enough to push the starferry into the Yuuzhan Vong tether ship. Lando swung his stern around and tractored the Luck alongside the Byrt.
The first two coralskippers arrived, belching plasma balls into the Luck’s energy shields. Lando shut down the sublight fuel feed and closed the efflux nacelles. Tibanna gas billowed out through the cooling vents, becoming trapped under the shields and engulfing the Luck in fused-photon “flames.”
The next two skips pulled up without firing, and Lando lowered the shields on the Byrt’s side of the yacht. “One-One-A, go!”
* * *
When General Calrissian’s attack authorization came, YVH 1-1A was already magnoclamped to the Byrt, affixing a bead of elastic detonite to the hull. Still troubled by his failure at the Coruscant proving trial, he had dedicated a processing band to weapon-circuitry tests. All systems checked full power and ammunition—but so they had on Coruscant. YVH 1-1A’s self-preservation routines kept accessing the memory of his blaster bolts dancing off the armored Yuuzhan Vong, kept reporting an undetected flaw in his power-selection module. His logic center knew the assertion to be groundless, but if it was only a ghost loop, why did it persist even after he degaussed his circuits?
In 1.2 seconds after General Calrissian issued the “go” order, two subordinate units secured the Lady Luck’s cofferdam around him. YVH 1-1A withdrew to the air lock and activated the detonite. A door-sized section of hull popped free and clanged off 1-1A’s chest armor as the pressures equalized.