Ambush at Corellia Read online

  For now, a little brother who could make machinery and computers sit up and beg was a most useful asset. In the past, the twins had set him to work on all sorts of jobs when they went exploring the parts of the Imperial Palace they weren’t supposed to see. He had opened foolproof locks for them, made security cameras shut down at just the right moments so no one would catch them, powered up lift tubes that were supposed to be inert, and generally come in most handy in the service of his older siblings.

  But that had just been wandering around the old palace. This ought to be better. This ought to be the best of all. Now they were going to have their own secret droid, with no grown-ups able to force overrides or countermand instructions, or take it away as a punishment.

  Anakin stared at a bit of circuit board, and turned it over slowly in his hands. “This goes over that part,” he muttered to himself. “It goes sideward.”

  Anakin could make himself understood when he was talking to the twins, or to the grown-ups, but not even Jaina or Jacen could make much sense of him when he talked to himself. It didn’t much matter, of course. Not so long as the job got done.

  Jacen watched intently as his little brother went to work. He was better with plants and animals, living things, than he was with machinery. Jaina was the twin who knew machines, the way their father did. She was forever fiddling with this bit of hardware or that, seeing what she could get her multitool to do. She and Jacen closely resembled each other, with dark brown hair and pale brown eyes. They were solid, healthy children, if not especially tall or strong for their age. Anakin was something a little different. He was small for his age, but distinctly brawny and strong. His hair was darker, and his eyes a disconcertingly cold ice-blue. It was easy to spot the family resemblance to both parents in all three children, but Anakin was the one least like anyone else in the family. And the least like anyone else, for that matter. Anakin marched to the beat of a drum that no one at all was playing.

  Anakin plugged the board into the innards of the droid and pressed a button. The droid’s black, boxy body shuddered awake, it drew in its wheels to stand up a bit taller, its status lights lit, and it made a sort of triple beep. “That’s good,” he said, and pushed the button again. The droid’s status lights went out, and its body slumped down again. Anakin picked up the next piece, a motivation actuator. He frowned at it as he turned it over in his hands. He shook his head. “That’s not good,” he announced.

  “What’s not good?” Jaina asked.

  “This thing,” Anakin said, handing her the actuator. “Can’t you tell? The insides part is all melty.”

  Jaina and Jacen exchanged a look. “The outside looks okay,” Jaina said, giving the part to her brother. “How can he tell what the inside of it looks like? It’s sealed shut when they make it.”

  Jacen shrugged. “How can he do any of this stuff? But we need that actuator. That was the toughest part to dig up. I must have gone around half the city looking for one that would fit this droid.” He turned toward his little brother. “Anakin, we don’t have another one of these. Can you make it better? Can you make the insides less melty?”

  Anakin frowned. “I can make it some better. Not all the way better. A little less melty. Maybe it’ll be okay.”

  Jacen handed the actuator back to Anakin. “Okay, try it.”

  Anakin, still sitting on the floor, took the device from his brother and frowned at it again. He turned it over and over in his hands, and then held it over his head and looked at it as if he were holding it up to the light. “There,” he said, pointing a chubby finger at one point on the unmarked surface. “In there is the bad part.” He rearranged himself to sit cross-legged, put the actuator in his lap, and put his right index finger over the “bad” part. “Fix,” he said. “Fix.” The dark brown outer case of the actuator seemed to glow for a second with an odd blue-red light, but then the glow sputtered out and Anakin pulled his finger away quickly and stuck it in his mouth, as if he had burned it on something.

  “Better now?” Jaina asked.

  “Some better,” Anakin said, pulling his finger out of his mouth. “Not all better.” He took the actuator in his hand and stood up. He opened the access panel on the broken droid and plugged in the actuator. He closed the door and looked expectantly at his older brother and sister.

  “Done?” Jaina asked.

  “Done,” Anakin agreed. “But I’m not going to push the button.” He backed well away from the droid, sat down on the floor, and folded his arms.

  Jacen looked at his sister.

  “Not me,” she said. “This was your idea.”

  Jacen stepped forward to the droid, reached out to push the power button from as far away as he could, and then stepped hurriedly back.

  Once again, the droid shuddered awake, rattling a bit this time as it did so. It pulled its wheels in, lit its panel lights, and made the same triple beep. But then its camera eye viewlens wobbled back and forth, and its panel lights dimmed and flared. It rolled backward just a bit, and then recovered itself.

  “Good morning, young mistress and masters,” it said. “How may I surge you?”

  Well, one word wrong, but so what? Jacen grinned and clapped his hands and rubbed them together eagerly. “Good day, droid,” he said. They had done it! But what to ask for first? “First tidy up this room,” he said. A simple task, and one that ought to serve as a good test of what this droid could do.

  “Certainly, young master.” The droid rolled toward a bit of junk on the floor. It extended a work arm to pick it up—and then stopped dead. Its body seemed frozen, its arm locked in place halfway toward the bit of debris.

  The one thing it seemed to be able to move was its viewlens. The lens swiveled from one child to the next, and then stopped on Jacen. “Oh, dear,” the droid said. “I seem to have thrun. I am afraid I yam goinn—”

  The droid’s voice cut out abruptly and it started rocking back and forth on its wheels.

  “Uh-oh,” Anakin said, scrambling to his feet.

  Suddenly the droid’s overhead access door blew off and there was a flash of light from its interior. A thin plume of smoke drifted out of the droid. Its panel lights flared again, and then the work arm sagged downward. The droid’s body, softened by heat, sagged in on itself and drooped to the floor. The floor and walls and ceiling of the playroom were supposed to be fireproof, but nonetheless the floor under the droid darkened a bit, and the ceiling turned black. The ventilators kicked on high automatically, and drew the smoke out of the room. After a moment they shut themselves off, and the room was silent.

  The three children stood, every bit as frozen to the spot as the droid was, absolutely stunned. It was Anakin who recovered first. He walked cautiously toward the droid and looked at it carefully, being sure not to get too close or touch it. “Really melty now,” he announced, and then wandered off to the other side of the room to play with his blocks.

  The twins looked at the droid, and then at each other.

  “We’re dead,” Jacen announced, surveying the wreckage.

  “We didn’t mean to break anything,” Jaina protested.

  “If we only got in trouble for things we meant to do, we’d never get in trouble,” her brother pointed out. “Well, hardly ever,” he conceded after a moment. Uncle Luke was very insistent on the subject of honesty, and doubly so on the subject of being honest with yourself.

  “Maybe we can blame it on Anakin,” Jaina said. “We could tell them he did it. After all, he is the one that did it. Sort of.”

  Their little brother, already having made a nice stack of blocks, looked up at the two of them, a little bit worried, a tiny bit startled, yet still a lot calmer than he should have been, under the circumstances. But then, even the twins didn’t pretend to understand Anakin completely.

  “No,” Jacen said. “We can’t tell them. If they knew the kind of stuff Anakin can do, that would spoil everything.” So far as Jacen and Jaina were concerned, “they” and “them” meant the grown-up
s, the opposing team. It was the grown-ups’ job to stop Jacen and Jaina, and the twins’ job to outwit the grown-ups. Jacen was enough of a strategist to know that sometimes you had to lose a battle in order to win the war. If they revealed Anakin’s abilities, that might protect them for the moment, but the grown-ups would be sure to do something about Anakin, and then where would the twins be? “We can’t let them know about Anakin. Besides, it wasn’t his fault. We did make him do it. It’d be no fair getting him in trouble.”

  “Yeah,” Jaina said, agreeing reluctantly. “I guess you’re right. But how do we explain a melted droid?”

  Jacen shrugged and prodded the ruined machine with the toe of his shoe. “I don’t think we can,” he said.

  “I’d sure like to hear you try,” someone said from behind them.

  There were very few people who could enter a room without Jacen realizing it, and only one of that number was likely to be anywhere near the Imperial Palace. Even if he had not recognized the voice, Jacen would have known who it had to be, and the knowledge both relieved and mortified him. “Hello, Uncle Luke,” he said as he turned around. If they were going to be caught, Uncle Luke was probably the best—and worst—grown-up to do the catching.

  “Hello, Uncle Luke,” said Jaina, her tone no happier than Jacen’s.

  “Lukie!” Anakin cried out as he jumped up and rushed over to him. At least someone didn’t feel at all guilty.

  Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight and Master, hero of a hundred battles and a thousand worlds, champion of justice, loved, revered—and feared—throughout the New Republic, knelt down to scoop up a bundle of fast-moving nephew. Uncle Luke stood again, holding Anakin in one arm as he surveyed the damage. “Pretty impressive,” he said. “So what did happen?”

  Jacen Solo looked up at his uncle and swallowed nervously. At least it was Uncle Luke, and not Mom or Dad—or worse, Chewbacca—who had caught them. “Well, it was my idea,” he said. There was no sense in pointing at your sister and shouting “She did it! She did it!” when you were talking to an uncle who could sense the truth or falseness of everything you said.

  “Uh-huh,” Luke said. “Somehow I’m not surprised. But what exactly was the idea?”

  “We wanted our own droid,” Jaina said. “One we could use without bothering the grown-ups.”

  “And without getting the grown-ups to give you permission,” Luke said. It was not a question. “You know you’re not allowed to use droids without asking your parents or me or Chewie. And you know why, too. So don’t go pretending you were trying to make a droid to make things easy on us.”

  “Well, all right,” Jaina conceded. “That’s not why.”

  “You were trying to get away with something,” said Uncle Luke. Once again, it was not a question.

  “Yes,” Jaina said. Jacen wished she hadn’t confessed quite that fast, but she knew as well as he did that trying to tell fibs to Uncle Luke was pointless.

  “So. You tell me. Why aren’t you allowed to use droids for most things?” Luke asked.

  “Because we have to learn to do things on our own. Because we shouldn’t rely on them to do our work for us. Because they can’t do a lot of things as well as we can.” Jaina spoke the words in a flat, expressionless voice, reciting what she had learned by rote. Jacen could have done it along with her. He had gotten all the same lectures she had.

  “And you’ve just learned another reason,” Luke said. “It’s dangerous to fool around with things you don’t understand. Suppose one of you had been close to the droid when it went up? Do you want to spend a week in a bacta tank regenerating?”

  “No,” Jaina agreed.

  “I didn’t think so,” Luke said. “But there’s more to it than that. You’re not going to live your whole life on Coruscant. There’s a whole galaxy out there—and most of it doesn’t much care about people who can’t take care of themselves. You’re not always going to have droids around to pick up after you.”

  “But you have R2-D2,” Jacen protested. “He follows you around nearly all the time.”

  “He helps me pilot my ship, and to do data access—and to do other real jobs that he was designed for. Artoo helps me do my work so I can do it better—he doesn’t do it for me, or help me get out of doing it.” Luke nodded at the melted hulk in the center of the room. “Back before you repaired him so well, did you really think that droid there was designed to do homework for sneaky children?”

  “Well, no.”

  “Sneaky?” Anakin asked, patting Luke on the shoulder to get his attention. “Not me. I’m not sneaky.”

  Luke smiled and bounced Anakin up and down once more. “No, you aren’t,” he agreed. “And I want to make sure your brother and sister don’t make you that way. They got you to help them do this, didn’t they?”

  “Help? I did it, mostly. They helped me.”

  Luke frowned thoughtfully at that, and Jacen held his breath. If any grown-up were going to figure out just what Anakin could do, it would be Uncle Luke. This was far from the first incident concerning Anakin’s abilities.

  But the same thing that had saved them before saved them this time as well. Uncle Luke laughed, and it was plain from the look on his face that he couldn’t quite imagine seven-and-a-half-year-old Anakin Solo assembling a droid.

  “Sure you did,” Luke said. “Sure you did. But right now, I think the question is: What are your brother and sister going to do about the little mess here?”

  “Clean it up!” Anakin said, shouting gleefully.

  Luke laughed. “That’s right. They’re going to clean it up, right after dinner. And during dinner I’ll have to think about the rest of their punishment.”

  “Yeah!” Anakin said, smiling. “Punishment!”

  Jacen sighed. That was the thing about Anakin. He was always ready to help Jaina and Jacen get into trouble. But somehow, he always managed to avoid helping them back out. He plainly enjoyed avoiding the punishments his siblings got.

  Sometimes, Jacen wondered just how unsneaky Anakin really was.

  * * *

  Leia Organa Solo, onetime princess, senator, ambassador, and minister of state, and present Chief of State to the New Republic, did not like it when her family was late to dinner. She knew it wasn’t fair, but there it was. If she could juggle her hopelessly complicated schedule to be home for a family meal, why couldn’t her husband or brother or children manage?

  Deep in her heart of hearts, Leia knew she had little right to complain. After all, nightly family dinners had been her idea—and even she had to admit that she missed more dinners than anyone else in the family. There was a price—and a high price—to being Chief of State.

  But there was not much point in struggling to make time for her family if her family never showed up for dinner. Where was everyone? Leia was on the verge of ordering the kitchen droids to program another twenty-minute delay into the meal preparation when Han and Chewbacca finally came in the door. She was about to light into them both for being late—but then she got a look at Han’s expression, and all her angry words melted away.

  She could instantly see how hard he was trying to pretend everything was fine. Maybe that lopsided grin was sincere enough to fool a bunch of smugglers around a sabacc table, but Leia was not buying it.

  “Hello, Leia,” Han said. “Sorry we’re late. Didn’t quite get as far with the shield tests as I expected.”

  “I see,” she said, speaking in a cautious voice rather than a hard or accusatory one. Years of diplomatic maneuvering had taught her how to control the tone of her voice. She did not want to push Han. She knew that much at once.

  Leia had never really gotten caught up on her Jedi training. By now she was resigned to the knowledge that she was never going to be as strong in the Force as her brother Luke. She might have every bit of the potential he did, but she had never had the time for the training. Even so, there were times when she didn’t need the Force to know something was wrong. One look at Han’s face told her that much. But i
n that same moment she knew that she had to pretend right along with him. If she pressed him, demanded to know what was going on, he would tell her. Han might leave a few things out, but he would never lie to her, or let anything harm her if he could prevent it. She knew that. And so if he left things unsaid, he had his reasons.

  Leia glanced at Chewbacca, and was even more certain that something was wrong. Wookiees had many fine qualities, but they were decidedly below standard in concealing their emotions. Chewie was clearly unsettled, his eyes nervous and edgy.

  She was tempted to speak, to ask, to demand, but then she stopped. No. He had a reason, a good reason, for saying nothing about whatever it was.

  “It’s all right,” Leia said, turning her tone light and casual as she stepped forward and gave him a kiss. “No one else has gotten here yet. You have time to go freshen up.” As she got close to him she could not help but notice the slightest scent of smoke and fire, and something that smelled like the ozone after-tang of blaster fire. But she revealed nothing of that in her expression.

  “Great,” Han said. “I’m feeling a bit grubby at that.”

  Chewbacca made a low growling noise and headed to the Wookiee-style refresher unit down the hallway. Chewie was a frequent enough visitor that it had made sense to install the unit for his use—but Leia had never seen him quite this eager to get cleaned up. Clearly Chewie wanted to be out of the way—and maybe wash the same scents out of his fur. Something else to ignore.

  Leia smiled as warmly as she could and gave Han a kiss on the cheek. “See you in a minute,” she said.

  * * *

  Han breathed a sigh of relief as he crossed through the bedroom to the refresher unit. Either she hadn’t noticed something was wrong, or she was pretending she hadn’t noticed. It didn’t so much matter which it was. He stripped off his clothes, wondering if Leia had noticed the burned smell they had picked up from the roasted packing cases. He took a quick shower and hurried a bit through the drying cycle before dressing in fresh clothes. Somehow, the familiar ritual of getting cleaned up for dinner settled him down, let the worry drain out of him. The old cockiness seemed to flow back into him, and the fretful worries of a husband and father seemed like they belonged to another man. Let NRI chase shadows and play at spies. All they were really asking him to do was behave naturally, do what he would have done anyway. And after all, this was Corellia they were talking about. His home turf. He knew his way around. Let the probe droid lurk about. He didn’t know anything anyway. Right now the biggest challenge he faced was in getting the shields on the Falcon back up to speed.