“Leia’s lost just as much. And Leia can still smile. Leia knows that she has to, from time to time, or go crazy.”
“I don’t think it’s a problem anymore, Han. I think Jag got through to her.”
Han glanced over at his daughter, who, having cracked the shuttle’s door security, was just entering that vehicle. “I hope you’re right.”
Zekk stood and swept his long hair up to the top of his head, holding it there while Han put the last piece of armor, his helmet, in place. Zekk pulled the helmet down low and picked up the guard’s blaster rifle. “Next stop, tractor beams…and the installation of some very specialized holocomm gear.”
Han gave him a lopsided smile. “Jacen’s going to get sick of people improving his ship.”
“Good.”
“So if you believe that Palpatine’s rule as Emperor was legitimate, you have to believe that any government, no matter how destructive, is legitimate.” Leia practically spat the words out. “Why did we bother taking back Coruscant from the Yuuzhan Vong? By your figuring, they were the legitimate rulers of the galaxy!”
Caedus stirred, irritated, but did not rise. “That’s not what I said, and don’t put words in my mouth. Palpatine worked within the system to gain prominence. That establishes a continuity of government. That’s part of the legitimacy. What you did with the Rebels, like what the Yuuzhan Vong did, was come in like an agricultural planetformer, digging up and destroying everything in its path—”
A second set of doors, the ones leading forward to the bridge, opened. Lieutenant Tebut stood there, looking momentarily surprised to have interrupted the heated exchange between two of the most famous people in the galaxy.
Grateful for the reprieve, Caedus swiveled his chair toward her. “Yes?”
“We’ve dropped out of hyperspace, Colonel. We’re at the negotiation site.”
“Thank you.” Caedus rose. “Come to the bridge, Mother. In the unlikely event that this is not some sort of trap by your Confederation friends, you might witness a successful negotiation for their legitimate return to the Galactic Alliance.”
Leia accompanied him to the door. “I can’t root for either result. You don’t deserve to negotiate and benefit from a peace. And I don’t want to be here if it’s a trap.”
Behind Tebut, they walked through into the bridge and were assailed by all its usual noise—chatter of officers at their stations in the pits to either side of the main walkway, the hum of computers and other machinery, the distorted and modulated voices of personnel coming across comm frequencies and intercoms.
Caedus marched up the walkway to the vast viewports at the bow end. He could see the hull of the Anakin Solo stretching away below and before him, with the domes of its gravity-well generators protruding like habitat shells and the distant, slightly irregular shapes of enemy ships among the unwinking stars. “Report.”
The officer in the sensor station, a woman with a Coruscanti accent, called up, “They dropped out of hyperspace thirty seconds after we did. Their numbers match ours, ship for ship. We’re running data on the ships themselves. The Anakin Solo’s opposite number is the Star Destroyer Valorum.”
“Valorum?” Caedus’s surprise was genuine. “Intelligence, best guess: did they name her for one of Palpatine’s political opponents to goad me?”
“No, sir.” The man at the intelligence station was dark-skinned; though young, he was completely bald, and his accent suggested worlds of the Unknown Regions. “That was her original name upon launch, about sixty years ago. She’s Victory-class, from the last years of the Old Republic.”
Caedus turned to his mother. “Ancient hardware. They’re getting desperate.”
Leia nodded. “Which affects the chances of this being a legitimate negotiation and a trap equally. So it’s information, but not informative.”
“Stop trying to teach me politics, Mother. I’ve already attained the highest rank you ever did, and I’m not done yet.”
“Except that I attained it by being elected to it, not by rewriting the law and jailing my predecessor.”
Caedus turned away, shaking his head. Leia was deluded if she thought there was a meaningful difference. “Communications! Has the enemy initiated comm contact?”
Lieutenant Tebut, back at her station, nodded. “Yes, sir. They’ve sent routine greetings and asked for you.”
“Let them wait. Have we established contact with the Blue Diver?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Put her on holo.”
A moment later a hologram swam into resolution before Caedus and Leia. It showed a female of the Duros people, with bluish skin, large red eyes, and a lipless slit for a mouth with no nose above it. She wore a white admiral’s uniform. She nodded to Caedus. “Colonel.” Recognizing Leia, she nodded again, her voice taking on a slight note of surprise. “Jedi Solo.”
“No, Admiral Limpan, sadly, my mother has not seen the light of reason and rejoined the Alliance. Are you on station?”
“We are.”
Caedus glanced his mother’s way. “I plan no violation of the terms of our meeting today, Mother, but if they spring a trap, I have elements of the Second Fleet standing by to jump in as a little surprise. Speaking of surprises, Admiral, if our holocomm contact is broken for more than fifteen seconds, consider that authorization to jump in. They could always manage some sort of sabotage or jamming to break contact between us.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Anakin Solo standing by.”
The hologram of Admiral Limpan vanished.
Caedus’s datapad tweetled, indicating that he had received a message, and the intelligence officer called, “That’s the breakdown of enemy forces, sir. All old ships. Some of them nearly derelicts. Some are still listed as decommissioned.”
Caedus didn’t bother to read the listing. “Very good. Communications, put the enemy commander on. Let’s get this farce moving.”
There was no hologram this time—the Valorum was either too old to have a holotransmitter or too strapped for resources to use one. Monitors all over the bridge, including those near the bow viewports, flickered simultaneously to show an aging woman, long-faced, in the uniform of a Corellian Defense Force captain.
Caedus moved up to stand before one of the monitors. Tebut nodded to him to let him know its holocam was now broadcasting. Caedus allowed a little discontent to creep into his voice. “A captain? They sent only a naval captain for this negotiation?”
“Captain Hoclaw.” The Corellian woman gave him a nod of mock-friendly greeting. “Technically, you’re a colonel, as I recall. But we both have the power and authority to enter into binding negotiatons.”
“I suppose. So you’re prepared to surrender?”
“I’m prepared to come to the best agreement that is in everyone’s interest, involving the Corellian system’s return to the Alliance. But if your first words are going to be, So you’re prepared to surrender, this could take even longer than it has to. I see you’re standing. Perhaps you should summon a chair.”
Caedus could see that Captain Hoclaw was seated in a comfortably padded officer’s chair at the back of her bridge. “Thank you, no. Let’s begin.”
chapter sixteen
Jag and Han got the panel covering the main motivators for the hangar exterior doors down and to the floor, revealing the machinery beyond.
Jag shook his head. “I do fine with mechanical gear, but I prefer to have manuals and charts on hand. Jaina’s better at this sort of thing than I am.”
Han smiled in combined pride and self-appreciation. “Don’t worry. She got it from me.” He pointed a long, callused forefinger at an expansive cluster of chips. “The main security module will be there. We just have to figure out which chip.”
“Out of, oh, three hundred or so.”
“Sure, no problem.” Han took a moment to wave at his daughter, who was visible in the bridge viewpoint of Jacen’s shuttle, then bent for his tool kit. “Just stand back and learn som
ething.”
Alone, all but forgotten except by a black-clad Guardsman at the door into the Command Salon who watched her every movement, Leia stood listening to the exchange between her son and the Corellian captain. Frowning, she moved to a monitor at the stern end of the bridge and leaned in so close that her right ear was adjacent to the device’s main speaker.
She shook her head and returned to the center of the bridge walkway, then stepped clean off of it, dropping nimbly to land beside the bald-headed intelligence officer who had been providing Jacen with data.
Rather than being alarmed, he offered her a sardonic smile. “Is this an attack?”
“If it were, it would be over by now. Can you give me an isolated audio feed of just the Corellian’s side of the transmission? So I can hear it without all this ambient noise?”
“I could, of course. But I won’t. Technically, you’re a prisoner of war.”
“You mean I’m the enemy.”
“Yes, that’s what I mean.”
“I’m also Colonel Solo’s mother, and this vessel was named for my other son. I don’t want to see either one destroyed. Which might happen if my worst-case suspicions turn out to be true and I don’t get some cooperation.”
The officer looked at her for a long moment, then sighed. Over Leia’s shoulder, he called, “Tebut! Isolation helmet, please.”
Tebut opened a cabinet drawer beside her station and withdrew a helmet. Not a piece of protective gear for pilots, it was smaller, smoother, with a full-face polarizing visor. She lobbed it to the intelligence officer, who set it beside his monitor, typed a pair of commands on his keyboard, and then handed it to Leia.
She donned it and immediately heard Captain Hoclaw speaking. “…asking us to bear a tremendously disproportionate burden of the cost of rebuilding. If I agree to the numbers you suggest, the Corellian system would be reduced to poverty for generations.” There was a long pause. “No, that’s not justice. That’s vindictiveness, and it presupposes that the entire burden of blame, that every wrong done in the course of these events, should be laid at the feet of the Corellian government.”
There was no other noise. No background conversation, no clattering of fingers across keyboards.
Hastily Leia removed the helmet. “Can you send a message, a text message, to Jacen’s monitor so he can read it but Captain Hoclaw can’t see it?”
“Of course.”
“Here’s my message.”
She told him, and as the words registered, she could see his instant decision to send the message on to his commander.
Impatient, Jaina glanced at her chrono. Leia had to be doing a magnificent job of delaying Jacen, but even so they couldn’t stay here forever. Her mouse droid had drunk in much of the raw telemetry data from the shuttle’s memory, but there was plenty more to go.
She saw Jag turn away from helping her father and, blaster pistol drawn, trot over to the hangar’s internal doors. He keyed a command to open them and stayed to one side, pistol aimed. But it was Zekk, still in Alliance armor, who marched in. As soon as the doors slid shut again, the tall Jedi relaxed. Talking with Jag, he caught sight of Jaina. Fist upraised, he waved to her, a gesture of success.
She nodded. One more task down. But they couldn’t relax. Couldn’t lose focus. Could never, ever lose focus.
As Caedus continued expressing his very reasonable demands, words appeared at the bottom of his monitor screen.
JEDI SOLO REPORTS NO BRIDGE OR PERSONNEL NOISES IN ENEMY TRANSMISSION. COMMUNICATIONS HAS ANALYZED AND CONFIRMS. SUGGESTS ENEMY COMMAND SHIP BEARS ONLY SKELETON CREW OR IS AUTOMATED.
Despite the distraction, Caedus did not miss the import of Captain Hoclaw’s last words. He adopted a look of mild confusion. “Step down? Why would I?”
“Because if you do, we might be able to transform this conversation from a simple negotiation to a genuine peace. We might bring an end to this war. I could take the fact of your cooperation to the Confederation as a whole. My sources tell me that a concession like that would earn a lot of favor within the Confederation.”
Caedus felt a flash of irritation. “That’s not on the table, Captain.” He was also growing impatient. Why had the Confederates not sprung their trap? Perhaps they would not until it became clear that the negotiations could not, would not, succeed.
Well, he could make them aware of that right now. “Captain, you’ve heard my terms. I will not budge on any of them. In fact, as I grow annoyed with you, I will make them harsher. I’ll give you ten standard minutes to accept them as is. If you do not, when we begin talking again, you’ll be in a worse bargaining position.” He switched off the monitor and Tebut, alert, cut the transmission altogether.
Caedus turned. The bridge walkway behind him was empty. “Where is my—where is Jedi Solo?”
The intelligence officer gestured toward the doors at the stern end of the bridge. “The guard there accompanied her back into the Command Salon.”
“Ah.” Caedus concealed the sudden chill those words stabbed into his heart. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.” At a trot, Darth Caedus headed aft for what he hoped would not be a confrontation with his mother.
CENTERPOINT STATION, FIRE-CONTROL CHAMBER
As with every such enterprise—the use of an unbelievably complicated, incalculably important piece of machinery in the hands of the military—the involved parties were divided into groups, each of them secretly condescending to and uncomprehending of the others.
In the control areas of this large chamber, where consoles, keyboards, monitors, readouts, and datajacks predominated, technicians were hard at work. They analyzed energy throughputs, calculated damage to systems from anticipated energy spikes, theorized about side effects, and discussed recent hypotheses about the physics of gravity.
In one open area, where once a twice-human-height droid that had believed it was Anakin Solo had lived—and died—military officers in the uniforms of the Corellian Defense Force now waited. One of them, a woman in white instead of the lower-ranking browns, irritably consulted her chrono. Tall and broad-shouldered, she had an intelligent expression and a gaze that moved everywhere in the chamber, cataloging hundreds of details and events.
The third group, nearest the doors leading out of this chamber, was made up of government representatives. Sadras Koyan, a short, burly man with thinning hair and an aggressive manner, had a gaze as sweeping and restless as that of the white-uniformed woman, but he seemed less to be registering details than waiting for some signal to satisfy his impatience. Beside him stood Denjax Teppler—a younger man, with bland but confidence-inspiring features. Teppler had worn many occupational hats since the crisis had begun in Corellia; he was now Minister of Information—a post disparagingly, and accurately, referred to in other offices as Minister of Propaganda.
Around these two men were arrayed aides and advisers, all dressed in expensive, subdued business garments that were so similar in style that they, too, might as well have been uniforms.
Finally Koyan’s patience broke. “What’s the holdup, Admiral Delpin?”
The woman in the white uniform moved toward him, stopping at the edge of her group as though it were an invisible national border. “Sim firings are suggesting an unacceptable chance of catastrophic failure. We’re locking down and locking out the subsystems that are most likely to be damaged by overloads. It’s just a matter of a few minutes.”
“Solo is going to jump out of there before we can even get the thing online!”
Teppler shook his head. “I don’t think so, sir. Captain Hoclaw says they’re in a brief break between conversations, but that Colonel Solo is giving Hoclaw so much to work with, she could probably stall him until her next birthday.”
“Oh.” Mollified, Koyan nodded. “All right, then.”
One of the technicians at the control board nodded in response to something he heard over his earpiece. He turned and flashed five fingers at Admiral Delpin. She, in turn, caught Koyan’s eye. “Five minutes.
”
Koyan nodded and mopped sweat from his forehead and cheeks with his sleeve. “Good.”
STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL
Alema wondered about worshippers. Now that she was a goddess, she should have some.
At the moment, of course, she did not look very goddess-like. She sat in the topmost chamber of Lumiya’s former habitat, the chamber with the curved, bookcase-laden walls and transparisteel dome, in a ridiculously comfortable stuffed chair…in her old body, the crippled one. In moments, though, she would shed that body again, float free through the galaxy, restore balance to the universe, and please herself.
How stupid Lumiya had been, to use this gift to further some ancient Sith agenda.
Speaking of the Sith, she would have to deal with them soon. Once she had reduced Leia to a tearful, useless wreck, as she imagined Luke now to be, she would turn her attention to Korriban and begin to exterminate the dangerous pest colony the Sith enclave there constituted.
It would take time. Her last projection to Kashyyyk had tired her immensely. She had slept for days afterward. That would probably be true again this time, but Lumiya’s notes had made it clear that with practice came stamina.
Alema relaxed, closing her eyes, and invited the immense pool of dark power waiting hundreds of meters below her, in the asteroid proper, to ascend to her, to flow through her. She stiffened as she felt the power grope its way blindly toward where she reclined. As it washed across her, it seemed to be half hot waterfall, half galvanizing electric current, but too full of malicious emotion to be cleansing or refreshing. It imparted to her a sense of greater power and destiny, yes, but it was also an invasion of her self, and that part of it she did not relish.
Now fully intermingled with the dark power, she set her mind adrift, looking for familiar presences in the Force. She knew where to start looking, at the cluster of presences where long-life patience warred with animalistic strength and rage—the world of the Wookiees.
Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Fury Page 13