Jaina was awakened by a blaring horn and the arrhythmic thumping of running feet. She sat up, trying to remember where she was.
The walls, ceiling, and floor were of blue-black ice. She’d been sleeping in her flight suit inside a thermoskin. Right, she had it now. Kyp’s hideout.
The other two people sleeping in the chamber—a human female named Yara and a disheveled Bothan whose name she had forgotten—were clambering to their feet. Jaina shrugged on her parka and followed them into the corridor and down to the command center.
Kyp was there, calmly giving orders. He saw Jaina and smiled, and she felt that funny little twist in her stomach again.
“Good morning,” Kyp said. “Sleep well?”
“Not bad, considering my bed was a block of ice,” she replied. “What’s going on?”
“Yuuzhan Vong recon just popped into the system. Not much of an outfit, but I don’t want them to find us here. If we hurry, we can jet out the back way before they’re any the wiser.” He locked his gaze on her. “That means I’m going to have to ask for your decision—now. If you won’t take this to someone in the military, I’ll have to do it alone. I’ll never convince them, but I have to try.”
His sincerity and urgency burned fiercely in the Force. Jaina remembered the column of sunfire, creeping toward the Yuuzhan Vong weapon. It wasn’t as if Kyp didn’t have proof. She at least owed his evidence a hearing, didn’t she?
“I’ll go to Rogue Squadron with it,” she said. “It’s the only place I know where I might still be welcome, and Colonel Darklighter will know what to do. But I’ll need your data.”
“Packed up and ready to go. And I’m going with you, just to make sure you get there.”
“That might not be a good idea. If Uncle Luke isn’t safe on Coruscant, I can’t imagine you would be.”
“Or you, for that matter,” Kyp added. “After all, you were last seen fleeing with them. I was hoping you could arrange a rendezvous someplace else.”
Jaina hesitated. “We could try that—I could send a message to Colonel Darklighter. But what if the Yuuzhan Vong or the Peace Brigade traces the communication?”
“You’re a smart young woman. I’m sure you can think of someplace you and Darklighter know that you can refer to obliquely.”
“Sure, probably.”
Kyp’s grin expanded again. “Good.” He jerked his head in the direction of the bay. “I took the liberty of refueling your X-wing and giving it the once-over. I’m afraid there’s no time for you to give it a personal inspection. We’ve gotta haul jets.”
“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.”