TWENTY

The Millennium Falcon was purring, and the controls felt just right in Han’s hands. Better than they had felt in a very long time, as a matter of fact. Oh, the coralskippers tried their best. They swooped in close, firing their molten projectiles and skittering away from return fire like a school of particularly ugly fish. The larger craft—about the size of the Falcon itself—kept a steady fire of its own weapons, releasing whole flights of grutchins. But today was not a lucky day for the Yuuzhan Vong, at least not so far.

Han whooped and turned tight, scraping so close to the transport analog that one of the pursuing coralskippers, already singed by laser fire, smacked right into it.

In his peripheral vision, he saw another skip flame out, drilled by turbolasers.

“Kid can shoot,” Han told his copilot.

“He’s your son,” Leia said. Her voice surprised him. For a nanosecond he’d forgotten it was her there, expecting to find Chewie instead.

And the odd thing? He didn’t feel the gullet-sucking sorrow he usually did. A little wistful, maybe, a little melancholy. A little happiness, too, to have his wife beside him. He’d nearly wrecked that, hadn’t he?

He blinked as a volley of Yuuzhan Vong ordnance found his shields when they shouldn’t have.

“Like I said, Han—” Leia sputtered.

He’d built some distance from the largest Yuuzhan Vong vessel. Now he turned and built g’s toward it. “Concussion missiles when I tell you.”

“Han?”

The Yuuzhan Vong ship loomed closer and closer, and Han grinned out of the side of his mouth.

“Yeah, sweetheart?”

“You’ve noticed we’re going to hit that thing?”

Han held course.

Leia nearly shrieked because the alternating smooth and striated pattern of yorik coral filled nearly the entire viewport. At the last instant Han nosed up slightly to miss by a few tens of centimeters.

“Missiles, now!” Han said.

The missiles detonated just behind them, a full spread. The Yuuzhan Vong ship broke in half.

“Noticed I’m going to hit what thing?” Han asked innocently.

“Have you lost it?” Leia exclaimed. “What do you think, that you’re twenty again?”

“It ain’t the years—”

She smiled, leaned over, and kissed him. “As I’ve said before, you have your moments. I always knew you were a scoundrel at heart.”

“Me?” The exaggerated innocence that had once come so naturally felt suddenly right again.

The rest of the Yuuzhan Vong ships went out like Hapan paper lamps caught in a high wind, and Jacen shot them into star food. Without the yammosk on the larger ship to coordinate them, the skips were less than dexterous.

“Speaking of scoundrels,” Han said, tapping on the comm unit.

“Hailing the freighter Tinmolok.”

The hail was answered immediately. “Yes, yes. Do not shoot! We are unarmed! We are Etti! We are not Yuuzhan Vong!”

“So you say,” Han said easily. “I can see that you’re taking cargo into occupied space.”

“Relief only! Food for the native populace!”

“Oh, really? Well, now, that I’ve got to see. I’m coming alongside.”

“No, no, I …”

“No problem. Just glad to be able to help.”

“Please, Captain, may I ask who you are?”

Han leaned back and clasped the back of his head in his hands. “You, sir, are speaking to the proud captain of the, ah—” He glanced at Leia. “—Princess of Blood. Prepare to be boarded.”

Leia rolled her eyes.

   “This is piracy,” the Etti captain—one Swori Mdimu—grumbled as Han and Jacen took possession of the crew’s sidearms.

“That’s good,” Han told him. “I thought I was going to have to write it down for you, so you’d know what happened. Though for the record, it’s actually privateering. See, pirates steal from anyone. They’re greedy, and they just don’t care who they hijack. Privateers, on the other hand, only attack ships allied with a certain fleet. In this case, I’m choosing for my targets any lowlife gutless and stupid enough to supply the Yuuzhan Vong or the Peace Brigade, or any other collaborationist scum, with anything whatever.”

“I told you—”

“Look,” Han said. “In about five minutes, I’m going to see your cargo. If it’s just a bunch of food that the Yuuzhan Vong are buying for their captives out of the goodness of their sweet, tattooed hearts, I’ll let you go, with apologies. But if I find you’re carrying weapons and ordnance, or any other sort of war matériel, I’m going to smack you around. And if you have captives … Well, you have an imagination. Use it.”

“No!” the captain said. “No captives. It’s as you said. Weapons for the Peace Brigade. Not my idea! I have an employer. I need this job. Please don’t kill me and my crew.”

“Quit your whining. I’m not killing anybody, this time. I’m setting you adrift in one of your shuttles.”

“Thank you. Thank you!”

“Here’s how you thank me,” Han said. “You tell anyone who’ll listen that we’re out here. Any ship delivering to a Yuuzhan Vong–occupied system is mine. And next time, I may not take prisoners. You get me?”

“I get you,” Swori Mdimu said.

“Great. My, ah, buddy here is going to put you all in stun cuffs now. I’m going to have a look at your cargo. If there are any surprises waiting for me, better tell me now.”

“There—there are two Yuuzhan Vong guards. They will be alerted.”

“No kidding?” Han said. “Okay, so we’re cuffing you and locking you up. Then the two of us will take care of these guards.”

“Two of you?” the Etti said incredulously. “Against Yuuzhan Vong?”

“Hey, don’t worry. You want us to lose, right? But if we don’t, I’ll be back, and we need to have a little talk about who exactly your employer is.”

Once the prisoners were secure, Han started off down a corridor.

“Da—ah, Captain?” Jacen said. “Cargo hold’s the other way.”

“That’s right,” Han told him.

“What’re you …?”

“Just stay here. If the Yuuzhan Vong come up, give a yell. I’ll be on the bridge.”

   Han returned from the bridge a little later, and the two of them went to the cargo access axis. At the first set of locks, they found two Yuuzhan Vong guards, collapsed near the door. Their faces were masses of purple—not from their own scarification, but from the capillaries that had burst beneath their skin.

“You killed them,” Jacen said dully, hardly believing it. “You sealed off the compartment and let the air out.”

Han glanced at his son. “Right on all but one count. They aren’t dead.”

Jacen frowned and knelt to search for some sign of life, since with the Yuuzhan Vong the Force could not help him. One of the two stirred at his touch, and he jumped back.

“See?” Han said, a sure note of satisfaction tinting his voice. “I just dropped the pressure until they did. There are surveillance cams in here.”

“Oh.”

“Better cuff ’em, unless you want to fight ’em. I thought things would go smoother this way.”

“Dad, what if there had been captives in here?”

“Then I would have seen them on the surveillance. Jacen, give the old man some credit.”

“Permission to speak freely, Captain.”

Han sighed. “Go ahead, son.”

“Dad, I don’t like this. Maybe you think being a pirate is okay, but—”

“Privateer,” Han corrected.

“You really think there’s a moral difference?”

“If there’s ever a moral difference in being on one side instead of the other in a war, yes. Doesn’t your all-knowing Force tell you that?”

“I don’t know what the Force wants. That’s exactly the problem.”

“Yeah?” Han said sarcastically. “You knew what to do when you found your mother with her legs half cut off. Fortunately. Or do you think it was wrong to save her life?”

Jacen reddened. “That’s not fair.”

“Fair?” Han threw his hands up. “Kids these days. Fair.”

“Dad, I know the Yuuzhan Vong are a darkness that must be fought. But aggression—that’s not my way. Setting up Uncle Luke’s great river, that I know I can do. This …”

“And you thought we were going to be able to carry out Luke’s grand scheme without ever getting our hands dirty? You heard them back at the Maw—we need ships, we need supplies and weapons, we need money.” Han tapped up the ship’s manifest on the captain’s datapad and whistled. “And now we have all three. Three E-wings, right out of dry dock. Lommite, about two hundred kilos. Enough rations to feed a small army.” He glanced back up at Jacen. “Not to mention that the Peace Brigade doesn’t get any of this stuff. C’mere. I want to see something.”

They made their way through the crated supplies until they came to those the manifest designated as weapons. Han worked the seal on one until it popped open.

“Well, how do you like that?” Han remarked.

“Emperor’s bones,” Jacen breathed.

The crate contained not blasters, stun batons, or grenades, but Yuuzhan Vong amphistaffs.

“Looks like our Brigade buddies are making the transition away from the evils of technology,” Han said. “Wonder if they’ve started scarring themselves yet?” He looked significantly at Jacen. “You still don’t think this was worthwhile?”

Jacen stared at the hibernating weapon-beasts.

“It’s done, now,” he allowed.

Han shook his head. “I don’t think so. I want to find out who is sending this stuff. Those amphistaffs were grown somewhere. Where? Duro? Obroa-skai?”

“You told the captain of this ship you would continue hijacking ships bound for Yuuzhan Vong space. Was that the truth?”

“It was. I’ve been trying to explain why.”

“It’s a bad idea.”

“Well, maybe. But like I told you earlier, I’m the captain.”

“It’s not that simple for me.”

“No? Then here’s something real simple. We’re taking this freighter and its cargo back to the Maw. When we’re done, you’re free to take one of these E-wings to Luke and sit the rest of the war out meditating or whatnot. Become a nurse or something. I don’t care. But if you’re going to keep this up, I don’t want you on my ship, son or not.”

Jacen didn’t answer, but his face went all stony. It was times like this that Han occasionally wished he had just a little of that Force ability to feel what others felt, because Jacen was a blank slate to him more often than not.

As his son vanished around the corner, Han realized exactly what he had said, and memory suddenly jolted through him with the force of vision. He saw himself with Leia in the cockpit of the Falcon the day they’d met, right after escaping the Death Star. “I ain’t in this for your revolution,” he’d told her. Not much later he’d told Luke much the same thing, dodging out of the fight against the Death Star for what seemed all of the right reasons, not the least of which that it was hopeless. That Han Solo had had a pretty weak grip on the idea of a worthy cause.

Somehow, things had gotten turned around. Not front to back, but in a weirder way. Ultimately it was because he just didn’t understand the kid, and the kid hadn’t a clue about Han.

Anakin he could understand. He used the Force in exactly the way Han would, if he had the ability. Jacen had always been more like Leia, and in the last year or so the resemblance had only grown stronger.

But here, suddenly, in the least flattering way he could imagine, the Solo genes were finally showing.

“Don’t go, son,” Han murmured, but there was no one to hear him but the sleeping weapons.