Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 01_ Betrayal - Aaron Allston [10]
“We go back to the shuttle and take off.”
“But the planet’s full of starfighters! One shuttle, even an armed shuttle, isn’t going to be able to fight its way through all of them.”
“Correct. But why would they attack us?”
“To keep—to keep—” Understanding dawned in the boy’s eyes. “To keep us from getting offworld with what we found out.”
“Correct.”
“But we just holocast it, so it’s too late.” Ben checked the screen on his datapad. “They got the package. They’re decrypting.” His expression turned suspicious. “But what if the Adumari attack us for revenge?”
“Think it through, Ben. Take your time.” They reached a broad plaza, and Jacen knew his bearings were correct; they were headed back toward the proper hangars, which should only be a couple of kilometers distant.
“If the package decrypts, and the spies see what we saw, they’ll start talking to the government here.”
“Military Intelligence. Not spies.”
“Oh, they’re spies.” Ben sounded scornful of Jacen’s correction. “Mom’s a spy. What we just did makes us spies.”
“Your mother’s a Jedi. We’re Jedi.”
“Jedi spies.” The datapad beeped, and Ben looked at it again. He snapped it shut. “The message decrypted. Our spy bosses say ‘Well done.’ So…they’ll talk to the Adumari government, who know that if anything happens to us, things will be worse for them.”
“Correct.”
“So we can leave.”
“And go on to our next assignment.”
A look of unease crossed Ben’s features. “Do we have to?”
“Yes, we do.”
“There are going to be a lot of them.”
“Not as many as we just encountered.”
“It’s going to be noisy.”
“Not as noisy as that assembly line.”
Ben heaved a sigh, defeated.
A few minutes later, Jacen and Ben boarded Jacen’s shuttle—an armored variant on the old Lambda-class model, fitted with a turreted laser cannon and a holocomm unit—and lifted off. The shuttle’s upswept wings lowered into horizontal position after liftoff, and Jacen oriented the craft toward Adumar’s sky.
A flight of four Blade starfighters, Adumar’s distinctive split-tail fighter craft, escorted the shuttle until it left the planet’s gravity well and entered hyperspace. Nothing came close enough to fire a shot at the Jedi craft.
chapter three
CORUSCANT
Leia Organa Solo, one-time Princess of the world of Alderaan, former Chief of State of the New Republic, now a Jedi Knight, stood dressed in all-white robes, suitable to either a Jedi or a politician in informal surroundings, before the portal. It was not an ordinary door; though in appearance it was identical to billions of dwelling exterior doors found on the world of Coruscant, in reality it was not. In the recent past, the original low-cost, composite-material door had been replaced with this innocuous-appearing thing of armor. It would hold against blaster assault—for a while, anyway. The cool blue it was painted belied its defensive function.
Leia’s husband, Han Solo, one of the most famous men in the galaxy, moved up beside her. He was wearing his favorite clothes: dark military trousers decorated with the red Corellian Bloodstripes he had earned when he was a younger man, light long-sleeved shirt, black vest, practical black boots. Except for the lines in his face and gray in his hair, honestly earned through deeds as well as accumulated over the passage of time, he was indistinguishable from the man she’d met aboard the first Death Star so many years ago.
Her spirit lifted. No matter how badly things went, they were always better with Han at her side.
Not that she’d necessarily tell him that. His ego hadn’t diminished in all those years, either.
Han looked gravely at the door. “You figure that’s how they’re going to come at us?”
She nodded. “That’s the only approach that makes any sense, and you know it.”
“Well, the only strategy that makes any sense is for us to just open the door for them. They’re less likely to attempt some sort of sneaky side entry if the front is open. We can pick them