FicWad

*Title: Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star (*working title only, though it may become the permanent title by default).

Chapter One: Lines of Fate Intersecting

Rating: Uhm, probably a borderline R (?), for the overall work, though I suppose that's debatable . . . PG-13ish, maybe, for this part (?)

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the lovely characters from the Star Wars ’verse, more’s the pity! What I do have is an extremely contrary muse that refuses to shut up and leave me alone . . .

Summary: The future is never a fixed thing. Though certain actions taken at particular possible points of divergence can, seemingly, preclude the possibility of specific future pathways ever coming into existence, other unexpected choices can have extremely powerful repercussions with far-reaching effects upon the possible probable pathways that the future might yet take . . . and sometimes the spreading ripples of those effects can be so powerful that even the present and a part of the past can be altered, if enough raw energy is poured into the process of causing those effects. For Tahiri Veila, the possibility of swaying the current balance of power in the galaxy from darkness and despair back to light and hope seems worth any sacrifice necessary . . . even if she will have to give up her own life and the life of her unborn son to accomplish this. Will her sacrifice be enough to change the shape of the future, though, or will evil yet find a way to triumph, in this the worst and most wide-spread of all galactic wars?

Story/Author's Notes: For general notes on this story and proposed series, please see the entry on this NaNo project, at http://polgarawolf. livejournal.com/140023.html

Specific Chapter/Part-Related Notes: In case anyone wonders, italics tend to indicate one of three things, aside from either emphasis in speech or thought or else the proper names of ships: thoughs/mind-speech; words in a language other than Basic; and words relayed across some sort of communication device.

Specific Chapter/Part-Related Warnings: N/A



Star Wars
The Rebirth of the New Jedi Order
Love Ignites the Galaxy, Star by Star


Chapter One: Lines of Fate Intersecting

27:05:29-27:05:31 After the Battle of Yavin (~1,028 After Ruusan Reformations or ~25,029 After Republic’s Founding)

War is a vile thing, and it brings out the worst in beings. But it also brings out their best – courage, sacrifice, resourcefulness, tenacity, comradeship, genius, even humor. Would that we could achieve that enlightened state without shedding blood first.

– Mentor Peet Sieben, Jal Shey philosopher, circa the Mandalorian Wars



Jaina Solo crests the latest in a long series of chalk dunes to inexplicably find an Imperial walker looming over the next one, its white cockpit and armored passenger hump silhouetted distinctively against the darkness deeper in the passage. She hisses a warning to those behind her before automatically dropping into a defensive crouch and snapping her lightsaber from her harness. An obsolete All Terrain Armored Transport is, quite possibly, one of the very last things she would ever expect to see inside a Yuuzhan Vong worldship, but a hundred Rogue Squadron actions have taught her never to be surprised by anything – or at least never to be so startled by something that her shock keeps her from responding swiftly and appropriately to the source of said surprise – and so, when a glow stick comes to life in the AT-AT’s cockpit viewport, she yields to her battle-honed instincts and instantly hurls herself down the slope in a series of evasive zigzag somersaults.

As Jaina rolls, she feels herself sinking into that odd state of emotional numbness that seems to accompany any fight these days. Other pilots sometimes talk about feeling detached or outside themselves in combat – usually about two missions before they make some stupid mistake and let a scarhead send them nova – but this sensation is closer to resignation, to a weary acceptance of the horror and heartache that is battle. She would’ve liked to have been able to attribute such feelings to her trust in the Force; unfortunately, though, she knows better than to be able to fool herself. Her reaction is nothing more than a kind of emotional armor, a way to try to avoid feeling the anguish that comes with watching a friend or wingmate die horribly . . . and to deny the fear that her turn – either to make a mistake or just to simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time – is also, inevitably, coming.

Jaina wonders sometimes (when she has time enough to wonder about such things and can’t find something to do that’ll keep her too busy to think about them – usually in the darkest reaches of the night, when a combination of exhaustion and fear of dreams keeps her from sleep and regulations or orders keep her from being able to be up and about, doing something useful, like helping to tend to wear and tear inflicted on her starfighter by battle) just when it was that she became so jaded, so cynical, about her own chances of surviving this war. But then she remembers Sernpidal, and Chewie, and she remembers Ithor, and Anni, and she remembers Fondor, and all of those Hapans (damn Jacen anyway!), and she stops wondering.

Jaina reaches the bottom in a billowing cloud of chalk dust and rolls to a stop. Swiftly, she springs into a low battle crouch and brings her lightsaber around in a middle guard . . . and it is only then that she hears a familiar hissing sound.

“Stickz, you should grow a tail,” Tesar Sebatyne siss-laughs. “Maybe then you would not be so clumsy.”

This observation draws of series of oddly sibilant chortles from Krasov and Bela.

“Very funny,” Jaina retorts, torn, for a moment, between snarling grumpily and rolling her eyes before joining in their amusement. Even without the battle meld – which Jacen has been leaving down, in an attempt to dampen the growing discord among the group, since they actually got to Myrkr – she is cognizant of the rest of the strike team’s silent amusement, and the strength of that awareness is such that it mostly overwhelms her own inclination to growl over being made into a joke. “You could have said something,” she half-heartedly grouses.

“And I could pluck the scales from over my heart,” Bela rasps. “But I do not.”

There’s more sissing, and Jaina gives in to the impulse and rolls her eyes, though she manages to restrain herself enough to keep from heaving a long-suffering sigh. She steps out of the chalk cloud to find the Barabels waiting with Anakin and the other team members who aren’t still following behind her, their vac suits folded neatly away in their self-storing protection packs and clipped to the back of their equipment harnesses. Caked hood to heels in dust and looking more like Jedi ghosts than Jedi Knights, they’re sitting against the passage wall, keeping a sharp watch for the coralskippers that always (eventually) seem to come around spraying some enervating breath agent whenever the Jedi happen to stop. Two clear pairs of footprints – one set huge and obviously Wookiee – lead over the next dune towards the AT-AT.

Stretching out through Force, Jaina feels Lowbacca inside the walker with Jovan Drark. “Where did that thing come from?” she asks, letting herself frown a little in puzzlement.

“The trainers are very thorough,” Lomi – the Nightsister whose strongly Force-sensitive presence on the Yuuzhan Vong worldship above Myrkr (along with Dark Jedi Welk) had kept them from executing their original plan (to sneak as close as possible to the cloning facility and destroy it with a baradium-packed missile and use the resulting confusion to confirm the voxyn queen’s destruction and escape), resulting in Ulaha Kore’s death, on the Exquisite Death, and the rest of them being stranded on this damned Yuuzhan Vong hunk of flarg – just explains with a shrug. “They keep an entire city of slaves to operate captured equipment so they can habituate their voxyn to ‘lifeless abhorrences.’ There is nothing they will not do to rid the galaxy of Jedi.”

“There’s even a starliner berthed in a grotto hangar,” Welk lazily adds.

Notions of rigging a million-ton spacecraft to crash into the cloning facility and be done with the blasted mission instantly begin to fill Jaina’s mind. “Is it – ”

“The energy converters have been removed,” Lomi cuts in, answering her before Jaina can even properly frame her question. “Even the walkers and landspeeders run on low-capacity battery banks instead of fuel slugs. They cannot range much farther from the slave city than this.”

“Of course,” Jaina sighs. Because Force-forfend that it should ever be /easy/!

Given a few resources and a little time, she and Lowbacca might be able to find a way to restore the machinery, anyway, regardless of how badly it’s been butchered; with the infiltration already thirty hours old, though, the last thing the strike team can afford to do is give the Yuuzhan Vongmore any more time to react, and that means that any plan involving sticking around to get those machines properly up and running is, unfortunately, out the porthole.

A pale green tint begins to brighten the harshness of the pale chalky passage, and Jaina looks up to see Myrkr pushing its emerald disk across a jagged patch of window membrane that has apparently been used to mend a twenty-meter breach in the outer shell of the worldship. In spite of everything, she suddenly feels rejuvenated, a little less jittery and worried. There’s just something about the arrival of a bright body in the sky that always makes her feel as though she’s just risen from a long night in a warm, safe bunk.

Jovan Drark’s Rodian voice buzzes over the comlink. “The Force has favored us today. The batteries still have a charge, but the power feeds have been isolated by mineral secretions.”

A shiver of danger sense instantly races down Jaina’s spine, warning her that something is not right. “Secretions?” she comms back, barking the question.

“It appears to be an insect nest,” Jovan reports. “Lowbacca is cleaning it off now.”

Jacen’s voice instantly comes over the comm channel. “What kind of insects?” Though her twin brother has always been interested in new creatures, Jaina senses through their bond that he’s asking out of more than mere idle curiosity. “If they look like worms with legs – ”

“It’s no shockapede hive,” Jovan comms back, sounding slightly irritated. “These are little flitnats, completely harmless.”

“Nothing the Yuuzhan Vong create is harmless,” Alema Rar instantly opines, turning towards Anakin with a concerned frown. “This is a trap.”

“Everything’s a trap, with you,” Tahiri just as quickly objects, scowling. As she speaks, the walker’s cockpit illumination activates, creating a band of pale light above the next dune, and a feeling of danger and wrongness twists in Jaina’s stomach like a knife as she notices how very like a beckoning spotlight that patch of illumination seems to be. “Why can’t the Force just be with us for once? We could all use the ride.”

Anakin wisely avoids placing himself in the middle of that argument – a confrontation that has been brewing a long time, Alema having apparently rubbed Tahiri the wrong way when they first met and the situation never really having improved much, since – by looking over at Lomi. “What do you know about those things?”

“That they are an unnecessary risk.” She points down the way to where the passage ends in a sheer face of yorik coral. “We have almost reached our destination. The main cloning lab is only a kilometer beyond that wall.”

“About time,” Zekk grumbles sourly, climbing up the last dune behind Jaina to join the rest of the group. “I was beginning to think you were stalling.”

Lomi smiles sourly, her pretty face twisting into an ugly sneer when her gaze passes over Zekk. “You will understand if I prefer alive over fast, Zekk. Our fates will be the same in this.”

“She’s kept us out of trouble so far,” Anakin quickly notes, frowning a little forbiddingly at Zekk over his provocative tone. In contrast to nearly everyone else on the strike team, Anakin seems completely untroubled by the amount of time it has taken them to negotiate the training course, and Jaina can’t help but wonder if that means the Force is telling him something it’s not sharing with the rest of them, or if it’s a sign that her little brother still has some naivete to be knocked out of him by this thrice-blast war. “Let’s make the safe play and avoid the walker. We’ll be done and on our way home in two hours anyway . . . four at the most.”

“Careful, Anakin,” Jaina warns. “You’re beginning to sound like Dad.”

Despite the jovial smile she flashes him, Jaina is truly distressed by her younger brother’s overconfidence. Having lost only Ulaha and the two droids so far, despite all of the setbacks that have plagued this mission, Anakin seems to think that the strike team is untouchable, that even an entire worldship full of Yuuzhan Vong cannot stop a single platoon of well-trained Jedi. That might even be true, but Jaina has learned in her time with Rogue Squadron that being the best guaranteed nothing and that plans can go awry for anyone – and that they always seem to do so at the very worst possible moment – and, in spite of everything she has been taught her entire life about trusting in the Force, she finds the kind of trustful confidence Anakin seems to have in their ability to succeed in this mission discomfortingly close to arrogance.

Anakin, though, merely flashes her a crooked little smile before nodding towards the Barabels, who never seem to tire of walking point, and prompting the strike team to start up the dune in a billowing cloud of pale dust. Jaina stays at her brother’s side, debating the wisdom of pointing out how much trouble they’re most probably in. Before leaving Eclipse, Ulaha and the tacticians had estimated that the mission’s likelihood of success would drop two percent with every hour of duration, which means that the strike team’s chances have to be approaching zero by now. Add to that the fact that the Yuuzhan Vong apparently anticipated their assault far enough in advance to set an ambush and send Nom Anor here to recapture them, and their odds of succeeding in this mission have clearly fallen to minuscule. Even the Wraiths would have given up at this point and called for extraction; that’s not an option for the strike team, though. They’ve known from the outset that any flotilla sent to support the operation would either be destroyed crossing the war zone or else once it was detected near Myrkr. Seeing this as his chance to save the galaxy (and, maybe, to expiate the guilt he still felt, for what happened at Centerpoint Station and Fondor, and for the loss of Chewbacca, on Sernpidal), Anakin had insisted on coming anyway, arguing that if the group needed to be rescued, then the Jedi were already doomed – and with them, the New Republic itself. As much as the idea frightens her, Jaina has to admit that he’s probably right.

That doesn’t keep her from worrying about Anakin’s reasons for being here, though, or his motivations for volunteering for this mission . . . or their chances of surviving the mission.

As they near the top of the dune, Anakin turns towards her, as if sensing her unease, and, lifting a questioning eyebrow, quietly asks, “Jaina?”

She looks over and is suddenly struck by how tall her brother has grow and by how handsome he has become – even with several days of beard growing through the chalk on his face – the realization that her baby brother is not only growing up but that he has grown up, that this war has made him grow up far faster than he ever should have had to and that, no matter how much or how little more he may still gain in height, he is, at the tender age of sixteen, essentially already an adult. “Yeah?” she asks, shock and pain stealing enough of her breath to make her voice come out high and shaky.

“What are you doing out of line?” He glances over his shoulder, quickly checking to see if anyone is walking too near to them to risk talking, and then speaks again, his voice so soft that he has to use the Force to carry his words to her ears. “Is there something you want to say?”

Jaina abruptly finds herself smiling and blinking back tears of pride. “There is.” She reaches over and gently squeezes his forearm. “You’re doing a good job, Anakin. If we’re going to get this done, it’s because of your confidence and determination.”

“Thanks, Jaina.” Anakin probably means for his lopsided grin to be cocky, but to Jaina it seems more surprised – and, perhaps, even a little bit relieved. “I know.”

“Sure you do.” Jaina laughs. To keep herself from making a scene by grabbing him and crying all over him, she punches him in the shoulder hard enough to make him stumble, and then adds, “Just remember to keep your guard up. I don’t like this AT-AT.”

They are about to crest the dune when a voice – familiar, yet unfamiliar – whispers in her ear, “Advice you, yourself, could benefit from heeding, Jaina Solo.”

Battle instincts whip her around towards the source of that unexpected voice and throw her into the same kind of defensive roll and lunging draw of her lightsaber as the unexpected first sight of the lighted viewport in that AT-AT prompted. She regains her feet untouched, snarling behind the indigo glow of her ’saber –

– and, from behind her, there is a breath of laughter. A cool touch – a small hand, slender, humanoid, fragile-boned enough to strongly suggest femininity – slides across the skin at the base of her neck, on the right side, and then darkness rises up from behind her eyes, and Jaina abruptly knows no more.

***

“You call this a shortcut?”

“Trust me.” Han looks away from the starless swirl of black nebula gas outside and smiles at his skeptical-looking, slightly frowning wife. “If the Vong who jumped Booster were protecting something, we’ll find it at the end of this run. This is the only way they could have reached the Core region without tripping a picket mine.”

“And we aren’t going to trip a picket mine /why/?” Leia only asks, frowning a little harder.

“Because there aren’t any,” Han replies with a careless shrug. “The New Republic doesn’t know about this lane. Nobody does.”

“Nobody?” Leia’s eyebrows are so high that they’re practically touching her hairline.

“Well. Lando knows.” Han returns his gaze to the long-range sensors and starts to scan for dangerous mass centers, to give himself something to be doing. “And Chewbacca, he knew – so did Roa. And, of course, Talon Karrde always knows.”

“So, basically you’re saying that every smuggler or gambler who ever had a reason to slip into Reecee undetected knows this shortcut?”

“Yeah,” Han half nods and half shrugs. “Like I said, nobody.”

They’ve already made five jumps in as many hours, and now they’re flying the Falcon into the inky heart of the Black Bantha. Listed erroneously on most star charts as a Gamma Class navigation hazard – which usually means an unlocated black hole – the Bantha is actually a protostar, a small cloud of relatively cool gas slowly contracting into a mass dense enough to become a new star. In a few million years or so, it will finally manage to contract enough to start fusing hydrogen, but for now its core emits nothing more dangerous than a vague aura of infrared heat. A good pilot could fly straight through it at near lightspeed, so long as that pilot was careful to stay clear of its dust ring and avoid the uncharted gamma-ray pulsar on the other side.

An alert chimes once, twice, a half-dozen times, and then becomes a steady bell. A field of dark shapes simultaneously appear on the display, ahead of the Falcon and a little below, each with a set of numerical readouts beneath it.

“Han,” Leia asks, in a deceptively calm tone of voice, “what are those?”

“Asteroid cluster,” Han nonchalantly replies. “It’s supposed to be farther out, but it must be drifting towards center.”

“Really?” Leia sounds doubtful. “Standard rock-iron asteroids?”

“That’s right.” Han glances down at the readouts and immediately sees her point. The contacts are both too uniform to be asteroids and not nearly dense enough. He instantly puts the Falcon into a hard turn and then shuts down the ion drives to avoid illuminating their position. “I said we’d find them here,” he notes, a ghost of a smirk on his face.

“At the end of the run.”

“It looks like this is the end of the run.”

The dark shapes of Yuuzhan Vong ships continue to appear on the display as they drift across the protostar. After a few moments, Leia activates a data record and starts to run an analysis. Han follows suit a few heartbeats later, activating the rest of the passive sensors and keeping a wary eye on the dark shapes as they slow and begin to deploy pickets. So far, they don’t seem to realize that they’re being watched, which doesn’t really surprise him – the /Falcon/’s sensors are the equal of any reconnaissance ship, and the New Republic’s one small advantage in this war seems to lie in surveillance. Still, he knows that it won’t be long before the picket ships draw near enough to them to sense their presence.

Several minutes later, Han declares, “Okay, Leia, I think we’d better go.”

“Not yet. This is too big,” Leia retorts, her frown having deepened to a scowl.

He surprises himself with a little chuckle. “That’s kind of the point.”

“No, Han – I mean really big. Isn’t the New Republic getting ready to jump to Reecee?”

“Yeah, in about – ” Han glances at the instrument panel chronometer, “ – three hours. Unofficially, of course.”

“I don’t think they’re going to find anything. There must be a thousand vessels already.”

Han starts to ask Leia what she wants him to do about it, but realizes almost immediately that he already knows. The crooked hyperspace lane behind them zigzags all the way through the Colonies to the edge of the Core region. From there, the Yuuzhan Vong would have a clear path to both Eclipse and Coruscant – and, as much as the Yuuzhan Vong hate and fear the Jedi, Han doesn’t think even Tsavong Lah would be sending a thousand vessels to attack the Jedi base.

“I don’t want to do this.” They’ve been in the right place at the right time too often in their lives already for him to be surprised at all by the pure serendipity of it. It just isn’t any fun anymore, is all. “I really don’t want to do this,” he adds, scrubbing a hand tiredly across his face.

“I’ll ready a message,” Leia only replies.

“Send it to Adarakh and Meewalh,” Han sighs. “We may get only one try, and they’re in a better position to make sure the news reaches Wedge and Garm.”

“Already thought of that.”

Of course you have. You’re /Leia/. You’ve always been good at the details. “And tell them to find Lando,” he just adds. “The fleet’s gonna need a guide.”

“Thought of that, too,” Leia merely notes, a hint of a smile entering her otherwise grim and increasingly impatient voice.

“And tell Luke – ”

“Han!”

“Hey, coming out here wasn’t my idea!” Han snaps. “I’m just trying to help.”

Leia just gives him a glare that suggests he’d better get on with it.

Old habit makes him roll his eyes as he reaches out to risk a subspace imaging scan. He locates the real field of asteroids where he’d been expecting them to be, just inside the dust ring down on the protostar’s plane of spin, and plots a short-burn course that’ll carry them away from the Yuuzhan Vong at an oblique angle and bring them in behind the asteroid cluster. Once they’re safely established there, they’ll be able to monitor the entire gas cloud with long-range sensors and feed the data to the New Republic fleet as it arrives – providing, of course, that it does actually /arrive/. There’s always a chance that Fey’lya or some other bureaucrat will panic, instead, and decide to keep the fleet at home. “We’ll have to risk an ion glow,” Han notes as he determinedly pushes that possibility back out of the forefront of his mind. “I don’t think anyone will see it in this cloud, but if they do – ”

“I’ve already plotted an emergency hop,” Leia quickly informs him. “It won’t be long, but it should buy us some time to come up with something better. The data dump is ready to go.”

“Hold on tight,” Han warns. “We’ll be slam-pivoting straight to vector.”

Leia sighs. “Wonderful. Something to look forward to.”

Leia grabs the arms of the big copilot’s chair and nods grimly. Han clenches his jaw (not particularly liking what he’s about to do and still not really used to the sight of Leia in that chair, not yet), and then activates the ion drive and hits the attitude thrusters. Though the acceleration compensator is dialed to maximum, the Falcon still manages to slue around so sharply that the crash webbing crackles from the strain. His hands nearly come off the yoke as he suffers the sickening sensation of tumbling sideways, and his stomach protests so violently that he has to clench his jaw tight to keep from embarrassing himself.

The acceleration compensator catches up only when they start to travel in a straight line again, and Leia promptly moves to open a subspace channel to Coruscant. It only takes a few seconds for the signal to find a route through the relay maze to their Eastport apartment, but Han has enough time to check the sensor displays and spy a pair of skips peeling off to investigate. Since the Yuuzhan Vong would have dispatched an entire flotilla if they had seen an ion glow, it seems likely that the pair are only chasing the wake the Falcon is punching through the nebula. Hoping to muddle enemy readings and give his ship the tumbling signature of a rogue asteroid, Han starts to cycle power to the particle shields in a top-bottom pattern and deploys the emergency gas scoop. The ship’s reactor can always fuse raw hydrogen, if necessary.

Meewalh’s voice finally comes over the subspace, a little scratchy due to signal loss inside the absorption nebula. “Lady Vader, we were not expecting to hear from you. All is well?”

“For now.” Leia starts the data dump. “See that this information reaches – ”

Leia gasps and lets the sentence break off, one hand rising to her chest, her expression growing pained and distant.

“Lady Vader?”

“Leia?” Han reaches over to touch her arm, but she signals him to wait.

“Here, Meewalh.” She closes her eyes and seems to collect herself, then continues, “I need you to see that the data package I sent reaches Wedge Antilles and Garm Bel Iblis in Fleet Command – /at once/. Do whatever you must to succeed. Send copies to Luke and to Lando Calrissian, along with my suggestion that they offer their services to Admiral Sovv. This could mean the war for us.”

“Lady Vader, it will be done.”

Meewalh’s tone is so flat she might as well have been promising to tell a neighbor that the Solos will not make it home for drinks after all. But if she has to fight her way into Fleet Command, Han pities the poor sentry or bureaucrat foolish enough to try to deny her access. Fortunately, the Noghri are as creative as they are stealthy, so she’ll probably just end up surprising the generals in the refresher or something and avoid unnecessary bloodshed.

Under other circumstances, the thought of a Noghri warrior surprising Wedge or even Lando in the ’fresher would be enough to at least make him smile, if not snicker a little.

Under other circumstances, he might wonder about what it says about him, that he can’t be fussed to take the time to appreciate such a notion.

At the moment, though, he has other things to worry about, and he’s too tired to do more than hope that nobody ends up getting hurt too badly.

Minuscule as friction is even inside a gas nebula, the drag created by the hydrogen scoop is enough to require an extra two seconds of ion glow. Han watches nervously as the /Falcon/’s vector converges with that of the investigating skips, trying to guess when the light of his ion drives will give them away, but the coralskippers continue as before until the burn finally comes to an end. When he sees that they’re slowing to swing in behind him – a standard safe approach for any unknown contact – and that their vector will not cross the /Falcon/’s until after it’s reached the asteroid cluster, Han exhales in relief. Apparently, their luck is holding: the Yuuzhan Vong still don’t know what they’re looking at.

Han turns in his seat to find Leia staring out the viewport, her face the color of bleached pearls, her expression distant and guarded. Recalling her unexplained gasp earlier – and her diplomat’s habit of not showing her emotions until she’s won control of them – he opens his mouth to ask what’s troubling her.

She cuts him off before he can manage a single word. “Later, Han.” There’s an alarming catch in her throat, but also that unyielding edge that he’s learned, over the years, to be about as flexible as durasteel. “Pay attention to your flying.”

A variation alarm sounds as they pass a straggler from the asteroid cluster large enough to exert its own gravitational pull. Han touches the alarm to silence it and plots their new trajectory without making the suggested correction. Any such change would instantly alert the approaching skips of the /Falcon/’s true nature and ruin all hope of the New Republic catching the fleet unprepared, and that means they’re just gong to have to wing it from here on out.

The new trajectory points the Falcon out towards the dust ring, where Han will be forced to retract the gas scoop to avoid clogging the intake filters. He’s still struggling over how to manage that without altering their flight signature when the variation alarm sounds again and another asteroid pulls them back toward the cluster. Han plots the new trajectory and sees that they’re going to hit – and soon. This is a big one, large enough so that its own gravity will have shaped it into a rough sphere, and it’s bending their vector ever more sharply. Han can see only inky swirls of nebula gas beyond the transparisteel, but he knows that the asteroid is out there, off to their left, yet drifting towards the center of the viewport and looming larger every moment.

And it is, surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) enough, just what they need.

Han turns to the navigation computer and starts to input blast radii and acceleration rates. The answer comes back higher than he likes, though, and he has to concentrate to keep from cursing aloud.

“Leia, you know that trick Kyp is always doing with Jedi shadow bombs?”

“Define /know/,” she merely warily demands in return.

“About a kilometer a second,” Han obliges by replying. “I can get some initial acceleration by pressurizing the missile tube – ”

“The missile tube, Han?”

“ – then blowing the hatch,” he finishes. “But we’ll be right behind it when the warhead detonates, and even Han Solo isn’t that fast.”

Leia’s face pales. “You’re not going to – ”

“We don’t have much time here,” Han notes, cutting her off, already moving to arm the missile. “Can you do it?”

Leia closes her eyes. “Which one?”

“Port tube.”

Han instructs the computer to open the rear of the tube, then deactivates the missile’s ion engine and overrides the launch safeties. By time he’s finished doing all that, a deeper darkness has begun to emerge from the swirling nebula fog, a looming shape with a certain stillness that leaves no doubt about its solid nature.

Han depresses the launch trigger and hears a soft pop as the hatch cover swings open. Sucked from its tube by the sudden decompression, the missile drifts out from between the /Falcon/’s cargo mandibles and seems to hang there, suspended.

After a few beats in which nothing else happens, Han finally urges, “/Now /would be a good time!”

“I’m /trying/!” Leia all but snarls in reply.

The missile begins to move forward, picking up speed . . . but only gradually.

“Well, it was a good idea,” Han sighs, prepping the ion drives for a blast start. Leia isn’t exactly a Jedi – she’s never had time for the same kind of rigorous extended training that Luke and his Knights have gone through – but she can control the Force, and he’s seen her use it to move things heavier than the missile. It’s not like he knows all that much about how it works, though. Maybe the nebula is interfering with the Force or something. “Nice try, but – ”

The missile abruptly shoots away, vanishing into the darkness.

“ – that’ll work,” Han finishes, unable to keep a smile from spreading across his face.

He moves his hand confidently to the repulsorlift drives and waits. In the sensor display, the coralskippers omit the detour caused by the first asteroid and cut straight for the one ahead. They’ll have a clear view of the impact – though hopefully not so clear they’ll see the matte-black Falcon silhouetted against the flash.

As soon as the first pinpoint of light causes the cockpit blast-tinting to darken, Han activates the repulsorlift drives and swings away, decelerating and turning almost as sharply as his earlier slam-pivot. The coralskippers will be in scanning range by now, but repulsorlifts aren’t nearly as conspicuous as ion drives, and he’s betting the energy burst from the concussion missile will wash out whatever the skips are using for sensors.

They’re around the horizon before the impact flash has even had a chance to start to fade. Flying in the total darkness by sensors and instruments alone, Han slips the Falcon into a deep stress rift, orienting it nose-up and using the landing gear to wedge it against the walls so that the efflux nacelles won’t be damaged.

“Now what?” Leia asks, her voice a little breathless, as if she’s been running.

“We wait until they’re done searching.”

“You think they’ll search?” Leia asks. “That concussion missile had to leave a pretty convincing crater.”

“Yeah, but that’s a big fleet,” Han notes, shrugging. “They’ll search – and then they’ll search some more.”

Han shuts down any of the /Falcon/’s systems that might leak so much as a photon of energy, and then he and Leia lie back and stare into the darkness. He purposely selected a rift facing the interior of the Bantha, so even the stars are too shrouded in nebula gas to count. It reminds Han a little of being frozen in carbonite – except, of course, that he hadn’t been conscious of time while in the carbonite.

“How long do you think we’ll have to wait?” Leia asks after a few beats of silence.

“Longer than we like.” Han has a bad feeling about her earlier gasp and wants badly to ask about it, but he knows better than to press. “We’ll know.”

“How?”

“We’ll get tired of waiting.”

They’re silent some more, and then Leia surprises him by just saying it. “Something’s happened with the strike team. Anakin was badly shocked, maybe even frightened, and then – nothing. It’s like one moment he was there, drawing breath to shout in my ear, and the next moment . . . nothing/. He just wasn’t there anymore. And I can’t get him back. I can still /sense him, in the Force, but I can’t get a response from him.”

Han’s heart collapses in on itself like a black hole. “Hurt?” He starts to depress actuator buttons and toggle circuit switches. Even with so many systems shut down and cool, the /Falcon/’s start-up sequence is remarkably short. They can be launched and on their way in less than three minutes, if they need to be.

“I can’t tell. It’s like someone or something is muffling him, keeping me from getting a strong read. I can tell he’s still there, but not a whole lot else, otherwise.”

He nods in grim understanding. “Trouble, then.”

“Han?” There’s a shocking sense of frailty in Leia’s voice. “Where are we going?”

“Huh?” Han primes the ion drives, beginning a twenty-second countdown. “Where do you think we’re going?”

“I have no idea,” Leia replies. “Because I know you’d never have let Anakin go through with that hypercrazed surrender plan if there was some other way to reach Myrkr.”

The count reaches fifteen, and Han’s finger automatically swings over to the actuator and hovers there waiting for twenty. Then he finally grasps why Leia waited for the Falcon to cool down before telling him, and stops counting. “There’s not another way.” He deactivates the primers and starts to shut down the rest of the systems, eventually finding the strength to ask, “Is it bad, do you think?”

Leia’s only response is a shallow nod.

Han desperately wants to do something – protect Anakin or help Leia with what she must be feeling (or not feeling, as it is) through the Force – but how can he defend a son from a thousand light-years away? Or assume Leia’s burden, when he can’t even sense the Force, much less feel, through it, whatever it is that’s happened to Anakin and the strike team?

“At least he’s not alone.” Han reaches over to her, noticing that his hand is trembling. He lays it on her arm anyway, sliding it up to squeeze her shoulder gently. “Jaina’s there.”

“And Jacen.”

“Yeah, and Jacen.” Given Jacen’s recent moral dilemma over using the Force, Han’s not exactly accustomed to thinking of his oldest son in the role of a Jedi warrior; on Duro, though, it had been Jacen who faced Tsavong Lah and saved Leia’s life, so he’s willing to give the kid the benefit of the doubt. “The twins will look after him,” he insists, not bothering to ask if she can’t sense something from one of them, since she he knows she will have thought of that and tried it already, and that it must not have worked, or else she wouldn’t be as worried as she is.

“That’s right.” Leia nods absently, her thoughts already back on Myrkr, a thousand light-years away. “He has the twins.”

The last glow fades from the cockpit displays, and they sit in the dark, alone with their thoughts and still close enough to hear each other breathe.

After a while, Han can’t stand it any longer. “I wish I hadn’t said those things when Chewbacca died,” he quietly but fervently declares. “I really wish I hadn’t blamed Anakin.”

A warm hand finds his in the darkness. “That’s over, Han. Really. He knows all of that. You don’t need to worry about it.”

They wait in silence, pondering the same unanswerable questions – What happened and how serious is whatever it is that’s happened? How did it happen? Is Anakin safe now? Is the rest of the team alright? – for what seems an eternity. Once, Han sees a glimmer of purple cross over the rift, but it’s so faint and fleeting that he thinks it more likely to be a trick of his light-starved eyes than the glow of a Yuuzhan Vong cockpit. For the most part, they just sit and wait, not even able to confirm that the New Republic will be sending an attack fleet, since the /Falcon/’s subspace transceiver antenna is shielded by several kilometers of iron asteroid.

With the sensor dish pointed out towards the heart of the Bantha, the one thing they can do to occupy themselves is to periodically risk a passive scan to update their data. Eventually, it becomes obvious that the Yuuzhan Vong are massing vessels drawn not just from the flotilla that grabbed Reecee, but from active duty stations all over the galaxy. Most of the arriving vessels go straight to the heart of the fleet and line up to nurse food and munitions from the big ship tenders. Han’s relieved to see that the Yuuzhan Vong are only marginally faster at the process than his own fleet had been when he was still a general. At the rate the enemy is reprovisioning, even the cumbersome New Republic Fleet Command will have time to make a decision; he only hopes that they’ll make the right one and bring enough ships to make sure it sticks.

The first hint of action comes several hours later, when a sensor sweep shows two skips – almost certainly the pair that followed them to the asteroid – streaking off towards the heart of the Bantha. Shuddering over how many times they’ve discussed leaving their hiding place, Han activates all passive scanning systems and plots the results on the main data display. The screen looks as though someone has blasted a nest of killer stingnats, with frigate- and corvette-analog yorik coral vessels boiling out towards the protostar’s opposite rim and more than a hundred cruiser and destroyer analogs moving to the heart of the formation, forming a sphere of protection around the enormous ship tenders.

“It certainly doesn’t look like a jump configuration,” Leia comments, sounding more than a little startled.

“No, that’s their ‘taken-by-surprise’ configuration,” Han replies with a small quirk of the lips that might almost have been taken for a relieved smile. “Store this for analysis – it’s not a formation the New Republic has seen before.”

Han cold-starts the repulsorlift drives and lifts the Falcon out of the rift. They’ve barely cleared the rim before the voice of a communications officer came over the tactical comm unit.

“ – hailing the /Millennium Falcon/.” /The energy-absorbing effects of the nebula gas render the young woman’s voice thready and full of static, but doesn’t distort it enough to mask any of her words. /“Repeat, this is the New Republic scout vessel /Gabrielle hailing the Millennium Falcon/. Please respond on S-thread six zero niner.”

“The coordinates don’t match the bearing to the battle,” Leia notes, frowning. She taps the data display, indicating a position a quarter of the way around the circle from where the corvettes and frigates are headed – and on the Reecee side of the Bantha. “Could the Yuuzhan Vong be pulling a Friendly Hutt?”

“If some traitor told them we were out here, why not?” A Friendly Hutt is an old Imperial tactic used to trick a quarry into giving away its position. “But we have to take the chance. This is no time to be a coward – not with the war hanging in the balance.”

Han doesn’t add, “And not when our children are risking their own lives,” but Leia hears him just the same. As he starts to bring the rest of the /Falcon/’s systems on-line, she activates the subspace transceiver and enters the coordinates provided.

“This is the Millennium Falcon – ”

“Thank the Force!” /Wedge Antilles exclaims over the line. /“We’ve been trying to raise you for an hour. I thought something unfortunate had happened.”

Han and Leia glance at each other, but neither volunteers anything about Anakin and the strike team. “We had a couple of skips sitting on us.” Leia’s fingers fly across the computer input. “Here’s the data we promised.”

As she speaks, the first bursts of battle static appear on the sensor display. The assault fleet itself is too distant to be detected through the nebula gas even with active sensors, but Han can tell by the fire that there are only a few hundred vessels attacking. Still, scores of Yuuzhan Vong frigates and corvettes vanish into stars of dispersing energy before they can organize themselves into a picket wall. The Falcon is too distant from the battle to detect anything as small as a starfighter, but Han knows they’re present by the sparks of explosion static that appear all too frequently between the Yuuzhan Vong vessels.

By now, the New Republic fleet must have its own surveillance craft watching the battle, but Han and Leia nevertheless holds their position and continue to relay data to the oddly placed command post. In a conflict this size, information is more valuable than ships, and both combatants place a premium on destroying, blinding, or misleading enemy reconnaissance vessels. That makes the /Falcon/, as an undetected observation asset, more important to the attack than any three Star Destroyers.

Slowly – painfully – the Yuuzhan Vong frigates and corvettes overcome their initial disorganization and start to hold the starfighters at bay. Once this threat has been brought under control, the big capital ships are free to leave their places in the heart of the formation and go forward to support their smaller companions. As they draw into range of the New Republic’s own capital ships, bright bars of energy begin to flash back and forth across the data display, at times lighting it up so brightly that Han can see nothing else but the glow. Eventually, the battle starts to drift in the wrong direction, and Han knows with the kind of bleak certainty that comes of having participated in too many battles in too short a period of time that their long wait will have been for nothing unless something happens /soon /to swing the tide of battle back in the New Republic’s favor.

He activates the subspace microphone. “Wedge, are you getting this?”

“We are, Han – but you’re the only asset still showing the situation in the heart of the protostar. Please stay on station.”

“What for?” Han grumbles. “Sovv didn’t bring enough ships. Tell him to break off and save what he can.”

“Negative, Han.” /Wedge doesn’t sound nearly upset enough, which is the first sign that something else besides what he’s seeing might be going on and the only reason why Han doesn’t try to press the issue, despite the sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. /“We can’t do that.”

A Yuuzhan Vong destroyer analog presses the attack too hard and erupts into a two-second flare of light, and frigates and corvettes continue to vanish at a steady rate. But the battle continues to drift in towards New Republic lines. Soon, a discernible gap appears between the capital ships participating in the attack and those that have remained behind to protect the huge ship tenders. Eventually, in a gesture of what has to be the ultimate disdain for the New Republic commanders, a quarter of the big ships turn aside to redock with the supply vessels and continue to reprovision.

“Now, that is just too arrogant,” Wedge comments, a note of gleefulness entering his voice. “Admiral Sovv needs to teach them a lesson.”

“I hope he scolds better than he counts,” Han mutters, almost certain that there’s a trick in play somewhere but not just able to bring himself to blithely trust in someone else’s plans.

“Han . . . ” Leia begins to caution.

Han ignores her, continuing to acerbically note, “Our message said there were a thousand ships – and more arriving every minute!”

“But I had only nine hundred ready for action,” /a pinched Sullustan voice retorts. /“And your message also said to hurry.”

Leia closes her eyes and lets her chin fall, pulling her head down low. “Admiral Sovv, please excuse my husband’s impatience.”

“No apology is necessary,” /Admiral Sovv graciously replies. /“We’ll be out of contact for eight minutes, but I’m sending you our order of battle. Can you have a tactical update ready when we make contact again?”

Instead of answering, Leia turns to Han with an expectant expression.

“Uh, sure thing,” Han agrees. When Leia scowls, he grudgingly adds, “Admiral.”

“Good.” This from Wedge. “And we have a request from Eclipse. They’ll be looking for the yammosk and would appreciate any guidance you can give them.”

“Tell them we’ll try to narrow the possibilities down to no more than a hundred ships.” Han rolls his eyes as Wedge and the admiral signed off, then turns to Leia, noting, “I guess Luke must have found his boarding harpoons.”

“Or had someone make them,” Leia agrees. “I only hope they work on yorik coral.”

Used legally and illegally across the galaxy by security forces, pirates, and anyone else who wants to storm a ship, boarding harpoons are a relatively recent technological development. Basically giant hypodermics filled with coma gas, boarding harpoons are made to melt through a target’s hull with a megaheated tip and then lodge themselves in the hole, extending a flexiglass membrane to seal the vacuum breach, before injecting the breached ship with gas. Depending on a ship’s recirculation system and size, everyone aboard could be rendered unconscious in anywhere from a minute to a quarter hour. For the sake of the Jedi who would be using them, Han hopes that it’ll be a lot closer to a minute, in this case.

They spend the next few minutes scanning the heart of the protostar, identifying high-priority targets, calculating ranges and hit probabilities, and estimating how quickly the capital ships on the front line will be able to disengage and return to the heart of the protostar. In less than five minutes, they have a situation report that clearly suggests it would be wise to attack cautiously and conservatively, despite the advantage of surprise. It’s not exactly the decisive blow Han had been hoping for, but there’s no arguing with facts, and this battle is too important to risk blowing on some wild scheme or damned foolish heroic attack.

Then Leia frowns, claims something doesn’t “feel” right, and starts to work the computer again. Han scans and rescans the entire Bantha and stares at the data display without blinking. Everything feels right to /him/. Hell, he’s even managed to narrow the likely yammosk ships down to three destroyer analogs and half a dozen big cruisers, which is pretty damned good work, in his opinion, if anybody else cares enough to ask.

Leia is still busily working the computer, muttering softly to herself and taking notes in a datapad, when New Republic contacts begin to blizzard onto the sensor display, jumping almost directly into battle because of the protostar’s dispersed mass shadow. By the time Admiral Sovv’s flagship has emerged from hyperspace, the lead vessels are already bleeding starfighters and pouring turbolaser fire into the Yuuzhan Vong capital ships.

The communications officer quickly establishes a comlink, and Leia sends the tactical update on an encrypted data channel. While they wait for Wedge and Admiral Sovv to digest the new information, Han is surprised to see the Yuuzhan Vong capital ships remaining close to the ship tenders instead of rushing out to engage the incoming fleet and buy time for their comrades to return from the forward battle.

He opens a voice channel. “Wedge, maybe you should have your forward elements hang back. Those rocks are hiding something.”

“Yes, they are,” Leia agrees, finally looking up from her datapad. “But don’t hang back. Those ships haven’t provisioned yet. That’s what they’re hiding.”

Admiral Sovv is on the channel at once. “Are you sure?”

“I am, Admiral. Our computer issued an identifier to each contact, and I just ran a full history of each one. None of them has docked with the tenders.”

“I see,” Sovv replies. “Your recommendation would be?”

Before answering, Leia looks to Han. If her analysis is right, then the tactics that follow from their report will be too conservative, maybe even give the enemy a chance to disengage and escape. But if she’s wrong . . . She isn’t wrong, though. Han can feel it.

He nods.

Leia smiled at him, then she said, “Go for sabacc, Admiral. Our recommendation is to bet the fleet.”

“I see.” Sovv is, unsurprisingly, barely able to choke out that much; Sullustans are seldom happy gamblers. “An unusual way to put it, but . . . thank you for your suggestion.”

Han winces, suddenly struck with the notion that the Falcon may be the only trick that Sovv is hiding up his sleeve, and frowns, checking to make sure they aren’t transmitting before complaining, “That’s what’s wrong with putting Sullustans in command. They’re more interested in building careers than winning battles.”

“Not this one, I think.”

Leia points at the display, where the largest part of the New Republic fleet – including all of the Star Destroyers and most of the cruisers – are peeling away from the ship tenders and fanning out towards the far edge of the Bantha. Their turbolasers are already flashing, pouring bolts into the rear of the Yuuzhan Vong battle line. Several cruiser analogs and two destroyer-sized vessels begin to break up instantly. Others quickly follow when they turn to meet this new threat and end up being assaulted from behind by a now-lethal decoy force. The two walls of New Republic ships begin to come together, slowly but surely smashing the disorganized Yuuzhan Vong between them.

In the core of the protostar, a swirling cloud of smaller vessels swarm the tenders and their escorts. The Yuuzhan Vong hold their attack until the enemy is almost upon them, then loose a wave of fire so intense that Han and Leia can actually physically see the glow with their own eyes, lighting the heart of the Bantha like the star it would one day be. The sensor display requires nearly a minute to clear, and, when it does, a full quarter of the New Republic contacts have simply vanished.

Leia closes her eyes, slumping forward in the copilot’s seat. “Han, did I – ”

“They’re Yuuzhan Vong, Leia,” he quickly insists. “You know they’re going to fight back – with rocks, if need be.”

They watch in apprehension as the tender escorts continue to lace the heart of the Bantha with plasma balls and magma missiles, sometimes taking whole frigates out in single volleys. Finally, though, the fire starts to dwindle, and the destroyer analogs begin to take hits. Whole squadrons of New Republic starfighters dart past the lumbering vessels to pelt the defenseless ship tenders with proton torpedoes and concussion missiles. It takes only a few minutes of this bombardment before the core of the protostar lights up again even more brightly as one supply vessel after another disintegrates in the heat of its own detonating cargo.

A few minutes later, Luke’s voice comes over the comm unit. “Han, can you come down here? We’ve got some cargo we need you to drop off at Eclipse.”

“Live cargo?” Leia asks, sitting up straight in her chair again. Danni Quee has, after all, been trying to capture a live yammosk since before Booster told them about the fall of Reecee.

“That’s affirmative,” Luke reports, his smile all but tangible across the open line.

“Sabacc!” Han cries out, clenching a fist tight and pumping it in the air triumphantly. “/Pure/ sabacc!”

***