Mirta knew—or claimed to know—all three answers. Sintas’s fate now wasn’t urgent; and he could find Ailyn for himself, because he could find Han Solo, and where Solo was, Ailyn would follow.
So he needed to track that clone of Skirata’s. Even if he didn’t have Ko Sai’s data, he might be good for a tissue sample that a Kaminoan could examine and reverse-engineer.
Still too many uncertainties. Still too many variables.
Fett decided it was time to reveal his interest, but carefully. “Where did you run into that clone?”
“Coruscant. Seemed to be a regular trip for him.” Mirta stared straight ahead as usual. “So where are we heading?”
To find Han Solo, because that’ll lead me to Ailyn.
He staged a conversational diversion. “You’ve got the necklace. You tell me where we’re heading.”
Mirta took the leather cord from her neck and stared at the shimmering stone in her palm. “Let’s try Coruscant.”
Aha. Fett had never taught Ailyn anything about bounty hunting, but she had obviously learned that you could often hide better on a planet that was one vast city of a trillion people than you ever could in a cave up a mountainside on the Outer Rim.
Fett laid in a course for the galactic core; zero, zero, zero. Slave I was about to make the jump to hyperspace when the comlink console flashed impatiently in front of him.
The point of origin said CORELLIA, even if the sender had tried to disguise the source with multiple relays. Fett didn’t get a lot of calls from Corellia, and when he did they usually weren’t the kind that he wanted to take in front of Mirta Gev.
“Time to eat,” he said. “Get back aft and see what you can find in the stores for us.”
Mirta obeyed in silence, without a hint of dissent on her face. It was the response of someone used to following orders, not a woman who spent her time in the kitchen. “Okay.”
“Not insulted by that, are you?”
Mirta looked at him as if he were mad. “My father was Mandalorian. So I can fight and cook.”
Fett realized how little he knew about the small details of his own culture. Next time he saw Beviin, he’d ask the man to explain all that. He waited for Mirta to close the internal hatch behind her and then switched the call to a secure circuit.
“Fett here. Make it fast.”
There was a slight pause. “And this is Thrackan Sal-Solo, Corellian Head of State. I’ve got a proposal for you.”
SQUADRON TRAINING SECTION AIRSPACE, CENTAX 2.
The XJ7 below Luke jinked to port and fell away beneath him with astonishing speed. Even for him, Jaina Solo was a serious challenge in aerial combat.
Or maybe I’m slowing down.
Luke throttled his own XJ7 into a dive, plummeting into the moon’s canyons in pursuit of Jaina. He’d thought she’d had enough flight time recently not to need to sharpen her skills, but when Jaina said she was returning to active service, she meant it. She went on exercises with the squadron just like the new intake, colonel or not.
It was a live-fire exercise, too. Some of the pilots had never been shot at for real. It tended to change their perspective of warfare.
Beneath them on the valley floor, a droid anti-aircraft battery let loose with ion cannons. The red bolts of energy soaring up at him seemed to merge into a single field with the red halos of the XJ7’s engines as Jaina zipped between the bolts, rolling instantly through 180 degrees to narrow the fighter’s profile and sending a stream of fire into the ion cannons.
She leveled out at the bottom of the canyon behind the battery, and Luke dropped down behind her, shaving the canyon floor so closely that the downdraft from the XJ7 threw up a cloud of tiny pebbles that hammered under the fuselage.
Luke sent a volley of fire after her, aiming a few degrees wide of her starboard wings. The canyon wall spat plumes of pulverized rock in her path, and she skimmed over it.
She broke comm silence, which wasn’t like her. “Don’t play, Uncle. It won’t help me.”
He realized he could have taken a serious shot and he still might not have hit her. But he couldn’t fire in earnest on his niece, even if he knew she could almost certainly evade it. It was the almost he didn’t like.
“I’m breaking,” he said, and climbed sharply to level out at a cruising altitude. “See you back at the mess.”
Centax 2 was a sterile moon with the usual sprawl of military facilities arranged like a warehouse floor covered in boxes. The base would win no prizes for architecture. If war broke out for real—and Luke always found the for real proviso painfully ironic—then it would switch overnight from a training squadron to an operational air station. The switch seemed close to being thrown. Luke lifted the canopy of the XJ7 and climbed out of the cockpit to slide down the ladder wheeled into position by ground crew.
I used to do that a lot faster, too.
He waited at the entrance to the mess until Jaina’s fighter swept into the hangar on repulsor power and settled in the bay next to his. When she slid out and took off her helmet, her face was taut and anxious.
“You’re up to speed,” Luke said comfortingly, walking toward the doors to get her to follow him. “Are we allowed to wear flight suits in the mess?”
Jaina managed a smile and indicated her own orange suit. “Don’t worry, I’m the colonel. I’ll provide top cover.”
It was the first chance Luke had grabbed since the Corellian internment row to talk to Jaina alone. She radiated misery. Anxiety about “skills fade” and being “fit for role”—phrases that had peppered her conversation rather too liberally in recent days to convince Luke—was good tech talk for the sake of the squadron, nothing more. She was Jacen’s twin. Whatever was happening, it was happening to her more acutely than the rest of the family.
“After you,” said Luke.
The mess was a warren of compartments with one large section where food was served and eaten, and a lounge area almost the same size that was scattered with comfortable seating and sparse entertainment, the main focus of which was a huge holoscreen on one wall. It was wide enough to be seen comfortably from the refectory area while pilots and ground personnel waited for meals to be dispensed.
Most of the pilots in the lounge area had their backs to the refectory and were watching the screen. The lunchtime HNE news had started, and that now meant complete silence descended: everyone was waiting and watching for the little twitches from the politicians that would mean that the squadron’s warned status would switch immediately to mobilized.
Jaina reached over the counter to scoop some vegetables onto her plate just as the top headline boomed to fill the entire complex. It didn’t, of course, but Luke felt that it did. He froze.
“And today’s top story—the roundup of Corellian nationals continues as thousands leave Galactic City in a voluntary repatriation program.”
The screen was filled with a shot of 967 Commando shock troopers advancing down the walkways at either side of a Coruscant residential skylane, one squad preceded by the now familiar figure of Jacen Solo in a stark black coverall of the kind favored by special forces. That would have been bad enough, but the only other person in any kind of uniform with his face visible was Ben.
It was very, very quiet in the mess now.
My son. How did I ever let Jacen do this to him?
The shock troopers all wore fully enclosed helmets. It was sensible equipment for a soldier to wear, but that didn’t make it look any less menacing. Luke could hear not the commentary pounding in his ears but Han’s voice saying that the Alliance was rapidly turning into the Empire.
“Colonel Jacen Solo, speaking earlier, said—”
Luke managed to look at Jaina, whose face was stricken. There was no other word for it.
And it was clear that most of those watching the screen had no idea who was standing behind them in the refectory.
“Old family tradition, terrorizing the population,” said one captain, feet propped on a low table. “Just
like his grandfather all over again. When’s he going to go for a nice black cloak and helmet? And lots of troopers in lovely white armor?”
Some of the officers in the mess laughed, but most looked as if they wished they were somewhere else. Luke had grown adept at reading the ebb and flow of trouble waiting to explode, and it surprised him again just how finely balanced it was between tempers fading and sudden explosion.
This time it was Jaina who exploded. Her fists were balled. Luke, caught off-guard by his own shame at Ben’s appearance, failed to block Jaina’s Force push as the captain hit the wall of the mess, upending his chair. Jaina lunged forward. Luke managed to shove in front of her. Two other pilot officers stepped in, sending chairs tumbling to stop their comrade from doing anything else stupid.
“He didn’t mean it,” said one. He didn’t seem to see Luke. “Sorry, Colonel.”
Jaina was flushed, eyes wide. Colonels didn’t take swings at other officers, using the Force or not. It was bad discipline. Luke wanted to get her outside, but she needed to let it be known she was back in control. Nobody enjoyed serving under an officer who couldn’t control her temper.
The captain was hauled to his feet. He looked more winded than injured. “Go on,” said one of the officers, “Apologize to the colonel. You were out of line.”
The captain’s expression said that he thought he’d got it about right, but his mouth did as it was told. “My apologies, Colonel Solo.”
“We’re all getting a little tense,” said Jaina. “I should have found a less assertive way to ask you to retract what you said about my family.”
And now the captain appeared to realize he was also facing Luke Sky walker. “Sorry, sir …”
It hurt because everyone’s saying it, thought Luke. You’re just the messenger.
“Forget it,” he said. “Jaina, let’s take a walk.”
There was no natural vegetation on Centax. They found a spot in the shade of a hangar and sat down on a couple of crates.
“We can fence around this or we can blurt it out,” said Luke. “I prefer blurting, personally.”
“Saves time.”
“I don’t know what’s happening to Jacen.”
“Neither do I, Uncle.”
“Try a guess, then.”
“I don’t know him anymore.”
“That’s a scary thing for any twin to say.”
“There’s something dark about him now. He shuts me out. He even manipulated me against the Chiss.”
“I know.” Yes, he’s good at that. “It’s … worrying.”
“I can’t trust him now.”
Luke didn’t want to hear it said aloud, but he knew he had to listen. Mara sensed it, too, but was satisfied that it was the opposing passions of a messy love affair that were creating the darkness. Luke thought of the images he had seen in recent days and knew that the darkness was separate from any problems Jacen had in his love life. It was graphic enough to be captured on holocam.
I want my son to stay away from him.
Luke thought of Lumiya and his dreams of the hooded figure, which was surely her. But those signs of impending disaster were new; Jacen had opened the rift with Jaina by tricking her into attacking the Chiss several years earlier.
Jedi were used to seeing what ordinary people couldn’t. Being deceived—something regular folk learned to live with from an early age—was especially threatening for them.
But you’re not fooling me, Jacen. You’re turning to the dark side.
“Uncle Luke, this is none of my business,” said Jaina, “but if I were you, I’d get Ben a new teacher.”
Luke knew she was right, and he also knew that Mara would fight that every step of the way.
And so would Ben.
BRAVO COMPANY 967 COMMANDO, VEHICLE CHECKPOINT: GALACTIC CITY, LOWER LEVELS, 2330 HOURS.
“We left the best till last,” said Corporal Lekauf.
Ben was confident in his lightsaber skills, but the lower levels of Galactic City made him envy the soldiers’ armor. It was the first time he’d been to the city’s grim heart, and it wasn’t like the Senate sectors at all.
In fact, it wasn’t even like the slightly seedy Corellian neighborhoods, where there had been a pleasant sense of normal family life going on—at least before the raids had begun. At night, the lower levels were genuinely intimidating. Ben kept one hand on the hilt of his lightsaber.
One soldier from Bravo Company set a vehicle barrier across the end of the road, a chain of small spherical droids whose armament and stinger cords could stop a vessel attempting to pass anywhere up to thirty meters away. There was another one at the far end of the street; the only level below this one was made up of utility tunnels.
I really hope we don’t end up going down there.
Standing well behind the barriers were small knots of people—human and other species—who looked as if they might cut Ben’s throat just out of curiosity.
“This is horrible,” he said.
“Beats doing this in broad daylight with HNE breathing down our necks,” said Lekauf. Maybe he had a point: the media never cared what happened to residents of the lower levels. “We can just go in and clear this place out.”
“This isn’t a Corellian neighborhood.”
“Not all the threats are Corellian.” Lekauf turned at the sound of jogging boots, and Ben followed his gaze to see Captain Shevu approaching. The only way Ben could tell the 967 apart when they were fully armored was by the name tags on their chest plates and their variations in build and height. Shevu had a single discreet gold star on his helmet; Lekauf had two thin gold stripes; and Witur, one of the sergeants, had three. Apart from that, they were an anonymous mass of black plastoid plates over black fatigues.
The CSF—some of whose ranks had volunteered for transfer to the 967—had already nicknamed them “Stormies.” Everyone seemed to see parallels with Ben’s grandfather’s day. Ben wasn’t ashamed of his lineage and he wasn’t ashamed of the work he had to carry out: he just didn’t understand how it all got this bad so quickly.
But, so far, nobody had been shot or badly injured. Every Corellian who had been detained was alive and well—or had been deported. It must have been hard, Ben thought, to be sent home if the only home you had ever known was Coruscant: but in that case, why weren’t they loyal to the planet where they’d been born?
Just as he’d thought he was growing up, Ben felt like a kid again, a kid who had missed something important that all the adults knew but weren’t telling him.
“Okay, listen up,” said Shevu. He gathered two squads around him, pulling in Ben and Lekauf, too. “Best intelligence is that Customs and Immigration got a tip-off about three Corellian agents and a bounty hunter they made contact with, and CSF tracked them down here.” The location was an apartment block with some boarded-up windows that sat between a sleazy bar and a brightly lit building whose business Ben wasn’t sure about, except that the staff all seemed to be women. “That’s who we’ve come for—names are Cotin, Abadaner, Bolf, and Habuur.”
Shevu handed Ben a datapad with pictures on it; the squads were receiving the images via the HUDs in their helmets.
“They know we’re here,” Ben said.
“Not much they can do about it, then, except come out when we ask nicely,” said Lekauf.
Shevu tapped the charge indicator on his blaster rifle. “Double-check them against your feature-recog software, because they’re going to be seriously armed and you might need to put them out of business permanently. Colonel Solo’s covering the rear exits with two squads if things don’t go to plan.”
It wasn’t a raid so much as a siege. Ben had learned an awful lot about storming buildings in a very short time. He didn’t feel that he was much use, but Lekauf reassured him that he could do things no ordinary soldier could when they needed him to.
“Okay, let’s start this like good guys,” Shevu said. He turned toward the front of the apartment block, and there was an audible cli
ck from his voice projection unit. He was about to use the loudhailer setting.
Ben braced for painfully loud noise.
“This is the security forces.” Shevu’s voice vibrated off the buildings, slow and carefully enunciated. People still in the street behind the barricades scattered and ran for cover. “Cotin—Abadaner—Bolf—Habuur! Surrender your weapons. Come out of the building and keep your arms above your heads. You can come out now, or we will enter and detain you.”
Maybe I could try mind influence, thought Ben.
A bolt of blasterfire spat from a window, and the squad returned fire as if by reflex.
Okay, maybe that isn’t going to work.
“We tried,” said Shevu. “Blasters only. No projectiles. Don’t want anything penetrating walls, because we’ve got civilians in there.” He opened the loudhailer again. “Residents! Stay in your homes with your doors closed. Armed security forces are entering your building. I repeat—stay in your homes.”
He shook his head, muttering about CSF failing to evacuate the apartment block in advance, and signaled the squads to enter. Ben could see at least two squads on the roof clambering into a maintenance access hatch. There were no stairways in some of these blocks, which meant each turbolift lobby was a potential killing field; it took guts to step out of a lift into the unknown. But that, Lekauf told Ben, was what armor was for.
“Wirut,” Shevu ordered. “Put a flash-bang through that window on my mark, will you?”
“Sir,” said the sergeant, and slipped a charge into the feed of his grenade launcher.
“Squads, when you access the fourth floor we’ll light them up from here. Count us down.”
Ben couldn’t hear the response. He really wanted a helmet with full comlink. But what he lacked in technology he almost made up for with his own Force-senses. Now that he focused on the shattered and gaping window where the blasterfire had emerged, he could feel the fear and hostility inside. There was a lot of general fear in the building, almost certainly the cumulative terror of other residents who were stuck inside the block.