by James Luceno
Han gave her a sharp look. He saw her eyes widen and he glanced back into traffic. In just fractions of a second, the distraction and the tightening of his hands on the controls had caused his speeder to slide partway out of its traffic lane, toward a tiny high-speed model with an elderly dark-skinned human couple in it. He flashed them a sorry-about-that smile and returned his attention to Leia, but kept better vigilance on his piloting. “Jacen.”
“Yes.”
“And Ben.”
“Yes.”
“Is Luke crazy?”
This time she didn’t answer. She continued, “Jedi teams also made attempts to snatch a few critical Corellian politicians out of Coronet. Jaina was on one of those teams.”
Han’s jaw set and he saw Leia pull back, unconsciously, just a few centimeters. She wasn’t afraid, had never had reason to be afraid of his reactions, but he was reminded of something a colleague once told him—when Han Solo got mad, he looked madder than any human in known space.
“He’s doing it again,” Han said. “He’s throwing my children—our children—into dangerous situations they shouldn’t be part of. What do I have to do to make him stop?”
“There’s more. Are you sure I can’t persuade you to pull over?”
“Is there anything you could possibly tell me that would make me lose my skill as a pilot?” Realizing he sounded testy, and not wanting to pour out his anger on Leia, he forced all anger out of his voice. “Just tell me.”
“The Corellians had ambushes and traps set up for them. Ambushes and traps meant for Jedi.”
They flew along in silence for several long moments. Han held what Leia had told him in his mind like an egg, something too delicate for him to handle roughly.
He noticed, even in his distraction, that the speeder had developed a shudder. Carefully, he experimented with the acceleration, with the controls during turns.
No, the speeder was unchanged. But his arms and hands were shaking so badly that they were affecting performance.
Abruptly he pulled out of traffic, sideslipping with ridiculous, dangerous accuracy into an unoccupied speeder dock at the five-hundred-meter level next to a restaurant-side walkway. The speed of his approach and his rapid, last-second deceleration caused pedestrians on the walkway to shriek and leap out of the way, as though he were going to overshoot and slam through them, but he was at a dead stop centimeters from docking, and let the dock’s grappler beam drag him in the final hand span of distance. Automatically, he inserted a credcard in the adjacent slot.
For long moments, he couldn’t bring himself to look at his wife. His voice was low and shaky when he finally said, “So I did that. I almost got them killed.”
“No.”
“Yes. I should have figured that our kids would get involved in what was going on with Corellia. And I went there and told the Corellians to line up their gun sights on our boy and our girl.”
“Han, you told them your guesswork. But you’re not listening to me. I said they were prepared for Jedi. What, in everything you told the Corellians, would have alerted them to be prepared for Jedi in exactly the situations where Jedi were used against them?”
Han thought about it. “Nothing.”
“That’s right, nothing. So?”
“So … somebody else told them where and when Jedi would be used.”
“That’s right. And the whole thing with Centerpoint Station. The Corellians are being kind of disingenuous about it when they say the Jedi came and sabotaged the place. They neglect to point out that they’d restored it to full operating status, or were on the verge of doing so.”
Han looked at her, tried to absorb the implications of what she was saying. No politician, he was still a skilled tactician, and the relative military strengths of Corellia with and without the station began clicking like numbers through his mind. They made him uneasy. With the station operable, Corellia could probably have achieved independence quickly, bloodlessly. But the system could only have done so by issuing threats—terrorist threats—against the Galactic Alliance. Suddenly he wasn’t sure he could support Corellian independence on those terms, and this lack of conviction made him uneasy. “You’re just full of good news,” he said, an attempt at humor that, to his own ears, fell flat.
“There’s more. And I don’t know what this means.”
“Go ahead.”
“Ben actually did the main bit of work in sabotaging the station. It was quite an achievement. But he’s not talking about it. He’s reported only to his father, and Luke hasn’t released any of that information. Ben’s not accepting congratulations very well. And when I went to him to offer mine, he couldn’t bring himself to talk to me. He just froze up and sort of nodded, and then made as hasty a retreat as he could. He looked … guilty.”
“He probably figured out how I’d take the news.”
“Maybe.”
Han drew a long, deep breath. “Anything else?”
She nodded. “They’re still going to try to fix everything by diplomatic means. There’s going to be a meeting between Saxan and Pellaeon. Both sides, and the Jedi, will be providing security. Luke asked me to be part of that effort. And he’s hoping you will be, too.”
“Did you accept?”
“I accepted for me.”
He nodded. “Then you accepted for me, too.”
Finally, Leia smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that. And we have one last problem to deal with.”
“Keep it up, my mind is going to crack. What problem?”
“Admirers.”
Han looked up. Just meters away, a crowd of at least twenty people, their attention on Han and Leia, had accumulated on the walkway, slowing foot traffic. When Han looked at them, some waved, some looked away, some stood as transfixed as if they’d been hit by a blaster’s stun bolt.
“Han Solo! Princess Leia!” called one, a Devaronian male, his ruddy red skin and white horns somehow out of place in this brightly sunlit spot. “Can we get a holo with you?”
“Our public,” Han muttered.
“You love it, you know you do.”
He flashed her a smile, stood, and offered her his hand, a gallant gesture, to help her rise. “Sure,” he called back. Then he whispered to his wife, “I hope there are no lip-readers in this crowd.”
KUAT SYSTEM, TORYAZ STATION
Five days later, an odd collection of ships converged on a space station in the Kuat star system.
The station itself was of unusual design. At its core was a disc two kilometers across, three hundred meters thick, its edges beveled and smoothed like an ancient, polished credcoin, its surface thick with glowing viewports in every imaginable color, blue predominating. From the edge of the disc, at regularly spaced intervals, radiated a dozen narrow spokes a quarter kilometer in length. At the end of each spoke was a pod a quarter kilometer across, forty meters high at its thickest point; six of the pods were discs, resembling the central core, and six were triangular, affixed to the spokes on one point of the triangle. The discs alternated with the triangles, giving the station symmetry of design.
Toryaz Station was a place of recreation and competition, negotiation and romance, cold-blooded calculation and hot-blooded rage. Its core disc was an environment of hotels and shops, gardens and waterfalls. By dictate of the trade families that ran the station, hotels did not offer singleroom accommodations; the lowliest quarters available for rent were lavish suites whose daily rent was equivalent to the yearly earnings of a middle-class family. Here corporations and merchant clans leased or maintained suites, entertained holodrama stars, made business deals that dictated the fates of thousands of occupations and lives.
The twelve pods were somewhat less glamorous, at least on initial inspection. Each would have been a fully self-contained space station but for the spoke, a sturdy, broad traffic conduit, connecting it to the main station—and in fact, in times of crisis, any of the pods could separate from the station’s main body, thrust free through use of a slow but
serviceable drive unit, and maintain itself in space for days or weeks until rescue arrived.
Each pod, which included hundreds of sets of quarters, conference chambers, exercise and recreation facilities, theaters, kitchens, vehicle hangars, security chambers, cell blocks for rowdy celebrants, and vast atria, could be rented as a single unit for any sort of corporate event. Merchant princes brought in several hundred of their closest friends to celebrate their hundredth birthdays in these pods; Kuat Drive Yards, the single greatest manufacturer in the system, had its trade shows in these pods.
And now one of them, a triangular pod known as Narsacc Habitat, had been hired—at the last minute and for an unspecified duration, displacing a suddenly very unhappy convention of airspeeder and swoop manufacturers from around the galaxy—by the government of the Galactic Alliance. The Narsacc Habitat’s crew of stewards, cooks, wait staff, cleaning and maintenance droids, valets, and dressing consultants had been dismissed on full pay for the duration of the GA stay, replaced by carefully screened government employees. The only Toryaz Station employees left were a skeleton crew of security officers, amply reinforced and overseen by GA security specialists.
The first ships to dock with Narsacc Habitat, one large transport each from Coruscant and Corellia, discharged hordes of soldiers and security personnel who immediately began scouring the pod for listening devices, booby traps, and hidden weapons. They found plenty, many of them years or decades old, all apparently left from previous events—the forgotten residue of attempted espionage and treachery in the past. After two days of examination, both sides reported to their respective leaders that there was no sign of ill intent from their opposite number.
Sufficiently reassured that matters could progress, both sides brought in protocol droids and status engineers who examined the habitat’s facilities, comparing them with the events of the conference to come, and immediately began negotiating to make sure that their respective sides would have slightly better-than-equal habitat resources. The views from the suites against the outermost hull were best, therefore the delegates must stay there, despite the fact that this increased demands on the security teams; the spinward edge of that bank of suites got to see each view in turn first, and therefore each side demanded them for its own delegation; in-suite breakfasts would be served simultaneously to the Saxan and Pellaeon suites, with no regard to the preferred breakfasting time of the delegates themselves. This went on for another full day.
Wedge Antilles ignored it all. Off-loaded with the first groups of security experts but not truly part of the Corellian force, he found what he thought was the best spot in the habitat—a lush green water garden beneath a tophull viewport a hundred meters across, showing glorious starfields during the hours when grow-lights were not activated—and spent most of his time there. No other men or women of the security details intruded except for the occasional perimeter search and weapons scan.
On the morning of the fourth day, as he sat in the dark in a lounger that conformed itself to his body with each of his movements, he heard rustling on the far side of the central clearing. He put his hand on his holstered blaster but did not otherwise move. In moments, another human walked into the clearing, oblivious to the surrounding ferns and the artificial waterfall and pool only a dozen meters away. Ramrod-straight, he wore a Galactic Alliance general’s uniform, its cap tucked under his arm, and his attention was fixed on the stars above. He was about Wedge’s age, with fair hair and a face a little lined by responsibility and old, old sorrow, but not by age. He looked like a prince, with features that could have been coldly aristocratic had the mood ever taken him, but Wedge had never seen him wear an attitude like that.
Wedge grinned and took a deep, silent breath. “Rogue Two!” he snapped. “Break to port!”
Before Wedge was halfway through his shout, the newcomer had dropped, rolled behind a long box planted with glowing woosha plants from Naboo, and then come upright again, his cap missing. His expression would have been ferocious had he been able to keep himself from grinning. “Wedge! Not nice.” He brushed himself off and stepped out from behind the improvised cover.
Wedge rose to take the man’s hand and embrace him. “Tycho. I didn’t know you were going to be part of this merry mess.”
General Tycho Celchu clapped Wedge’s back before releasing him. “I knew you were. But there’s a little problem with sending you messages these days.”
“I know.” Wedge gestured to the lounger next to his, then resumed his original seat.
Tycho sat but remained upright, his posture perfect. The humor gradually left his face, leaving behind a combination of curiosity and regret. “I can’t believe that we’re sitting here wearing different uniforms.”
Wedge felt the way Tycho looked. He nodded. “Me, either.”
“What is that all about?” Tycho sounded almost angry; certainly, he was upset. “I heard about the kidnapping and your escape. That sent a shock wave through Intelligence, and a lot of idiots were busted down in rank on account of it. Which suits me just fine. But what are you doing in that uniform?” Then he narrowed his eyes and looked around. “Or should we be talking here?”
Wedge nodded, unconcerned. “We can. This place has been screened so often and so well, by your side and my side, that I’d be more surprised to see a listening device than a rancor in a formal gown. But Tycho—we are talking strictly off the record. Correct?”
Tycho nodded.
“Corellia’s a coalition government,” Wedge said. “Saxan is riding herd on a vast number of ministers and subministers, most of whom want her job or want to decide who’s going to have her job next.”
“I know that.”
“Well, because of various pressures, she’s had to appoint Sal-Solo her Minister of War.”
“I’d heard that, too.” Tycho’s face showed his distaste for the longtime politician. “It’s sort of like appointing a piranha-beetle your Minister of Meat Supplies. How could the Corellians be so crazy as to let him do anything more important than sweep sidewalks?”
“People redeem their heroes,” Wedge said. He heard the weariness in his own voice. “Sal-Solo’s a convicted conspirator. Han Solo was a spice smuggler. Luke and Leia are children of the most notorious mass murderer in history.” He paused, realizing that he might have gone a step too far in his comparisons—Vader’s complicity in the destruction of Tycho’s homeworld, Alderaan, was well known—but Tycho didn’t twitch. “Anyway, Saxan needs someone to be on hand to interpret Sal-Solo’s moves, to give him strategic advice when it’s his glands rather than his brains moving units around on the war board, and so on. And to accompany her here and see what I can do to promote the cause of peace. Reunification.”
Tycho nodded. “If things go badly, you’re aware you could end up being listed as a war criminal.”
“I was thinking about that.” Wedge stretched and put his hands behind his head to become more comfortable. “It’s been a little over forty years since I was a smuggler.”
“Oh, don’t say it.”
“I bet I could get my hands on a good, fast transport. Find some of my old contacts—”
“One or two may still be alive.”
Wedge shrugged. “Syal’s on her career path, and Myri’s going to finish her education pretty soon. Iella and I can wander the spaceways, buy a little here, sell a little there. I could use a good copilot …”
Tycho fell silent, considering.
“You’re still keeping an eye on Syal for me?” Wedge asked.
“Oh, yes. She’s up for a transfer to a test squadron, if she wants it. She doesn’t know yet.”
“She fired on me at Corellia.”
“No.”
“Oh, yes. Came close to getting me, too, considering how green she is.” Wedge smiled proudly, then sobered. “Tycho, let’s get this situation patched up. If it comes to war, with you and Syal where you are, I’ll have family on both sides.”
“Aww. You’re going to make me cry.”
Both men smiled. They returned their attention to the stars above and settled into a companionable silence.
chapter eighteen
Later that day, the remaining ships dedicated to the diplomatic mission drew in to land in hangars spaced around the perimeter of Narsacc Habitat. One hangar was larger than all the others, but neither set of status engineers could agree on the envoy from either side arriving there—it would be too great a slight to the diplomats’ perceived status—so it went unused. The Galactic Alliance and Corellian envoys landed in hangars of identical size, while the Jedi put in at a hangar slightly smaller than the others.
Then the three groups met in the habitat’s largest conference area, roomy enough for two games of zoneball to be played simultaneously. One set of tables had been arranged as a conference area, its seating carefully ordered by the rank of the individual assigned to it. Another set had food laid out upon it, a buffet of dishes from several worlds, including Coruscant and Corellia. A third area was bare of furniture, but a phalanx of musician droids was arrayed against one wall—the area’s purpose, as a floor for dancing, was obvious.
Han Solo, technically a consultant with the Jedi party, strode in beside his wife and took a quick look around the broad area. “This isn’t a negotiation meeting.”
Leia smiled up at him. “No, it isn’t.”
“It’s a party.”
She nodded.
“Why are we wasting time with a party when we’ve got two sides about to go to war?”
Luke, walking two steps ahead beside his wife, grinned over his shoulder at his brother-in-law. “Nobody’s going to war while the delegates are here. The only one with any likelihood of wanting to is Thrackan Sal-Solo, because war will give him a better chance to assume control of the entire Corellian system … and our Intelligence contacts say he doesn’t yet have enough influence over the other four Corellian Chiefs of State to manage that.”
“And this gathering projects the idea that things are calm,” Leia added. “There are newsgatherers and historians here. They’ll see the calm, the unconcern, and they’ll report on it to the HoloNet today.”