• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Jacen nodded. “Pretty much, yes.”

In the living chamber, as C-3PO held out his carefully arrayed tray of geometrically shaped cheeses and fungus crackers to Mara, Leia said, “Jaina just called in. She and Zekk are just a few minutes out.”

Han straightened, irritably, on the couch. “And Zekk. Who, may I ask, invited Zekk? He’s not family.”

Luke and Mara managed to say “Not yet” simultaneously.

Han glared at them.

“I invited him,” Leia said. “Just now. Otherwise, he would have gone off to the Temple, been alone in whatever tiny chamber they gave him, been eating bland Jedi cafeteria food, all alone—”

“While rain poured on his head wherever he moved and sad synthesized music filled the hallways.” Han shot her a scornful look.

Leia merely smiled at him, the maddening smile of a politician who won’t be budged from her position. “Han, he’s her partner. Her Jedi partner. If he were her, say, smuggling partner, would you send him off?”

“Depends on how he looks at her. Y’see, here’s the problem. A father’s got a right to terrorize any young bantha who’s following his daughter around.”

Leia shook her head. “Jaina says they’re friends. Just friends.”

Han’s scowl deepened and became almost comic. “Jaina’s got herself blinded. It’s got to be one of those Force abilities—they say the Force can have a profound effect on people who don’t want to believe the truth.”

Luke snorted. “No, they don’t.”

“Anyway, it’s my right to scare Zekk out of his hide, but Zekk’s a Jedi. He doesn’t scare easily. So what do I do?” Han considered, then looked around. In corners of the room, motionless, inconspicuous, stood Leia’s bodyguards, Meewalh and Cakhmaim, members of the Noghri species—gray-skinned, no taller than R2-D2, shrouded in concealing cloaks. Like hold-out blasters, they were small, hard to detect, and deadly. “Maybe we could get Meewalh and Cakhmaim to rattle him.”

“Give it up, Han,” Mara suggested. “Leia, I like your quarters.”

“Thanks.” Leia settled on the couch beside her sulky husband. “It’s really nice to have someplace that’s permanent, not the hotel of the month, or quarters aboard some political ship, or the living compartment on the Falcon. It’s the first place we’ve been able to really call home since Coruscant fell.” A shadow crossed her face. Coruscant had fallen to the Yuuzhan Vong at almost the same time the Solos’ youngest son, Anakin, had died. Those had been dark times.

“We almost decided on Corellia,” Han said. “A planet where you can move more than three meters without hitting a wall. But we have too many family and friends here.” The door chime rang again. “Speaking of which…”

This time it was Jaina and Zekk. Jaina, too, was in standard Jedi robes, hers made of hard-wearing cloth suited to travel and styled to be less conspicuously those of a Jedi Knight. She was of about the same height as her mother, and more slender of build, with dark eyes and delicate features. Zekk, her partner, was in his late twenties, slightly younger than Jaina, but was otherwise her opposite in almost every way—tall enough for his scalp to scrape the top of the doorway as he entered, his long black hair pulled back in a ponytail, he would stand out in any crowd regardless of the cut and color of his traveler’s robes, and so made little effort to conceal his cheerful, energetic appearance. But he was, in contrast with his good nature, quiet almost to the point of shyness during the tour he and Jaina received of the quarters. His one comment was to Leia: “I take it that the Vongforming has pretty much been beaten back from this area?”

At the height of the Yuuzhan Vong war, when Coruscant had fallen, the Yuuzhan Vong had used their arts to alter the very nature of the world, installing a World Brain to coordinate the reshaping of the planet. Under the brain’s guidance, they introduced overwhelming quantities of fauna and flora to erode the construction that nearly covered Coruscant’s surface and replaced indigenous species with Yuuzhan Vong species, attempting to eradicate every sign that any species but