Except, Tsavong Lah thought, when the priests are in collusion with the shapers. What will your reward be? A generous portion of land on the world the Yun-Yuuzhan priests receive? A continent, perhaps?
“I will consider this,” the warmaster said. He rose and allowed Ghithra Dal to bring him his garments. And I will seek a second opinion. I will find someone who can speak as a shaper … but does not owe any loyalty to the main orders of shapers.
I will bring Nen Yim to me.
Borleias Occupation, Day 11
Luke Skywalker sat cross-legged on the floor of the Millennium Falcon’s forward cargo hold, which was empty of cargo. It was one place, in this overcrowded military base, where he could be alone, one place where what he was doing was less likely to distress his son.
He opened himself to the Force and floated within it. He did not think of the question he hoped he would answer—thought was counterproductive to intuition. But this time, the currents of the Force took him where he wanted to go.
He could feel an enduring manifestation of the dark side. It was not waiting for him, not beckoning to him; it had an agenda that had nothing to do with Luke Skywalker. And in the brief moment before he lost his awareness of it, he knew that it still roamed the broken pathways of Coruscant.
Han Solo watched his wife come slowly back to life.
Not long before, the loss of Anakin and Jacen had shattered her, convinced her that all her works and efforts were meaningless. Once she had realized, at an intellectual level at least, that this was not so, their daughter Jaina’s troubles in the Hapes system had reminded Leia that she had duties, obligations. She began to carry them out in her customarily brisk and efficient manner, but without the spark of enthusiasm or the wicked humor that were so much a part of the Leia he loved.
At any time of day or night, her thoughts might return to Anakin, the way he had suffered and died on his mission to the Yuuzhan Vong worldship above Myrkr. Her breath and color would leave her and she would have to lean into Han’s arms or curl into a ball wherever she was sitting until the pain eased. Han, too, felt the stab of Anakin’s loss, but held himself upright, trying not to show it—he was determined to be there for Leia, to never again let her down the way he had after Chewie’s death.
But now, as Leia spent her time with her datapad linked to various ships’ libraries and her personal archives aboard Millennium Falcon and Rebel Dream—cataloging politicians who owed her favors, reconstructing the measures she and the other founders of the Rebel Alliance had taken when laying the groundwork of their movement more than two decades before—a semblance of enthusiasm was returning to her. The pain from Anakin’s loss and uncertainty from Jacen’s disappearance were still there, undiminished … but when they did not completely occupy her, she seemed more vital, more alive. More herself.
Han welcomed the change without entirely understanding its cause; as far as he could tell, she was merely doing the sort of political work she’d been doing for decades.
Leia’s exclamation startled him out of his studies: “What happened here?”
He turned and grinned up at her, at the blank expression she directed toward the open space where Chewbacca’s seat had been. “I’m having something Leia-sized put in today.” The grin was half genuine amusement at her surprise, half mask to hide his own lingering feelings of dismay; replacing Chewie’s chair, one of the last tangible mementos of the Wookiee’s life, had been among the hardest things Han had ever done. “Are you through reorganizing the galaxy for now?”
She shook her head, finally turning her attention to her husband. She moved up beside him. “I still have some solar systems to move, and I’ll be laundering the Hapes Cluster—”
“It could use it.” Han dragged her over and onto his lap. “We can start with Isolder, the walking headache—”
But Leia’s attention was focused elsewhere, on the planetary data now displayed on the Falcon’s computer screens. “Han, what’s this?”
“Coruscant.”
“I know it’s Coruscant. I mean, what are you doing studying it?”
He shrugged as though he didn’t know the answer, a delaying tactic as he tried to sort among any number of lies he could tell. None of them seemed likely to fool her. Finally he said, “It’s the twins thing, Leia. Twins are sacred to them. They think Jacen and Jaina have meaning to their gods, and that means if you’re right that Jacen is still alive, then he’s going to be in the hands of their most important people. Their command worldship is at Coruscant. You don’t have to be a genius to figure out that Coruscant, either on the planet or in that worldship, is the most likely place for Jacen to be.”
She looked him in the eye, all levity gone from her expression. “You’re not going to go in there after him.”
“I might,” he said. I am, he told himself.
“Han, no. Listen to me.” This was not Leia’s voice of command; it was a plea. “You can’t help him. If you go, I’ll lose you, too.”
“I’m as hard to lose as a bad reputation.”
Leia didn’t bite, didn’t respond with any of a dozen glibly appropriate responses, one more sign of her seriousness. “You have to understand. I can’t see the Yuuzhan Vong in the Force, I can’t see Jacen in the Force … but I’m not cut off from the Force. It still shows me things, offers me visions, from time to time. When I see either of us going back to Coruscant while it’s in Vong hands, I see us failing there. Dying there.”
Chilled by the tone in Leia’s voice, Han shook his head. “Someone has to go.”
“Luke. Luke has to go. He has a chance. We don’t.” Leia seemed to deflate, as if the admission that she could offer no help, no comfort to her missing son had reduced her in volume. But she straightened again in a moment. “You can’t help Jacen, but you can help me.”
“How?”
“With politics.”
“You know how I feel about politics. You know how good I am at it.”
Her smile returned. “The Resistance means it’s time for new politics. The kind where, if the fellow smiling at you is planning to put a vibroblade in your back, instead of smiling in return, you shoot him.”
“Really?” He thought about it. “Shoot him just once, or as often as I want?”
“As long as your blaster’s batteries hold out.”
“Sounds wonderful. What’s the catch?”
“I’ve accepted the assignment Wedge talked about the other night. Pending you signing on, that is. Once we’ve got a plan worked up, we’ll be traveling from system to system setting up Resistance cells. Calling in favors. An extension of the Jedi Underground. Probably blundering into Yuuzhan Vong forces and Peace Brigade units.”
“And shooting them.”
“Yes.”
He opened his mouth to ask if this is what she really wanted to be doing while one of their surviving children was missing and the other was in unknown circumstances on an almost hostile world, but then he caught the look in her eye, the gleam that had often graced Rebel Alliance leader Leia Organa’s expression in the darkest days of the first war with the Empire.
The darkest days brought out the best in some people … people like Leia Organa Solo. Now the days were dark again. Now, in spite of the pain and uncertainty she struggled through, Leia was at her best again.
She was back.
“I’m signing on, lady.”
“Good. We need a scoundrel like you.”
“I don’t have to be a nice man anymore?”
She shook her head and leaned in for a kiss.
From behind them, the singsong voice of C-3PO blared, “Master Solo! The mechanic with your new copilot’s chair is here.”
Han and Leia both jolted, then Leia dissolved into silent laughter.
Han glared at her. “As a reactivated scoundrel, I get to shoot Goldenrod, too, don’t I?”
She shook her head.
“So that’s the catch.”
“That’s the catch.”
Danni Quee jumped and straig
htened in her seat, and in the brief moment after she awoke, she couldn’t remember what had awakened her. But then it came again, a knock at the door. “Come in,” she said automatically, and brushed hair back from her face.
The door slid open and Tam Elgrin stood there, hands held before him as though he wasn’t sure quite what to do with them. He put them on his hips, thought the better of it, crossed them before him, and leaned on the doorjamb. The door hissed partway closed, recognized him as an obstruction, and hissed open again.
“Tam. Hello. I didn’t think you could be on this corridor.”
He offered her an uncertain smile and gestured at the identichip adhering to the front of his shirt. “I’m, uh, doing repairs with the civilian repair group. So I can be here.”
“Ah.”
“Do you have anything you need repaired?”
The door tried to close again. Tam ignored it.
Danni shook her head. “Not really. I’ve been doing most of my own maintenance.”
“Oh. Right. Well, if you ever get shorthanded, be sure to, you know, contact me.”
“I’ll do that.”
Tam waited there, through one more cycle of the door attempting to close, before appearing to realize that the conversation had probably run its course. “Um, can I get you something? To eat or drink?”
“No, that’s all right. Thank you anyway.”
“Well, then. I’ll be going.”
“Good-bye.”
“Good-bye.” Tam’s expression graduated to perplexed, then pained. He stood back from the door and reached up to rub one of his temples. “There’s that headache ag—”
The door slid shut, cutting off his last word.
Danni slumped. This was the third time in three days that Tam had gone out of his way to talk to her, in his inimitably clumsy fashion. Obviously, he’d developed an interest in her, and that was the last thing she needed.
Oh, it wasn’t that she disliked him. But her duties, analysis of Yuuzhan Vong technology, came first. Then there was her as-time-allowed training in the use of the Force, her occasional missions with the Wild Knights. She had meetings with the Insiders and lengthy consultations with others who were knowledgeable in Yuuzhan Vong technology, individuals such as Cilghal, the Jedi healer from Mon Calamari. She had sleep, now her favorite hobby, appreciated because of its scarcity. She just didn’t have time for the legions of male pilots, officers, technicians, and civilians who thought that she surely must be interested in spending some time with them.
It was even worse with Tam, who stared at her with big, needy eyes filled with an emotion she couldn’t quite interpret. It wasn’t love, or affection, or admiration. It was something like longing, only worse.
If she didn’t know better, she’d have said it was desperation.
She rubbed her eyes in the vain hope that it would allow them to focus, then turned her attention back to her instruments.
* * *
Preparing for bed, Iella asked, “Wedge, do you have any reason to distrust Luke and Mara? Or does Tycho?”
Wedge lay back on the bed and winced in anticipation of the day’s accumulation of aches and pains assaulting him. “Of course not. Why?”
“A couple of days ago, I found a listening device planted in the Skywalker quarters. It was an amateur job, attached with a little patch of duracrete to a water pipe in their refresher. So it would only pick up conversations taking place in that one-person refresher, and only when water wasn’t flowing through the pipe.”
He gave her a curious look. “Sounds like we’re being spied on by someone who hasn’t seen enough holodramas.”
She slid into place beside him. “Today I found the corresponding listening device. In Tycho’s quarters.”
Wedge chuckled. “So you suspect Tycho of wanting to listen to fourteen hours a day of crying baby?”
“Certainly not. But I’m taking it seriously because I don’t know what it represents. I know what to do when I find signs that a competent agent is working against us. This, this is just confusing.”
“Maybe our enemy has two listening devices. One to listen to and one to plant to throw blame on Tycho.”
“That’s a good guess.”
“So what did you do about it?”
“I left the listening device, and told Luke and Mara not to talk in the refresher, and why. I’ll script up some false leads for them to say within its range and see what comes of it.”
“Problem solved.” Wedge reached over to switch off the bedside light.
Borleias Occupation, Day 15
It had been nearly a week since Lusankya’s arrival had smashed the Yuuzhan Vong fleet. Since then, squadrons and even smaller units of coralskippers, now based out of the captured lunar station above Pyria VI, had harassed the New Republic ships in orbit and made some daring runs against the biotics station on the ground, but these attacks seemed little more than probes testing for weaknesses.
Luke Skywalker and a man named Kell Tainer worked on Luke’s X-wing, patching up the damage done during the last attack. The damage was mostly minor, hull scoring and components shaken loose, but if allowed to accumulate it would gradually render the snubfighter useless.
Tainer was tall and in shape, the leanness of his muscles suggesting that they were for use rather than for show. His brown hair was receding from his forehead but long in back and braided. He wore a droopy mustache and a close-trimmed beard. He looked like nothing so much as an asteroid miner or backworld mechanic, but Luke knew better.
“I thought you were Intelligence,” Luke said. A needle-thin stream of lubricant sprayed from the engine he was working on, the one at lower starboard, and left a zigzag red-black mark on his cheek and forehead. He tightened the clamp over the perforated hose and mopped ruefully at the fluid on his face. “A Wraith, right?”
“You’re not supposed to know that.” Kell’s voice was muffled. His upper body was wedged into the snub-fighter’s tiny cargo compartment; he dangled from the waist down out of the access hatch at the underside of the X-wing’s bow. It looked as though the X-wing had decided to begin a career as a carnivorous beast and Kell had been its first, unresisting prey. “Now I have to kill you.”
Luke grinned. “What are you doing working with the mechanics?”
“Used to be a mechanic. Worked for a while in a Sluis Van refitting shop that Admiral Thrawn’s forces eventually blew up, in fact. But I could ask you the same thing. Thought you were a Jedi Master. What are you doing working with the mechanics?”
“Same answer, more or less. I had to maintain all my machinery on Tatooine when I was a kid and many times since. And this is my X-wing.”
“Get in there, you little—all right. Your ejector mechanism should be working again. Let me get this panel dogged down so your feet don’t drop into the cargo compartment.”
“I’d appreciate that. Not that my feet always reach the floor anyway.” Luke finished sealing off the second of two valves. He removed the damaged tubing in between and began attaching its replacement.
Kell slid out from the compartment as though the carnivorous X-wing had decided he just wasn’t worth swallowing. He landed on his feet, nimble for such a big man. “Want to test it?”
“No, thanks.”
“Go ahead, hop in and fire it off. That’s the only way to be sure it works.”
Luke glanced up at the drooping metal docking bay ceiling five meters above their heads. “No, thanks.”
“Spoilsport.” Kell grabbed the lip of the hull beside the cockpit—the canopy was raised, allowing him the grip—and heaved himself up, leaning over into cockpit, his upper half disappearing from view again.
“You’re Tyria Sarkin’s husband, aren’t you?”
“Aha, that’s how you knew I was a Wraith. Yes, I am.”
“How is she doing?”
Kell was silent for long moments. Luke heard the ratcheting sound of the man’s hydrospanner. “She’s doing well,” Kell said. “Mostly she travels
with our boy, Doran. Teaching him the ways of the Jedi. She travels so far afield … she probably doesn’t even know how bad the Yuuzhan Vong invasion has gotten. We have pretty much a long-distance marriage. Months of separation alternating with extravagant welcome-home celebrations. Back when you confirmed her in her rank as a Jedi Knight, that thrilled her for months. Years.”
“She earned it.” Luke finished fitting the second tube end and reopened the valves. The tube stiffened a little as lubricant coursed through it, but it held.
Tyria Sarkin walked a strange and solitary path for a Jedi, Luke knew, but it was a path he was familiar with; it had been his own. He’d tested her about twenty years ago, when he’d first heard of her, a New Republic pilot candidate with Force abilities, but discovered that her powers were weak, her self-discipline inadequate to the task of shaping her into a Jedi. He’d let her down easy and suggested that she concentrate on her piloting skills. But sometime in the next few years she’d found the discipline she’d needed and resigned from the military to learn the ways of the Jedi. She’d learned mostly on her own, traveling and exploring, experimenting and investigating, reading communiqués and advice Luke had sent her but spending no time at Luke’s Jedi academy on Yavin 4. The fortunate thing, Luke reflected, was that she had never rejected Luke’s guidance and authority the way disaffected Jedi like Kyp Durron had; she had simply progressed in her own way, at her own rate.
Kell dropped to the ferrocrete floor again. “All done.”
“Here, too, just about.” Then Luke felt a new presence and glanced over at the docking bay entrance.
Iella Wessiri stood there. “Thirty standard minutes,” she said. “Insiders meeting.”
“The bantha crows at dawn,” Kell said.
Iella blinked at him. “What?”
“You know. ‘The bantha crows at dawn.’ What’s the countersign?” Kell aimed his hydrospanner at her as though it were a blaster. “Or perhaps you’re not Section Head Iella Wessiri at all? Pull that ooglith masquer off, or I open fire.”
She gave him a thin smile. “My husband never really told me how annoying you were.” She turned to Luke. “Thirty minutes. There’s news.” She turned and left.
Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I Page 12