CORUSCANT
Two days after the Solo-Skywalker family dinner, Han Solo sat on one of his living chamber sofas, a portable terminal in his lap, scowling at the display screen. Every so often he typed in a series of commands or used the voice interface, but each attempt he made was eventually greeted with a red screen indicating failure.
Leia materialized behind him, leaning over his shoulder, and read aloud the text on the screen. “OPERATION FAILED. YOU MAY BE USING CONNECTION INFORMATION THAT IS OUT OF DATE. Trying to straighten out your taxes?”
“Very funny.” Han didn’t sound amused. “Do you remember Wildis Jiklip?”
Leia frowned. Wildis Jiklip was a mathematics prodigy about Han’s age. Well traveled, with a Corellian mother and a Coruscanti father, she had been educated in both systems and had been licensed to teach at the university or academy level by the time she was in her early twenties. Then she’d disappeared for two decades, and only a few people knew what she’d been doing during that time.
She’d become a smuggler under the name of Red Stepla. She ran unusual routes, carrying unusual cargoes, and had an uncanny ability to get forbidden goods to their markets at a time when they’d be most valuable. Her record for success was unrivaled. Where most smugglers led a hand-to-mouth existence, spending their earnings in port on gambling binges and other recreations, retaining barely enough for fuel and to acquire new cargoes, Red Stepla and her crew led very unobtrusive lives, investing their earnings in a variety of ports all over the galaxy.
A few years before the start of the Yuuzhan Vong war, Red Stepla and her crew retired—by the simple expedient of disappearing. Wildis Jiklip then reappeared, an independently wealthy theoretician who occasionally taught university-level courses on Coruscant and Lorrd, focusing on interplanetary economics, supply-and-demand trade economics, systemic economic reactions to widespread warfare, and related subjects.
Han knew the secret of her dual identity, and Leia had learned it from Wildis herself, who trusted anyone Han would trust enough to marry.
Leia nodded. “Sure. What about her?”
“She’s supposed to be on Coruscant, doing one of her lecture series. I tried to get in touch with her to talk about Corellia. I thought maybe she could give me a hint about the official GA reaction to what’s going on there. But she discontinued her lecture series in the middle, just a few days ago, and all the ways I have to get in touch with her are out of operation—reporting that she’s on leave of absence due to a family emergency.”
Leia shrugged. “So?”
“Well, she has no family. Yeah, I know, that’s not suspicious in and of itself. But I still wanted to talk political shop with other Corellians. So I arranged for a holotransmission to Wedge Antilles.”
Leia felt a moment of surprise but kept it from her face. She knew she was spoiled when it came to finance—she’d lived as a planetary princess, albeit one from a financially responsible family, as a child and young woman; she’d commanded the resources of a rebel government and then a legitimate one. Expenditure had seldom been a consideration for her. Han, who had been reared in poverty and had lived in difficult financial circumstances for the first half of his life, was more stingy, and the fact that he’d been willing to pay for a live, instantaneous conversation with a friend light-years away was quite a concession for him. It told more about the state of his concern over Corellian politics than anything he’d said over the last few days. “And how is Wedge?”
“Well, I couldn’t get through to him via HoloNet. They say there’s some sort of equipment breakdown causing intermittent connections with the Corellian system.”
“So you sent him a message by standard record-and-transmit.”
Han nodded. “Just a heads-up, how’re-you-doing sort of message.”
“And?”
“And it got there, and I got a reply … but it was delayed by several hours. Long enough for my message and the reply to have been intercepted, decrypted, scanned, and analyzed before being passed on.”
Leia didn’t say, Now you’re being paranoid. They were the first words to leap to her mind, but in truth Han wasn’t being paranoid. The GA government was probably keeping a close eye on comm traffic to and from Corellia in light of that system’s ongoing defiance of government edicts. “All right,” she said, “so communications to Corellia are under close scrutiny.”
“So I kept looking around.” Han looked troubled. “Activated some false identities. Bounced message packets to Corellia via Commenor and some other worlds. Checked with some old friends still in the trade, found that anti-smuggling patrols by the GA are intensifying right now … in the vicinity of Corellia and a few worlds that have spoken out in support of Corellia. I’m really beginning to think something’s up.”
Leia moved around to the front of the couch and settled beside her husband. “Something more than just mild harassment by the GA to inconvenience a system that’s not playing by the rules, you mean.”
“Yeah. But I don’t really know how to confirm it. How to take my hunch and make it into a fact.”
Leia considered. As a Jedi Knight her primary responsibilities were to the Jedi order and the Galactic Alliance. If the Galactic Alliance was indeed planning some sort of action against Corellia, her duty was to support it.
But that was only one of her loyalties. She couldn’t just ignore her loyalty to Han, even if he was supporting a foolish cause. Suddenly she grinned. Had he ever supported a cause that, from some perspective, wasn’t foolish, including the Rebel Alliance?
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking about … other ways to figure out what’s going on.”
“Such as?”
She began counting off on her fingers. “One. If the GA is planning some sort of action against Corellia, then a number of people in the GA government know it. Particularly self-serving ones with economic interests on Corellia are going to be doing whatever they can to protect those interests. If they’re sloppy, it would be possible to spot their activities, their transactions.
“Two. If the action against Corellia is going to involve the military, determining which military forces are called up would be very informative. Different forces would be used for an assault or for a blockade, for instance. Now, it’s tricky to find out that sort of information—without being spotted as a spy, especially—but it’s possible, and we have a slight advantage in that it’s been a good while since we’ve been at war. Security won’t be as tight as it was at the height of the Yuuzhan Vong war or the war against the Empire, for instance.”
Han nodded. “Good, good.”
“Three. We could formulate some likely plans for action against Corellia, determine the resources needed for those plans … and then attempt to determine whether those resources are actually being moved into place. That would give you some sense of what’s actually going to happen … assuming that your plans are accurate ones.”
“Right.” Han smiled. “I don’t care much for data work or number crunching, but it looks like I’ve just assigned myself a lot of it.”
“I’ll help you.”
“Thanks.”
“After breakfast.”
Han’s smile grew broader. “You’re just not the same tireless, selfless woman I married, are you?”
“I guess not.”
“I’ve corrupted you.”
She sighed dramatically. “Well, you’re the same tireless egotist I married.”
The CorSec officer, trim in her brown and burnt orange uniform, her face hidden behind the blast shield of a combat helmet, leapt into the doorway and raised her blaster rifle. Before it could line up against Jacen, he lashed out with his lightsaber, slicing through the weapon, through the woman. She fell in two smoking pieces, making a resounding bang against the metal floor.
Jacen cast a quick look back the way he’d come, down endless halls packed with twisting cables and mechanical extrusions whose functions no one had been able to discern or divine even after decades of study. Somewhere back there, Ben lay, victim of a blaster shot to the chest, part of a barrage that had been too fast, too heavy for Jacen to compensate for …
He shook his head. He couldn’t allow himself to be distracted by irrelevancies, not with the success of his mission so close. He reached out with the Force, a casual sweep that would reveal to him the presence of living beings beyond the portal, and, feeling none, he stepped through.
Here it was, the control chamber for the Centerpoint Station weapon. The room was surprisingly small, considering the incredible power it harnessed—it was large enough for a medium-sized crew of scientists to operate in, but something this grand should have been enormous, with monumental statuary commemorating the times in the past it was used. Instead there were seats, and banks of lights, switches, and levers, an upright joystick control at the main seat—all of it exactly as he’d last seen it, years before.
Shortly before Ben’s birth, in fact. He’d last seen it before the boy was born; now he was seeing it just after the boy had been cut down.
Irrelevancies. From a pocket within his Jedi robes, he plucked a peculiar datachip. Unlike a standard data card, which would fit within the slot readers of the billions of datapads, computers, high-end comlinks, or vehicular control panels that were equipped to scan and utilize the memory devices, it had rounded ends and spiky protrusions of gold, allowing it to conform to exactly one known port in all the galaxy.
But where was that port? Jacen scanned the banks of switches and other controls. Nothing seemed suited to the datachip, not even on the exact section of control board he’d been told to look for. He was aware that there were distant shouts out in the corridor, signs that Corellian Security forces were rushing his way, that he had only seconds left to complete his mission.
He closed his eyes and probed with senses that could not be so easily fooled.
And he found, almost instantly, what he was looking for—a slot shaped in the reverse image of the front end of his datachip. Eyes still closed, he stepped forward, extended the chip, and felt it being gripped by, then drawn into the machinery below the control board’s surface. He released it and opened his eyes.
The chamber’s thousands of indicator lights went dead and the sounds of shouts and onrushing feet from the corridor stilled. A female voice announced, “Simulation ended. Success ratio seventy-five percent, estimated only.”
Jacen grinned sourly. Anything over 51 percent was sufficient for the success of the mission—it meant that one of the several techniques intended to damage or destroy Centerpoint Station had been initiated. But even 75 percent wasn’t good enough: it meant that either he or Ben had fallen. Fifty-one percent and both would have died.
Ben moved into the doorway and carefully stepped over the bisected body of the droid wearing CorSec armor. He rubbed his chest and looked embarrassed. “Stun bolts sting,” he said.
Jacen nodded. “More motivation for you not to be hit by them.”
The wall behind the main control board slid upward, revealing a monitoring chamber beyond—several computer stations, one central chair with four viewing monitors mounted on spindly, adjustable bars around it. The man in the chair—stout, gray-bearded, a trifle overweight—offered the two Jedi a faint smile. “You’re getting there,” he said, his voice deep, rumbling.
“This one seemed pretty easy, Doctor Seyah.” Jacen gestured around. “One guard in the final chamber—”
“Easy?” Ben sounded outraged. “They shot about a thousand blaster bolts at us!”
“Jacen’s right,” Dr. Seyah said. “This one is easier. Easier than restarting the station’s centrifugal spin and sabotaging the artificial gravity counterspin to tear the station apart, easier than introducing the station’s own coordinates into its targeting computations and having it destroy itself, easier than hijacking a Star Destroyer and crashing it into the proper end of the station—”
Ben’s face brightened. “We haven’t done that one yet.”
“Nor are you going to. That’s not a mission for Jedi. It’s for crazy old naval officers.”
“Oh.” Ben’s expression fell. “I would have liked that one.”
Dr. Seyah pushed aside a couple of obtrusive monitors and rose from his chair. “The problem is, we don’t know what the main weapons control chamber looks like now. This is how it was three weeks ago, when everyone but a core crew of scientists—carefully vetted, very pro-Corellian scientists—was pulled out and reassigned elsewhere. They could have replaced all the equipment with string cheese or encased the room in duracrete—we don’t know. But we have no reason to think they did.” He shrugged. “So long as you have that datachip intact, and so long as that receptacle slot is still in existence on the control board—even if you have a wobber of a time finding it—then this approach could work.”
“Could work?” Jacen repeated.
“We think it will. The commands in that datachip should initiate a ten-minute countdown and then activate a complex repulsor pulse that will tear the station apart. Assuming that they haven’t reprogrammed their systems sufficiently to overcome the programming on that chip. Assuming that my team and I did our jobs right all these years. Assuming a lot of things.” Dr. Seyah sighed, then placed a hand on the shoulder of each Jedi. “This is the only thing I can guarantee you: come with me to the cafeteria, and I can treat you to lunch.”
“Sometimes the simple answers are best,” Jacen agreed, and allowed himself to be turned toward the door.
But inside, worry tried to gnaw at him. Ben had faltered or died in eight out of ten of the simulations they’d run, suggesting that he should not, after all, be along on this mission … but Jacen’s own sense of the future, day after day, told him that the boy would be crucial to its success, if success were to be found at all. Perhaps both outcomes were correct. Perhaps the mission would succeed, but only if Ben fell during its accomplishment.
If that were so, how would Jacen face Luke?
“So what’s it like to be a spy?” Ben asked.
Jacen murmured, “Doctor Seyah is not a spy, Ben. Be nice.”
“Oh, of course I’m a spy. Scientist and spy. And it’s very nice. I get to study ancient technology and learn how the universe works. And every so often, I get to go on vacation to learn how to plant the newest listening comlinks, to subvert or seduce enemy spies, to use the latest blasters and fly the latest airspeeders—”
“Have you ever broken anyone’s neck?”
“Well, yes. But it was before I was technically a spy …”
Across a span of days, Han and Leia put together facts, numbers, disappearances, reappearances, ship movements, personnel reassignments, things said, and things not said into a complex computer projection, carefully maintained—though scarcely understood—by C-3PO.
Fact: elements of the Galactic Alliance Second Fleet were being diverted from their missions of record. As an example, the Mon Cal heavy carrier Blue Diver was supposed to be heading out to the Tingel Arm of the galaxy on an annual fleet mission to retrace the Yuuzhan Vong’s entry route into the galaxy in order to spot any lingering manifestations of their passage. Yet when it had reprovisioned, it had not taken on the sort of provisions appropriate to a months-long solo mission.
Fact: communications between Coruscant and Corellia continued to be problematic, in a fashion suggesting that comm traffic was being heavily monitored and analyzed—but no anticipated boycotts or economic sanctions had been put in place against the increasingly independent system.
Fact: civilian experts on Corellian government, military, and economics were increasingly unavailable. None had technically disappeared; all were “on vacation,” on leave of absence, on recent intergallactic assignment. The same was not true of experts on other worlds that had united with Corellia in agitating against the GA—Commenor or Fondor, for instance.
Fact: Corellian corporate properties belonging to Pefederan Lloyn, chair of the GA Finance Council, had recently been sold or traded in kind for properties in the Kuat system. In theory, because of the active role she played in GA government finances, Lloyn was not exerting any direct control over her business holdings, having assigned that control to business officers for the duration of her government service … but Han Solo put no faith in theories heavily involving the integrity of government officials.
These were only a representative sampling of the data Han and Leia found and loaded into C-3PO’s new analysis routine. But all the facts supported Han’s growing conviction that something very bad was about to happen in the planetary system where he’d grown up. His conviction wasn’t eased when C-3PO, during one of their analysis sessions in the Solos’ living chamber, said, “To all appearances, Corellia is about to experience a—a pasting, I believe the term is.”
Han snorted, an irritated noise that caused the protocol droid to lean back, away from him. “Does your newfound analytical skill give you any idea as to exactly what form this pasting is going to take?”
“Oh, no, sir. I’d have to be loaded with extensive military planning applications, not to mention extensive databases, in order to offer you a useful prediction on that matter. Which would, of course, interfere with my primary function as a protocol droid. Why, the memory demands alone would force me to remove millions of language translators and inflection interpreters. That would be disastrous. I might even become”—the volume of the droid’s voice dropped—“more aggressive.”
Leia kept her face straight. “That would be terrible. What form would this aggression take? Would you strangle security officers and kick children?”
“Oh, no, Mistress. But I might become … more sarcastic. Even verbally abusive.”
“Goldilocks, go get us some caf,” Han said.
“Yes, sir.” The droid rose. “I don’t believe any has been brewed. Would you like instant?”
“About as much as I’d like a blaster burn on my kneecap. Go ahead and brew some.” Han waited until C-3PO was in the kitchen and the door closed behind him. He turned to his wife. “So what do we do to keep this from happening?”
Leia drew in a breath to answer, but held it for several long moments. Han stared at her curiously. He could tell that she was framing her reply, but she was so well practiced at doing so that she could normally compose a speech as she was beginning to recite it. This sort of delay was unusual for her.
“Perhaps,” she finally said, “the best thing to do would be to not interfere.” The look she turned upon him suggested that she expected him to transform into a rancor and go on a rampage.
“Not do anything,” he said.
“Han, what happens if Corellia continues doing exactly what it’s doing … and gets away with it? Suffers no consequences?”
“Corellia becomes independent again.” Han shrugged. “So?”
“And other worlds follow Corellia’s lead.”
“Again—so?”
“The Alliance will be weakened. Things will become more … untidy. More opportunities for crime. Black markets. Corruption.”
For once, Han spent a few moments considering his reply. A flip answer would have come easily to him, but good government and a stable galaxy were important to his wife, and he couldn’t casually dismiss them. “Leia, there’s got to be room in this galaxy for independence. For chaos. In a galaxy as tidy, as sanitary, as controlled as you’re talking about, I never could have happened. I’d really prefer to live in a galaxy where there’s room for someone like me.”
Leia looked away from him, and in her expression Han could see the dawning of a regret that amounted to mourning. Once again, she was mourning the loss of a system, a government that had always existed only in the abstract—one so fair and reasonable, it could never endure when implemented. “Then the thing to do is warn Corellia,” she said. “Preferably without alerting the GA that you’re doing it. Because it would be nice for you not to be thrown in jail.”
“You’d just rescue me. If I took too long to escape on my own, that is.”
She smiled sourly, still keeping her attention on the viewport and the sliding door out onto the balcony.
“I need your help, Leia. I can’t do this alone.” It took an effort to speak those words. Admitting that he couldn’t perform some ordinary task—such as saving a world from invasion or conquest—all by himself was painful enough. It was worse to ask a woman devoted to order and lawfulness to set those considerations aside for him.
“I know.” Leia looked back at him. “I’ll do it, Han. But only if you’ll help me. Corellia can’t play both sides of the field. If the system is going to be independent, it has to be independent. It can’t continue to accept all the benefits of GA membership and defy GA law. If you tell them the GA is coming in to compel them to obey, you have to tell them to stop playing games. They have to grease the whole bantha.”
Han blinked at her. “They have to grease—they have to what?”
“To grease the whole bantha. It’s an expression. From Agamar, I think.”
“Sure it is.”
“It is. And you’re just trying to keep from responding to what I just said.”
“No, I’m not. You’re right, Leia. No more games for Corellia.”
“Then I’ll help.”
“And more grease for the bantha.”
“Don’t make fun of me, Han. There are consequences.”
“We could grease the protocol droid.”
“Han, I’m warning you …”