FicWad

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

Chapter Six: Hopes and Fears

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: N/A.

Specific Chapter/Part-Related Warnings: N/A.



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


Chapter Six: Hopes and Fears

Productivity Day (Holiday 2)-27:06:01 After the Battle of Yavin (~1,028 After Ruusan Reformations or ~25,029 After Republic’s Founding)

If we can’t stop them, then we delay them as long as we can, and, after that, if we can’t escape to fight another day, then we make sure that they have to crawl over our bodies. It’s been an honor, gentlebeings!

– General Ba’tra, Productivity Day 27 ABY, during the Battle for Coruscant



A hand on her shoulder (small, slim, familiar) shakes her roughly from the darkness that has consumed her ever since Tahiri opened her up to show her the true shape of the future that would have come, had she not come back in time to prevent it, and she groans groggily, head throbbing with residual pain and pressure, automatically (if weakly) trying to bat that hand away.

“Stop fussing, Tenel Ka! I think her time’s up. You need to see this,” Jaina leans down to hiss harshly in her ear, shaking her even more roughly, fingers closing with demanding tightness around the fragile joint.

It’s the edge of sorrow and sick horror lurking in the back of Jaina’s voice that makes her open her eyes and sit up, and the sight that she beholds – Tahiri Veila, the older Tahiri, if a shape seemingly formed of almost blinding light, framed by multiple furling fans of pure energy, the Force haloing her like wings, can be said to be that of a human woman of mere flesh and blood and bone – is at once so awful and so awesome that, for a moment, it feels as if the heart has stopped beating in her chest.

“Oh, Tahiri, /no/!” she finds herself whispering, protesting, the whole of her silently crying out in pained protest. “Your son – ”

/“A necessary sacrifice – a worthy /sacrifice.” The words lick at her consciousness like fire, the sense of them communicated half simply verbally and half in a mental voice so clear and so powerful that her head aches with the strain of receiving and containing it.

“I’m so sorry you had to do this – sorry I wasn’t there to protect you, to stop things from getting so bad.” Anakin Solo looks like nothing so much as a waxen doll – like death warmed over only the barest little bit – the small scattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose and his high cheekbones standing out against the shocking paleness of his skin like splotches of old-fashioned ink dripped blackly across the crisp whiteness of an empty page of unlined paper. He is standing extremely close to the blazing figure of the older Tahiri – far too close for comfort, so close to the outermost edges of her brightly crackling aura that little tongues of energy streamers occasionally lick along the toes of his boots, crawling up around his feet like flames – his right arm curled with possessive tightness around the slender shoulders of their Tahiri, her green eyes steadily streaming tears.

/“It’s not your fault, Anakin. This whole mission was FUBAR from the moment it began. The few who got out alive only did so because of your sacrifice. I am simply negating the need for that sacrifice.”/

“I wish you wouldn’t go,” Tahiri whispers, her voice surprisingly steady in spite of her tears. “I wish you’d’ve figured out a way to stay. You don’t deserve this. And we could really use your help, to make sure the Sith don’t figure out some other way to try to tear everything apart.”

“You don’t need me, child. You /are me, now, for all extends and purposes.”/

“It’s not the /same/,” Tahiri only insists, the hand that’s not clutching with desperate tightness at Anakin’s shoulder clenching into a helpless fist, leaning forward until the nimbus of Force-energy lifts and rifles her golden curls and the power reflects from her eyes like fire. “I’ll never be as strong as you are. /Never/.”

/“No. You are a phoenix, Tahiri Veila. You will ever rise from the flames of your own destruction, reborn from the ashes of yourself – stronger, glorious, good – remade in an image of splendor, of the Force. Remember that. The Force will ever be with you.”/

“Jacen – ” Jaina begins to say, her voice low and rough, as though she has been crying.

/“If he lives and if he wakes, he will be a far better person. He will have survived the crucible, the terrible trial of knowing himself utterly, in the full potential of his own inner darkness, and he will have come out the other side, cleansed, scourged, remade. Then, he will require your aid and support. Then, he will deserve your succor.”/

“He – he has not woken?” Tenel Ka finds herself asking, her voice trembling with fear.

The look that the Force-shrouded form of the older Tahiri turns on her is so awful in its compassion that she has to turn away, feeling as if her eyes have been scorched, as though she has been staring unshielded at a sun. /“I neither know nor care if he will wake. But if he does, he will need you – all of you. You will have to carry him out of here with you when you go.”/

Anakin wavers bodily on his feet, as if fighting not to hurl himself forward, into the heart of the fanning power surrounding the other Tahiri. “Are you sure – ”

/“You all know how to make yourselves small in the Force, now. Keep yourselves hidden from Vergere and use Vongsense to avoid the patrols. All you need is a spaceworthy ship. Use the detonator as you escape. The voxyn will be destroyed, as will this worldship.”/

“The slaves – ”

/“I am sorry, Anakin. There is no way to both save them and destroy the voxyn while also preserving the lives of every member of the strike team. It must be this way. Most of them are dying, painfully, a millimeter at a time, as the surge-coral implants mutate and spread. This will be a far better, far more merciful end, for the vast majority of them.”/

Anakin wavers again, even more strongly, his own visible hand clenching into a tight fist. “That doesn’t make it right – ”

/“No, beloved. But it will be a kindness. And it is necessary. You cannot flinch away from this, I fear. If I could save them, I would do so. But I cannot. And you cannot. And there is nothing else that can be done about it. It is not fair, it is not right, but it is, unfortunately, the simple truth of the matter.”/

Somewhere behind her, Ganner Rhysode growls low in his throat, startling her so badly that Tenel Ka’s hand twitches towards her lightsaber hilt before she can quite stop herself from reacting. “The Yuuzhan Vong are a plague upon this galaxy. The lives lost to them and on account of them will not be forgotten.”

/“Ganner.”/ The name resounds powerfully in her mind, sounding oddly like hero to Tenel Ka’s ears. /“You are a good man – a true Jedi Knight. Keep these younglings safe. Get them back to their families again.”/

“I will, Tahiri. I /swear /it. It will be done.”

Her smile is terrible in its beauty. The Force pulses around her like wildfire, like a beating heart, the fanning spread of wings layering more and more thickly behind her, around her, until the light makes it hard to truly see her, any longer.

Anakin presses forward – so far that the Force limns him with that terrible light – and the sound of his voice is heartrending. “Tahiri. I love you. /I’ll /always love you. Never forget that.”

“I love you, Anakin Solo. Live, for me. Live, for my unborn son. Live, that the galaxy may live and the Sith may never know another day of victory.”

The wing-like aura of light flares impossibly bright, spitting out curving, fanning streams of fire like prominent flares from a sun’s blazing corona, and the slender form of Tahiri recedes, coalescing into the living heart of a hugely looming star, grand and beautiful and terrifying, a spinning ball of heatless fire and increasingly bright light that grows larger and larger until she is forced to shut her eyes as the illumination expands to swallow her form in its warm embrace.

Cradled for an instant in pure power, in warmth, in life, in love, she cries out, helplessly, still trying to deny what’s happening –

– and then the leading edge of that expanding ball of Force-energy simultaneously seems to both explode and implode, streamers of dissipating power flowing through her (mingling with her essence and vanishing away) like sparks of electricity grounding themselves into nothingness. The sensation is indescribable, ineffable, incredible, awful, /holy/, and Tenel Ka screams and sobs, unable to help herself, wailing like a mad thing, her keening cries joining a ragged chorus of others, the other members of the strike team affected at least as much as she is by the experience.

When the light is gone, Tahiri is gone with it.

The sound of unabashed sobbing fills the air for a long, long time.

***

They are picking their way carefully back towards the surface of the worldship and the place where, according to Tahiri’s memories, many of the smaller Yuuzhan Vong ships are berthed, all of them wrapped up tight in the Force, Jacen’s too pale, too limp form cradled in Lowbacca’s huge arms like a drowsing child, Lomi Plo and Welk – too frightened to simply obey orders and follow along, sniffling and wailing like frightened five-year-olds when conscious – purposefully made to sleep and being passed around and shouldered impersonally amongst the Barabels, when it happens. Ganner slips along the nearest wall, stumbling heavily over nothing, nearly crying out when a deep rumbling thump shakes the passage. Tesar (whose hands are, thankfully, currently empty) hisses in shock and retracts his claws, nearly taking Ganner’s head off as he drops along the wall, skidding slightly. They stare at each other for a few heartbeats before hurrying deeper along into the tunnel, their eyes fixed on the dimly shining ceiling.

“Something landing?” Raynar asks, frowning as he turns back from a little further ahead.

Tesar nods. “Something big.”

“Ah. Aha. See? She was right. They were trying to lure us into a trap.” Eryl Besa bumps her shoulder into Ganner’s. “I believe the time has come to leave here, my friends.”

“Perhaps.” Ganner does not turn back. He has a feeling like there something is/ wrong/ here, like something is yet to be revealed. “But if it’s a trap, then why give themselves away?”

Another thump, this one smaller, rumbles down through the yorik coral.

“This one could go look,” Tesar suggests, hissing a little in anticipation.

Ganner wordlessly passes over the electrobinoculars, and the Barabel bounds up the passage rapidly on all fours. This area of the worldship seems to be devoted to producing foodstuffs and other necessities, and, every kilometer or so, there are huge large air locks opening out onto the surface access routes. Ganner has traveled enough of the worldship (in memory, if not yet in fact) to understand that such a surface network would be a far more efficient system for moving freight than the sometimes cramped, always meandering passages inside.

A minute later, Tesar’s voice comes over their comm, reporting,/ “Frigate analog – perhapz the one that brought Nom Anor. Its shuttle is missing.”/

Despite the extra weaponry and personnel such a vessel carries, Ganner is no more worried than before. Frigates of this size are known to carry only three assault companies, and, by his count, they’ve already destroyed one and cut up the other two pretty badly. If Nom Anor intends to launch an attack from this ship, it will either be with worldship personnel or the vessel crew – neither of which is likely to be experienced enough to keep them from escaping fairly cleanly, given the tricks they have stuffed up their sleeves now.

“Any sign of an assault company?” Ganner asks.

“The boarding ramp is down,” Tesar promptly replies. “But the onez who used it are already gone.”

“Huh. This seems familiar, somehow.” Tekli’s voice sounds slightly puzzled, as if she cannot quite place why the situation seems so familiar.

After a few moments of rapid thought, it finally occurs to Ganner why that somewhat hesitant observation feels right, to him. “That’s because it is. This is about when Vergere joined the party, in the other timeline.”

“Okay. So we’ll need to watch out for her even more, to make sure she doesn’t try it here,” Raynar opines with a little shrug. “It shouldn’t be too hard. She can’t sense us at all, while we’re like this, can she?”

“Shouldn’t be able to,” Ganner allows. “Okay, Tesar,” he adds, speaking into his comm unit. “Keep an eye on things up there. We’ll be along shortly.”

They’ve been dodging heavily armed Yuuzhan Vong search parties with eerily effortless ease, ever since they left the chalk dunes, and the frigate’s arrival is the first hint that the enemy has still somehow managed to guess their location. It’s a little unsettling, to realize that, even with the Force cloaking their life signatures and wrapping their bodies and scents in muffling layers of camouflage and bent light that essentially renders their physical forms invisible, the Yuuzhan Vong have been able to pinpoint just about where they should be with such accuracy. Still, all things considered, they’ve been making good time, and, considering the increasing desperation and anger with which the Yuuzhan Vong parties they’ve been passing seem to be searching for them, it seems fairly obvious that the landing of the frigate so near to them is more a matter of sheer dumb luck (or very good guesswork) than anything they need to worry about.

They are halfway up the tunnel when a series of frantic clicks suddenly come over the comm net. Ganner automatically reaches out to Tesar and senses that the Barabel is still waiting at his station on the surface, concerned but not nearly excited enough to be fighting someone. A single click confirms that Tesar has felt his questing/questioning touch, and then the boom of an exploding missile reverberates through the yorik coral.

“Jaina?” Ganner gasps, staggering slightly.

“Who else?” Eryl replies, laughing a little.

Though he didn’t like to split up, they are moving in two parties – Ganner and Eryl, along with Tekli, Krasov and Bela (and, technically, Tesar), Lowbacca and Em Teedee, Raynar and Zekk, and Jacen and Lomi and Welk sticking to the interior passageways while Jaina and Anakin and the others stealthily work their way up along the surface freightways – both to make it harder for the Yuuzhan Vong to try to track them and to get them that much more quickly to a ship they can steal. Though he does not for a moment doubt that the sudden explosion is the other half of the strike team’s doing, Ganner still opens his mind and emotions to the others, drawing them deeper into the battle meld and reaching out to Tesar with the same question that’s on all of their mind./ Is this Jaina’s doing?/

They are answered with a confirming click.

“It’s a good plan, catching the frigate off guard like this,” Eryl notes with a satisfied nod. “Not only will it greatly aid our final escape, it may even strand our worst enemies here, to be consumed in the blast with the rest of the worldship, when we use the detonator, if we’re lucky.”

Another blast shakes the passage, this one closer than the first, followed by another, even louder eruption. Flakes of glow lichen begin to snow down from the ceiling. When yet another explosion hits close enough to shock the dust off the walls and loose chunks of ceiling begin to rain down in the chamber the passageway they’re in opens out into, behind them, Ganner begins to get concerned.

Tesar’s desperate voice comes over the comlink. “Stickz, not there – you’re too close to the others! Stop!”

Even as Tesar yells out his warning, a fourth explosion drops an avalanche of vault ribbing down it the chamber behind them, the ceiling collapsing into rubble and flooding the passageway with an impenetrable cloud of dust.

When a sporadic rain of yorik coral continues to fall from the weakened ceiling, cracks spidering out into the roof of the passage itself, Ganner begins backing deeper into the tunnel and pulls his equipment harness off his back.

“We’d better get into our vac suits,” he notes, coughing a little.

“Remind me to remind Jaina that following Tahiri’s memories so closely may not be the best of ideas,” Zekk grumbles, coughing as he scrambles out of his own harness.

“Remind/ me/ to remind Anakin to be more careful of us,” Raynar grumbles back. “There’s no way he could’ve known for sure we’d be far enough out of that passageway to be safe. He has to’ve just been guessing, when he told Jaina to fire.”

“Oh, quit your moaning and groaning, you two!” Eryl scolds. “It’s not like anyone’s hurt. And you don’t know that they can’t sense us well enough to’ve shot around us. The passage’s sealed off, so no one can follow us from that way, now, can they? And they’ve likely taken care of the frigate, by now, which means one less big ship after us when we jet.”

Zekk and Raynar look at each other and then shrug, a little sheepishly. “They still could’ve been a bit more careful,” Zekk opines after a few moments, but softly enough that Ganner has to strain to hear him, over the sounds of everyone getting into their vac suits and the Barabels awkwardly forcing Lomi and Welk into two of the spare vac suits Lowie’s also been carrying, along with Jacen’s comatose form.

“I heard that,” Eryl sings out, voice pitched low and quiet but still carrying enough for them all to hear her, prompting Raynar to flush and the others to all laugh a little.

Zekk looks angry, but then, Zekk often looks angry. And he hasn’t been quite right, since he woke back up from Tahiri’s sharing. Considering the shape of Zekk’s future, in that time, Ganner’s not too surprised that Zekk’s a little out of sorts. He’ll watch him, just to be sure that Zekk really is going to be alright, but as long as he doesn’t start lashing out at anyone, Ganner thinks it’s probably best to let the kid vent some of his pain and confusion in the occasional odd grumbling complaint.

As long as he doesn’t get worse, he should be alright. Just like the rest of them.

***

After failing to destroy the frigate on the first two passes, Tesar assumes that the assault shuttle is going to turn about and flee. That would have been the tactic of a wise hunter striking at such dangerous prey. But Anakin is, apparently, still upset over not being able to help the slaves, while Jaina is simply unable to resist the temptation of a 150-meter Yuuzhan Vong frigate sitting motionless on the surface, its debarking ramp still hanging open like the mouth of a winded dewback. The assault shuttle wheels sharply around, coming in close for a point-blank shot, and looses a pair of plasma balls that vanishes almost instantly into shielding singularities, flashing over its target and pulling up sharply, preparing to wheel around for yet another attack. And, unfortunately, it’s then that the frigate finally answers, launching a flurry of plasma balls and magma missiles from its port-side weapons bank. At such short range, the missiles lack the time to fix on their target and so streak past harmlessly, but two plasma balls explode either into or very near to the shuttle’s rear quarter – the flash of detonation is so bright that he can’t quite tell which, at first – blasting through the firewall and sending the vessel spinning off into the sky.

Tesar fears for a moment that the shuttle will either explode or spin itself into pieces, but then Jaina – at least he’s fairly sure that she’s the pilot, given how smoothly the vessel has been flying, up until now – somehow manages to bring it under control and banks sharply away. The craft climbs five hundred meters before belching out a streamer of flame and starting a long and slightly wobbling but obviously mostly controlled descent towards the horizon. Tesar is tempted, for a moment, to snap his tongue against his faceplate in anger, over such recklessness, but then he notices that the assault vessel’s final salvo seems to have hit home at least partially, the frigate smouldering sullenly where it sits, its debarking ramp simply /gone/, and finds himself hissing with helpless laughter instead. After thinking it through for a moment, he decides to risk a quick message over Ganner’s personal comm channel. Even if the Yuuzhan Vong have somehow figured out a way to eavesdrop on their comms, this isn’t exactly something he wants to try relaying through clicks and Force sensations.

***

Jaina wakes to the sound of laughter, with a bright light shining in her eye and a stink in her nose like a Gamorrean refresher station. The laugh is just the sort of mad cackle one might expect in a Kala’uun ryll den, but she knows better than to think that her throbbing head and aching shoulder are the by-products of a bad spice dream. This nightmare is undeniably real. Nom Anor’s frigate has shot down her stolen shuttle, Ganner and the rest are stranded on an enemy worldship, and Anakin – Anakin –

She panics, thrashing around blindly, memories of a time that will not come and the present bleeding together in a confused blur, unable to tell, for a few heart-wrenching moments what is truly happening /now /from what happened in that other time, and then a familiar hand is on her right shoulder, pressing her back gently but insistently, and a brush of mind against her’s calms her as effortlessly as a pacifier might calm a cranky baby.

The longblaster roars again, all but deafening, and another mad cackle sounds from somewhere forward of Jaina.

“Did you see that one?” Tahiri chortles gleefully. “I think I cut him entirely in two!”

“Good,” Jaina rasps. The effort fills her head with pain, but she welcomes it, draws strength and resolve from it. “Kill some more of them, little sister.”

“Be quiet, Jaina,” Anakin whispers, his voice not quite condemning but not entirely happy sounding, either. The small dazzle of light shifts to her other eye. “You don’t know what you’re saying, yet.”

“And you do?” Jaina slaps the glow stick irritably aside, and the foul-smelling stinksalts, as well. “Little brother, they would have killed you, without flinching.”

“But I’m still alive. And I don’t want to lose you, Jaina,” he instantly, vehemently insists. “I’m not losing you to the Dark Side, Sis. This isn’t the answer.”

“Who said I was turning to the Dark Side, you little dork?” Jaina gripes, a little offended by the suggestion. “I know what happened, in that other time. I think I know better than to fall.”

“I’m worried about you. You’re so angry – ”

“Tahiri had to /die/, to save you. She was pregnant with my twin’s child – a child he got on her through an act of force and planned to eventually marry off to his girl by Tenel Ka, something I apparently had to kill him to stop him from being able to do – at the time. I think I have a right to be upset about all of that!” Jaina snaps, gritting her teeth against the pain and pushing herself laboriously upright.

“Jaina – ”

“I’m angry, alright? That doesn’t mean I’m going to snap like an over-stressed rubber band and start using the Force to slaughter people!”

Anakin sighs, but he doesn’t say anything else.

Scowling a little (even though a part of her is touched by his concern, given all that he’s gone through), Jaina touches his hand gently, to let him know that it’s alright, and then looks around. The inside of the shuttle is, unfortunately, a listing mass of clutter, with a long crack running the length of the hull and a fluid-smeared tangle of cognition hoods and burst villips strewn across the flight deck. Jaina flashes on a garbled memory of struggling with the controls to keep the nose up, of skimming a crater rim and coming down like the rock the shuttle truly is, of skipping across the basin floor and rolling sideways and decelerating sharply as the nose caught on something . . . then there’s nothing, only a vague feeling of pitching forward and the sound of screaming voices and a sudden darkness.

Across from Jaina, a pale Tenel Ka is laying silently on a litter, her one whole and now obviously broken arm resting across her slowly rising and falling chest, bruises on her pale face already vanishing, her body healing rapidly from the deep healing trance she’s plunged herself into. In the back of the vessel, Jovan Drark lets out low groan as he uses the Force to move something heavy into place. He mumbles softly to himself, grumbling in the kind of half-slurred voice that usually indicates a concussion, then lets what sounds like a rock plop down into a pool of viscous liquid. A sodden bang follows, and, an instant after that, the distant crackle of an erupting plasma ball.

“A little short,” Tahiri calls out from the forward door. “Raise it one more degree, and you should be able to burn them to a crisp.”

“I take it we’re under attack,” Jaina asks, raising an eyebrow at Anakin.

“Not exactly under attack, but they’re coming,” her littler brother confirmed. “Nom Anor is still trying to capture us – or at least some of us – alive.”

A sneer comes to Jaina’s lips. “Let him try.” She swings her legs off her own makeshift litter and reaches for her power blaster. “I’m going to enjoy this.”

***

The skips are stacked like the stones in an ancient Massassi wall, each craft hovering above the gap between the two below, every gap covered by interlocking fire from an inner ring of corvettes. Behind the corvettes wait frigates, and somewhere behind the frigates is the cruiser bearing the yammosk. Luke and his shield mates launch yet another volley of shadow bombs and watch the weapons veer off into shielding singularities. The three Jedi continue on vector long enough to taunt the Yuuzhan Vong pilots with a fusillade of cannonfire, then break off amidst a storm of hot plasma and angry grutchins. Though all three are careful to present inviting attack angles as they turn, none of the enemy coralskippers abandon station to pursue. The Warmaster has, apparently, finally learned how to protect his yammosk, and woe to the warrior who might dare to break formation.

Luke opens a channel to Orbital Defense Headquarters, to whom they were passed off as the battle drifted closer in to Coruscant. “Zero on the chasers, Gambler. That yammosk is in the battle for good.”

“Copy, Farmboy. No reason to be disappointed,” Lando promptly replies. “You’ve forced them to take half a fleet out of the fight.”

“That’s something.” Luke has no idea how Lando came to be General Ba’tra’s special operations commander, but he’s glad to have someone of such composure serving as their battle coordinator. Judging by the static and booming on the channel, the ODH itself is under heavy attack. “Let’s try a wave attack. Maybe we can just punch through.”

“Negative,” /Lando replies. /“Stand by for a planetside comm patch.”

Luke can feel Mara grow instantly apprehensive. Han and Leia should have been off of Coruscant an hour ago, but it cannot possibly be anyone else.

Han, unsurprisingly, comes on the channel. “Can you break free up there?”

“You know we can,” /Mara grimly replies. /“What’s wrong?”

“You need to catch the starferry /Byrt/.” As Han speaks, the tactical display shifts scales. A targeting square appears a quarter of the way around the planet, on a 200-meter transport rising into space. “C-3PO is aboard with your package.”

“It’s my fault.” Leia’s voice is as brittle as a glitterstim web. “Viqi Shesh ambushed us in the docking bay, and I was so furious – ”

“Leia, don’t worry,” /Mara cuts in. There’s only resolve in her voice, no blame or worry. /“We’ll get him back.”

“Okay.” Han sounds relieved. “We’re stuck planetside until we find some containment fluid. The Senator did a job on our feed lines and umbilicals.”

Now Mara is worried, Luke senses. Charging an empty containment unit can take hours. Coruscant doesn’t have hours. Given the number of coralskippers and airskiffs already dropping out of orbit, it might not even have one hour.

Luke is about to send Saba Sebatyne down in her blastboat when Lando comes back on the channel. “Old buddy, the scarheads will blast this bucket of bolts out from under me any minute. I could drop down in the /Luck and give you a lift.”/

“And leave the bird behind? Never!” Han immediately comms back. “You guys just take care of things up there.”

“Will do,” Luke promises. “And may the Force be with you.”

“Yeah, kid – you, too,” /Han replies. /“Solo out.”

Luke’s thoughts turn to his son. Mara has already plotted an atmosphere-skimming vector that will intercept the Byrt and a thousand other vessels streaming up from the Eastport/Imperial City area. But they’re going to have to hurry. The tactical display shows a Yuuzhan Vong frigate group moving to intercept the fleeing starships.

“Gambler – ”

“Go,” /Lando comms back. /“A couple of Jedi won’t make a difference here.”

Luke peels off after Mara, who is already diving away. Noticing that Tam is following, he comms, “Quiet, stay with the wing. Hisser, you’re in charge. Make it look good until things fall apart, then come for the rendezvous.”

“You do not want help, Master Farmboy?”

“Oh, I /want /it.” Luke pushes the stick forward and follows Mara under the flaming belly of a kilometer-long KDY New Republic battle cruiser. “But every minute you hold that task force here saves ten thousand New Republic lives.”

“Copy,” Saba acknowledges. “Count on us to save a million.”

The comm speaker gives a sharp crackle, then Luke comes up on the other side of the cruiser to find a rolling fireball where the tactical display shows Mara’s X-wing.

Jinking around the explosion, he comms, “Mara?”

He receives no verbal answer, but she reaches out through the Force, urging him not to worry and to concentrate on getting Ben.

R2-D2 tweedles a warning. Luke immediately swings left and narrowly avoids a barrage from the enemy vessel – also a cruiser – that’s set the KDY aflame. He designates it a high-priority watch for R2-D2 and automatically falls into a random jink-and-juke evasive pattern. He eventually finds Mara silhouetted against the lights of Coruscant’s night side, her number three engine trailing yellow flame, her astromech droid domeless, her S-foils stuck half open – no good either for firing or for speed. If it had been anyone else or their task were anything but retrieving Ben, Luke would have ordered her to a safe base. With Mara, though, he knows that it’s out of the question until their son is safe again. So he pulls his X-wing alongside hers and points at her shield generator.

Mara shakes her head. No shields. Wonderful.

Finally frightened, Luke reaches out with the Force, consciously reinforcing their bond. Mara reaches back and slides into place beneath his X-wing before he can physically gesture her over. They skim through the upper atmosphere together, giving wide berth to a small battle raging around a skyhook residential platform tethered in low orbit, then begin to take incidental fire dodging through an airskiff insertion zone. As they draw nearer the/ Byrt/, R2-D2 keeps changing the tactical display’s scale to show more detail, and it soon grows apparent that the Yuuzhan Vong frigate group is moving to intercept the same starferry that they are. When they leave the atmosphere again, they promptly find themselves surrounded by a dozen small battles as Yuuzhan Vong assault groups struggle through the interlocking fire zones of Coruscant’s orbital defense platforms. The invaders are succeeding, but slowly and only by weight of superior numbers. In view of the naked eye alone, there are a dozen enemy cruisers venting their entrails into space and hundreds of smaller craft drifting about in aimless, decaying orbits. Luke starts to detour around the combat cluster . . . and draws an admonishing whistle from R2-D2. A pair of time estimates appear on the main display, showing that the frigate will beat them to the Byrt as it is, if they take the time to make such a detour. Luke sighs and adjusts the threat alarms to their most sensitive, and then sets the X-wing on a straight vector.

Something bumps his starfighter’s belly. Luke’s first thought is of Mara, that she could have possibly been hit again; then he feels her apprehension and knows that she’s still there. His X-wing jumps again. He looks over and sees her flying down to one side. She pulls back on her stick and bangs her S-foils into his undercarriage, hard/. When she’s bounced away again, the S-foils are closed. A new time estimate appears on Luke’s display. They going to intercept the /Byrt within a few seconds of the Yuuzhan Vong.

“Artoo, is Mara seeing this?”

The droid chirps impatiently, then an explanation appears on the primary display. R2-D2 has been using his transceiver to feed data directly onto her vid displays.

“You could have told me, you know,” Luke replies, a little grumpily. “Ask how many shadow bombs she has available.”

Mara holds up three fingers.

Luke nods, then flashes three fingers twice and closes his own S-foils. “Give us a two-second count.”

The count appears, and, two seconds later, they’re flying through the combat area at two-thirds an X-wing’s top speed – the best Mara can manage on three engines without drifting into overload ranges. Luke loses his own shields when an enemy corvette uses half a dozen dovin basals to rip them in swift succession, drawing down the grab-safety and overloading the generator as it tries to bring up new protection too quickly. But by then they’re above the defense platforms and out of those battles, streaking after the /Byrt/.

Luke opens a channel to the liner. “Starferry /Byrt/, please alter vector toward incoming X-wings. We’ll eliminate your pursuit.”

There is a short pause, and then a deep voice comes over the channel. “You gone vac-brain? There are only two of you!” /A second New Republic vessel, a sleek KDY staryacht flying with its transponder off, appears on the tactical display behind the /Byrt/. /“We’ll take our chances. No particular reason they’d be after us.”

“There is,” Luke urgently insists. On the display, the frigate group – a frigate analog and two corvettes – is gaining on the starferry. “This is Luke Skywalker. You have my son aboard.”

“What?” the captain cries out in shock./ “This is no time for jokes!”/

“No joke,” Luke replies, voice hard. “Alter your vector /now/.”

Though he doubts it will carry over comm waves, Luke puts the weight of the Force behind his words.

The /Byrt/’s vector starts to bend.

Mara’s relief washes up from below. Luke checks the tactical display to find the KDY staryacht continuing along its original vector – one less factor to worry about. The Byrt comes into visible range, a finger-length needle of ion efflux illuminating the yorik coral noses of the three pursuing vessels.

Luke touches the symbol of the rearmost corvette. “Artoo, designate that one for Mara . . . and tell her to be careful.”

R2-D2 bleeps an acknowledgment. The Jedi split, streaking towards their targets in wild corkscrews. The frigate group drops skips and starts to spray plasma. Lacking shields, Luke and Mara pour on speed and give their stick hands over to the Force. The enemy vessels swell into stony monoliths, scabrous and black and half hidden behind whirling curtains of flame. Mara breaks towards her corvette, barrel-rolls past half a dozen skips, and launches her shadow bombs.

Luke swings after her. The skips take the bait and rush to intercept him. He breaks back towards the frigate and dodges past a magma missile, slashed a grutchin viciously apart on his closed S-foils, and makes an oblique run down the vessel’s flank. A shielding crew snares his first shadow bomb twenty meters from target, but the other two blossom against the hull. One breaches at midships, the other behind the bow. The frigate falls silent and begins to vent flotsam. Luke dodges over the top and starts a tight turn towards the last corvette.

Her first target already reduced to rubble, Mara is also swinging towards the corvette. Luke can feel her resolve as clearly as his own, but with her shadow bombs gone and her S-foils stuck closed, that’s all she has.

“Artoo, tell her to dock with the /Byrt/.”

The droid whistles negatively, regretfully. They’re too far apart, now, to project data directly onto her screens.

“Great.”

Luke finishes his turn to find skips swarming over the corvette to cut him off. The /Byrt/’s two laser cannons have started to spray red bolts at the vessel’s nose, but the corvette holds its fire and extrudes capture tentacles.

Luke instantly deploys his S-foils and starts to trade fire with the skips. With Corran’s new targeting system, he quickly destroys the first pair and forces the rest to spread out. A notice alarm beeps on the tactical display afterwards, though. The unidentified staryacht has changed vector and is coming in behind Mara.

“What now?” Luke grumbles. “Get this onto Mara’s display.”

R2-D2 whistles doubtfully.

“Try.” Luke jukes past a plasma ball and pours cannon bolts into the skip that’s launched it. “And open a channel to that yacht.”

A half-dozen skips swing towards Mara. He starts after them, then hears her voice in his mind, urgently crying out, /No! /The image of the corvette flashes in Luke’s mind, and he knows that Mara wants him to concentrate on saving Ben.

/Behind you, /Luke returns. He sends a flurry of bolts streaming at the skips, then rolls back towards the corvette. “How about that channel, Artoo?”

An explanation appears on the primary display.

“They won’t?”

The reason for the staryacht’s silence grows clear when it fires on Mara from behind. Luke twists around to see bolts streaming into her starfighter amd then the bright flash of a hit. A piece of wing spins off flaming.

Go! Mara urges. The panic in her though is entirely for Ben, not herself. A single word more,/ Eject,/ comes to Luke’s mind. Then Mara is wheeling towards the planet, using the Force to hold her X-wing level so it won’t go into a tumble when she hits the atmosphere. Luke reaches out to envelop her with his love, then looks to his tactical display and finds her craft already marked for tracking. There’s now a transponder identification below the staryacht: the Wicked Pleasure/, registered to Senator Viqi Shesh. Luke takes in a deep breath and lets it out, lets his fury go with it. /Then he marks the vessel as a target of opportunity.

A plasma ball skips across his nose cone, and the tactical display goes dead beneath his fingers. R2-D2 shrieks with static, then falls into an electronic babble as melted comm components and burning sensor packages spill out into space. Luke scowls and soars in among the skips, dodging and rolling and pivoting, targeting by the Force alone and still scoring hits. He blasts one skip into pebbles and suddenly finds a clear hole to the corvette. He instantly closes his S-foils and accelerates. The skips whirl after him, pouring fire from behind. The X-wing bucks. Alarm screeches fill the cockpit. The engines lose power, and he decelerates. But Luke launches his shadow bombs anyway. The first one veers into a skip’s shielding singularity and detonates barely a hundred meters away. The other two vanish against the corvette’s black silhouette. He keeps pushing until their proximity fuses detect the pull of a dovin basal and blasts a pair of deep hollows in the vessel’s hull.

Close, but no breach.

R2-D2 wails urgently for Luke’s attention. He glances back to find two engines, possibly all four, burning. He slaps the emergency shutdown, wheels towards Coruscant, and reaches out with the Force, pulling himself towards Mara and her plummeting X-wing.

I couldn’t get to him, /he tells her, consumed with anguished regret. /I just couldn’t make it.

***

In all his decades of kicking around the galaxy, Han has never heard anything quite as eerie as the ululation of an anguished Noghri female. It reminds him of the sound of crumpling durasteel, or of the comm shriek a star gives off just before going nova. Even shielded from the noise by the flight deck door and half the length of the /Falcon/, it sends a shiver down his spine and draws tears from his eyes. After eighteen years with the Noghri, he still cannot honestly say that he understands them, but he is painfully aware of just how much he owes them, and it always hurts when one of them falls defending his family.

Han wipes his eyes, then looks away from the rain of burning ships outside the Falcon’s cockpit long enough to check the temperature in the fusion power unit. “We have about ninety seconds before we become just another fireball crashing down on a tower. Think we still have enough pull to recharge at Imperial City? Or should we try Calocour Heights?” He waits one second, five, then ten. “Leia?”

When there’s still no answer, after that, he glances over at her. She’s sitting stiffly upright in the oversized copilot’s seat, her hands folds in her lap and her blank gaze fixed on her feet. For the first time, Han notices that Chewbacca’s old seat is so large that it leaves her toes dangling ten centimeters above the floor.

Han reaches over to gently shake her arm. “Leia, wake up. I need you here.”

Leia looks up, but stares out the cockpit at the distant smoke plume of a crashing Star Destroyer. “Why would you need me, Han? I’ll only let you down.”

“Let me down?” Han echoes. “That’s/ crazy/! You’ve never let me down.”

Finally, Leia looks over at him. “Yes, Han, I have. I went after Viqi Shesh – ”

Han scowls irritably, cutting her off with a curt, “So did I.”

“But you didn’t lose Ben and get Adarakh killed.”

“Really?” Han sneaks a glance at the temperature of the fusion unit, then glances around the cockpit theatrically. “Funny, I don’t hear anyone here trying to claim they could’ve done any better.”

“/Han/.” Leia sighs the word, then looks out over Coruscant’s smoking, broken-toothed skyline. “You know what I mean.”

“I suppose I do,” Han shrugs. “I just didn’t think you’d go away like I did. I thought you were stronger than that.”

Leia turns back to face him and, for the first time, really seems to be looking, really seems to be seeing him. “How can you say that?” Though her voice remains even, her very calmness betrays the depth of her anger, and he finds himself pitifully glad to be able to reach her even that much. “This must hurt you, too – or do you care only for Wookiees?”

“I care.” Han manages to hold his anger in check by reminding himself that her bitterness is a good sign, that any truly emotional reaction is a good thing. “And that’s why I’m not giving up this time – not ever again. Chewbacca may be gone and Adarakh and maybe even Ben and Luke and Mara – and maybe even Anakin – but /we still have each other/.”

“That’s about all.” Leia looks back out the window, shoulder slumping.

“And we have hope,” Han insists. “As long as we have each other, there’s still hope for us, for Jacen and Jaina – wherever they are – even for the New Republic.”

“The New Republic?” Leia’s voice rises so sharply that it rivals Meewalh’s ululation. “Are you blind? There is no New Republic! It died before the Yuuzhan Vong came!”

“It didn’t!” Han yells back, no longer able to contain his anger. “Because if it did, then Chewie and all the others died for nothing!/ Nothing/!”

He glances back down at the temperature of the fusion unit again and sees that they’re about thirty seconds from becoming a crater. Han says nothing about it, though; if his wife has really given up, then he does not care to keep fighting himself.

Leia’s mouth opens as though she’s going to yell back, but then she sees where he’s looking and all of the emotion leaves her face. Han feels her watching him watch the gauge. He still says nothing. The gauge ticks up another bar.

“You’re bluffing,” Leia finally grinds out being obviously clenched teeth.

“I’m betting,” Han retorts. Jaina and Jacen are still alive, so far as they know, and she will not let her grief make her give up on them.

Leia watches the temperature rise another bar, then quietly sighs, saying, “Imperial City.”

Han lets out his breath. “Calocour’s closer.”

“Han!”

Han swings the/ Falcon/ around and begins a silent countdown.

“Go to the chief of state’s landing pad,” Leia orders. “We need to see Borsk.”

“You think Borsk is still on Coruscant?” Han gasps, startled.

“Where else? He certainly won’t be going to Bothawui.” Leia pulls a datapad out of the stowage slot on her seat and, with the ease of a practiced statesperson, begins to make speech notes. “There’s something I need to do for him.”

***

With the Orbital Defense Headquarters burning like a second sun as it plummets across Coruscant’s opalescent sky, the tapered spires and delicate towers of the Imperial Palace are bathed in scintillating orange light. As they descend towards the Chief of State’s private landing pad, Leia feels as though they’re dropping into a forest ablaze. Han brings them down less than a meter behind the tailfins of Fey’lya’s garish Kothlis Systems Luxuflier and shuts down the fusion unit even before the Falcon has had a chance to settle fully onto its struts. Leaving Anakin’s young look-alike – whose true name is, apparently, Dab Hantaq – aboard under Meewalh’s care, they lower the boarding ramp to find themselves looking down the barrel of a tripod-mounted G-40 portable cannon.

“Something wrong with the /Falcon/’s transponder, Garv?” Leia asks, not all that surprised by the cautious reception. “We tried to comm, but couldn’t get through.”

“Just being careful, Princess.” A thin man in the uniform of a New Republic general steps up into view. “Sorry about the comm problem,” he adds. “The Yuuzhan Vong are starting to take out the satellite web, so Chief of State Fey’lya has ordered a blackout on all nonmilitary communications.”

“That’s sure to help the evacuation,” Han sighs, rubbing a hand tiredly across his face.

Garv – General Tomas to everyone except his superiors and former superiors – responds with an enigmatic half nod. Leia personally named Garv the commander of palace security, and, in all the time she has known him, that’s about as close to a comment on a superior as she has ever seen from him.

“Garv, we ran into a little sabotage problem with Viqi Shesh,” Leia quickly explains. “Would it be too much to have someone recharge our containment fluid? And I’d like to speak with Chief of State Fey’lya.”

“We can arrange both.” Garv sends a furry-cheeked Bothan aide off to fetch the maintenance crew, then turns back to Leia, looking uncharacteristically doubtful. “Forgive me if I’m intruding, but I’ve heard rumors about Anakin. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“Thank you,” Leia replies, her voice carefully even. Knowing she will need to accustom herself to people offering condolences, unless (/until!/) they find out what’s really happened and Anakin makes it back to them, she lays a hand on Garv’s arm. “That means a great deal to us.”

Han nods. “We’re hoping for the best, still, but we just don’t know what happened, yet.”

“The New Republic hopes and grieves with you,” Garv earnestly replies.

“And speaking of the New Republic,” Leia interjects, glad for an excuse to change the subject, “I noticed that the data towers are still intact. Shouldn’t someone be destroying those records?”

“Someone/ should /be,” Garv darkly replies. “But Fey’lya refuses to give the order.”

“He thinks he can hold the planet?” Han asks, patently disbelieving. “The idiot! If the scarheads capture those survey abstracts, there won’t be a safe place in the galaxy to put a base.”

Garv’s expression turns incredibly sour. “I have mentioned as much.”

“I’m sure the Chief of State will give the order when the time comes,” Leia soothingly notes. With shafts of turbolaser fire starting to strike at hostile vessels from rooftops all across Coruscant, she feels certain that the time has already come, personally, but Garv Tomas is too good an officer to exceed his authority even under these circumstances. “Still, it wouldn’t be improper to arm the charges now, would it, General?”

Garv smiles, looking almost painfully relieved. “Not improper at all.”

He keys the order into a datapad and dispatches an officer to see it carried through, then leads the way through the hangar to the Chief of State’s towertop office suite. After a brief dispute with an agenda droid, which Garv wins by virtue of a security override command, the General admits them to the restricted chambers and withdraws to continue his duties. They find Fey’lya bereft of his usual gaggle of advisers and sycophants, standing alone in the heart of his opulent office, studying a holographic display of Coruscant’s crumbling defenses.

The situation is obviously hopeless. What remains of the New Republic fleets are either surrounded or cut off from the planet, sometimes both at the same time. Half of the defense platforms are literally falling out of orbit, the rest blinking with critical damage indicators. The atmospheric security force is still fighting fiercely in their V-wings and Howlrunners, but the superiority of their air-dedicated craft simply cannot overcome the enemy’s sheer numbers. Yuuzhan Vong drop ships are already forming up to make their runs, and Leia knows that this battle will soon be moving to the rooftops.

It takes Fey’lya a minute to notice he has guests. “Come to gloat, Princess?”

Leia forces a warm tone. “Not at all, Chief.” Hoping Han’s face won’t betray the opinion of Fey’lya he expressed earlier, she extends her hands and crosses over to the Bothan. “I came to apologize.”

Fey’lya’s ears flatten. “Apologize?”

“For not helping with the military,” she quietly explains. “I’m afraid I was too consumed with grief.”

Fey’lya’s attitude changes instantly, and he takes her hands between his paws. “Not at all. I am the one who should apologize – to call upon you at such a time!”

“It must have been important, or you wouldn’t have intruded.” Confident that Fey’lya is already considering how he might use her to bolster his evaporated support, Leia shifts her gaze to the display and lets the comment hang. “Our position certainly looks tenuous. Can we hold?”

“We must,” Fey’lya swiftly replies. “If Coruscant falls, so does my government.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t that be a shame?” Han notes, voice biting.

Resisting the urge to stomp on his foot, Leia smiles and pretends not to notice the sarcasm. “What my husband means to say, Chief Fey’lya, is that you have our support.” She pulls Han over to her side. “Isn’t that right, dear?”

“Of course, dear.” Han sounds sincere – or at least close enough to draw an accepting nod from Fey’lya. “Chief Fey’lya can count on us.”

Leia puts on an earnest look, eyes shining with sincerity. “If you thought a few words from me would do any good . . . ”

Fey’lya’s smile looks more relieved than appreciative. “What could it hurt? If the military knows you’re with me, they’ll stand firm behind my government. That’s been the problem, you see – all these Senators running for home and grabbing a piece of any fleet they can.”

“I know,” Leia sourly agrees. “I’ve seen the newsvids. Is the comm center still over by the window?”

“That was such an easy place for Baldavian lip-readers to watch.” Fey’lya takes her arm and guides her over towards what had been, when she occupied the office, only a coat closet.

***

“One body of open water on the whole frakking planet, and you manage to drop our X-wings in it?” Mara gripes, wrapping an airsplint around her broken ankle. “The /only /one? What were you thinking, Skywalker?”

“Mara, I really didn’t have a choice,” Luke patiently replies. The heat of his engine fires has fused the fibers on the back of his flight suit, and he will need an extremely close cut before his singed hair starts to look human again. “It was put them here or crash them into a tower.”

Mara and Luke are staring across the firelit waters of the Western Sea, a vast artificial lake and multispecies recreation area spread across thousands – perhaps even tens of thousands – of rooftops. A dozen violent whirlpools mark where crashes less controlled than their own have punctured the durasteel bed and freed the contents to rain down on Coruscant’s underlevels. All in all, it hadn’t been a bad place to push the X-wings after they ejected, but the bottom is, unfortunately, so strewn with discarded droids and junked airspeeders that locating their cherished R2 unit is proving difficult even for Luke.

She pulls the airsplint’s inflation tab and does not allow herself to wince as it mercilessly compresses her broken bones, then takes an injector out of the ejection medpac and gives herself a shot of bacta numb. Mara would normally have avoided any kind of painkiller, but they’re going to be moving fast over the next few hours, and she doesn’t want her injury slowing her (and therefore them) down. The Yuuzhan Vong are already starting to bring their big vessels down to suppress the rooftop turbolasers, and she can sense that the Byrt has not yet escaped into hyperspace with Ben. They have to find a way back into orbit, and fast.

Luke finally stretches a commanding hand over the water. A distant speck swiftly breaks the surface and swells into the shape of a scorched X-wing. A pair of Yuuzhan Vong airskiffs promptly drop out of the sun to attack, in turn drawing fire from a nearby turbolaser battery. For a few short seconds, the sky above the lake erupts into a gridwork of streaking plasma balls and flashing energy bolts, and then one skiff bursts into rubble and the other pulls up, vanishing into the sun with a stream of laser shafts chasing its tail. Mara waves their thanks up to the battery crew, which is so well camouflaged on a nearby rooftop that she initially had difficulty finding it until she used the Force. Luke brings the X-wing to shore and lifts a wildly chirping R2-D2 from the astromech socket. Other than heat scarring, the droid looks remarkably sound, and the fuss he’s making confirms that his hermetic seals have, thankfully, remained intact after both fire and submersion. As Luke floats him over to them, something big exploded high above, momentarily outshining the sun and spraying long tongues of white flame across the sky. Mara and Luke look up, watching until the brilliance dims enough to reveal individual pieces of debris fluttering planetward, but there’s no way of knowing whether the vessel had been New Republic or Yuuzhan Vong. Suddenly overcome by the desperation of their situation, Mara loops her arm through Luke’s elbow and allows him to take the weight off her broken ankle.

“Luke, how are we going to do this?” They’d managed to see, from the air, that all of the hoverlanes were either jammed with traffic or blocked by debris, and they both know that, even if they do reach a spaceport, any spacecraft worthy of the name will be long gone. “We’ll be lucky to get ourselves offplanet, much less rescue Ben.”

Luke takes her in his arm, holding her close. “Trust in the Force, Mara.”

“Is that the best you can do?” Mara asks bitterly. “Did trusting the Force save Anakin?”

“Perhaps Anakin was meant to save us. Perhaps he still will,” Luke gently replies. He kneels down in front of R2-D2 and uses his sleeve cuff to dry the droid’s auditory sensors. “We’re not in this alone, Mara. If Artoo can get through on a military channel, maybe someone else can help.”

“Maybe.” Mara looks away and tries to keep the dark emotions from rising inside her. She truly does not want to blame Han and Leia for their son’s peril, but it had, after all, been their “help” that endangered Ben in the first place. “Will you hurry, Skywalker?”

“Got it,” Luke quickly replies. “Artoo – ”

The droid promptly whistles in excitement.

“You’re sure?” Luke starts to dry R2-D2’s speaker grille. “You found Leia?”

***