The Bacta War

Corran heard a bellow from the other room. Huff shoved the other door open to reveal a huge, powerful man freeing himself from the clutches of a spindly chair. The man, whose hair was a short bristle of white and gray, dwarfed Gavin and even made Huff look small. Where his left eye had been, burned a red replacement, though his right eye was a normal brown. “Come to deal, have you?”

  Corran gave him a hard stare. “Listen pal, you can leave right now because your dealing days are over.” Thinking back to the cantina, he let a smile slowly spread across his face and jerked a thumb over his shoulder back at Mirax. “That’s Mirax Terrik, Booster Terrik’s daughter. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll go.”

  The large man stopped, his jaw hanging open, then he reared his head back and laughed.

  Corran turned and looked at Mirax. “How come that scared people at the bar, and this guy laughs?”

  “It worked on the people at the bar because they’re afraid of my father.” Mirax smiled sheepishly at him.

  “And what’s wrong with this clown?”

  “Well, Corran,” she winced, “he is my father.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Oh,” said Corran, without missing a beat, “I guess you take after your mother.”

  Though he saw mirth and astonishment mix on Mirax’s face, and saw a smile begin to blossom on Gavin’s face, Corran wished for nothing so much as a chance to inhale and suck those words out of everyone’s ears. Could there have been a more stupid remark you could have made? A dozen different candidates flashed through his mind, including several that could have reminded Booster of his stint on Kessel. Okay, it could have been worse, but not by much.

  Booster Terrik’s laughter died. “Mirax, who is he, and why shouldn’t I show him why others fear me?”

  A smile fitted itself on her face, but her eyes tightened. “This is Corran Horn.”

  “Horn?” Booster’s voice descended into bass tones. “This is Hal Horn’s boy?”

  Corran turned to face Mirax’s father. “I am.”

  Booster’s hand’s balled into fists the size of Corran’s head. “So, then, there’s no reason I shouldn’t give him the beating I owed his father. If you don’t mind, Huff.”

  The rotund Darklighter shook his head. “I’d prefer it to happen outside, otherwise, beat away.”

  Mirax stepped up beside Corran. “There is a reason, Father.”

  Booster’s face slackened for a moment, then he frowned. “I’ve heard that tone of voice before. You don’t want me to take a round out of him. You even want me to like him, but there’s no reason in the galaxy why I’d like him.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  “Why am I going to like the son of the man who sent me to Kessel?”

  “Because I do.”

  “What?!”

  Mirax slipped her hand into Corran’s. “You heard me. Corran’s saved my life, I’ve saved his, and we like each other. A lot.” She gave his hand a squeeze. “You can jump in any time, Corran.”

  “Me? You’re doing fine.”

  Her father’s face went through all sorts of contortions. “No, no, not a daughter of mine. If your mother weren’t dead, this would kill her, you know that.” Booster snarled, then spitted Corran with a stare. “And you! Your father would be mortified. Your grandfather would tear his hair out. A Horn keeping company with my daughter! It’s unthinkable.”

  Mirax’s face twisted down into an angry mask the equal of the one her father wore. “It’s not unthinkable at all, at least not for someone who is willing to use more than one synapse on it. Wake up, Father. The Emperor is dead. It’s a new galaxy.”

  Booster shook his head, then looked toward Huff. “The Emperor dies, and the natural order gets its double helix all twisted the other way. Next thing you know it will start raining here on Tatooine, and you’ll have tourist trade for seaside resorts.”

  Huff smiled. “Actually, I have some sites picked out to cover that eventuality.”

  “I bet you do.” Booster frowned at his daughter again. “A Horn! Hal Horn’s son! I wouldn’t have wanted this for you for all the glitterstim in the galaxy.”

  “What you want for me, and what I want for me have long been different, Father.” Mirax let Corran’s hand fall away, then walked to her father and gave him a big hug and kiss. “That doesn’t diminish my pleasure at seeing you again.”

  Booster returned the hug and swung his daughter off her feet so his broadly muscled back hid her from Corran’s sight. Corran couldn’t hear what father said to daughter, but the smiles on their faces as they again turned around told him their exchange had not been acrimonious.

  Booster kept his left arm draped over Mirax’s shoulders and posted his right fist on his right hip. “I was sorry to hear about your father’s death. No love lost between us, but I respected his tenacity.”

  “And my father respected your ingenuity.” Corran gave Booster a thin-lipped smile and got the same one in return. He lifted his chin. “Huff indicated that you’re here to negotiate for the remains of an Imperial arms cache. I’d gotten the impression from Mirax that you were retired and only dealt in collectibles.”

  “You’d be surprised what prefall Imperial artifacts are going for today.”

  “Lots of weapons collectors out there?”

  Booster shrugged. “You Rebels made going to war against the government so popular that everyone is taking it up these days.”

  “So you’ll supply them?”

  Booster smiled. “I’m merely a broker.”

  Huff rubbed his hands together. “So, we can have an auction here. Opening bids.”

  Corran shook his head. “No bids. We need what you have. We get it.”

  Booster blinked his eyes in surprise. “You need? You need? You’re not on Corellia, Horn. You have no authority here. Your needs are immaterial.”

  Mirax twisted out from beneath her father’s arm. “It’s not Corran who needs this stuff. Wedge needs it.”

  The elder Darklighter’s smile broadened. “Good, get Wedge Antilles here, and then we’ll have our auction.”

  “Wedge, eh?” Booster frowned at Mirax, then glanced over at Huff. “Give it to them.”

  “Fine, if you don’t want in, that’s all right by me.” Huff’s smile shrank as he turned toward Corran. “What I have will cost you two million credits—four if you expect me to trust the New Republic for it.”

  Booster reached out and slapped Huff on the shoulder. “I told you to give it to them.”

  “I am.”

  “No, you’re negotiating when I said you should be giving.”

  Huff looked confused for a moment, and Corran could sympathize. “You want me to give it to them for free?”

  Booster nodded. “If not, I think you’ll find that records of certain transactions that could be considered Palpatinistic could come to light.”

  “That’s extortion.”

  “No, that’s deal making. I have something you want—my silence—and you have something I want—the weapons to go to Wedge. We exchange wants and everyone is satisfied.”

  Mirax interposed herself between Huff Darklighter and her father. “Extortion or deal making, it doesn’t make a difference. We’re not doing it that way, period. If we take things away without compensation, we’re as bad as the Imps. If we let ourselves pay inflated prices, we’ll be as stupid as the Imps. That isn’t what’s going to happen. We’re going to be fair about this.”

  She pointed a finger at Huff. “You will get me a complete inventory of the material we’re looking at and will let us inspect the merchandise, choosing random bits to examine ourselves. My father will prepare a list of the prices for all these things in the prevailing market. We’ll pay something below the going price because everyone knows the father of Biggs Darklighter wouldn’t try to make a profit off his son’s comrades, but you will be capitalizing assets for which you have little use here on Tatooine. We’ll pay half now and half when we take possession of the items.”

  Huf
f’s jowls quivered as he shook his head. “You’ll pay fifteen percent over the current—”

  Mirax held a hand up. “Stop. I said we’d be fair, I never said we were negotiating. If you want to negotiate, we’ll start from my father’s position and work down to the details of your paying the freight to move the goods we’re taking off your hands.”

  Huff Darklighter stared at Mirax, his jaws agape. “Do you know what you’re asking?”

  Mirax smiled sweetly. “Only what’s fair.”

  Gavin laughed. “Admit it, Uncle Huff, you’ll accept her terms, because you’re not going to get anything better.”

  “True, I accept.” Huff nodded his head slowly. “Listen to me, young lady. If you ever find yourself in need of a steady job, please come see me. You have talents I could use.”

  Huff Darklighter invited them to remain as his guests for the duration of their visit to Tatooine. They accepted—not only were the accommodations he offered far nicer than those they had booked in Mos Eisley but Gavin’s family traveled from their farm to see him. With Booster’s presence and the extended Darklighter clan getting together, the visit began to feel like a big family vacation.

  Corran enjoyed meeting Gavin’s parents. His father, Jula, looked similar to Huff Darklighter in the face, but the lack of a moustache on Jula made telling them apart rather simple. Likewise, the fact that Jula’s hard work on a moisture farm had left him harder and more weathered than his prosperous brother helped differentiate them. There definitely seemed to be affection between the brothers, though Huff tended to keep Jula in his place by referring to the cost of this item or that and feigning astonishment when Jula said he didn’t own one.

  Jula, for his part, showed incredible restraint and even resignation over his brother’s lack of manners. Corran shook his head. If I had a brother and got that treatment from him, my sister-in-law would be a widow. Jula’s responses were polite, and in some ways his forbearance seemed to bother Huff more than any direct confrontation would have.

  Gavin’s mother, Silya, could have been Lanal Darklighter’s twin. Her concern for Gavin rolled through every question and comment, though she managed to avoid tears all but once or twice. In the way she looked at Gavin, Corran recognized the same expression his mother wore when he graduated from the Corellian Security Force Academy. Pride and fear—a mother’s dreams and her nightmares—fight for supremacy.

  The focus of the gathering quickly became Gavin. He thrilled his cousins and younger siblings with stories of what he’d seen and done, though Corran noted that he downplayed nearly getting killed on Talasea. That didn’t surprise him, but it was also clear to Corran that Jula had not missed what had gone unsaid. The specter of Biggs’s death formed the foundation for every question and comment.

  And the comparison of Gavin with Biggs fuels the analysis of stories he’s telling. There was no doubt that Biggs had been a hero and had acted heroically. His death at Yavin had allowed Luke Skywalker to blow up the Death Star. His death marked the extreme danger of the situation and was not unexpected, given the circumstances. Even so, the situations in which Gavin found himself were no less perilous, yet he had survived them. To Corran’s mind, Gavin’s parents had to be thinking that made him better than Biggs in some undefinable away, and for Huff it planted the seeds of doubt about how great his son truly was.

  Because he had been an only child born of only children, the Darklighter family gathering gave Corran a window into a whole different family dynamic. Because there were so many children among whom things were shared, personal boundaries and the ideas of ownership were weakened. Younger kids seemed to see every adult as part of the family, fearlessly climbing into laps or asking permission or asking for help.

  At first this threatened Corran—in part because of the utter chaos of the situation but mostly because the children thrust responsibility into his hands. The fact that none of the Darklighters seemed to mind their children paying him attention—as long as the kids didn’t seem to be bothering him or to be ill-mannered—meant he had to accept that responsibility and act on it. The openness of the families drew him in and they accepted him, but Corran was uncertain if he was ready to be accepted.

  Mirax and her father, by way of contrast, formed a little insulated party within the grander goings-on. The hushed tones of their conversation, their quiet laughter and their general ease with each other reminded Corran very sharply of the relationship he’d had with his own father. Hal Horn had been friend and confidant as well as parent and work associate. Corran had always thought of family as a place where he could open himself up and get advice without fearing censure or ridicule. Shared blood meant a bottom-line alliance that no disagreement could shatter. He and his father had disagreed on plenty of things, but that which united them was far stronger than anything that could divide them.

  Despite the efforts of everyone to include him in what was going on, Corran began to retreat a bit as melancholy over his father’s death slowly seeped into his heart. It was all too easy for him to imagine his father at the gathering, again hearing his laughter and watching the others react to the stories Hal used to tell. They would have loved him here. And he would have loved being here, too.

  A chill ran down Corran’s spine. The openness of the families twisted like a vibroblade into his guts. His father, Hal Horn, had known his own father, the Jedi Master Nejaa Halcyon. Hal had never told Corran anything about Nejaa. I know he did that to protect me, but I know he had to have been proud of his father. When I told my father that I had “hunches” and he told me to go with them, he knew they were manifestations of my—our—Jedi heritage. That was his quiet way of telling me of his pride, but it must have torn him up to have to remain silent. Perhaps he anticipated telling me about that stuff later, after the Rebels had destroyed the Empire, but he never lived that long.

  Corran absented himself from the gathering, walking up the steps to the surface of the planet. The twin suns had set, letting the day’s heat begin to bleed off into space. The chill creeping into the desert likewise began to gnaw at him. It found a willing ally in the sorrow sloshing around in Corran’s guts.

  “Excuse me, Lieutenant Horn, I don’t want to intrude.”

  Corran looked back and saw Jula Darklighter silhouetted against the glow from the pit mansion. “No intrusion, sir. I came from a small family, so this is rather overwhelming.”

  “I came from a big family, and it’s overwhelming.” Jula glanced down at the ground and toed an alkali crust into dust. “I wanted to say thank you for taking care of my son out there.”

  Corran smiled, but shook his head. “Gavin takes care of himself out there.”

  “He said you had confidence in him and that you got another pilot to stop picking on him. He didn’t say it that way, mind you, but he’s not hard to read.”

  Corran laughed lightly. “No, your boy—young man—does tend to digitize and broadcast his emotions. The situation he refers to, though, was one where another pilot, Bror Jace, and I were having a bit of a conflict, and Gavin just happened to find himself in the middle. I’m glad he took heart in my having confidence in him, because I did and do believe in him and his skills, but he needs no protection. You raised a man of whom you can be proud.”

  Jula smiled and nodded, then looked Corran straight in the eyes. “He’s almost ended up like Biggs, hasn’t he?”

  “We’ve all almost ended up like Biggs, sir. The Empire may be in retreat, but there are plenty of folks still willing to fight for them.” Corran raised a hand to his breastbone and unconsciously stroked the Jedi medallion he wore. “Gavin has been wounded and did almost die, but the fact is that he was too tough to die. As a pilot, he’s getting better and better and has vaped his share of the enemy we’ve faced. He’s brave without being stupid. He’s the sort of person who is the Rebellion’s backbone and the reason it has succeeded as well as it has.”

  “What you’re saying, Lieutenant Horn, makes me very proud indeed.” Jula sighed. “It
also fortifies me against anticipating the worst. I imagine your parents are equally worried about you and proud of you.”

  Corran frowned. “My parents are dead, sir.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you.”

  Jula jerked a thumb back toward the sounds of the gathering. “This isn’t very easy on you, is it?”

  Corran shrugged. “Compared to an Imperial prison, it’s actually very nice. The trick of it is that there I had a focus for my negative thoughts—the people who had me imprisoned. Here there is no such focus.”

  “Perhaps that means that you should just let your negative thoughts go.” Jula patted him on the shoulder. “Nothing wrong with feeling and acknowledging sorrow and pain, Lieutenant Horn. The crime is letting them hold you prisoner. Come on back, and we’ll do all we can to set you free.”

  He’s right. Mourning is appropriate, but not here and not now. Corran smiled. “Thanks. I think I will rejoin the group. In fighting the Imps I’ve been in so many places where I’ve been reviled, it’s great, just for once, to be welcomed so openly and graciously.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way.” Jula threw an arm over Corran’s shoulder and steered him back toward the light. “Darklighters believe in treating friends like family and family like friends, and we’re always glad to add yet one more to the family.”

  Chapter Eight

  This has to be a dream. A nightmare even. Wedge cracked his left eye open and let it slowly attempt to focus. At first he noticed nothing unusual in the unlit room, but then he caught sight of little motes of light streaking like shooting stars across night sky. The possible presence of something in his quarters did convince his sleep-besotted brain that he should continue his trek toward consciousness, but until he heard the voice a second time, he wasn’t wholly certain he wasn’t enmeshed in a nightmare.

  “Good morning, sir. It is very good to see you again.”

  Wedge rolled over and reluctantly opened both eyes. “Emtrey?”