Ambush at Corellia Read online

  Neither of them spoke, and the room was quiet for a moment. The twins could hear Anakin’s gentle, rhythmic breathing. Their little brother was already asleep.

  Jacen found himself in a thoughtful mood as he stared up at the darkened ceiling. “Aren’t you being kind of easy on yourself?”

  “What do you mean?” Jaina asked.

  “You didn’t mean it, so it doesn’t count,” he said. “It’s not what you mean to do that matters. It’s what you actually do.” That sounded a little preachy, especially considering that he had been tempted to use the didn’t-mean-it defense himself a couple of hours before. But it seemed to Jacen that being tempted and not doing whatever it was counted for something. “Anyway, you did mean to cause trouble, and you know it.”

  “Now you’re starting to sound like Uncle Luke,” Jaina said.

  “I could do worse,” Jacen said, noting that his sister hadn’t denied the charge of deliberate troublemaking. “Uncle Luke is pretty smart. But if it’s any help, I don’t think it was all your fault tonight. They were already upset before we came in.”

  “Yeah,” Jaina agreed. “They were all worked up over something.”

  “And everyone was making believe there was nothing going on,” Jacen said.

  “Including us,” Jaina pointed out. “We didn’t say anything either, and we could tell. The only one who wasn’t pretending was Anakin.”

  “Don’t forget, he let Uncle Luke think he didn’t have anything to do with the droid,” Jaina said. “He’s the best actor of all of us. We knew Anakin was the one that built the droid, and we still couldn’t tell if he was pretending with Uncle Luke. Maybe Anakin was putting us on, or maybe he didn’t even know what he did.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” Jacen said. But Anakin was an old, familiar mystery. They were used to the fact that he was incomprehensible. “So what do you think is wrong?” Jacen asked as he stared up into the cool, quiet dark. “With the grown-ups, I mean.”

  “No idea,” Jaina said. Her sheets rustled as she turned over on her side. “But my guess is that Dad knows something he doesn’t want to tell Mom or Uncle Luke.”

  Jacen turned toward her as well and propped his head up on his hand. He could just make her out in the dim light. She was facing him, mirroring his own pose. “Do you think it’s a real big deal?” he asked her. “Or just some dumb politics thing that doesn’t really matter?”

  “I don’t know. But whatever it is has something to do with us. Mom and Dad never act that weird unless they’re worried about us three little darlings.”

  “That’s for sure,” Jacen agreed. “They sure do worry.”

  Jaina chuckled softly as she turned over on her other side to go to sleep. “Come on, Jacen,” she said, her voice a bit muffled by the pillow. “If you were our parents, wouldn’t you worry?”

  Jacen rolled back onto his back and stared at the ceiling. He had to admit that she had a point.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Dangers of Peace

  In deep space, far from any inhabited system, a small, solitary star hung in the firmament. It had no name, but only a code number, a string of digits to identify it on the celestial charts. Star Number TD-10036-EM-1271 had no planets to speak of, only a few debris belts that had never coalesced into worlds of any size. It had no resources that were not available someplace else, and was not of any particular aesthetic or scientific importance. In short, there was no good reason for anyone to bother with it—and no one did.

  There were quite literally billions of stars like it in the galaxy, and it was of a size and age and type as well understood as any. Any astrophysicist worth his or her or its salt anywhere in the New Republic would have been able to make several very basic measurements of that star, and report back immediately on its age, the course of its development, and the pattern of its future evolution.

  And all of the astrophysicists would have been wrong.

  Many light-years away, hidden deep in the Corellian System, a secret team of technicians and researchers was seeing to that. They had been working for a long time, but soon their efforts would bear fruit. Soon the energies of their machines would reach across the stars.

  Soon they would change everything.

  * * *

  Luke drew himself up and took a deep breath before he pressed the door annunciator at Mon Mothma’s quarters. He had learned to respect many beings in the galaxy over the years, but Mon Mothma held a special place in his esteem. Perhaps it was because of her seeming ordinariness, her quiet, backstage approach to things.

  People who had not been paying attention might easily think that she had played, at best, a rather minor role in recent galactic history. She had commanded no fleets, fought no battles. She had no strange powers, or mysterious past, or remarkable talent.

  She was nothing more, and nothing less, than a brave, intelligent, ordinary human being, a human being who had pressed and prodded the Rebel Alliance into being. More than any other single person, she had created the New Republic itself.

  If that did not rate respect, even from a Jedi Master, Luke did not know what did. He pressed the annunciator and the door slid silently open. Mon Mothma stood just inside the entrance. She nodded to him and smiled. “Greetings, Jedi Master. Welcome to my home. Please come in.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Luke said. It seemed to him that “ma’am” wasn’t much of a way to address a person of such importance, but Mon Mothma had never been much for titles or honorifics.

  Luke stepped inside, and looked about with interest. He had, of course, known Mon Mothma for years, but he had been in her home only a handful of times.

  Mon Mothma’s current quarters resembled the woman herself—quiet, unassuming, yet with an air of steady confidence. There was little furniture, but every piece was finely crafted, graceful and yet sturdy, everything perfectly matched to everything else, in muted shades of ivory and white. The room gave the appearance of being larger than it actually was. No doubt that was at least in part an effect of simple contrasts. Most homes of the high-ranking families of Coruscant were cluttered with bric-a-brac, gaudy souvenirs and collectibles from every world of the New Republic. It was something of a relief to find a home that did not resemble a crowded and badly organized museum.

  “I am pleased you could come and visit me, Jedi Master,” Mon Mothma said.

  Why in space was she, of all people, addressing him by his most formal title? “I am pleased to come,” Luke replied.

  “I am glad,” Mon Mothma said. “Please take a seat.”

  Luke sat down in a severe-looking stiff-backed chair, and was surprised to find that it was much more comfortable than it looked. He did not speak. His host was capable of speaking her mind without prompting from him.

  Mon Mothma took a seat opposite Luke and looked at him with an appraising eye. “Tell me of your current circumstances, Jedi Master.”

  Luke was taken aback by the question. Then he realized it was no question at all, but a command. After all, why should she ask when she knew the answer as well as he did? She was the former Chief of State. She had access to all sorts of information, and had always followed Luke’s career with particular interest. “Well, ma’am, as you know, the Jedi academy is now well established. I still visit from time to time there, but the students are progressing well and the first class has reached the point where they should be learning on their own, and, indeed, some now spend as much time teaching the second and third class as they do learning.”

  “So you are not needed there.”

  “Not full-time, no. To be there too much at this stage would be to distract from the process of learning.”

  “So it goes deeper than your not being needed. You choose to stay away so you will not interfere.”

  It was not the most diplomatic way of expressing the thought, but it was true enough. “That is one way to put it, yes.”

  “So what are you doing with yourself?”

  Luke shifted in his seat, and fo
und that it now seemed far less comfortable than it had before. He had not expected this sort of interrogation. But even if the questions were awkward, a Jedi spoke the truth. And even if the questions were a bit more intrusive than was polite, even a non-Jedi would find it hard to lie—or even shade the truth—when looking Mon Mothma straight in the eye. “I find that I have not been doing a great deal,” Luke said.

  “No grand crusades? No desperate battles or heroic missions?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Luke said, starting to feel a bit annoyed. Revered figure or not, she had no right to be so rude to him.

  “Of course not,” she said. “We’re at peace.” She smiled and laughed in a tired sort of way. “That’s the problem with peace,” she said. “No crisis. No trouble. No adventure. Which means there’s not much need for people who are good at dealing with crisis and trouble. There’s just no call for adventurers these days. Or for revolutionaries either. Do you know, Jedi Master, that I haven’t been doing a great deal myself in recent days?”

  There really didn’t seem much Luke could say in reply to that, and Mon Mothma didn’t seem to be expecting an answer anyway. He kept silent.

  “You are wise to say nothing, Jedi Master,” Mon Mothma said. “You have no idea why I have called you here, or what the point of all this uncalled-for rudeness could be. Well, I shall tell you.” She stood up and crossed the room to the opacified window. She touched the controls and the window turned transparent.

  Coruscant’s sun was setting in a glory of reds and yellows that lit up the sky. A spacecraft heading for orbit streaked up through the blaze of light, and reached for the night. “Perhaps I had them put my quarters on the wrong side of the building,” she said. “Every day I see the sunset, but never the sunrise. The symbolism is a bit too much for me at times. Every day I look out this window and am reminded that my day is over. I know that I have done good, that I have left my mark on the galaxy. I know that it is even possible that I will be of service someday in the future. Yet I cannot imagine that the future will offer up any challenges like the ones I confronted in the past. Praise be for that, but it leaves me at loose ends. It is—unsettling—to have my life’s work ended before my life is. Do you ever feel that way?”

  Luke could think of nothing to say. Mon Mothma turned away from the window and looked toward him. “If you do feel that way, it must be harder for you than for me. My day is past,” she said again, “but I am an old woman. At my time of life, I find that, at least at times, I welcome the prospect of peace, of quiet, of leisure and privacy. The restlessness, the urgency of youth have burned themselves away, and I can enjoy my life as it is.”

  Mon Mothma looked directly into his eyes. “But what of you?” she asked. “What of the Jedi Master? I fear I know the answer.”

  “And what is the answer?” Luke asked.

  “That your life’s work is indeed done as well,” Mon Mothma said. “You have fought your wars. You have saved countless lives, liberated any number of worlds, fought great battles. You have restored the Jedi Knights. Now all that work is done and yet you are a young man still.

  “You grew up in wartime, and the wars are over. History tells us that peacetime is often not very easy for warriors. They don’t fit in. In plain words, Luke Skywalker, what will you do now?”

  “I don’t know,” Luke said. “There are things I could do, but—well, maybe the reason I’ve been at loose ends for a while is just that I’ve been trying to find things to keep busy. Things I could do. Not things that I wanted to do, or things that needed to be done.” His protest sounded hollow.

  Mon Mothma nodded thoughtfully. “That all sounds very familiar,” she said. “But that is the problem. What could compare with what we have done in the past, you and I?”

  “I don’t know,” Luke said. “It sounds like you might have some ideas, though.”

  “Well, it does strike me that another member of your family has faced the same problem,” said Mon Mothma. “That person seems to have dealt with it.”

  “I’d say that Han is more at loose ends than I am,” Luke said. “I don’t think I want to look to him for an example.”

  “It was not Han that I was thinking of. But just in passing, I wouldn’t worry about him. He might be having a quiet spell for the moment, but somehow I don’t think the universe is likely to leave him alone for long.”

  “That’s true enough, I suppose.”

  “I was thinking of another member of your family who also faced the same situation, the same transition from war to peace. She did rather well for herself.”

  Luke frowned thoughtfully. “Leia? I hadn’t even thought of her.”

  “My point exactly,” Mon Mothma said.

  “But it’s different for Leia,” Luke said. “She was doing the same sort of diplomatic and political work she’s doing now even before the war. And after the war, she just kept going on with it until—”

  Mon Mothma smiled. “Until she got my job. I was glad to let the work go, of course, but there are times I miss it. And I might add that it’s a job that suits Leia.”

  “I don’t know that it’s the sort of job that would suit me, if that’s what you’re getting at. I’m just not good at that sort of thing. I don’t think I’d like it.”

  “Leia shows few signs of enjoying her work—but she is good at it. Probably better than I was. But tell me—what sort of a Jedi is Leia?” Mon Mothma asked, changing the subject again with startling abruptness.

  Luke looked up in surprise. Once again, Mon Mothma surely knew the answer as well as he did. But he could tell she was not looking for a pat answer. She wanted Luke to hear himself answer. “She has the innate skills, the inborn talent,” he said carefully. “That much is obvious. But there has always been some other demand on her time, that prevented her from pursuing a course of dedicated instruction. That has cost her part of her potential. Even so, if she applied herself, starting now, and studied full-time, she could, in time, have very close to my degree of ability.”

  “But at present she has nowhere near your level of skill in the ways of the Force,” Mon Mothma said. “She has not made the most of her gifts.”

  “She has not yet made the most of them. She still could,” Luke said, with a bit more passion than he had intended. “If she gave up all the other demands on her time, and studied the ways of the Force, she could develop her skills tremendously.”

  “Do you see any chance of that happening?”

  Luke shook his head slowly. “No,” he said. “She has made her choices already. Her career in politics put too many demands on her. Besides which, she has three children to raise.”

  “Yet it has always been a regret to her—and to you—that she has not developed her skills more. And if I am not mistaken, the issue has been the cause of gentle and repeated reproaches from you?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Do you find it upsetting that your sister has great gifts and has not developed them? That she has not made use of them? Do you find it something close to a scandalous waste?”

  Luke raised his head and looked Mon Mothma straight in the eyes. The truth. That was what she wanted to get—and, he realized, what he wanted to give. The truth, solid and clear. “Yes,” he said in a slow, firm voice. “Yes, I do.”

  “Then, Luke Skywalker, I suggest you consider the fact that some mirrors reflect both ways,” Suddenly there was nothing remotely gentle or subdued about her voice or her manner.

  “Excuse me, ma’am?” Luke asked. It occurred to him that he had had difficulty reading Mon Mothma’s emotions since he had come in here. Her calm manner had hidden a subject about which she felt great passion. “I don’t understand.”

  “I have heard it time and time again, from all sorts of people,” she said, somewhat testily. “How the two of you are twins, how you each inherited the same potential, but only one of you made use of it, while the other chose to do something else, something less. People say what a shame it is. And always it is Leia O
rgana Solo, the Chief of State of the Republic, that they talk about that way. The Chief of State, and they whisper that she has not done enough with herself!”

  “What’s your point?” Luke asked, feeling his temper starting to flare.

  “My point is that I think it is long past time for you to consider that Luke Skywalker made some choices as well. It is long past time to reflect on the fact that you have talents and potential you have never developed.”

  “For instance?” Luke said.

  “If Leia has potential in the Force because you, her brother, have shown you do, does it not follow that you have potential in other areas because Leia, your sister, has shown she does? She has become a leader, a stateswoman, a politician, a spouse, and a parent. She is building the New Republic even as she is raising a new generation of Jedi.

  “Let us look in the mirror again,” Mon Mothma said. “The Republic is in need of a new generation of political leadership. I don’t know whether you realize it or not, but it is all but inevitable that you will enter politics, whether you like it or not.”

  “Me?” Luke asked. “But I’m—”

  “A hero of the Rebellion. You’re famous throughout the Republic, and on hundreds of worlds outside it. The various powers-that-be will not be able to resist someone as well known, or as well liked, or well respected, as yourself. You will be an inevitable focal point of political maneuvering in the years to come.”

  “But I’m a Jedi Knight,” Luke protested. “A Jedi Master. I can’t go into politics. Besides, I don’t want to.”

  Mon Mothma smiled. “How much of your life so far has consisted of what you wanted to do? But let’s talk about the Jedi, what I most wanted to talk with you about. What are the Jedi to become?”

  “I’m sorry,” Luke said. “I don’t understand what you mean.” It seemed to him that the whole conversation had been little more than riddles of one sort or another. If the Jedi were the most important thing on her agenda, why had she waited until now to bring them up? As for her question, the Jedi were—Jedi. What else would they be?