Ambush at Corellia Read online

  Amazing how getting cleaned up could improve your whole outlook. Everything was going to be fine.

  Han headed back out to the living room and settled himself down in his favorite chair just as Chewie emerged from the refresher. Chewie gestured at the chair and gave Han a derisive little burbling noise.

  “All right, so I’m getting a little soft. Is there some grand crime in liking a comfortable chair?”

  Chewie didn’t answer—but Han could not help notice that the Wookiee declined to take a seat himself. Han grinned and shook his head. Even after all these years, he was never quite sure what the Wookiee would decide to get competitive about.

  Leia came back into the room. “I told the kitchen droids to go ahead and get dinner on the table. They can reheat it for the kids. Maybe a dinner or two of overcooked food will teach them to get here on time.”

  Han was about to reply when he heard the apartment’s outer door opening. “Looks like they’re in just under the wire,” he said. He could hear youthful voices and a bit of giggling and the sound of small feet, but it was not his children who appeared at the living-room entrance, it was his brother-in-law. Han had clean forgotten that Luke was eating with them tonight.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Luke said as he came in. “I walked in on the kids trying to burn down the palace again. We had to have a little talk. I sent them to go wash up.”

  “What was it this time? Anything we need to know about?” Leia asked.

  Luke hesitated before he answered. “We’ve already sorted out a punishment. If I tell you, you might feel obligated to reopen negotiations—”

  “And that might end up getting us all a worse deal,” Leia said. “All right. Tell me in a day or two, once the dust has settled.”

  Han, sitting back in his favorite chair, couldn’t help but smile. Leia and Luke’s side of the family might be the high-and-mighty, important one, all strong in the Force and busy in politics, but it was obvious that his children took after him. So what if that did mean the little monsters were a constant source of aggravation?

  It seemed as if none of his children were happy unless they were a hairbreadth from some sort of disaster. He had lost count of the times they had “experimented” with their uncle Luke’s lightsaber. Rules did not set limits for the children of Han Solo—they represented challenges. Han smiled, thinking back on a few moments from his own childhood. It pleased him no end to see so much of himself in his children.

  The twins, Jacen and Jaina, were more overt troublemakers than Anakin would ever be. Anakin was a dreamier child, seemingly off in his own little world, but that was deceptive. He was capable of causing at least as much damage as the other two put together. It was just that Anakin never seemed to notice the chaos he caused—while the twins absolutely reveled in it.

  At that moment the children came tumbling into the room, the twins just a little ahead of Anakin.

  “Come on,” Han said as he stood up. “Let’s go in to dinner.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Family

  Pharnis Gleasry, agent of the Human League, sat in his hidden bunker, deep in the bowels of Coruscant, and checked his detectors one more time. He came up with nothing once again. The probe droid had vanished utterly, and was not responding to any call codes.

  Pharnis fretted to himself, knowing just how costly and difficult it could be to get probe droids, even obsolete ones. Yes, you expected to lose a certain amount of equipment. That was part of the fortunes of war. But he could not imagine the Hidden Leader would be exactly pleased to learn the droid had vanished.

  But still, the droid’s task had been secondary. The real task—of getting to Skywalker—was yet to come. Everything had been carefully timed, the sequence of events worked out most precisely. The Hidden Leader’s plan afforded only a narrow window of time for Pharnis. It would have to be after the moment Organa Solo took off for Corellia and before the planned demonstration. If he delivered the message too soon, Organa Solo could elude the trap. If he delivered the message too late, all of the Hidden Leader’s other plans might well fall apart.

  It was a grave responsibility. And truth to tell, Pharnis had not felt completely up to it even before the loss of the probe droid.

  * * *

  It was not a happy meal, Jaina thought. There was something in the air, something unsettled and nervous. Jaina was not as good as Jacen at sensing such things, but it seemed to her that, somehow, her father was at the center of it. Something was going on with him, something that got Mom upset, and even had Chewbacca a little edgy.

  Jaina wanted to ask what was wrong, but thought better of it. If the grown-ups wanted to pretend everything was fine, she could do the same thing, even if she did not know what the problem was.

  Besides, there was another question preying on her mind, one occasioned by the droid they had just blown up. They had built it to get out of doing work they didn’t want to do, work that the grown-ups didn’t let droids do for the kids. But suppose even the regular droids weren’t around? She and Jacen would get stuck doing even more chores. What if the droids weren’t coming on the trip?

  “Dad? Are we taking R2-D2 and C-3PO to Corellia?” Jaina asked as she stabbed at another bite of food.

  Her father sighed, gave her mother a meaningful glance, and got the slightest of nods in return. Jaina knew what that meant: Mom was on his side with this one. She instantly regretted having raised the question. Bad tactical error. There was always the chance of getting around Mom or Dad, but she should have known there was no hope at all when they presented a united front.

  “We’ve been through this a dozen times,” Han said. “One, you kids are getting way too dependent on the droids to take care of you. Two, there won’t really be room for them on the Falcon. Three, I don’t like having droids around in general. Four, I especially don’t like them on my ship. I don’t carry them if I don’t have to.”

  “But—”

  Han pointed a warning finger at Jaina and cut her off. “And five, I’m your father, and that’s final.”

  “I should think now was not exactly the moment for you kids to be asking for more droid favors,” Uncle Luke said, nodding his head almost imperceptibly toward the compartment down the hall with the melted results of their failed experiment in it. “I was going to talk about the other matter with your parents later, but now you’ve raised the subject. Of course, if you really want me to discuss it with them here and now—”

  “No, no, that’s fine,” Jacen said in hurried tones. “No need to bother. The droids aren’t coming. Fine. Fine.”

  Jaina gave her twin brother a dirty look. Just like him to retreat like that. But still, what else could he do? The grown-ups had won this round, and no doubt. Even so, there was still a little part of her that couldn’t go down without a fight. She was still a little mad and embarrassed about being caught by Uncle Luke. The temptation to stir things up on another front was irresistible. “Maybe there’d be room for the droids if we didn’t have to take the dumb old Falcon,” Jaina half mumbled, glaring at her plate.

  There was a moment of utter silence around the table, and Jaina knew, even as the last words were leaving her mouth, just how big a mistake she had just made. She looked up to see everyone, even little Anakin, staring at her. She stole a glance at her twin brother and saw him shaking his head at her in mute exasperation.

  “You know how much that ship means to your father,” her mother said, using the coldly reasonable tone of voice that was somehow worse than the loudest yelling. “You also know that the Falcon has saved the lives of half the people around this table, some of them many times over. And I know you know that we know you know. So I can only assume you said something that spiteful and insulting with the deliberate intent of being disrespectful to your father. Am I correct?”

  Jaina opened her mouth to deny it all—but then she caught Uncle Luke’s eye, and knew there was no point to it. For that matter, her mother had the same skills in truth sensing as Uncle
Luke. That would be the one facet of her abilities in the Force that her mother would have practiced. Life would have been a lot easier if she could fib to her parents the way other kids could. But as it was, there really wasn’t any point. “You’re correct,” Jaina said, not quite able to keep a sulky tone out of her voice.

  “In that case, I think it is just about time for you to go to your room, young lady.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing,” Han said. That did it for Jaina. There was no point in fighting against her father when he used that tone of voice. She got up from the table and stalked to the room she shared with her brothers, still pouting and annoyed at them all—even though she knew, deep in her heart of hearts, that it was all her own fault.

  That was the other problem with all this Jedi business. You couldn’t even tell fibs to yourself.

  * * *

  The rest of the meal did not go much better after Jaina was sent to bed, Leia thought. There was sort of a chain reaction whenever they punished one of the twins. The other twin would get edgy, and ask to be excused, so as to slip away to commiserate with the prisoner. Then Anakin would notice something was wrong and want to go see what was up. Send one child away, and all three would be gone from the table in ten minutes. Usually the adults managed to have a pleasant meal afterward by themselves, and enjoyed the peace and quiet. Not tonight. Han was relentlessly pretending everything was fine, Chewie was being even less convincing, and Luke was doing his best to go along with the charade.

  “Looking forward to the trip to Corellia?” Luke asked, plainly trying to make conversation.

  “Hmm? Oh, yeah. Absolutely,” Han replied. “It’s going to be great. Wish you could come along.”

  “It’s tempting,” Luke said. “But I promised Lando that I’d help him with some sort of secret project of his.”

  “Yeah, he mentioned something about that,” Han said. “Any hint about what it might be?”

  Luke shook his head. “Not a word. Just that it might take a few weeks.”

  “Well, I can’t wait to see what he’s gotten himself into this time.”

  “Me neither,” Luke said. “Oh, Leia, by the way, speaking of secrets, I’m supposed to have a meeting with Mon Mothma tomorrow evening. She wouldn’t tell me what she wanted, either. Nothing but classified missions for me, I guess.”

  Han gave Luke a strange look, and had to force a smile. “Yeah, real hush-hush stuff,” he said.

  At last Leia couldn’t stand it anymore. “Excuse me,” she said. “I really have some work I have to do tonight.” She got up from the table, not really caring how lame the excuse sounded, and hurried along to her study. She closed the door and slapped the override on the light control before the automatics could brighten the room too much. She edged the lights up just a trifle from minimum. Let it stay dim in here.

  Of course, the sad part was that work wasn’t actually an excuse. There was always some bottomless pit of work, no matter how much she delegated. Leia let out a sigh and crossed to her desk. The desk light turned itself on, a shaft of light bright and clear, and she left it that way. She sat in the darkness, on the edge of a pool of light, and found that she could not bring herself to deal with even one of the vital documents that covered her desk.

  Why should such a tiny dinnertime scuffle upset her so much? She knew that most of it was the underlying tension at the table, but there was more to it than that. There were times, and this was one of them, when, for no clear reason at all, the whole idea of motherhood, of the job of molding her children into civilized humans, seemed suddenly terrifying.

  She saw now just how much of her childhood had been spent being told to be quiet and not to fidget during state dinners, being constantly handed off to nannies and guardians when her father was too busy. She had had far more meals with the droids and servants than with Bail Organa. And what childhood she did have had not lasted very long. She had still been in her teens when she found herself getting pulled deeper and deeper into politics. It had been a real accomplishment to become a senator as young as she had—but the accomplishment was purchased by surrendering the last of her childhood, the last of her innocence. Only now, as she looked at the world through her children’s eyes, did she realize just how steep a price that had been.

  Han never did say much about his own childhood, or about much of anything concerning his life before leaving Corellia. Luke had come the closest of any of them to having a normal upbringing. He had been raised on Tatooine, thinking a farm couple, Owen and Beru Lars, were his aunt and uncle. But his early life had been just as isolated as Leia’s, in its own way. A moisture farm must have been a pretty lonely place for a child to grow up on, even in normal circumstances—and circumstances had been far from normal.

  Owen and Beru had posed as Luke’s uncle and aunt. As best Leia understood, they had been kind to Luke, but in a distant sort of way. There had never been the closeness, the warmth, Leia wanted for her own children.

  It didn’t escape Leia’s notice that neither she nor her brother had actually been adopted by the people who raised them. Circumstances had required a certain degree of subterfuge, of well-intended deception, of careful distance for everyone’s protection. Foster daughter and purported nephew were the closest ties Leia and Luke could claim.

  There was another piece of knowledge, guilty knowledge, that gnawed at Leia’s conscience, and, she had no doubt, at Luke’s as well. Each had been the unwitting, unwilling agent of death for the people who had raised them. The planet of Alderaan was chosen as a fit target for destruction by the Death Star in large part because it was Leia’s home, and Owen and Beru had been killed by Imperial stormtroopers as they searched for the droids Luke had.

  With all that baggage to carry around, it was scarcely surprising that Leia was determined that her family would be a family, and not just a collection of strangers who happened to share some ancestors. Nor was it ever far from her mind that the children of powerful or prominent families often found themselves as players—or worse, pawns—in complicated power struggles. Even if her children were not going to inherit her office or her powers, they were still the next generation of what came close to being the Republic’s royal family.

  Like it or not, intended or not, her children were, in effect, the second generation of a dynasty. It did not take much imagination to see the dangers in that. The temptations of power and wealth could be strong. Suppose that, somehow, they proved stronger than family ties?

  Suppose, twenty years from now, Anakin were plotting to gain some advantage over Jacen? Suppose some untrustworthy adviser urged Jacen to push his brother and sister out of the way of some glittering prize? It seemed impossible—but history was littered with such tales.

  But there was more, and worse. That her children were strong in the Force was, beyond doubt, a great gift. But it was also a great danger. It was never far from Leia’s mind that Darth Vader, her father, her children’s grandfather, had likewise been strong in the Force—and had been destroyed by the dark side. The day would dawn, no doubt, when each of her children would have to face the dark side. The very idea terrified Leia. It made her fear that they might someday bicker with each other over money or power seem utterly trivial.

  Every little outburst of childhood surliness, every momentary black mood, every childish temptation to tell an obvious fib, scared her to death. It was illogical, irrational, but she could never stop herself from wondering if this bit of childish naughtiness or that bit of youthful bad judgment was really a child succumbing to some temptation of the dark side of the Force.

  In theory, that was not supposed to be possible. Jedi lore held that childish innocence was a bulwark against the dark side. But Jedi lore also held it all but unheard of for any child to display the ability and strength in the Force that her children exhibited.

  The dangers were great, but it seemed to her there was but one defense against both dangers, a defense so commonplace that it almost seemed absurd that it could t
riumph over such mighty forces, but there it was. The best she could do was to raise her children well.

  Leia Organa Solo was bound and determined that her children would reach adulthood with their characters strong and firm and honest, their family ties solid, with love in their hearts for each other. If that meant being strict with her children, or sending Jaina to bed straight from dinner, or refusing them droid servants, then so be it.

  Leia propped her elbows up on the desk and rubbed her eyes. She was just too tired, that was all. A minor dinnertime squabble should not induce this much worry. It would be good to get away, take a rest. It was a fine idea of Han’s for them all to go to Corellia for a family vacation before the trade conference.

  It would be wonderful to have some peace and quiet.

  * * *

  “Brilliant move tonight, Jaina,” said Jacen as he got into his bed and pulled the covers up.

  “I didn’t mean to do it,” Jaina replied as she got into her own bed on the other side of the room. “Room, lights-to-sleep mode,” she said.

  The lights lowered, with the only illumination coming from the dim night-light in Anakin’s adjoining alcove. The three children could have had their own rooms, of course, and had even tried that arrangement at times, but had soon discovered they were too used to being together. The present arrangement of one big shared room, with Anakin just slightly off to one side, suited everyone best. Besides, they were going to be a bit crowded on the Falcon. They might as well get used to it.