The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  They spun, they struck, the impacts of their lightsabers causing flares of light to cast the walls and floors behind them into greater darkness. On and on they fought, their loss giving them strength, until—

  Jacen cut Luke down. Sometimes it was a blow across the shoulder, down into the chest. Sometimes it was a slash, too fast to see, across the throat that sent the older man’s head from his shoulders. Sometimes it was a thrust to the stomach, followed by minutes of agony, Luke writhing in a futile struggle for life while Jacen, tears running down his cheeks, knelt nearby.

  Luke died.

  Luke died.

  “No,” Jacen whispered. He summoned himself back to the here and now.

  Nelani and Lumiya were walking away. The younger woman held the older by the shoulder, guiding her.

  Jacen lit his lightsaber and struck. Nelani jumped away, but the glowing blade merely parted the cuffs that held Lumiya’s hands together behind her back.

  Both women looked at him.

  “She remains free,” Jacen told Nelani. “If you take her …” He could not say the rest of the words. Luke dies. And I kill him.

  There was more to it than that. For a moment, he was drawn back into the streams of probability that led him into the future.

  Nelani could leave without her prisoner. She would return home to Lorrd and tell all to her superiors. To Luke.

  Jacen cut Luke down. Luke died.

  Nelani could be persuaded not to tell. She would rethink her promise later and break it, telling all to Luke.

  Jacen cut Luke down. Luke died.

  Only in the time streams where Nelani fell, never to rise, did Luke remain on his feet, in command, alive. Other tragedies, shadowy and indistinct, swirled around him, but he lived.

  Jacen returned again to the present. The truth of what he had just experienced through the Force numbed him.

  But it was the truth, and he had to be strong enough to face it.

  Lumiya knew it, or had some sense of it. There were tears on her cheeks to match the ones he felt on his own. “There is this about being Sith,” she told him. “We strengthen ourselves through sacrifice.”

  Jacen nodded, grudging acceptance of that fact. “Yes.”

  Nelani looked at him, and beyond him, into his intent.

  With a noise that was half moan, she turned and fled.

  Jacen raced after her.

  RELLIDIR, TRALUS

  More missiles poured into the downtown area that had surrounded the Center for the Performing Arts. The spotter droids on the ground didn’t direct them to the crater that had been the Galactic Alliance beachhead. Instead, they sent the missiles toward enemies in the skies—the starfighters of the Galactic Alliance.

  Han rose toward one of them, the X-wing whose transponder signaled TRAGOF1103, Tralus Ground Occupation Forces Number 1103, on frequency 22NF07.

  His progress was not easy, fast, or safe. The skies were still cluttered with Galactic Alliance starfighters, and a surprising number of them seemed intent on shooting him down. They dived at him and rose toward him, firing lasers; a vengeful interceptor pilot even tried to ram him, a tactic that would have constituted suicide had Han not sideslipped and allowed the tiny, high-speed fighter to roar through the space he had just occupied.

  Han’s intent was simple: get close enough to his daughter that missiles chasing her would abort, would turn away to find new targets.

  In the few moments he had to watch her, moments when he wasn’t ducking incoming laserfire, he saw that she was doing pretty well on her own. Her X-wing, moving higher and higher in the sky, dipped and fluttered, firing its own lasers at Corellian attack fighters and Vigilance Interceptors. Those starfighters tended to veer away, smoking, or detonate, leaving oddly peaceful and colorful clouds in the sky.

  Missiles roared toward her from the front; she sideslipped and they missed, or fired her lasers and they detonated, eliminating the missiles around them in an explosive act of fratricide. Missiles roared toward her from the side, the back; she eluded them, now rising, now dipping, an indestructible leaf caught in a speed-of-sound wind, and the missiles shot past.

  Sometimes another X-wing rode at her wing, supporting her tactics with movements that were eerie in their instantaneous adjustment, in their perfect complementarities.

  Once a trio of missiles roaring toward her from the starboard side detonated two hundred meters from her X-wing for no reason Han could see. Had they hit shrapnel? Had Jaina destroyed them with a flip of her hand and a Force technique? Han didn’t know.

  He did realize two things. The first was that as fast as he climbed, as fast as he could afford to climb while being pestered by enemy pilots, she was rising faster. The second was a more painful realization, which settled on him like a weighted net wrapping itself around a tired swimmer:

  She didn’t need him.

  She was a brilliant pilot with a brilliant wingman. She was older than Han had been when he’d pitted the Millennium Falcon against pilots from the first Death Star, and was more experienced. Part Han, part Leia, and all herself, she dominated the air around her.

  Mixed in his heart were pride and pain in the discovery that she had outgrown him.

  Green laserfire flashed from the vicinity of his starboard hull and an incoming Howlrunner exploded. Snapped back to the here and now, Han looked to starboard and port, realized that he was flanked by two attack fighters on either side, and almost jumped out of his seat.

  But they were green on his sensor board—friendlies.

  Wedge’s voice was in his ears and Han realized it had been there for some time. “What was that, uh, One?”

  “We have escorts out of the combat zone,” Wedge said. “You should be picking yours up now.”

  “They’re here.”

  “We have to leave the zone, Two. The enemy still has numerical superiority, and we’re not in fighters. Also, I think the really nimble X-wing up top is your daughter. It would be a karking shame to be shot down by your own daughter, wouldn’t it?”

  Han laughed. It was a brittle noise. “It sure would. All right, lead me out of here. Speaking of daughters, I need to talk to you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Later, back at base.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Across long minutes, the battle over Rellidir moved farther and farther away from downtown. The incoming missiles were spent against the Center for the Performing Arts, against starfighters too slow or luckless to elude them, against each other when a random detonation would claim an entire flight of them.

  Syal kept her attention on the skies beyond her viewport. She ached all over and could taste blood in her mouth. “How’s it look?” she asked.

  Zueb, kneeling in his chair, facing backward, pulled his hands and face out of the mess of dislodged circuits and wiring he’d been working with. He gave her a noncommittal look. “Not good.”

  “Will we make orbit?”

  “Orbit, yes.” The Sullustan shrugged. “But no hull integrity. Blow up a balloon and let it go to fly around, venting air? That’s us.”

  “Plug our suits in for direct atmosphere and power for heating. We’ll put up with a few minutes of cold.”

  “Yes, boss.” Zueb fiddled around behind their seats, plugging both their flights into power and air suppliers, then turned around and settled into his chair. He uttered a bark of pain. “Oww. Think I have no spine left.”

  “You had one to begin with?”

  “Not nice.” Zueb strapped in.

  Syal brought the engines up. They whined, unnaturally loud, the noise strained and wrong, but the diagnostics board indicated that they were supplying power to the thrusters. Gently, slowly, Syal lifted off, pointed the Aleph’s battered nose away from the portions of the sky where combat was still thick, and accelerated.

  “We lost this one,” she said.

  “You did great.”

  “I’m a great loser.”

  “I fly with great loser any day. Al
so, Lieutenant Baradis thinks you’re really good looking.”

  “What?”

  “Said so in mess yesterday.”

  “You’re trying to take my mind off all this.”

  “Yes. Am doing a good job?”

  “No.” She frowned. “Baradis, huh?”

  “Don’t see it myself. Human heads too tiny to be good looking.”

  She grinned. “Shut up.”

  STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL

  Nelani ran with the speed of a trained athlete, but as soon as she passed beyond the cavern where Darth Vectivus’s house stood and where the artificial gravity generator operated, her gait became inefficient, her leaps too long—she didn’t have Jacen’s experience with low gravity.

  He began to catch up to her.

  She bounded up along the rails, toward the surface habitat, her lightsaber giving her enough light to see the cross-rungs where she needed to place her feet.

  Jacen saw spots of blood on some of those rungs, evidence of the injury Lumiya’s whip had inflicted on her.

  The rails rose through a gap in the cavern ceiling, and beyond that point Jacen could no longer see Nelani. He left his own lightsaber on but closed his eyes, seeking her with his Force-senses—

  And there she was, hurtling toward him in the leg-forward posture of a vicious side kick.

  Not looking in her direction, he twisted aside and swatted at her with his lightsaber. He put no strength behind his blow; he didn’t need to. The blade caught her on the inner thigh, slicing through cloth and skin and muscle. She shrieked, flew past him, hit the stony surface of this cavern floor, and rolled, in the curious way that low gravity mandated, to a halt.

  He bounced toward her, slow, sure, and predatory.

  When he reached her, she was sitting, unable to stand, her now lit lightsaber in her right hand, her right leg, now useless, beneath her. He could see part of the wound, black with cauterized flesh and blood. She looked up, the pain on her face made more stark by the glaring brightness of both their blades.

  “Jacen, don’t do this,” she said.

  “You don’t understand what’s at stake.”

  “I’m not concerned with living or dying,” she told him. “I surrendered my fate to the Force when I joined the order. It’s you. If you do this, you’ll become something bad. Something destructive.”

  “A Sith.”

  “No. Call it whatever you want to. What do you call someone who kills without needing to? Someone who joins sides with evil because of a well-reasoned argument?”

  He stood there and looked at her, and was battered by emotions—his, hers, lingering dark side energies from thousands of years before. Her health and beauty, which had been marred and which he would mar further. Her despair and disillusionment, which were almost palpable energies, scarring his nerves like sanding surfaces.

  A deep sorrow settled across him, sorrow at the tragedy being perpetrated. In Nelani’s myriad futures he could dimly glimpse good and kind acts, love, perhaps family and children. He was about to cut through the connective tissues between Nelani and those futures, and he could feel the pain of that cut. In a way, the sensation was almost comforting, reminding him that he was still possessed of human emotion, of human values.

  “Nelani,” he said, “I’m sorry. You’re … a deflector that would send the future spinning into tragedy. And you’re too young, too weak to understand it, to correct it.”

  “Jacen—”

  He struck, a slash that turned into a twirl binding her blade. The maneuver disarmed her, leaving her arm untouched but spinning her lightsaber off into the darkness.

  He struck again, a surgical thrust that entered the precise center of her breastbone, emerged from her spine.

  Jacen pulled the lightsaber free. Nelani slumped to the side, and he felt her begin to vanish into the Force.

  Until she finished her slow fall and her head lolled against the stone, her eyes did not leave his.

  chapter thirty-four

  CORELLIAN SPACE, ABOVE TRALUS

  Leia watched the status boards as they provided updates on the situation at Rellidir.

  Headquarters shields down. Headquarters destroyed. Tralus citizens spilling into the streets, sniping on GA ground occupation forces with hand blasters, hunting blasters.

  Corellian capital ships and hyperdrive-equipped starfighters dropping out of hyperspace on the far side of Tralus, joining the furball in the skies above Rellidir, swelling its numbers even as the GA retaliated with more and more starfighter squadron launches.

  Covert messages from Han relayed in tight-burst data packets; they arrived from his datapad through a sophisticated comlink currently glued to the bottom of a mouse droid scurrying around somewhere in the vicinity of the bridge. Those messages reported Han alive, Jaina alive, Wedge alive, the Antilles girl alive.

  Withdrawal command from Dodonna. The GA squadrons obeyed, disengaging where and when they could, some of them staying behind for last-minute exchanges with the gloating Corellians.

  Leia was called back to the bridge, where she rejoined Admiral Limpan on the walkway. Together they watched Dodonna’s complement of surviving starfighters line up for landings in the ship’s hangar bays.

  “We could have held on here,” Admiral Limpan said. “By throwing more and more forces into the mix. And yet that would have been counterproductive. Making peace harder to achieve. We didn’t, we won’t … but that makes this conclusion a scripted one. The men and women who died, young and brave, did so for a predestined conclusion.”

  Leia nodded in silent agreement.

  “It feels not like a victory, or even like a loss. It feels like dancing to someone else’s tune.”

  “The GA isn’t playing it,” Leia said.

  “Nor the Corellians.” The admiral shrugged. “Perhaps it’s random chance. I believe in randomness; I see it often. But one can never think of it as friendly. It never has our best interests at heart.” She turned her attention to Leia. “Colonel Moyan says your tactical recommendations were very well reasoned, very helpful. Though he was surprised to find them a bit conservative, considering your reputation.”

  Leia shrugged. “We get older, perhaps we get more protective of those we lead. If I’m more conservative, that’s why.”

  “Of course. Will you be returning to Coruscant or Corellia?”

  “Corellia, for now. Where I can conservatively argue for peace while the warmakers are strutting around, crowing about their victory.”

  “I’ll arrange for a starfighter escort for your shuttle.”

  Leia shook her head. “No one’s going to fire upon an unarmed shuttle. This isn’t like the Yuuzhan Vong war, fought in mindless savagery. Both sides … are us.”

  “For now.” Even on the admiral’s Duros features, considered expressionless by human standards, Leia could detect sorrow, pessimism. “In my experience, it doesn’t take long for ‘us’ to become ‘them.’ And when that happens, every savagery becomes possible.”

  “True.”

  The admiral returned her attention to the viewports. “May the Force be with you, Princess.”

  “And also with you, Admiral.”

  On the shuttle flight back to Corellia, Leia sat wrapped in something like sorrow, and for the first few minutes of the flight she could not understand where it came from, what it meant. Her family had survived.

  Then the answer came to her. Her family had survived—but she hadn’t, in a sense. She’d turned into something else for a while. In protecting her husband and daughter, she’d lied and deceived, not even as any politician must, but as a conscienceless manipulator of others. Anyone finding out the truth about her activities could use them as leverage against her, weakening her, perhaps disillusioning others about her.

  She tried to think of what she wouldn’t have done to protect Han and Jaina. If she’d had access to a self-destruct code that would annihilate any pilot getting too close to them, would she have used it? If she’d been ab
le to swap transponder codes so that friends seemed like enemies, causing the GA forces to shoot one another out of the skies wholesale, sacrificing a hundred or a thousand lives for one she loved, would she have done so? Would she sacrifice the peace they were so desperately seeking, would she send whole populations to war with one another, to keep her loved ones safe?

  She didn’t know, for the answer was mixed within her, and she wasn’t exactly the same person she’d been half an hour before. But there was enough yes to it that it worried her, caused her to imagine what she would become if all her answers were in the affirmative.

  That was what attachment was, she decided, the kind of attachment the Jedi had traditionally worked to avoid. It was sacrificing lives that were not hers to preserve her own happiness.

  In the future, she would willingly give up her life to preserve that of Han, or her children, or Luke and his family … but she would not give up a life she did not have the right to sacrifice.

  She could not keep Han alive forever, nor herself. Someday he would die, or she would. That was life. She would do whatever she could to keep it from happening—whatever she could short of evil.

  Making that decision was like plunging a blade of transparisteel into her heart, breaking it off so the tip remained within her.

  But it was the right choice.

  When the pilot finally announced “Entering Corellia atmosphere” over the shuttle’s speakers, Leia was at peace. She was not happy—she could almost feel her heart’s blood dripping from her wherever she walked, pooling beneath her wherever she sat—but she was serene.

  STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL

  “You’ll give her appropriate rites?” Jacen asked.

  Lumiya nodded. “She was a noble warrior. I will treat her as such.”

  They stood together in the large air lock adjacent to the hangar bay where Jacen’s shuttle waited. The docking tube was pressurized and coupled to the shuttle’s side. Ben, unconscious, was aboard, strapped onto a seat with his lightsaber once again hooked to his belt.