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Luke smiled in return. “Times change.” He nodded his respects to the others and swept out of the chamber.

chapter seventeen

CORUSCANT

The airspeeder was big, roomy inside and outside in a way that had not been in fashion for several years. It was sky blue but scarred and dented by a generation’s worth of ordinary accidents and mishaps, and it looked as slow as a bantha at naptime.

A human male lounged in the backseat, his feet toward the elevated walkway against which the speeder had docked. He wore dark pants with narrow red stripes running up the outsides of the legs, a tan, long-sleeved shirt, a dark vest, and worn boots. A yellow rag was draped across his face. He looked at first glance as though he was sleeping, the rag keeping sunlight from his face, but something in the way his head was propped up against the side of the seat, orienting his eyes toward the adjacent walkway, something in the way his raised right knee hid his hand and perhaps the presence of a blaster pistol—illegal here but hardly uncommon—kept even the most larcenous passersby from giving too much consideration to stealing the speeder.

Moving briskly, a small woman in a brown traveler’s robe, hood up to conceal her face, moved out of the stream of foot traffic and dropped into the passenger seat.

The man in the backseat pulled the rag from his face and rolled forward into the pilot’s seat, fast and graceful. He had the speeder backed up thirty meters and was reversing direction, blasting forward into a traffic lane at a rate that seemed remarkable for such an awkward speeder, before other passersby began to register the fact that he was Han Solo.

“What’d you find out?” he asked.

The wind from their movement whipped the hood from Leia’s face; it fell against her back. She didn’t bother to replace it. Nor did she bother to conceal her unhappiness. “Maybe we ought to get home before we discuss this.”

“I’ve already waited several hours,” Han said.

“Maybe you ought to park.”

Finally he gave her a close look. “That bad.”

“Worse.”

“Give it to me.”

There was an almost imperceptible pause. Han knew Leia was arranging facts, deciding on order of presentation.

“Some of this I’m guessing, based on things that weren’t said and things that were. Some that I’m sure of is based on things I overheard. I guess I’ll start with the biggest things and go down from there. The Corellian claims that Centerpoint Station was sabotaged by Jedi are true. The station has been seriously damaged, setting the Corellian scientific corps back several years. And the Jedi who did it…were Jacen and Ben.”

Han gave her a sharp look. He saw her eyes widen and he glanced back into traffic. In just fractions of a second, the distraction and the tightening of his hands on the controls had caused his speeder to slide partway out of its traffic lane, toward a tiny high-speed model with an elderly dark-skinned human couple in it. He flashed them a sorry-about-that smile and returned his attention to Leia, but kept better vigilance on his piloting. “Jacen.”

“Yes.”

“And Ben.”

“Yes.”

“Is Luke crazy?”

This time she didn’t answer. She continued, “Jedi teams also made attempts to snatch a few critical Corellian politicians out of Coronet. Jaina was on one of those teams.”

Han’s jaw set and he saw Leia pull back, unconsciously, just a few centimeters. She wasn’t afraid, had never had reason to be afraid of his reactions, but he was reminded of something a colleague once told him—when Han Solo got mad, he looked madder than any human in known space.

“He’s doing it again,” Han said. “He’s throwing my children—our children—into dangerous situations they shouldn’t be part of. What do I have to do to make him stop?”

“There’s more. Are you sure I can’t persuade you to pull over?”

“Is there anything you could possibly tell me that would make me lose my skill as a pilot?” Realizing he sounded testy, and not wanting to pour out his anger on Leia, he forced all anger out of his voice. “Just tell me.”

“The Corellians had ambushes