Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [8]
It would mean parts of us would never be separated again.
That thought struck me as so right and good, even flying over the debris fields littering Coruscant could only slightly tarnish my mood. Vast swathes of destruction had been carved across the urban landscape. Ships never meant for entry into atmosphere had crashed down, glowing white from the heat, trailing thick clouds of black smoke, to slam into the cityscape. They gouged great furrows through neighborhoods and blasted huge craters out of the buildings. Hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions of people had died in the factional fighting that followed Thrawn’s assault on the New Republic; and we were nowhere near recovered from it.
Looking at the shattered buildings and twisted wreckage, I found it difficult to conjure up my memories of Coruscant from before, back when it was still Imperial Center. I could remember vast rivers of light making the nightside glow with life, but here only dull grey predominated. Bright lights had once given Coruscant an artificial life and without them the urban planet seemed dead.
I knew it wasn’t really that bad. Despite the vast surface destruction and tremendous loss of life, people did continue living. The catastrophic damage did bring out the worst in some people, but it brought out the best in even more. Mirax and I had planned to live in her Pulsar Skate when our home had been destroyed by one of the crashing ships, but friends wouldn’t let us. Iella Wessiri, my old partner from the Corellian Security Force, managed to convince her boss at New Republic Intelligence that we should be given the run of a safehouse they maintained, so we ended up with a place even closer to Rogue Squadron Headquarters than before.
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