“Not just any Ryn.” Han fumbled, not for the first time, for the right way to describe the Ryn he was seeking. “Just one that was supposed to meet me here on Onadax. He hasn’t shown, so I’m looking for him.”
“In a bar?”
“It’s not as if Onadax has much else to offer.”
The voice chuckled again. “You’re looking in the wrong place, Solo.”
“That sounds suspiciously like a brush-off. I swear, it’s nothing underhanded.”
“From you, those words take on a whole new meaning.”
“I’ll even pay, if that’s what you want.”
“If that’s what you think I want, then I fear you’re definitely in the wrong place—and at the wrong time.”
The Whiphid guarding the door stirred.
“So it would seem,” Han said. “Look, I’m racking my brain here trying to work out where we’ve met before. Can’t you give me a name to help me out a little?”
There was no reply.
“What’ve you got to lose?” Han said. “You obviously know me—”
He stopped when the Whiphid’s clawed hand came down on his back and began to drag him away. “At least give me a clue!”
The Whiphid hauled him out of the audience chamber and back down to the barroom. Clearly, the interview was over, and no protest from Han was about to be considered.
“Is he always this friendly?” he asked the bouncer. He amended that to a hopeful “She?” when the question wasn’t answered.
The Whiphid collected Han in its powerful grasp once again and hoisted his feet from the floor.
The bouncer forced its way through the crowd. Laughter and applause followed them, turning to cries of annoyance as Han’s head rammed into something’s foul-smelling midriff and sent a jug of ale splashing across the floor. Recriminations flew, which the bouncer ignored.
“I think you’ll find my seat was over that way,” Han said, pointing hopefully in the direction of the sabacc table where he’d been playing.
The Whiphid ignored him as well, propping him upright none too gently at the door. There was no question that Han was being told—not asked—to leave the premises.
He smiled, taking a hundred-credit chip from his pocket and slipping it to the alien bouncer.
“For your trouble,” he said.
“For yours,” was the response as he was forcibly ejected into the street.
“What sort of dive is this, anyway?” Han protested to the closed door as he picked himself up and dusted himself down once more. His shoulder was tender where he’d hit the ground, and the bouncer’s claws had left a few tears in his jacket. Still, it could have been worse. At least he’d made it out with his winnings.
His comlink buzzed as he limped down the seedy back alley that housed the Thorny Toe. He pulled the comlink out of his pocket, knowing before he’d answered the call that it was Leia on the other end.
“You’re out?” Her voice was faint, but her concern was obvious.
“And in one piece. The bar staff aren’t as tough as their jamming fields suggested they might be.”
“Did you find anything?”
“Nothing useful, although I’m guessing there’s more going on here than meets the eye.”
“There always is.” Leia hesitated. “Is that fighting I hear?”
Han glanced behind him. The ruckus inside the bar was getting nastier by the second.
“My exit was none too subtle,” he said, picking up the pace.
“Start making your way back, then. It’s not safe out there, Han.”
“On my way now.”
“I’d advise against stopping somewhere else en route, even if it does allay suspicions.”
Han smiled to himself. In the old days, he would’ve been tempted. But the choice between Leia and a seedy dive was getting easier every year. “Will do.”
The secure channel closed with a soft click. Han’s smile ebbed as behind him the fight spilled noisily out into the street. He hurriedly rejoined the stream of barhoppers cruising the settlement’s main thoroughfare, the grilling he’d received at the Thorny Toe still nagging at him. That the owner of the bar had known him didn’t bother him so much; after all, the Solo name had spread across the galaxy and back again, especially in the quasi-legal circles to which he’d once belonged. But the complete stonewalling regarding the Ryn did bother him. His other sources hadn’t known anything, but at least they had been up front about it. Dumb ignorance was totally different to silence.
Han rubbed his shoulder and hurried back to the Falcon, hoping Jaina had had better luck on the other side of town.
Luke Skywalker gripped the sides of his seat as Jade Shadow emerged roughly from hyperspace. The bulkheads groaned under the strain, while containers of stored goods in the passenger bay could be heard crashing to the floor. Deeper into the ship could be heard the beeping and tweetling of an anxious R2-D2.
“What was that?” he asked his wife beside him in the pilot’s seat, when the disturbance had passed.
Mara was already flicking switches and checking monitors, giving her ship a quick once-over. “A hole the size of a Star Destroyer just opened up in front of us.”
Every hyperspace jump they’d made in the last couple of weeks had been fraught with danger and uncertainty. Not even with the detailed maps of the Chiss Expansionary Defense Fleet to guide them could they account for every hyperspatial anomaly. But if anyone could find a way through the rips and reefs on the other side of known space, it was Mara. He had nothing but confidence in his wife to get them to their destination.
Luke examined the boards before him. “Let’s just hope Widowmaker is okay.”
Lights flickered across the displays, and a new blip appeared on the scopes—shakily at first, but steadying.
“Here she is now,” Mara said.
Seconds later, the voice of Captain Arien Yage sounded over the comm. “How about a warning or something next time?”
Luke smiled to himself at the captain’s comment. “Sorry about that, Arien. If we could give you a heads-up, you know we would.”
“No problem. We got out in one piece, and that’s the main thing.”
The frigate was locked on Jade Shadow’s navicomputer and would mirror every move Mara made through the shoals of the Unknown Regions, but there was no way to communicate through hyperspace and therefore no way to warn of any sudden exits.
“This is getting annoying,” Mara muttered after doing checks on her displays. “I can’t work out what I’m doing wrong.”
Luke was just as confused. Three times they’d tried and failed to jump the last parsec to where the empty system of Klasse Ephemora lay. There—so Jacen had deduced on Csilla, and so all evidence supported—they would find the living world of Zonama Sekot. But it felt to Luke as though something were keeping them out. Mara assured him that it wasn’t like that: the hyperspace anomalies were a natural phenomenon; they didn’t do anything consciously. Nevertheless, it was uncanny how there seemed to be so many of them around this particular point in space.
“Maybe it’s because of the anomalies that Zonama Sekot came here in the first place,” Luke suggested. “It’s safe in here, after all. Once it got in, it could be reasonably sure no one else would bother trying.”
“Well, the Chiss probes managed to get in,” Mara said. “And if they can do it, then so can I.”
Luke sent a wave of reassurance to his wife, buoying up the flagging confidence that simmered just beneath her show of determination. She was a much better navigator than an astromech, and—while it was pointless speculating on the capabilities of a world-sized intelligence like Zonama Sekot—he was sure she could match its flying abilities any day.
“It could be dark matter,” Soron Hegerty said from behind them. The elderly professor of comparative religions—a specialist on exotic alien life—had come forward from the passenger bay, steadying herself with one frail hand against the transparent canopy covering the cockpit.
Luke faced her. “Do you think so, Doctor?”
“Perhaps,” Hegerty said. She paused a moment, obviously trying to think of a way to condense all her studies on the subject into a few words. “Dark matter interacts only gravitationally with the rest of the universe. It pools into clumps like ordinary matter, forming clusters and galaxies similar to the one we inhabit. Some scientists believe our galaxy to be surrounded by a halo of such galaxies—completely invisible to the eye, but there nonetheless.
“Danni and I were talking about this just yesterday,” she went on. “She wonders if such an invisible clump might explain the hyperspace disturbance in the Unknown Regions. A dark matter cluster could be in the process of colliding with our galaxy right now, passing invisibly through it, detectable only by its gravity. Clusters aren’t uniform in density: they have dust lanes and empty bubbles—and stars, of course. The uneven distribution of dark matter might account for the difficulty we’ve had charting this region from the ‘real’ universe. It all comes down to a collision with another galaxy we can’t even see—a collision taking place over billions and billions of years.”
Hegerty looked through the forward screens, eyes glittering as though in wonder at the invisible worlds she imagined.
Mara brushed a strand of red hair back from her face. “That’s all very interesting, Doctor. Can we chart the dark matter somehow and work out how hyperspace is folded around here?”
Hegerty returned from infinity with a shrug. “Theoretically, perhaps. You’d need some sort of large-scale gravity detector, and a means of working out exactly how dark matter influences hyperspace.”
“So it doesn’t actually help us right now?”
Hegerty shook her head. “I just wanted you to know that you’re dealing with a changeable phenomenon. If Zonama Sekot can detect the gravitational passage of dark matter through our galaxy, it might have located a bubble that was about to close. If it put itself inside this bubble, and the dark matter walls slammed shut around it, it could guarantee its safety. Nothing would be able to get through until the dark matter shifted and the bubble opened again.”
Luke could tell from Mara’s expression that she didn’t like this idea at all.
“If you’re right, this bubble must be big enough to enclose an entire star system,” she said. “I don’t believe something that big would be totally seamless. There has to be a way in—and a way out, too. If I were a living planet on the run, there’s no way I’d lock myself in anywhere. There has to be a way.”
Luke put a soothing hand on her arm. “I suggest you rest first, my love. You’re not going to get anywhere when you’re frustrated like this.”
Mara was about to argue the point, but then something softened behind her eyes and she sagged back into her seat. “You’re right, of course. I guess I’m just in a hurry to get on with it. The sooner we find Zonama Sekot, the sooner we can go home.”
Luke sympathized with that feeling all too well. Ben, their son, was a long way away, hidden in the Maw with the other Jedi children, safe from the Yuuzhan Vong. The last holos they’d received had revived an ache that was never far away. The boy was growing up without his parents, just as Luke had grown up without his. It was necessary, but not ideal.
With Mara’s approval, he ordered a rest stop. Deep in the star-spangled blackness of the Unknown Regions, the mission came to a temporary halt.
Jag Fel sat by Tahiri’s bed, staring curiously at the young girl for what must have been the tenth time in two hours. Her brow was drenched with sweat and needed to be wiped frequently. Her hands gripped tightly at the sheets on which she lay. Every now and then she made a strange mewling noise, which sounded to Jag almost like a suppressed scream.
Jaina had wanted to make sure that someone was at Tahiri’s bedside at all times, in case she woke up.
It was Jag’s shift. He just hoped it wouldn’t be on his watch that Tahiri opened her eyes—because if it was Riina who emerged, he knew he would do whatever was necessary for the safety of all concerned.
Jag was startled out of his brooding by the buzz of the comlink. Captain Mayn of the Selonia had installed a compact communications rig in Tahiri’s room so that whoever was on watch could keep in touch with events elsewhere. He answered it before the noise could disturb her.
He found himself in the middle of a joint conversation between Jaina and her parents.
“Something fishy is definitely going on,” Jaina was saying.
“At the Thorny Toe?” That was Han, speaking from the bridge of the Falcon. He sounded slightly out of breath. “I thought so, too. The guy I spoke to—whoever it was—is definitely up to something.”
“Not that,” Jaina said. “The cubic sabacc gives it away. It’s too unlikely. Someone let you win.”
“What about that famous Solo luck?”
“No one’s that lucky, Dad. Face it: someone didn’t want you snooping around. Rigging the table to make it look like you cheated would have been easier than trying to expel you by force for no good reason. It’s the only explanation.”
Her father reluctantly conceded her point. “It’s possible, I guess.”
“That still doesn’t tell us who’s behind it.” Leia’s unease wasn’t so easily assuaged. “The bar owner is clearly involved. He’s either warning us off or looking for an edge of his own. Either way, we know that we should go back.”
“What about you, Jaina?” Jag broke in. “Did you find anything?”
She made an exasperated noise. “If I’d been stonewalled I’d count myself as lucky. I haven’t found a whiff of the Ryn anywhere, and I’m not likely to, now.”
“Not now that they’re onto us,” Han said gloomily.
“Worse. There’s some sort of disturbance out here. A brawl of some kind, and it’s spreading.” For the first time, Jag noted the sound of the city behind her voice. He could hear shouting and what sounded like transparisteel shattering. “Law enforcement is nonexistent here, of course, so it’s getting nasty very quickly.”
“How far are you from the Falcon?” Leia asked.
“A dozen blocks, but it’s getting tougher by the minute. Wait a second.”
Jaina’s end of the conversation went silent for a minute. Jag was prepared to wait it out with the others, but Captain Mayn’s voice came over the comm.
“We’ve got something of a situation here,” she said. “Dock security is warning of a riot breaking out across the city. There’s a mob on our way, apparently.”
That accorded with the sounds Jag heard at Jaina’s end.
“Any word on what caused it?” Leia asked.
“None as such. There are rumors of an incident somewhere in the city. They say that a Galactic Alliance agent attempted to infiltrate a secure compound and has made off with a fortune.”
“We have no agents here that I know of,” Leia said.
“Apart from us,” Han put in.
“Sorry,” Jaina said, coming back onto the line. “Got caught in a traffic snarl. The way to the Falcon is blocked. I’m going to try for the Selonia instead.”
Jaina’s footsteps were hurried over the comlink. Jag could hear the concern in Leia’s voice as she said, “Hurry, but be careful. Someone might be trying to whip up resentment against us.”
“Why?”
“Let’s wonder about that later,” Han said. “Just get back safely.”
Jag echoed that sentiment wholeheartedly as Jaina’s channel went silent. “Sounds to me like someone’s covering their tracks,” he said to those remaining on the line.
“You and me both, Jag,” Han said. “And if Jaina wasn’t out there in the middle of it, I’d happily leave them to it.”
“That’s probably our best course of action,” Leia said. “We’ve been looking for the Ryn and haven’t found them. They’ve had plenty of opportunities to look us up and haven’t. I’m starting to think that we’ve been wasting our time.”
Han uttered a grunt that could have been one of agreement.
“I’ll prepare for liftoff,” said Mayn, ever the pragmatist. “We’ll be away the moment she’s on board, if that’s what you decide.”
“Should I ready Twin Suns?” Jag asked.
“Not necessary, Jag,” Leia said. “We can handle the Onadax defense grid long enough to get away, if it comes to that.”
“I’ll wait here then.” He nodded stiffly. “Thanks for keeping me posted.”
“Stand by,” Mayn said.
With a slight hiss of static, the line closed.
Jag resisted the impulse to pace. He hated being confined to medical quarters while Jaina put herself at risk out in the city, but there was nothing he could do about it. Orders were orders, and his Chiss training left him no option but to obey. All he could do was wait for Mayn or somebody else to update him.
Tahiri stirred on the bed beside him, issuing another of her strange, strained sounds.
Hurry up, Jaina, he thought as he mopped the girl’s brow. Hurry back to me …
Jacen frowned and tried again.
“Mon Calamari Communications Control, this is Farmboy One. Come in, MCCC. I repeat, this is Farmboy One. Please respond.”
Silence.
He sighed as he leaned tiredly back into his chair. While Luke and Mara rested, Jacen was in charge of Jade Shadow. Sensing a familiar wistfulness in his uncle and aunt, he had decided to report to the new capital, looking for an update on his cousin Ben. His failure to raise Mon Calamari troubled him, even though he knew there was probably a perfectly logical explanation. Communications with the Unknown Regions weren’t ideal; all transmissions were routed through a bottleneck on the edge of the Outer Rim. That bottleneck had never closed before, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t possible.
Before jumping to conclusions, though, Jacen had wanted to test every alternative hypothesis. Jade Shadow’s comm systems were working perfectly well at short range; several conversations with the Widowmaker proved that. And when he’d changed his target and tried to hail the CEDF network, the crisp precise tones of a Chiss comm officer answered immediately, so it was clear that the subspace transmitters were still working, too.
“MCCC, this is Farmboy One,” he continued. “This is an emergency. We require an immediate response!”
Reunion: Force Heretic III Page 2