by James Luceno
Han grimaced. “I need my blaster,” he said.
Jacen, right behind his father with Ben in tow, said, “You feel defenseless without it, Dad?”
“Nothing of the sort. I just want to shoot everyone who decides on these protocols.”
Jacen nodded agreeably. “If I ruled the universe, I’d let you do that, as a service to galactic civilization.”
Luke’s smile lasted for another two steps; then he straightened, looking forward. He stepped to the side of the Jedi formation to let it pass and began looking right and left.
Mara, Han, and Leia stepped out with him, letting the others continue on. Jacen, Ben, Jaina, and Zekk moved toward the center of the room, Ben sparing his father a curious glance. Mara asked, “What is it?”
“He was here,” Luke said. “The man who doesn’t exist.”
Mara began a slow, casual, visual sweep of the room and asked, “How long ago?”
“I’m not sure,” Luke admitted. “I just had a flash of him in the Force. But it was clear and distinct … and, again, no dream.”
“He has to exist, then,” Mara said.
Han cleared his throat. “Anybody care to toss a clue to a non-Jedi?”
Leia said, “I’m in the dark, too, Han.”
“An enemy,” Luke said. “I became aware of him when he didn’t yet exist. And now I’m beginning to think he sometimes exists and sometimes doesn’t.”
“That’ll make him hard to track down,” Han admitted. “Hard to make him pay up his rent.”
Luke shot Han an admonishing glance, then followed the other Jedi.
“He’s actually worried,” Han said.
Mara nodded. “And getting more worried.”
Leia linked her arm through her sister-in-law’s. “So tell us about this man who doesn’t exist.”
The party, Luke had to admit, did serve its main purpose—giving the newsgatherers information that would probably reassure the public at large—and a secondary purpose, that of an icebreaker.
At its start, the attendees stood about in rigid little groups dictated by their function and place of origin—here Corellian politicians, backs to a functionally identical group of Coruscant politicians a meter away, there a cluster of Jedi. At various points around the wall stood pairs and trios of security operatives—here GA, there CorSec, next Toryaz Station experts.
Oddly, it was a pair of aging pilots who began to thaw the hard edges of the groups. Walking together, Wedge Antilles and Tycho Celchu moved from cluster to cluster, shaking hands, clapping backs, telling stories. Their genuine affection for the people they were addressing was obvious, as was their genuine unconcern for the political boundaries of the gathering.
Tycho was first on the dance floor with Prime Minister Saxan; Wedge, with Leia, was next. Soon the noise level in the chamber rose and the boundaries between groups increasingly blurred.
Jaina, dancing with her father, told him, “You can be doing that, too.”
Han gave her a puzzled look. “Dancing? I am. If crushing my daughter’s toes one by one counts.”
“Not what I meant. Did you know, there’s someone here that everybody on both sides likes and admires?”
“Sure.” Han looked around. “Luke’s over there. He’s talking to Pellaeon right now.”
“No.” Jaina shook her head, setting her hair swaying. “I mean you. A hero to the Corellians and the rest of the GA. And you could be walking around, getting to know everyone, and making everybody feel better about being here.”
Han gave her a mock grimace. “I hate that sort of thing.”
“My father, the hero, won’t walk around smiling, even if it keeps war from happening?”
“Not fair. Who taught you to argue?”
“Mom. Besides, you can get up to speed just by staying here on the dance floor. In case you haven’t noticed, there are ladies from both sides hovering, waiting for when you find yourself without a dance partner. Like this.” The music, a familiar dance number, signaled a twirl, and when Han completed it, Jaina was two meters away, dancing with Zekk and giving her father one last merry smile.
Han pointed at her, an I’ll-get-you-for-this gesture, then felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned. Before him stood a young woman with short blond hair; she wore the uniform of a junior officer of the GA security team. “General Solo?” she asked. “I’m Lieutenant Elsen Barthis. Could I have this dance?”
“Of course.” Han put on a smile he didn’t feel and glanced briefly to where Wedge danced with his wife. He’d heard the story of Wedge’s escape from Coruscant and knew Barthis to be one of his captors. He decided that discussing her recent demotion wouldn’t benefit the cause of détente. “Your accent—you’re Corellian?”
“Yes, originally. I’m surprised you can hear an accent. I’ve worked for several years to get rid of it.”
“Oh, some things never fade away completely …”
* * *
Four hours after it began, the party ended. A handful of delegates and advisers moved to a much smaller adjoining chamber set up with a long conference table. Prime Minister Aidel Saxan sat at one end, Admiral Gilad Pellaeon at the other, and their respective parties occupied the seats between them.
“So,” Pellaeon said. “Rules of order?”
“Let’s dispense with them,” Saxan said. She looked weary but not ill tempered.
“In that case,” Han said, “I’m taking off my boots. Nobody can make good decisions when his feet hurt.”
The experienced politicians, except Leia, looked at him in surprise, but Han followed words with action, reaching down under the table to yank his boots free. A security officer knelt to peer under the opposite side of the table, doubtless to make sure Han wasn’t securing a hideaway blaster … and then the officer had a lot to do as other attendees followed Han’s lead and discarded footwear that had been binding and pinching for hours. Pellaeon didn’t join in; Han, with a twinge of envy, suspected that the old admiral had enough experience and sense to equip himself with perfectly fitted, comfortable boots.
“Let’s get to it,” Pellaeon said. “Prime Minister—may I call you Aidel?”
“Please.”
“Gilad. I’ll stipulate that the arrival of a GA naval task force in the Corellian system was an unfriendly act if you’d be so kind as to make the same admission about the secret reactivation of Centerpoint Station. Let’s get that out of the way. Let’s neither of us pretend that one side or the other is blameless.”
Saxan smiled in mock sweetness. “We can still argue over which is the greater offense.”
Pellaeon nodded. “We can. Which is to your advantage.”
Saxan looked surprised. “You admit that?”
“Of course. I’m a very old man. Any protracted argument—well, I could die at any moment.” The old strategist smiled to put the lie to his words.
Saxan, caught out, smiled despite herself. “All right. Let’s prioritize, then. I won’t pretend that the only possible outcome of this gathering is Corellian independence. Corellia has, at times, thrived as part of a wider government. She has also thrived as an independent state. But she can’t thrive as a disarmed state dependent on GA forces for protection of the system. Corellian pride won’t allow for that. Insist on that, impose it, and you transform us into something other than Corellians.” She pointed, in turn, to Han and Wedge. “Think how things would be in the GA today if not for Corellians like these. There would be no Galactic Alliance. No New Republic. It would still be the Empire.”
A silence fell across the gathering as all present remembered that Pellaeon had been an officer of the Empire at the time of its inception, had served the Empire faithfully—through the years of its wars with the Rebel Alliance and New Republic, through the decades of its existence as a remnant government, to the time in recent years when it and the rest of the galaxy had changed and the Imperial Remnant had become a part of the Galactic Alliance. Those capable of saying anything admiring about the Empire always
said that Pellaeon and officers like him represented the best part of it; could have forged it into an ethical and civilized regime had they been in charge from the start.
And Pellaeon, too, was Corellian.
Pellaeon smiled again, this time showing teeth. The obvious reply would have been, And what’s wrong with that? Instead, he said, “So what you’re arguing for, principally, is the preservation of a Corellian space navy above and beyond the Corellian Defense Force.”
“Of course.”
“That’s not necessarily impossible,” the admiral said. “But would Corellia still be able to provide resources to the GA military at a rate dictated by its gross system production, as other GA signatories do? That would seem to be a substantial drain on Corellia’s economy.”
“Well, obviously, our contribution to the GA military would have to be reduced by a value equivalent to our space navy. And that navy would be available to the GA for military activities when called upon.”
“Not acceptable. The Galactic Alliance military funding has to come first.”
It was at this point that Han’s attention wandered. He supposed that the two diplomats must be arguing their agendas with what, in political circles, would be considered blinding speed—otherwise the discussion wouldn’t have held his attention even that long. But verbiage had reached a toxic level and he could no longer concentrate on it.
Now he looked around the table, from face to face, trying to glean what information his experience as a sabacc player would grant him.
Saxan and Pellaeon were the most interesting studies. Each was alert, energetic, apparently unmovable in argument position. But they had to come to some sort of agreement here, or both sides would lose—war was an unacceptable result. So below the hard surfaces, each had some flexibility to offer. The question was when they would offer it, and in the face of what circumstances.
Leia was intent on the discussions, though Han noticed that each time a provocative statement was offered, she looked not at Saxan or Pellaeon but at the chief adviser of whichever politician was receiving the statement.
Luke was serene, almost in a meditative state. No—Han corrected himself. Luke was calm, but not serene. There was still the faint shadow of anxiety to his manner. This whole situation with the “man who didn’t exist” obviously continued to worry him.
It troubled Han, too. Luke could see things Han couldn’t. If there were things that Luke couldn’t see, it was likely that no living being in the galaxy could see them.
Except … Han’s attention fell on his son. Jacen was, like Leia, earnestly following the discussion, but he also occasionally turned away from the talk at hand to stare in some direction that always seemed random. Han supposed that Jacen, with his training in diverse and unusual aspects of the Force, was looking in directions no one else felt the need to.
Perhaps he could see things even Luke couldn’t.
Han resolved to talk to his son later.
This first meeting between Pellaeon and Saxan went on for four hours. Eventually, the two diplomats agreed to retire for the evening and resume their talks in the morning, station time.
The delegates and their advisers discovered that they were all quartered on a single passageway of Narsacc Habitat, where the rooms commanded the best view of stars and the moon Ronay. The passageway was named the Kallebarth Way. At each end of its 275-meter run, and at any point a cross-corridor intersected it, a security station had been installed.
The Galactic Alliance delegation was assigned the spinward end of the passageway, having won the right to the slightly more desirable quarters by virtue of the GA having paid for this conference. The Corellian delegation was quartered at the far end. The Jedi accommodations were in the middle. Numerous suites lay unoccupied in the areas between the delegation quarters. The passageways immediately above and below Kallebarth Way were sealed off, all the suites there locked down, in an effort to keep saboteurs from assaulting the delegations from either vertical direction.
Still awake a couple of hours after the breakup of the first meeting, Han sat on a couch facing the Solo suite’s largest viewport, a huge expanse of radiation-shielded transparisteel, fifteen meters long and five high. At the moment it was oriented out to space, but the starfield was slightly marred by the presence of the GA frigate Firethorn, guaranteeing safety, only a kilometer out. The frigate was not stationary; it paced the occupied edge of Narsacc Habitat and so was, from Han’s perspective, fixed in place outside the viewport.
“I think we have the exact center suite,” Han commented. “Accident or design?”
“Design,” Leia said. She was sitting in a chair two paces closer to the viewport than Han’s couch. “Even though Luke’s the Master of the order, the two of us are supposed to be the most neutral of all the parties present—except for Toryaz Station Security—because of our, um, unique circumstances. So we’re smack in the middle.”
Han shrugged. “Still, nice view.” He turned his attention to Jacen, seated at the other end of the couch. “So?”
His son looked thoughtful. “I don’t like this stuff about a ‘man who doesn’t exist.’ ”
“Neither do I,” Han said. “Neither does your mother.”
“Maybe, but I suspect we don’t like it for different reasons.” Jacen gave Leia an apologetic look. “Ever since Dad started talking about it, I’ve been looking. Sensing. Peering into the future and the past, to the extent I can.”
Leia nodded. “And?”
“And nothing. I don’t see, or feel, any trace of something like that.” He frowned. “There’s the faintest touch of a female presence that feels antagonistic, malevolent. It has some flavor of the Force with it. But it’s so faint that it doesn’t have to pertain to the here and now. It could be a leftover from years or decades ago. It could be pre-Imperial.”
“Could it be a Force-user who’s here now, and using arts to diminish her presence?” Leia asked.
Jacen nodded. “Maybe.”
“Then why couldn’t it be Luke’s ‘man who doesn’t exist,’ using those same arts to impart a different gender feeling, perhaps to throw Luke off?”
Jacen smiled. “Mom, that doesn’t make any sense. First, if I could detect the presence Uncle Luke is feeling, then I would probably detect it the same way, at least initially. If it’s a man to him, it should be a man to me. Second, and I think this is very important, why hasn’t Luke mentioned this female presence I noticed? Did he not detect it all, or has he dismissed it because it’s not as strong or as in-your-face as his ‘man who doesn’t exist’?” He took a deep breath. “Mom, I think Uncle Luke is dismissing a lot of information and premonitions he may be getting, simply because they don’t match with what he believes. He didn’t think much of my suggestion that the Corellians wouldn’t roll over as quickly as the GA said they would, and look what happened. Now he has a pet theory about some shadowy enemy, and nothing else seems to be getting through to him.”
“I know he hasn’t studied every esoteric Force discipline you have,” Leia said, “but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong. His opinions shouldn’t be disregarded.”
“Neither should mine.” Jacen’s tone was sharper than he intended. He softened it for his next words. “I didn’t mean to sound angry—”
“You are angry,” his mother said.
“Maybe. But my point is still worth listening to. Uncle Luke had to carry the burden of the survival of the entire Jedi order all by himself for years. He’s faced pressures that no Jedi in history has endured. After forty years of doing this, he may be burning out.”
“I doubt it,” Leia said. “Jacen, the way he’s lived his life, the way he’s learned about the Force, that’s one path to knowledge. Yours is a different one. Do you really think yours is better?”
“With apologies, Mom—yes, I do. I think Uncle Luke is closed off to some avenues of learning, and it may mean there are things he’ll never be able to see.”
“All the same,” Han said, “keep you
r eyes open for strangers. Ignoring warnings is a good way to get dead.”
Jacen grinned. “We agree on that.”
chapter nineteen
Two levels above Kallebarth Way and toward the habitat center, in an auxiliary security command compartment normally occupied only in times of emergency, Captain Siron Tawaler scanned a series of readout boards, looking for trouble.
The leftmost board showed him the station’s external tracking sensors, indicating every ship, piece of debris, or asteroid larger than a groundspeeder within several thousand kilometers of the station’s position. On the screen, numerous green-for-friendly blips dotted space.
The next board showed a much closer view; only Toryaz Station appeared there. On it, a green blip moved with considerable delicacy among the spokes that connected the station to its satellite habitats.
The third screen on that bank showed an almost identical view, but did not show the green blip. It was this view that command crew on the bridge would be seeing, this view that was being recorded in the station’s files.
The rightmost screen showred a diagram of the station’s layout, each section colored by alert status. Everything was in the green except for one belt of yellow, Kallebarth Way, the yellow indicating its heightened state of security.
Tawaler felt rather than heard his companion lean over his shoulder, and was for once not startled when she spoke. Her voice was, as ever, quiet and silky: “I am always amazed at the initiative security officers show in ensuring that they can peer through every set of holocam lenses on a ship, pry into every confidential computer file, and access every ship’s function … even when they’re not supposed to.”
A comment like that would normally have made Tawaler feel defensive, but here it seemed soothing. Tawaler chanced a glance over his shoulder.
The woman who stood there was a beauty—tall, slender, and aristocratic, her dark eyes intelligent. She wore colorful but cumbersome robes in the latest Kuati style, and she did so with a grace that began with a lack of self-consciousness.
