Ours was hardly the most remarkable of tales. Supplies that had been hoarded for years during times of political instability suddenly poured forth. People took refugees into their homes, which seems hardly unexpected, but a lot of the hosts were old Imperial families and the refugees were from the various non-human species in the galaxy. The battering Coruscant had taken at the hands of Imperial warlords had broken down the last walls of resistance. Suffering formed a common bond that began to erode xenophobia on both sides.
With the rest of the squadron I made my approach and landed in our hangar bay. I turned the X-wing over to a tech, changed into civilian clothes and caught a hoverbus south to the Manarai mountains. A mother and child in a seat up the way from me caught my eye. I watched the woman smile as the infant reached out unsteadily and grasped at her nose. She tilted her face up slightly, kissing the hand, then lowered her face until she was nose to nose with her baby. She whispered something and rubbed her nose against the child’s, then pulled back accompanied by the baby’s laughter.
The infant’s delighted laugh still echoed in my ears as the bus broke from the darkened canyons and started flying across a ruined landscape of duracrete chunks strewn like a dewback’s scales on a stable floor. The burned-out hulks of airspeeders lay twisted and half-melted all over the place. Scraps of cloth that had once clothed victims flapped and fluttered from various points in the stone piles. Bright bits of color, that could have been anything from toys to the shards of a holodisk player, littered the landscape.
Despite the utter destruction, the child’s laugh overwhelmed it all. The laugh was innocent and light, it mocked the ruin surrounding us. People could create and destroy, but, the laugh seemed to suggest, anyone who thought destruction was more powerful than creation was a fool. Within the first ten years of that child’s life, the scars from the battling on Coruscant would be erased. And even if they were not, that child could, in twenty or thirty years, be the person who saw to their erasure. Life truly was the antidote to destruction.
I smiled. Mirax has been right all along, and Ooryl, too. If we live for the present and in the present, we short-change the future. Living for the future is necessary if we are to have any sort of future at all. Yes, Mirax, we’ll have a child. Make that children. We’ll make our contribution to the future.
I winked at the woman with the child as I got off at my stop. I threaded my way through the buildings and over the catwalks that led to my home. I almost stopped at a store to buy a decent wine to celebrate the resolution of our problem, but decided instead to whisk Mirax off somewhere for a quiet, romantic meal. I didn’t know where we’d go exactly, but with the construction droids roaming over the planet, I knew there were dozens of restaurants that had been created in the week I’d been gone. Finding a place to eat wouldn’t be much of a problem.
I hit the door and punched the code into the lockplate. The door slid open and a wave of warm air cascaded down over me. I stepped into the apartment’s darkened interior, letting the door close behind me. The warm air surrounded me like a thick blanket and for a moment I almost gave in to panic because it seemed suffocating and dense.
My high spirits began to die down. The air had become warm because Mirax had shut off the apartment’s environmental comfort unit. We both did that when we were going to be gone for an extended period of time. It was possible she was only going to be gone during the day, but a quick glance at the food prep station told me that wasn’t the case. All the dishes had been washed and put away; and the small basket of fruit she kept around wasn’t in sight. That meant she’d tossed it in the conservator so it wouldn’t spoil while she was gone.
I continued my way on into the apartment. I ducked my head into the darkened bedroom on the left, but saw no signs of life there. The dining area, which abutted the food prep station on the right, was likewise devoid of life. The main table had a couple days’ worth of dust on it and the datacard that had been set near my place likely held all the messages that had come in for me up to the time Mirax left.
In the living room area off to the left I saw a light blinking on the holotable. I smiled. Good girl, you didn’t leave without giving me a message. I shucked my jacket and tossed it on a nerf-hide chair, then crouched down and hit the button below the light.
Standing forty-five centimeters tall and as beautiful as ever, Mirax smiled at me. Even in miniature, her black hair shined lustrously and fire filled her brown eyes. She wore the black boots and dark blue jumpsuit in which I’d first seen her, and had a blue nerf-hide jacket slung over her shoulder. A small canvas satchel rested at her feet.
“Corran, I’d hoped to be here when you got back, but I’ve got a run I can’t turn down. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back. You should only be lonely for about a day. If my plans change, I’ll let you know.” She bent to pick up her satchel, then smiled at me again as she straightened up. “I love you. Don’t forget it and don’t doubt it. Ever. I’ll be back soon, love.”
Her image dissolved into static, then the holopad shut itself off. I reached out to run the message again, but hesitated. I’d come home to dozens of such messages during our time together, as had she, and never before had I wanted to play one again. Why do I want to now?
It struck me that I might be feeling a bit cheated and a bit vulnerable. I’d spent the better part of my time away from her thinking about children and had finally come around to her point of view, and she was gone! I’d made one of the most important and momentous decisions of my life and she was just off flitting about the galaxy as if my decision was no big thing. To have it treated so casually stung a bit and I wanted to hear her say again that she loved me.
As much as I knew my analysis of my emotions was true, I also knew my emotions were not at the core of my problem. I hit the button and listened to her message again, then nodded. She said I’d be lonely for only a day or so, and that if she had a change of plans, she would let me know. The fact was, however, that I had been a full day late because of our escorting the Glitterstar here to Coruscant, so she should have been here. I’d had no message from her about a delay here or at Squadron HQ, and that surprised me.
Others might have taken the phrase “about a day” and have seen it as a fairly loose measure of time, but to Mirax it was painfully exact. She made her living delivering items of value to various clients, on time and intact. If she had meant twelve standard hours, she’d have said so. If she’d meant twenty-five hours, she’d not have rounded them down to a day, she would have given me her best estimate, to the hour or minute.
As damning and worrisome as that might seem, I knew better than to panic. Any message could have been delayed or misrouted. She could have even stopped off to see her father on the Errant Venture and his communication system could be down again.
A shiver ran down my spine, but I shrugged it off. “Your good news will just have to wait, I guess.” Still feeling a little achy and tired from the run home, I stripped my clothes off, hit the refresher station, cleaned myself up, then dropped into bed. I left the bedroom door open in the hopes that I’d awaken when Mirax returned.
Scant chance of that. I dropped into a deep sleep, dark and black, like the deepest shadows on Coruscant. I realized I was drifting off and tried to seek out the dream about the child, hoping my decision would paint more details onto him, but it eluded me. Consciousness evaporated in a pool of nothingness and I fell into a dreamless sleep.
Corran.
I stirred at the sound of my name but couldn’t recognize the voice.
CORRAN!
Mirax’s shriek ripped me to wakefulness. I sat bolt upright in bed and reached out for her. The image of her face faded from before my eyes as my hands encountered only cold sheets where she should have been. I felt about for her, seeking the warmth that her body should have deposited there, but I found none of it. For all of a heartbeat my brain chastened me with a flash of Mirax’s message, then something more horrible slammed into me. Bile surged up into my t
hroat, choking me.
In one blindingly terrible moment, I knew Mirax was gone!
THREE
I stumbled out of bed on the far side and barked my shin on a low table set there. I kicked out angrily at it. Who would have put that there? I knew I wouldn’t have put it there because even a gentle bump would have toppled it and scattered the datacards stacked there as easily as my kick had.
I looked around the room and in the half-light I saw all manner of things that were wrong about the place. The holographs on the walls were pleasant enough, and were even of scenes from Corellia, but were of locations I’d not known on my homeworld. Who built this parody of my home?
My feet caught in the sheets I’d tossed off and I crashed to my hands and knees. The pain in my shin found an ally in my knees and hands, and just for a moment shocked me into a clarity of mind. The holographs and the table and the datacards, all these little pieces of the apartment that were not mine, they were things Mirax had placed here. Mirax, my wife.
I looked up at everything she’d brought in to make our apartment feel like a home. Somehow she had found replacements for many of the things we had lost when our previous home had been destroyed. Intellectually, as I looked around the room, I could catalog her contributions to the decor, and could even remember the when and where of her finding the items. I looked at the closet and could see her clothes hanging there. I found it easy to recall when she had purchased this gown, or where she had gotten that jacket.
But I could not recall anything about her connections to those items. In looking at the clothes I couldn’t remember which gown was her favorite. I couldn’t remember which jacket she considered slimming, or which blouse and slacks she considered appropriate for business, and which outfit she wore when we were out to have fun.
I studied a holograph of Vreni Island on Corellia. It showed a small island covered with trees, floating in a stormy sea as a thunderstorm approached. Shifting my view slightly I injected lightning into the picture, a massive triple fork that sent countless tendrils crawling across the waves. The image was fantastic and the holograph was a work of art, but I could not recall why Mirax had wanted it. I didn’t know if she had known the holographer or if she had spent time on the island, or if she had purchased it as an investment.
Mirax is gone, and I am losing details of her life.
I got up and ran to the living room. The red light still blinked on the holopad. I punched it with the urgency of a pilot ejecting from a stricken fighter. Her image appeared once again and I smiled, but as she spoke, my smile died. The countless nuances I’d read into how she looked at me, and what she said, how she inflected her voice and shifted her balance, were gone. I could have been looking at some commercial broadcast of a beautiful woman selling anything from lum to a trip to the Alakatha resorts.
I hit another button and switched the holopad over into communications mode. I keyed in a call to Squadron Headquarters. The head and shoulders of a black droid materialized, all but lost in the darkness except for the glow of golden eyes in his clamshell head. “You have reached Rogue Squadron Headquarters. This is Emtrey. It is good to see you, Captain Horn.”
“You, too, Emtrey.” I raked fingers back through my short brown hair. “I’m going to ask you a question and I want a straight answer—and the question is going to sound strange.”
“I understand the parameters of your request.”
“Good.” I hesitated for a moment. “It is approximately 1:30 in the morning, Coordinated Galactic Time, right?”
“1:31:27, to be exact, sir.”
I nodded. Normally I found Emtrey’s slavish adherence to reality annoying, but right now it was a lifeline to sanity. “And I’m Corran Horn, right?”
The droid’s head jerked back. “Yes, sir. A moment please.…Your voiceprint checks to within 99.4953 percent of accuracy, the variation being accounted for by travel stress and degree of rest.”
“Okay, good, Emtrey, very good.” I licked my lips. “Here’s the big one.”
The droid’s image leaned forward toward me. “I am ready, sir.”
“I’m married to Mirax Terrik, right?”
Emtrey’s eyes flared. “Oh, yes, sir. You will recall that I attended the ceremony Commander Antilles conducted on the Lusankya, and again attended the ceremony you had here on Coruscant. I believe Whistler made a holographic record of the first ceremony, and I know there were multiple holographs of the second one.”
My jaw dropped. I knew there were holographs of the ceremonies, but I had forgotten them. Our original copies had been destroyed when our home had been leveled, but Mirax had obtained new copies from her father. I wanted to turn to the cabinet where we stored them and play one immediately, but I hesitated. I couldn’t risk finding them as emotionally empty as I had the replay of Mirax’s message.
“Are you all right, Captain Horn?”
I frowned, then nodded slowly. “I don’t know, Emtrey. Is the colonel available?”
Emtrey’s eyes flickered for a moment. “The colonel is in his office. He has a meeting scheduled thirty standard minutes from now.”
“Ask him to cancel it or postpone it, please. I have to talk to him.” I stared intently at Emtrey as if I could reach into his robotic brain and communicate my urgency. “Mirax is gone, I mean really gone, and I have to find her. I’ll be there in a half hour. Horn out.”
I arrived at headquarters a little later than expected because of gross indecision on my part concerning clothes. I went to toss almost anything on, but I saw too many shirts and pants and jackets that Mirax had bought for me and, rather often, transported from all over the galaxy. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember what she had said about any of them. I couldn’t remember her smiles or laughter as she dressed me up, or what she’d said as she later worked me back out of the clothes. Each shirt hung there like a ghost of a memory, all two dimensional and lifeless.
I’d finally shrugged something on—a hideous matching of patterns and colors, as it turned out, but I had dressed in the dark. I had a haunted look on my face so people on the hoverbus shied away from me. I would have taken our airspeeder and doubtlessly salvaged some of the time I’d lost dressing, but even as messed up as I was, I knew I had no place piloting anything through Imperial City even if the traffic was light.
Emtrey made no attempt to stop me in the antechamber to Tycho’s office. I shot in past him, then snapped to attention and gave Tycho as crisp a salute as I could manage. “Thank you for seeing me, sir.”
Standing at his desk, with a big transparisteel viewport framing a view of the Imperial Palace behind him, Tycho looked every bit the recruiting hologram image of a pilot. Steel-spined straight, wasp-waisted, with his light brown hair cut short and just beginning to show some white at the temples, he returned my salute sharply. Sympathy softened his blue eyes. “Emtrey told me about your problem, though he didn’t give me much detail.”
“I didn’t have much to give him. I’m sorry.”
Tycho shook his head and pointed me to a chair in front of his desk. “Not your fault, I think.” He glanced back at the doorway. “That’s why I asked General Cracken to join us.”
I turned back and saw Airen Cracken enter the office. Though an older man, he had not thickened around the middle with age. White predominated in his hair, but tinges of the red hair he’d passed on to his son Pash still lingered around the sides and back. His eyes were green, like mine, but more of a sea-green, which did not make them lack for intensity. He waited for both of us to salute, which we did, and he returned it sharply.
Tycho waited for General Cracken to take the other chair and sit before he sat himself. “General Cracken was my appointment anyway, and one I could not postpone.”
“No, sir,” I said, as I sat. I had first met General Cracken on Coruscant, when I showed up at Tycho’s treason and murder trial. My arrival seemed to surprise the general, but that was the first and last time I’d seen him taken unawares by anything. He’d asked me
to help him negotiate with Booster Terrik for possession of an Imperial Star Destroyer, and I had failed in that mission rather dismally. The infrequent times we had met since then had been more satisfactory, but his presence here did nothing to put me at ease.
Cracken smiled carefully. “I wanted to discuss with Colonel Celchu the intelligence we obtained from Phan Riizolo, the Booty Full’s captain. From him, really, we learned very little that will help us deal with the Invidious and solving the mystery of its location.”
I frowned. “I’d really rather talk about my wife.…”
“I know, but this is germane, believe me, Captain Horn.”
He leaned forward and plugged a cable from the datapad he carried into the holoprojector pad on the corner of Tycho’s desk. An image of an Imperial Star Destroyer hovered there as if in orbit around the crystalline model of Alderaan centered on the near edge of the desk. “This is the Invidious, represented in old Imperial holo-images because we have no current ones of any reliable quality. At the time of the Emperor’s death, it was part of a task force commanded by High Admiral Teradoc and served as part of the fleet with which he secured his holdings as the Empire crumbled. That was a good seven years ago. Then, approximately six years ago, Leonia Tavira appears to have obtained it.”
Cracken hit a key on his datapad and the image shifted to that of a very young woman in an Imperial Naval uniform, with the rank insignia of an admiral. I’d seen enough of those rank badges on self-styled warlords to make me imagine the Empire had given them away as party favors at the Emperor’s funeral, but I’d never seen them on someone so young. Her black hair had been cut to the line of her jaw, emphasizing her youth, but an ancient hunger played through her violet eyes.
I looked at Cracken. “She’s a child.”
“Was.” Cracken sat back in his chair. “We think she was sixteen standard years old when she began an affair with the Moff on Eiattu 4, the homeworld of a former pilot in Rogue Squadron.”