The living troops poured out of Record Time’s bays, their war cry an inarticulate roar. Lando steered his bodyguard, another of his droid troopers, in the wake of his main body of troops while the others surged toward the main building, spread out to set up a perimeter, or stopped to set up equipment.
Ahead, his droids were experiencing heavy incoming fire; their laminanium armor was pocked with small impact craters from thud bugs, stained with the juices of razor bugs that had smashed harmlessly into them. Lando watched as a warrior of the Yuuzhan Vong hurtled between two of them, his vonduun crab armor dark but gleaming, and whipped his amphistaff back and to the right as he passed. The staff, rigid, swept toward the droid’s midsection, but the droid caught it with a free hand, its own motion a blur. The droid aimed its heavy blaster and fired, a burst of energy tearing through the Vong warrior. The warrior jerked backward, convulsed by the outpouring of blaster damage, and hit the ground steaming.
A blow to Lando’s back not hard enough to be a thud bug hurled him onto the grass, and he dimly heard his bodyguard say, “Down, sir.” Then the droid was firing. Lando half-rose and saw a Yuuzhan Vong warrior approaching at a dead run, zigzagging to avoid the droid’s blasterfire.
From his knees, Lando aimed to the right of the onrushing enemy and fired, spraying laser energy up and down into open space, then traversed left. His shots flanked the droid’s, and the Yuuzhan Vong warrior, now five steps away, dodged into them, taking a blast in the knee. He fell forward and skidded toward Lando and the droid, his amphistaff whipping around, pliant.
Lando stood. He and the droid backed away at divergent angles and continued to pour fire into the fallen warrior. The warrior rose, his armor blackened in several places, and drew back his hand to throw something, but a blast—Lando wasn’t sure whether it was his or the droid’s—caught it in the throat. It toppled backward.
Lando nodded at the droid. “I’m a businessman,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“You know what that means.”
“You hate being here, sir.”
“You’ve got that right.” The two of them circled around the smoking body, continuing toward Lando’s force.
Now the armor-plated beast was visible around the building’s edge. The muscles beneath and surrounding its armor plates rippled and the plasma cannons all over its back tilted, taking aim—directly toward Lando, it seemed to him.
He dropped to the ground and began firing.
Luke, Mara, and Corran took a high-speed run over the base area, giving them a split-second view of the Yuuzhan Vong building, of the Record Time, of the tremendous beast hurling plasma into the transport’s side.
Luke sighed. The last time he’d faced one of these creatures, which Jaina Solo had nicknamed “ranges,” and later was known by its Yuuzhan Vong name, a rakamat, and saw the tactic he’d used to destroy it had knocked him out for hours. He couldn’t afford to do that now. “Let’s do what we can to distract the thing from the ground troops,” he said. “Two Flight, Three Flight, Four Flight, whenever you get through playing with those skips back there, we can put you to work up here where the fight is.”
He led Mara and Corran in a tight loop back toward the engagement zone. All three X-wings began juking just before they cleared the jungle canopy, and plasma danced up through the air all around them. He fired linked lasers at the enormous beast and saw his blast and those of his flightmates swallowed by the creature’s void defenses. Then they were over jungle again.
Lando elbow-crawled forward, chanting, “I’m too old for this, I’m a businessman, I’m too old for this, I want a drink.” The rhythm of his own words kept him from being fully aware of the sweat dripping from him, of the fear radiating from him as plasma fire flashed by mere meters over his head and into the side of the Record Time. Return fire crossed from the other direction, heavy laser cannon blasts that would evaporate him if they grazed him. His droid kept pace, walking slowly so as not to leave Lando behind.
He’d crawled into a circle of troops before he knew it—six of them, five humans and a Twi’lek, only three of them with shoulder arms. “Where are your blasters?” he asked.
The Twi’lek, a red-skinned female, huddled against the mound of her pack. “We’re engineers.”
One of the others, a long-faced male with a blaster rifle, said, “They’re engineers.” He fired at the legs of the giant creature lumbering in their direction.
“Engineers?” Lando asked. “With explosives?”
The woman nodded.
“You’re hiding behind your explosives?”
She nodded again, her dismayed expression suggesting that she understood the insanity of it.
“Dig,” Lando said. “A shallow hole. Large enough to put all those explosives in.”
“No,” said the trooper with the blaster. “We’ll just leave them behind and get clear of them.”
“No, we’re digging.” Lando glanced at the Twi’lek woman, who was frozen, her hand halfway to her field shovel, looking between him and the trooper.
The trooper gave Lando an ingratiating smile. “I’m only a noncommissioned officer, but that beats a civilian on the battlefield. We leave.”
Lando grabbed him by the collar of his tunic and dragged him close. The trooper had to be younger than twenty, despite his apparent poise. “Listen to me, bantha fodder,” Lando said. “I blew up a Death Star before you were born. In twenty seconds I can conclude a conversation with General Antilles, who blew up that Death Star with me, and I’ll be General Calrissian again, and and you’ll spend the rest of your military career cleaning refreshers on Kessel. Or you can dig. Which is it?”
The trooper looked at him for one long moment, during which streaks of plasma began to look like solid lines in the air above them. “I guess we dig, sir.”
“Right.” Lando released him. He looked at the Twi’lek engineer and gestured at the trooper. “Give him your shovel.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lando stretched out, took up his blaster rifle, and took the trooper’s place at the perimeter. He fired a few times at distant Yuuzhan Vong warriors and once at the creature. Then he turned to his bodyguard and smiled. “You know, that’s the kind of worker negotiations I really love.”
The droid nodded. “Yes, sir.”
The latest flyby of Luke and his wingmates, during which some of their shots were again absorbed by the rakamat’s voids and others hit the side of the Yuuzhan Vong building, showed one party of soldiers in a circle directly ahead of the oncoming rakamat. The soldiers seemed to be digging a hole. “What do you think?” he heard Mara ask. “Idiots?”
“Picnickers,” Luke offered.
“There’s a thought.”
Luke led Mara and Corran back toward the Yuuzhan Vong base. A moment later, three more Twin Suns settled into formation with them.
“Good to see you,” Luke said. “Split off and approach the base from the far side so that you reach the edge of the canopy half a second after we do. They’re only expecting three of us. Ready, break.”
The ground here was soft; they had the hole dug and three engineers’ worth of explosives loaded into it in less than a standard minute. The eight of them crawled away from the hole and toward the Record Time.
The Twi’lek woman wasn’t crawling. She was flat on her back toward the rear of the column, fiddling with a remote detonator, while Lando’s droid dragged her by the feet. The droid kept up sustained fire aimed behind them, toward the rakamat and the main engagement area of the infantry fight.
Lando, elbow-crawling at the head of the column, heard the roar of the returning X-wings. He knew their attacks on the beast were futile, but was grateful for their strafing runs, which had kept him and this unit from falling under constant fire.
Three X-wings flashed by from the right, unloading laserfire on the beast’s left side. The voids flicked around into the path of the attacks, and Lando thought he saw the snubfighters’ red laser beams actually bend as they entered the voids.
Then three X-wings flashed by from the left, pouring laserfire into the beast’s right side. The six snubfighters crossed like a demonstration of trick flying and disappeared beyond the jungle canopy.
Lando saw yorik coral superheat and explode, propelled out as the flesh beneath the coral was instantly transformed into steam.
Blackish blood poured down the beast’s right flank. The creature roared, a noise like the offspring of a ground-quake and distant thunder, and poured plasma fire after the six snubfighters. But still it came on, toward them, toward the Record Time.
“Got it,” the Twi’lek engineer said.
“Get ready,” Lando said. “We’ll try to time it to the X-wings’ next pass if they’re back in time.”
The woman began elbow-crawling, freeing Lando’s droid.
Lando suddenly found two stumps in the way before him. He looked up. They weren’t stumps. They were the legs of a Yuuzhan Vong warrior, encased in vonduun crab armor. The warrior’s amphistaff was straight as a spear, its tapered tail pointed right at Lando’s back; the warrior held it up, ready to plunge.
The point came down and a dark shape shielded Lando from it, from the dazzling display of plasma and laser energy overhead. Lando heard a human scream, and abruptly the Yuuzhan Vong warrior was flat on the grass, his feet kicking centimeters from Lando’s nose. One of the soldiers was atop him, but was already going limp, the amphistaff driven clear through his back.
From his position, Lando had a view under the skirt plates of the Yuuzhan Vong warrior’s armor. As the warrior tossed aside the soldier’s body, Lando angled his blaster rifle in and fired, hitting the warrior where neither leg armor nor skirt armor protected. This time it was the Yuuzhan Vong who cried out in pain. The warrior jerked and writhed, agony twisting his body apparently beyond the level that even a Yuuzhan Vong could endure.
Lando’s bodyguard droid landed between Lando and the warrior. It kicked out against the amphistaff. Its blow hurled the weapon away, though the amphistaff, pliant again, bit the droid; the attack, faster than Lando’s eye could follow, did not penetrate the droid’s armor and would not have damaged the droid if it had. The amphistaff flew meters away.
The droid stood over the warrior, aimed carefully, and began firing.
Lando twisted around. The giant creature behind them, still pouring blood, had picked up speed. Knowing it was injured, perhaps dying, it was charging the Record Time.
The Twi’lek engineer had the detonator in her hand, her thumb over the button.
“Wait,” Lando said.
She turned an anguished expression toward him, but didn’t argue.
The roar of the returning X-wings began to rattle everyone and everything in the field. Lando watched the skies with a small part of his attention and kept the rest on the oncoming creature. Its front feet were over, then past the buried cache of explosives, and its main body was moving into place above the disturbed ground that marked its location.
Lando swallowed. If he was successful, the beast would die. Innocent, and Lando found it painful to watch it lumber toward him, toward its death.
He put the blame on the Yuuzhan Vong. It was better than accepting every bit of responsibility for killing a tremendous creature that, but for its controllers, might never have endangered him.
The X-wing roar rose in volume, and the plasma cannons on the beast diverted their streams of fire from the Record Time into the air. Lando saw the vehicles flash in from two sides, north and south this time instead of east and west. He saw red lasers flash down into the blackness of the beast’s voids, saw return plasma fire clip an X-wing’s underside and begin burrowing in.
Then the snubfighters were gone, the plasma cannons sending fiery destruction after them. “Now!” Lando shouted.
He didn’t even see the woman press the button; he was aware only of the fire, reddish yellow and as evil looking as anything produced by the Yuuzhan Vong, roiling out from under the beast. It engulfed the creature and slammed Lando with heat and noise; he buried his face in the grass to escape it.
A moment later, he could look again. The creature was down on its side, its belly ripped and blackened by the force of the explosion. Blood streamed from it, but amazingly, it still lived, at least for the moment, its sides heaving with the effort to breathe.
It was not firing on X-wings or the troop transport now. Lando could hear and see the transport’s lasers picking up again, not concentrating their fire on the creature, now picking off individual Yuuzhan Vong warriors within sight.
Lando’s droid was firing, too. Lando looked over to see the droid placing shot after shot into the body of the Yuuzhan Vong warrior who’d come so close to killing him. The warrior was dead, the neck and top torso portions of his armor burned away by repeated blasts.
“One-One-A, you can stop now,” Lando said. “What’s wrong? Is your threat-recognition software on the blink?”
The droid looked at him. “Yes, sir. I suspect so, sir. I still register this one as a threat.”
“Override control twenty-seven aye aye six, flag this target as no threat.”
“Understood, sir.” The droid stopped firing.
“We’ll get you in for repairs,” Lando said. “But don’t feel bad. You did well.”
“Yes, sir.”
The situation was largely under control by the time Wedge descended to the planet’s surface in his shuttle. He made a pass over the site of the Borleias New Republic base.
Once upon a time, it had been an Imperial base, housing TIE fighters and stormtroopers, charged with the duty of defending a nearby biological research facility managed by the Imperial general Evir Derricote. Then Rogue Squadron, at the time commanded by Wedge himself, had come as the spearhead of a mission that had wrested control of the world from Derricote. The Imperial base had become a Rebel Alliance base, and then, once the Rebels had taken Coruscant and become the legitimate government in this part of the galaxy, a New Republic base.
Now it was rubble. Wedge doubted that any part of the original base was more than two meters in size. Where the main facilities buildings had once been now rested another sort of building, pastel red and pearl, several stories in height, a circular core from which eight more or less evenly spaced extensions radiated, like arms on a sea creature. Wedge didn’t have to ask to know that the building was something organic, a living creature bred by the Yuuzhan Vong to serve as a dwelling. Had it been dropped on the former base like a bomb, crushing it flat, or had it grown out of the middle? Wedge didn’t know.
Lying beside it was a gargantuan creature, another of the Yuuzhan Vong’s fighting resources, the reptile the Record Time had reported. It lay on its side in an immense pool of black blood. Wedge’s troops reported that it was dead and awarded the kill to Lando Calrissian and the group of engineers.
The main building was surrounded by numerous smaller buildings, these shaped like the curved shells found on the backs of oceangoing arthropods and some land-based snails. Each was the size of a small house, aesthetically pleasing in muted color and curving design—so long as one didn’t remember that they housed beings who killed other sapient beings without mercy and injured themselves for pleasure.
The rest of the old base was in ruins, docking bays and outbuildings turned into blackened, crumbling shells. It looked to Wedge as though they’d been used for target practice by the coralskippers’ plasma cannons.
The area was swarming with New Republic troops. Dead men and women in New Republic uniforms lay at various points on the ground; there were many dead Yuuzhan Vong among them. Wedge saw his troops leading prisoners into open patches of ground surrounded by other troops. Many of the prisoners were human, their foreheads, even at this distance, clearly bearing the coral-like twin horn growths that signaled they were slaves of the Yuuzhan Vong. Other prisoners were Yuuzhan Vong, but their skins were smooth, unadorned by the extensive tattooing or scarring he’d seen on Vong pilots; Wedge assumed that they were members of the Shamed Ones, the pariah caste of Yuuzhan Vong society, whose bodies rejected modifications and who could thus never climb the ranks of the Yuuzhan Vong social hierarchy.
The base was a loss, and, even though it was captured, the new Yuuzhan Vong base on top of it was not the sort of place Wedge wanted to use as a ground-based operations center. It might contain numberless traps and dangers for New Republic occupants, and it certainly wouldn’t reassure the New Republic refugees he expected to begin streaming in from Coruscant.
He keyed his comlink. “Rogue One, this is Antilles. Give me an escort. We’re going to visit the biotics facility.”
“Will do.” A few moments later, two X-wings, one belonging to Gavin Darklighter and the other to his wingmate Kral Nevil, maneuvered to flank him. Wedge heeled about toward the biotics facility and hit his thrusters. Not long after, he hovered over the site of that base.
General Derricote’s biotics facility was a long single building, several stories tall, its eastern facing a sheer drop, its western facing graduated downward in an aesthetically pleasing slope; the top story was a narrow strip, wide enough for a corridor along one set of rooms, the next story down wider, the next story down wider still, so that the whole thing seemed to be a gigantic wedge whose sharp edge pointed at the sky. Officially, it had been a site where Derricote preserved and studied samples of rare plant species from the world of Alderaan. Secretly, it had been used to engineer a deadly disease, the Krytos virus, which afflicted and killed members of nonhuman species. It was spread by the Imperial forces when the Alliance captured Coruscant.
From this height, Wedge could see that the building was still intact. The jungle had grown right up to it, trees surrounding it, vines draping over the turquoise-colored banks of viewports. But those viewports were unbroken; it didn’t surprise Wedge that Derricote had used transparisteel instead of some lesser material.
Wedge transmitted a holocam view of the site, adding coordinates to the data stream accompanying the transmission. “Mon Mothma, this will be our ground facility. I want an occupation force and engineers here from our battle reserves as soon as possible. I want the jungle burned away for a kilometer around on the north, east, and south faces, two kilometers to the west—with escaped Yuuzhan Vong in the jungle, I want a substantial kill zone. Once that’s done, have the ground forces enter and clear it of Yuuzhan Vong and other predators, then bring in personnel to clean it up, get its generators working, and so on. The field immediately west will be our landing zone.
“Issue the order that all the Yuuzhan Vong dead are to be stripped of gear for study, but their bodies are to be left where they fell.” This was not an act of insult on Wedge’s part. The Yuuzhan Vong had several times in the past demonstrated a need to retrieve the bodies of their dead. By leaving the bodies, Wedge hoped to reduce the number of assaults that his troops would suffer, since there would be no assaults while attempting to retrieve bodies.
“Keep a detachment on duty to contain the Yuuzhan Vong base while another detachment, plus Danni Quee’s people and Lando’s droids, searches it for prisoners and hiding Vong. When they’re done evacuating the site, have the engineers blow it up.”
He sighed to himself. After a brief respite from it, he was back to niggling administrative details. He’d rather be retired or fighting again.
A day later, the biotics building was secure and operational.
The occupation forces hadn’t found any Yuuzhan Vong hiding within the structure, but it was obvious the enemy had been here on a few occasions, breaking up machinery, smashing furniture—warrior-vandals. The bad news was that the building’s generator had been smashed. Currently a small freighter was situated next to the building, heavy cables running from its engine compartment into the building’s basement and to field shield units set up to protect the complex.
The building was now surrounded by six square kilometers of destroyed jungle growth. His forces had used fire, lasers, defoliants, whatever they could get their hands on. The biotics facility, a secret home of ugliness, was surrounded by obvious ugliness. To step out of the building was to step into a hot, humid environment that stank of burned vegetation and offered no view but char, ships that had landed for repairs, and distant jungle.
Luke, returning from a perimeter sweep around the Yuuzhan Vong settlement—a sweep in which they’d encountered no Yuuzhan Vong, but suspected, from the behavior of Borleias’s animal life, that Vong were out there—learned that Wedge had requested his presence at a general meeting of his senior officers and personal allies. He joined the crowd in the biotics building’s ground-floor mess hall. Mara was already there, baby Ben in her arms; at her feet was a baby carrier she’d jury-rigged from a backpack. On one ankle was a cast, immobilizing it against the bone break she’d sustained when she crash-landed during Coruscant’s fall.
Luke headed for a seat beside her, but Wedge waved him up to the head of the table, to the other seat beside him. Luke gave Mara a smile of apology and moved to sit by Wedge.
“Our stay here is going to be short,” Wedge said to the entire assembly. “But it’s going to be longer than we’d like. There’s going to be more fighting. I’d like to have some tricks up our sleeves to offer the Yuuzhan Vong when they come, so I want you to be thinking about it. Transmit your ideas to your commanding officers. The commanding officers will transmit them to me—and I don’t want there to be too much editing of them. Now’s not the time to think conservatively.”
A naval officer Luke did not know, a woman in a lieutenant’s uniform, spoke up. “General, if I can ask—”
“Go ahead,” Wedge said.
“Why do we want to stay here at all? The garrison has to have alerted their commanders that they were being overrun. The Yuuzhan Vong will be coming.”
Wedge nodded. “Well, there are several reasons. The first is this: because Borleias—rather, the Pyria solar system—is an important hyperspace crossroads, the convenient intersection of a lot of routes, it’s on a lot of people’s nav computers. It’s inevitable that many refugees fleeing Coruscant—or arriving there and suddenly discovering that the Yuuzhan Vong have taken it—will be coming here as the first stage of their escapes. Someone needs to help them. A lot of them may be in damaged craft. We can’t have them clogging up our repair facilities in space, not when they’re needed to repair combat craft, so they’ll have to put down on the planet’s surface.
“Second, we need to catch our collective breaths. We left Coruscant with just the ships on our backs. We need to take stock, take inventory … and calculate the enormity of the disaster that we’ve just experienced.” Wedge’s face, for a moment, expressed a pang of pain, and Luke felt it, too. Wedge hadn’t been able to get in touch with his wife, Iella, or daughters, Syal and Myri, before duty had forced him to leave Coruscant. Not knowing what had happened to them, the shame of not being able to carry out both his duties to the New Republic and his duties to his family, had to be eating at him. Wedge swallowed hard, then his features were schooled once again into impassivity, and he continued.
“Third, yes, the Yuuzhan Vong will be coming here. They can’t permit an enemy garrison so close to the planet they’ve just taken. And if we can hold their attention for a while, that’s even more time for others fleeing Coruscant to get away, and for our other fleet groups, the ones bel Iblis and Kre’fey command, to gather themselves, too.
“Fourth, and last, it’s a morale issue. Our people have just taken a tremendous kick in the teeth—the loss of Coruscant. We’re going to kick in return. If you run from neks, or Vong, they won’t respect you. They’ll chase you, drag you down, and kill you. Only if you stand your ground do you have a chance of survival. If we dig in our heels here and slap the Yuuzhan Vong across the face, it may do some harm to their morale. It may do some good for ours. Luke, I’d appreciate it if your Jedi could be not just as active as possible, but also out there for everyone to see—a constant reminder to our forces of the strength and versatility they represent.”
“And of one of our most important roles,” Luke said. “Protectors of the people. Consider it done, General.” Luke left unstated the fact that a higher profile for the Jedi could mean more lost to the Peace Brigade, fewer able to reach the escape routes Han and Leia were establishing. This was a necessary risk.
“Thanks.” Wedge turned his attention away from Luke and to the gathering before him. “Colonel Darklighter, I want to keep Rogue Squadron on high guard in Borleias orbit for the time being.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Captain Deevis, I want at least two ships with good sensor systems on-station in the Coruscant-Borleias approach corridor, one just on this side of the point Borleias’s gravity well would cause incoming ships to come out of hyperspace, one at a distance, our best-guess projection based on previous tactics as to where a Yuuzhan Vong sortie might drop out of hyperspace.” He began looking among the assembled officers and civilians, not waiting for confirmations of his orders. “Captain Birt, while Record Time is being repaired, you’re in charge of the injured. Find a portion of this facility you can set up for triage, surgery, and wards. Coordinate with Haven Jace, our medical frigate. Lando, the rest of the facilities are yours to apportion, and you’ll act as quartermaster. Booster, you’re in charge of communications. Make sure we make the best use of whatever equipment we have on hand, and coordinate it through the Errant Venture. Danni—is Danni Quee here?”
“I’m here.” Luke saw a hand waving from the back.
“You’re in charge of just about everything Vong. You’ll get the prisoners, the gear, and vehicles we’ve captured from the Yuuzhan Vong garrison. First priority, in my opinion, would be freeing the prisoners from the blasted coral things. Corran Horn?”
“Here.” Another hand waved from the back of the crowd. Horn was no taller than Luke and wasn’t always easy to spot in a large group of people.
“Corran, Gavin did receive your request to rejoin Rogue Squadron, and he and I both welcome it, but I’ve got another assignment for you for the moment. We know there are Yuuzhan Vong out in the jungle. I want you to help set up security for this facility. Your combination of Jedi, Corellian Security, and Starfighter Command experience is just what we need. In the meantime you can continue flying with the Twin Suns until you transfer back to the Rogues.”
“Understood.”
“Tycho, you’re in charge of starfighter forces. I remain in direct command of space navy forces. I want preliminary status reports downloaded to my datapad in half an hour and a meeting of officers and divisional heads in the conference room in two hours. Lando will let you know where the conference room is.” Wedge clapped his hands together sharply. “Let’s move, people.”
The crowd dispersed with military rapidity, leaving behind only Wedge, Tycho, Luke, and Mara. Mara joined the other three at the table.
Luke made his voice mild. “You didn’t ask anything of me. Well, you asked me to do what I was going to do anyway. You didn’t have a specific task or duty for me.”
Wedge gave him a puzzled look. “Luke, you’re more or less the guiding light of this whole operation. I don’t mean just my fleet group. All three groups are looking to you for advice. I can’t make demands of you, or of the Jedi.”
“You can make demands of friends.”
Wedge blinked, then offered up a slight smile. “True. And I’d be happy to do that.” He offered an apologetic shrug. “As drained as we are of resources, I want the Errant Venture to stay here. I’ve already asked Booster. But that means that if the Jedi trainees stay aboard her—”
“It’s no longer a safe haven for them, I know. I’ll be dealing with that. I have some ideas on where we can put the students.”
The Maw, he thought, with the Jedi haven under construction there, with its surrounding screen of black holes and mad gravitic interactions, would be best for now.
“Then I want you in charge of special forces, special operations. Mara, I know this is a lot to ask of a woman with a small baby—”
Mara straightened, holding Ben to her. “Trust me, my capacity for mayhem is undiminished.”
Wedge’s smile broadened. “I didn’t spot any ranking Intelligence officers in that crowd. I’d appreciate it if you could act as our Intelligence head for the time being. When we get in an officer from Intelligence, you can move over to Luke’s department of special forces and mayhem.”
Luke hesitated before speaking again. “Wedge, has there been any word about Iella or the kids?”
Wedge shook his head. “None. But if there’s anyone in the New Republic who could smuggle herself and two children offworld—”
“It’s Iella, I know. They’ll be fine, Wedge.”
“Are you—” Wedge’s voice was suddenly hoarse. “Does that mean you’ve seen something? With your Jedi perceptions?”
Luke shook his head. “I’m sorry, no.”
“Oh.” Wedge schooled his features back into impassivity, but to Luke, he looked as though another hope had suddenly died within him. Luke felt a crushing shame at having given him a false hope, however inadvertently.
Wedge rose. “Yes. I’m certain they’ll be fine.” He left the chamber, Tycho with him.
“He’s hard to read,” Mara said. “How is he?”
Luke shrugged. “Holding on. Relying on all that military discipline. But not knowing about his family is chewing away at his guts. “C’mon, let’s find out what sort of resources special operations and Intelligence can put together. And we need to find someone who can baby-sit while we’re off doing our duties.”
Mara shook her head. “I’m not going to accept any duties that take me away from Ben. Not anymore. Flying yesterday, that was the last time. I couldn’t stand it again.”
“Mara—”
“No, listen to me, farmboy. There’s no one, other than you and Karrde, that I’d trust more than Leia. But she couldn’t protect Ben. Viqi Shesh took him back on Coruscant, and we had to rely far too much on luck to get him back. I’m not going to let him out of my sight. Period. Anyone who comes after him, I kill personally.”
Luke looked at her, taking in her calm demeanor and the wild eruption of emotions it hid, emotions he could feel through his Force-bond to her, and knew he wouldn’t win this argument today. As if on cue, Ben woke and erupted into wails of distress. “We’ll talk about this later,” Luke said.
Mara gave him a frosty little smile. “Sure, if you like reexperiencing the same conversation and the same results.”