by Greg Keyes
“Okay,” Jaina said, “but if I flame out from a cracked nacelle, I’m holding you responsible.”
“Don’t worry. I prefer my friends uncooked. Especially my more attractive ones.”
“Boy, you’ve been practicing that flattery stuff, haven’t you?” Jaina shot back. “I’ve already agreed to help you. No need to pour frill syrup on honeycrust.”
“I wasn’t,” he replied, smiling that annoying smile again.
They reached the X-wings in silence, where Kyp’s people were already arrayed. There were more than a dozen and one, now, and she recognized few of them. They all had a certain raggedness to them, a look of almost never sleeping. They had eyes as hard and glinting as Corusca gems, and they looked at Kyp as if he were some Master of old.
“All right,” Kyp told them. “We want to fly quiet this time. Most of you know we seeded a moon of the sixth planet with a signal emitter. They’ll go there first and find nothing but a wayward probe. Keeping the planet between us and them will allow us a sunward course. By the time we need to change our vector, the solar radiation ought to cloak us from their long-range sensors. Then we put the sun behind us and make the jump. Any questions?”
There were none, only a swelling sense of pride and confidence. Jaina tried to shrug it off—these weren’t her feelings, after all. But it was infectious.
“Great,” Kyp said. “As soon as we’re out, I’ll trigger the thermal charges. They won’t find a thing, and we can always dig in here again.”
They cleared the planet without incident, keeping comm silence until they were well around the primary. There, Kyp peeled off from his wing and came alongside Jaina. He signaled for her to switch to a private channel.
“Ready?” he asked, when she’d made the switch.
“I didn’t think we had reached the node.”
“The Dozen are headed to another hiding hole. We’re heading Coreward. We split up here.”
Jaina nodded. “Just give me the jump, so I can lay it in.”
“Coming,” Kyp said.
They made the jump, and then another. After that they had a long realspace jaunt through another uninhabited system.
“Jaina?”
“Still here,” she said. Kyp was only about ten meters away. He had his cockpit light on, so she could see his face through the transparisteel.
“Why did Luke send you? Really?”
“I didn’t lie to you. He’s trying to pull the Jedi back together.” She paused. “He also wanted to know what you were up to.”
“That’s very paternal of him,” Kyp remarked. “Almost as paternal as planting a tracer in my ship last time I was on Coruscant.”
“You found—” She suddenly recognized that Kyp had been nudging her very subtly in the Force.
“Don’t ever do that,” she snapped.
“I do what I must,” Kyp replied. “I guessed there was a tracer. I couldn’t find it. Must be something new. I had to trick you into confirming it, though, and I respected your intelligence enough to believe you wouldn’t fall for such a simple ruse without a nudge. I do apologize, but then, you did come to spy on me.”
“If you think that, you don’t know much about me,” Jaina replied. She glared across the empty space at him.
“Perhaps that’s true. But you didn’t willingly tell me about the tracer.”
“That’s not my secret to give out.”
“Neither are mine. Do you understand?”
Jaina thought about that a moment, then nodded. “Understood.”
“Okay.”
“No, not okay. I’m still not happy with you, Kyp. I don’t think I like who you’ve become.”
“I’ve become what I need to be. What your uncle Luke was in the war against the Empire.”
“Boy, you must love your mirror.”
“No. I’m not saying I like what I’ve become either, Jaina. Your uncle Luke eventually went to the dark side—”
“Hey,” Jaina snapped. “At least he fought it. You spent what, a week training to be a Jedi before the dark side seduced you?”
Kyp laughed easily. “Something like that.”
“And you blew up a planet, right? If it hadn’t been for Master Skywalker speaking for you, you’d be in prison to this day, if not dead. And my father—”
“I know what I owe Han,” Kyp said. “I won’t forget it. I haven’t even begun paying off that debt.”
“Or the one to Uncle Luke. But that doesn’t stop you from bad-mouthing him all over the galaxy, does it? It doesn’t stop you from undermining him as a leader.”
“Any time Luke is ready to be a leader again, I’m ready to follow him,” Kyp said.
“Riiight. Just so long as he tells you to do things you already want to and doesn’t tell you to do anything you don’t want to.”
“You’ve just described what a real leader does.”
“Yeah? And that’s what you are, aren’t you? A leader. I see the way your squadron looks at you. You like it too much. I doubt very much you would give that up, whatever course of action Master Skywalker might lead us on.”
“Jaina,” Kyp said, after a moment, “I won’t say you don’t have a few good points there. Maybe I am addicted to this now. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. Every day, thousands of living, breathing beings are sacrificed to the Yuuzhan Vong gods. There’s a pit on Dantooine. I’ve seen it. It’s almost two kilometers across and full of bones. And the slaves, what they make the slaves do …”
He stopped, and she felt waves of anger, pity, and grief lap over her. “The Vong obliterate whole worlds, and yes, I know I did that once, but I’m not crazy enough to think it was right. The Vong think it’s a holy obligation. Maybe Master Skywalker is right to urge a passive role. Maybe that’s what the Force really asks of us. But I don’t believe it. Luke Skywalker risked everything in his war, the war against the Empire. Everything, including the peril of turning to the dark side as his father did. That was his war, Jaina. That was his war. This one is ours. Luke wants to protect us from ourselves. I say we’re all grown up. The old Jedi order died with the Old Republic. Then there was Luke, and only Luke, and a lot of fumbling to re-create the Jedi from what little he knew of them. He did the best he could, and he made mistakes. I was one of them. His generation of Jedi was put together like a rickety space scow, but from it something new has emerged. It’s not the old Jedi order, nor should it be.”
His eyes burned across the space between them like quasars. “We, Jaina, are the new Jedi order. And this is our war.”
TWENTY
The Millennium Falcon was purring, and the controls felt just right in Han’s hands. Better than they had felt in a very long time, as a matter of fact. Oh, the coralskippers tried their best. They swooped in close, firing their molten projectiles and skittering away from return fire like a school of particularly ugly fish. The larger craft—about the size of the Falcon itself—kept a steady fire of its own weapons, releasing whole flights of grutchins. But today was not a lucky day for the Yuuzhan Vong, at least not so far.
Han whooped and turned tight, scraping so close to the transport analog that one of the pursuing coralskippers, already singed by laser fire, smacked right into it.
In his peripheral vision, he saw another skip flame out, drilled by turbolasers.
“Kid can shoot,” Han told his copilot.
“He’s your son,” Leia said. Her voice surprised him. For a nanosecond he’d forgotten it was her there, expecting to find Chewie instead.
And the odd thing? He didn’t feel the gullet-sucking sorrow he usually did. A little wistful, maybe, a little melancholy. A little happiness, too, to have his wife beside him. He’d nearly wrecked that, hadn’t he?
He blinked as a volley of Yuuzhan Vong ordnance found his shields when they shouldn’t have.
“Like I said, Han—” Leia sputtered.
He’d built some distance from the largest Yuuzhan Vong vessel. Now he turned and built g’s toward it. “Conc
ussion missiles when I tell you.”
“Han?”
The Yuuzhan Vong ship loomed closer and closer, and Han grinned out of the side of his mouth.
“Yeah, sweetheart?”
“You’ve noticed we’re going to hit that thing?”
Han held course.
Leia nearly shrieked because the alternating smooth and striated pattern of yorik coral filled nearly the entire viewport. At the last instant Han nosed up slightly to miss by a few tens of centimeters.
“Missiles, now!” Han said.
The missiles detonated just behind them, a full spread. The Yuuzhan Vong ship broke in half.
“Noticed I’m going to hit what thing?” Han asked innocently.
“Have you lost it?” Leia exclaimed. “What do you think, that you’re twenty again?”
“It ain’t the years—”
She smiled, leaned over, and kissed him. “As I’ve said before, you have your moments. I always knew you were a scoundrel at heart.”
“Me?” The exaggerated innocence that had once come so naturally felt suddenly right again.
The rest of the Yuuzhan Vong ships went out like Hapan paper lamps caught in a high wind, and Jacen shot them into star food. Without the yammosk on the larger ship to coordinate them, the skips were less than dexterous.
“Speaking of scoundrels,” Han said, tapping on the comm unit.
“Hailing the freighter Tinmolok.”
The hail was answered immediately. “Yes, yes. Do not shoot! We are unarmed! We are Etti! We are not Yuuzhan Vong!”
“So you say,” Han said easily. “I can see that you’re taking cargo into occupied space.”
“Relief only! Food for the native populace!”
“Oh, really? Well, now, that I’ve got to see. I’m coming alongside.”
“No, no, I …”
“No problem. Just glad to be able to help.”
“Please, Captain, may I ask who you are?”
Han leaned back and clasped the back of his head in his hands. “You, sir, are speaking to the proud captain of the, ah—” He glanced at Leia. “—Princess of Blood. Prepare to be boarded.”
Leia rolled her eyes.
“This is piracy,” the Etti captain—one Swori Mdimu—grumbled as Han and Jacen took possession of the crew’s sidearms.
“That’s good,” Han told him. “I thought I was going to have to write it down for you, so you’d know what happened. Though for the record, it’s actually privateering. See, pirates steal from anyone. They’re greedy, and they just don’t care who they hijack. Privateers, on the other hand, only attack ships allied with a certain fleet. In this case, I’m choosing for my targets any lowlife gutless and stupid enough to supply the Yuuzhan Vong or the Peace Brigade, or any other collaborationist scum, with anything whatever.”
“I told you—”
“Look,” Han said. “In about five minutes, I’m going to see your cargo. If it’s just a bunch of food that the Yuuzhan Vong are buying for their captives out of the goodness of their sweet, tattooed hearts, I’ll let you go, with apologies. But if I find you’re carrying weapons and ordnance, or any other sort of war matériel, I’m going to smack you around. And if you have captives … Well, you have an imagination. Use it.”
“No!” the captain said. “No captives. It’s as you said. Weapons for the Peace Brigade. Not my idea! I have an employer. I need this job. Please don’t kill me and my crew.”
“Quit your whining. I’m not killing anybody, this time. I’m setting you adrift in one of your shuttles.”
“Thank you. Thank you!”
“Here’s how you thank me,” Han said. “You tell anyone who’ll listen that we’re out here. Any ship delivering to a Yuuzhan Vong–occupied system is mine. And next time, I may not take prisoners. You get me?”
“I get you,” Swori Mdimu said.
“Great. My, ah, buddy here is going to put you all in stun cuffs now. I’m going to have a look at your cargo. If there are any surprises waiting for me, better tell me now.”
“There—there are two Yuuzhan Vong guards. They will be alerted.”
“No kidding?” Han said. “Okay, so we’re cuffing you and locking you up. Then the two of us will take care of these guards.”
“Two of you?” the Etti said incredulously. “Against Yuuzhan Vong?”
“Hey, don’t worry. You want us to lose, right? But if we don’t, I’ll be back, and we need to have a little talk about who exactly your employer is.”
Once the prisoners were secure, Han started off down a corridor.
“Da—ah, Captain?” Jacen said. “Cargo hold’s the other way.”
“That’s right,” Han told him.
“What’re you …?”
“Just stay here. If the Yuuzhan Vong come up, give a yell. I’ll be on the bridge.”
Han returned from the bridge a little later, and the two of them went to the cargo access axis. At the first set of locks, they found two Yuuzhan Vong guards, collapsed near the door. Their faces were masses of purple—not from their own scarification, but from the capillaries that had burst beneath their skin.
“You killed them,” Jacen said dully, hardly believing it. “You sealed off the compartment and let the air out.”
Han glanced at his son. “Right on all but one count. They aren’t dead.”
Jacen frowned and knelt to search for some sign of life, since with the Yuuzhan Vong the Force could not help him. One of the two stirred at his touch, and he jumped back.
“See?” Han said, a sure note of satisfaction tinting his voice. “I just dropped the pressure until they did. There are surveillance cams in here.”
“Oh.”
“Better cuff ’em, unless you want to fight ’em. I thought things would go smoother this way.”
“Dad, what if there had been captives in here?”
“Then I would have seen them on the surveillance. Jacen, give the old man some credit.”
“Permission to speak freely, Captain.”
Han sighed. “Go ahead, son.”
“Dad, I don’t like this. Maybe you think being a pirate is okay, but—”
“Privateer,” Han corrected.
“You really think there’s a moral difference?”
“If there’s ever a moral difference in being on one side instead of the other in a war, yes. Doesn’t your all-knowing Force tell you that?”
“I don’t know what the Force wants. That’s exactly the problem.”
“Yeah?” Han said sarcastically. “You knew what to do when you found your mother with her legs half cut off. Fortunately. Or do you think it was wrong to save her life?”
Jacen reddened. “That’s not fair.”
“Fair?” Han threw his hands up. “Kids these days. Fair.”
“Dad, I know the Yuuzhan Vong are a darkness that must be fought. But aggression—that’s not my way. Setting up Uncle Luke’s great river, that I know I can do. This …”
“And you thought we were going to be able to carry out Luke’s grand scheme without ever getting our hands dirty? You heard them back at the Maw—we need ships, we need supplies and weapons, we need money.” Han tapped up the ship’s manifest on the captain’s datapad and whistled. “And now we have all three. Three E-wings, right out of dry dock. Lommite, about two hundred kilos. Enough rations to feed a small army.” He glanced back up at Jacen. “Not to mention that the Peace Brigade doesn’t get any of this stuff. C’mere. I want to see something.”
They made their way through the crated supplies until they came to those the manifest designated as weapons. Han worked the seal on one until it popped open.
“Well, how do you like that?” Han remarked.
“Emperor’s bones,” Jacen breathed.
The crate contained not blasters, stun batons, or grenades, but Yuuzhan Vong amphistaffs.
“Looks like our Brigade buddies are making the transition away from the evils of technology,” Han said. “Wonder if they’
ve started scarring themselves yet?” He looked significantly at Jacen. “You still don’t think this was worthwhile?”
Jacen stared at the hibernating weapon-beasts.
“It’s done, now,” he allowed.
Han shook his head. “I don’t think so. I want to find out who is sending this stuff. Those amphistaffs were grown somewhere. Where? Duro? Obroa-skai?”
“You told the captain of this ship you would continue hijacking ships bound for Yuuzhan Vong space. Was that the truth?”
“It was. I’ve been trying to explain why.”
“It’s a bad idea.”
“Well, maybe. But like I told you earlier, I’m the captain.”
“It’s not that simple for me.”
“No? Then here’s something real simple. We’re taking this freighter and its cargo back to the Maw. When we’re done, you’re free to take one of these E-wings to Luke and sit the rest of the war out meditating or whatnot. Become a nurse or something. I don’t care. But if you’re going to keep this up, I don’t want you on my ship, son or not.”
Jacen didn’t answer, but his face went all stony. It was times like this that Han occasionally wished he had just a little of that Force ability to feel what others felt, because Jacen was a blank slate to him more often than not.
As his son vanished around the corner, Han realized exactly what he had said, and memory suddenly jolted through him with the force of vision. He saw himself with Leia in the cockpit of the Falcon the day they’d met, right after escaping the Death Star. “I ain’t in this for your revolution,” he’d told her. Not much later he’d told Luke much the same thing, dodging out of the fight against the Death Star for what seemed all of the right reasons, not the least of which that it was hopeless. That Han Solo had had a pretty weak grip on the idea of a worthy cause.
Somehow, things had gotten turned around. Not front to back, but in a weirder way. Ultimately it was because he just didn’t understand the kid, and the kid hadn’t a clue about Han.
Anakin he could understand. He used the Force in exactly the way Han would, if he had the ability. Jacen had always been more like Leia, and in the last year or so the resemblance had only grown stronger.