Ambush at Corellia Read online

  “All right,” Mon Mothma said. “Let me put it another way. In the years to come, as the Jedi grow from a handful of students into an order of thousands of Knights, will they set themselves up as an elite priesthood or as a band of champions? Are they to be cut off from the people by privilege and mystique, answerable to themselves alone? Or will they act in the service of the people, be intimately bound to the people? Will they be part of the people, the citizenry, or outside them?”

  Luke had never considered the question in quite that way before. “It’s obvious what answer you want,” he said, “but I think it’s the answer I would choose no matter what. It seems to me that an order of Jedi that isolated itself from the population would be a very dangerous thing indeed. It would be very easy to forget the ways of ordinary folk if you never experienced the things they did.”

  “Precisely,” Mon Mothma said. “I believe, and believe strongly, that the Republic needs Jedi that get their hands dirty, that are part of the Republic’s daily life. Jedi that live in ivory towers might be more dangerous than no Jedi at all. You need look no further than our very recent history to see that it has been the Dark Jedi that have sought isolation. To be a Jedi of the Light, a Jedi must be one with the people. There must be a Jedi on every planet, a Jedi in every city—not a few planets full of Jedi and nothing else. There must be Jedi doing what ordinary folk do, Jedi who are ordinary folk. There must be Jedi doctors and judges and soldiers and pilots—and politicians.”

  “And you believe that my path will guide me into politics,” Luke said.

  “Yes. If for no other reason than because it is your duty to set an example—and you have always been a slave to duty. If you wander off to brood on a hilltop somewhere, your followers will head off to find their own hills to brood on. If you are out in the world, so, too, will they follow that example.”

  “I see your point,” Luke conceded, none too happily. Setting a good example was a laudable reason for most things, but it was not one that made the heart beat fast with excitement. But Mon Mothma had a point—excitement was going to be in short supply for a while—and for the general population, that was, perhaps, no bad thing. “Do you really think I’ll get pulled that deeply into politics?”

  “I certainly have no way to see into the future,” she said. “I cannot see your path. But people will look for leaders, and I believe they will look to you.”

  “I suppose it is possible,” Luke conceded.

  “It is highly probable. Probable enough that you should consider the situation in advance.”

  “But I’ve never been interested in power,” Luke said. “I’m not going to wake up one morning and decide to run for office.”

  “No, of course not. But that is not how it will happen. Someone—I don’t know who, or when, or how many, or why—will come to you, seeking not a leader but a champion. Someone who will ask you to take up their cause, speak on their behalf, fight for their rights. You are not interested in power—but could you resist a call for help?”

  “No,” Luke said, something half-regretful in his voice. Mon Mothma was right. It was exactly the sort of approach he would find impossible to resist. “No, if someone put it that way, of course I’d have to say yes.”

  “And sooner or later someone will put it that way. The question then is, will you become a real leader or just a figurehead.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Luke said.

  “Will you be a figurehead?” Mon Mothma asked again. “Will you know the craft of leadership, of negotiating when you should and of making difficult decisions when you must? Or will you be full of good intentions but ill trained and ill prepared to function in the world of politics, so that others must guide and control—and manipulate—you? If you are to be a real leader for the people, you must prepare for the job, just as you prepared to be a Jedi. You must undergo the training that Leia underwent while you were learning your Jedi skills.”

  There was an unmistakable hint of reproach in her tone, if not in her words. Leia was learning by doing the boring, necessary drudge work while you were out having exciting adventures. She did not say it, but Luke got the message. “There’s been a little more to what I’ve done than fun and games,” he said.

  “Yes, of course. You have, beyond question, served the Republic well, even heroically. But history moves on. Times change. Tomorrow’s galaxy will demand new and different things of us. It is time that you found ways to act as a leader, a negotiator, a spokesman for those with no voice. You will be a guide or a commander or a mentor. Now comes the day of the people marching together. Will you be at the head of the parade?”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Luke said, though he didn’t feel very convinced. “But even if I wanted to do what you say, there wouldn’t be much I could do about it. Not much is going on.”

  “Yes,” Mon Mothma said, smiling again. “Very few opportunities for dynamic leadership are presenting themselves at the moment. That’s what happens in peacetime. In a way, peace is the whole problem.”

  “How could peace be a problem?” Luke asked.

  “Please, don’t get me wrong,” Mon Mothma said. “War is a terrible business, and I hope it never comes again. But there are ways in which war is simple and clear as peace rarely is.

  “In war, the enemy is clear, and he is outside your group. All of your friends and allies must come together for survival. In peacetime, there is no enemy. There are merely people who vote against you on this issue, and side with you on that proposal.

  “We fought the Empire in the name of liberty and justice. But now our task is to make liberty and justice real. We are now seeking to correct wrongs that would have seemed trivial in the old days. There was no time to worry about the fine points of fair legislation when we were about to get our throats cut.

  “Peacetime is complicated, murky. We could win the war by blowing up a Death Star or two—but we can only win the peace by building new space stations, new houses, new cities. That is not a question of largess or generosity. If we do not rebuild, there will be new unrest, new disturbances, and new war. In peacetime, you cannot win by destroying, but only by building—and it is always far easier to destroy. That is quite literally a law of nature.

  “Rebuilding is slow, painstaking work, unsuited to a warrior’s mentality. That is the real problem, for people like you and me. We became addicted to the thrills, the challenges, of war, and now they are gone. There are those who will be tempted to stir up trouble just for the sake of having some excitement.”

  “I doubt that is so, Mon Mothma,” said Luke. “There will always be perils and challenges. The universe is a dangerous place. And I also don’t know that I am addicted to such things. I could live the rest of my life quite happily if no one ever tried to kill me again.”

  “Perhaps you are right, Luke Skywalker. But even if no task now calls out for you to serve as leader—be ready for such a chance when it comes. Seize it, learn by it. Be not just a Jedi, not even just a Jedi Master—but a Jedi leader.”

  “I will consider your words,” Luke said, standing up and preparing to take his leave.

  “That is all that I hoped for,” she said. “But there is one other matter in which I hope you will indulge an old woman.”

  “And what might that be?” Luke asked, a bit warily.

  “You are to meet with Lando Calrissian,” she said. “He is going to ask you to assist in a—project—of his.”

  “Yes,” Luke said, wondering, not for the first time, where she got her information. “That is so. But I do not yet know what the project is.”

  “Ah,” Mon Mothma said, smiling one more time. “I thought you might not. It just so happens that I do know what he is up to. It is an unusual sort of project for Lando to undertake, but it does have that grandiose element to it.”

  “And you wish me to talk him out of it.”

  “On the contrary, I would like you to offer him every assistance. That it is grandiose does not make it ill advised. No. Help
your friend. I believe that in doing so, you will do yourself great good as well.”

  It was not until sometime later, when he was out the door, that Luke realized that he hadn’t quite managed to ask what she had meant by that.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Rough Welcome

  Lieutenant Belindi Kalenda hesitated a moment before she activated the cargo transport’s lightspeed engines. The little ship hung in the dark between the stars, its navigation checks complete, all systems ready for the final stage of the journey to Corellia. Once she fired up the engines, she was committed, with no way back, no way out. That shouldn’t have bothered her quite so much, but she knew what was going on in the Corellian System—at least she knew as much as anyone from the outside did.

  She was flying a small, nondescript freighter, very carefully chosen by NRI to fit her profile of a slightly down-on-her-luck trader. She carried a varied cargo from a half-dozen worlds, and the ship’s logs had been expertly manipulated to show that she had indeed been to all those places. Bits of litter in the trash matched her previous ports of call. The air filters even contained stray hairs and bits of shed skin and carapace, all of which matched the various intelligent species of the worlds to which she had allegedly been.

  But the thing that got her most nervous was the deliberate flaw in the lightspeed engines. The remodulating buffer heat sink was just about to go. The NRI technicians assured her that it would function for exactly one more start-up, and then be blown by the heatpulse at shutdown. In short, her hyperdrive would die just as she arrived in-system. They would not be able to throw her out of the system, and they would more or less have to allow her to land and get to the central repair facility, where, by all accounts, it took weeks, or even months, to get anything repaired, unless a bribe changed hands. And Kalenda would just barely have enough to pay the standard repair costs—if she managed to sell her cargo.

  In short, she was going to be stranded for an indefinite period of time the moment she hit the Corellian System, hoping that the role of a cargo pilot having a run of bad luck would be convincing enough to let her escape detection.

  Kalenda sincerely wished that she could wait to go in until after Solo and his family had arrived to serve as a diversion. But that was not to be. No one could make the two operations dovetail like that, for the very simple reason that no one else in NRI even knew about Solo. She had been doing a bit of freelancing there. It would be better for all if no one—and she meant no one—knew about that plan. If one thing was plainly clear from all the things that had gone wrong recently, it was that somehow someone in the Corellian System had done a very good job of penetrating NRI.

  If she had cleared the Solo-as-diversion plan with her superiors, the odds would have been strong that the Corellian opposition—whoever that was—would have learned about it already, and the whole plan would have been wrecked before it got started.

  Besides which, she had at least managed to give Solo some sort of warning that something was wrong. It would keep him on top of things, make sure he watched out for his children. They needed some sort of protection. Leia Organa Solo had insisted that her family travel together, alone, before the trade summit. Once the official part of the trip got under way, the Chief of State’s security detail would have a free hand. Until such time, they were on their own—giving the NRI plenty to sweat about.

  Speaking of being on top of things, it was past time to get her own little operation started.

  But had it been compromised? There was the question. If talking to Solo had been a bit of freelance enterprise, then setting up Kalenda’s attempted infiltration had been a one-hundred-percent standard-issue NRI operation. NRI prided itself on meticulous planning and team effort. Normally that was all to the good, but every member added to the prep team increased the odds that the Corellian source would have found something out.

  Kalenda wished she could change her coordinates for arrival in-system, but she knew that was impossible. The Corellian Defense Forces Space Service had a well-earned reputation for jumpiness as it was. If she arrived from hyperspace outside the authorized entry coordinates, they would go absolutely wild. At best, she would attract a hell of a lot of unwanted attention for herself. At worst, she would get blown out of the sky.

  Maybe, just maybe, the fact that she had dawdled a bit and was going to arrive a few hours late would throw off any hypothetical Space Service border guards. Maybe they would think she wasn’t coming after all, and would give up and go home. Or maybe she was just giving them time to get into position for the intercept.

  There was nothing more she could do but activate the navicomputer, make the jump to light speed, and hope to luck. Kalenda swallowed hard, flexed her hand a time or two, and pressed the button.

  She watched through the freight’s forward viewport as the stars flared off into starlines and her ship leaped into the unknown and unknowable darkness of hyperspace. She let off a sigh of relief as the last of the stars winked out of existence behind her. She was safe, at least for the moment.

  Unfortunately, her departure point was only a light-year out from the Corellian System, and she was not going to stay safely hidden for long. She spent the short ride worrying about all the things that could go wrong on her mission—or at least some of them. She would have needed a lot more time to get through the whole list.

  All too soon the navicomputer beeped its get-ready warning. Kalenda settled herself in the pilot’s chair and wrapped her hands around the controls. This was it. The navicomputer finished its countdown and dropped her back into normal space.

  The universe flared back into existence around her spacecraft. Kalenda saw Corell, Corellia’s sun, right where it ought to be. She checked her navigation displays and confirmed her position. Good. Good. Right in the middle of the authorized approach lane, nicely on course for Corellia itself.

  Maybe she was going to pull this off after all. All she had to do was play her assigned role and everything would be fine. Speaking of which, it was time to contact Corellian Traffic Control.

  She switched on the com system and punched in the proper frequency. “Corellian Traffic Control, this is Freighter PBY-1457, on approach to Corellia. Requesting landing and berthing instructions and permission—”

  Wham! Something slammed her forward in her restraint harness, and her freighter shuddered from a massive impact. Kalenda lunged for the flight controls. It couldn’t be the buffer heat sink blowing already. The techs had promised it would be at least half an hour before it went. It had to be—

  Wham! Another hit. That was no internal explosion. Someone was shooting at her. Even before she had completed the thought, she had flipped her freighter into a barrel roll and taken it into a dive straight for the planet.

  There was a flare of light off her port bow as the next shot went wide. She punched up a view from the rear external camera on her cabin display and risked a peek at it even as she jinked her freighter sideways to dodge the next shot. A Pocket Patrol Boat, just as she had thought. If anything but a PPB had made two hits on this old tub, she wouldn’t still be alive. A PPB was a very small single-pilot ship that traded high speed for limited firepower. Of course, even the popgun on a PPB would be more than enough to take out this unshielded, unarmed junk heap if she took enough hits.

  She jinked again, just in time to dodge the next shot. Blast it all! It was obvious they had been waiting for her. Her cover had been blown before she even entered the system. She had to think, and think fast. She couldn’t outrun a PPB, and she couldn’t outmaneuver it for long. She threw another random turn into her flight path as she rushed for the planet. Could she bluff a run back toward hyperspace? No, think! They obviously knew everything else about her. They’d have to know her hyperspace motors had been gimmicked. The bluff wouldn’t fool anyone. She couldn’t enter hyperspace without the whole hyperspace engine blowing out—

  Wham! A bigger hit that time, harder. Alarm bells started going off, and Kalenda could smell smoke and burni
ng insulation. Dead. She was dead if she played by the rules. Her freighter lurched suddenly as the number-three engine flared and died.

  Kalenda cut the power to number three and diverted it to numbers one and two. No sense worrying about engine overloads now. The PPB would stay on her tail and use her for target practice until it ruptured the hull and got her dead. She couldn’t reach the planet and she couldn’t enter hyperspace without the buffer heat sink exploding and dropping her right back out—

  Yes! That was it. It was a near-suicidal plan, but everything was relative, and staying here would be utterly suicidal.

  She reached for the hyperspace controls with one hand as she flew the ship with the other. She cut off all the safeties and overrides, cut the selector to manual, and stabbed in the activate button before she could think of what she was doing. An uncalibrated, uncalculated jump into hyperspace this near a planet was nothing more than a fancy way to kill herself, but if she stopped long enough to tell herself that, she would already be dead.

  No smooth transition to light speed this time, but a lurching, horrific crash into hyperspace, as graceful as slamming the ship into a brick wall. The freighter started to tumble end over end, but Kalenda didn’t even try to stop it. Not when—

  Blam! With a horrible, shuddering explosion that sent the ship into new paroxysms, the buffer heat sink blew. The plan had been for it to give out quietly during the cooldown phase. But with the hyperdrive under power, the heat sink failed in far more spectacular fashion, detonating with almost enough energy to tear the ship in two. The hull breached somewhere in the engine compartment, and air thundered aft out into space. The cockpit’s hatch slammed shut automatically. Alarms were clanging everywhere, and Kalenda hit the general override button, cutting the alarms off and killing power to all systems.

  With the heat sink destroyed, it took less than a half second for the hyperdrive coils to overheat and melt down. With an even more violent lurch, the freighter crashed back into normal space. At least Kalenda hoped it was normal space. Plenty of ships had vanished from hyperspace over the millennia and no one knew where they had gone.