• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

They flew along in silence for several long moments. Han held what Leia had told him in his mind like an egg, something too delicate for him to handle roughly.

He noticed, even in his distraction, that the speeder had developed a shudder. Carefully, he experimented with the acceleration, with the controls during turns.

No, the speeder was unchanged. But his arms and hands were shaking so badly that they were affecting performance.

Abruptly he pulled out of traffic, sideslipping with ridiculous, dangerous accuracy into an unoccupied speeder dock at the five-hundred-meter level next to a restaurant-side walkway. The speed of his approach and his rapid, last-second deceleration caused pedestrians on the walkway to shriek and leap out of the way, as though he were going to overshoot and slam through them, but he was at a dead stop centimeters from docking, and let the dock’s grappler beam drag him in the final hand span of distance. Automatically, he inserted a credcard in the adjacent slot.

For long moments, he couldn’t bring himself to look at his wife. His voice was low and shaky when he finally said, “So I did that. I almost got them killed.”

“No.”

“Yes. I should have figured that our kids would get involved in what was going on with Corellia. And I went there and told the Corellians to line up their gun sights on our boy and our girl.”

“Han, you told them your guesswork. But you’re not listening to me. I said they were prepared for Jedi. What, in everything you told the Corellians, would have alerted them to be prepared for Jedi in exactly the situations where Jedi were used against them?”

Han thought about it. “Nothing.”

“That’s right, nothing. So?”

“So…somebody else told them where and when Jedi would be used.”

“That’s right. And the whole thing with Centerpoint Station. The Corellians are being kind of disingenuous about it when they say the Jedi came and sabotaged the place. They neglect to point out that they’d restored it to full operating status, or were on the verge of doing so.”

Han looked at her, tried to absorb the implications of what she was saying. No politician, he was still a skilled tactician, and the relative military strengths of Corellia with and without the station began clicking like numbers through his mind. They made him uneasy. With the station operable, Corellia could probably have achieved independence quickly, bloodlessly. But the system could only have done so by issuing threats—terrorist threats—against the Galactic Alliance. Suddenly he wasn’t sure he could support Corellian independence on those terms, and this lack of conviction made him uneasy. “You’re just full of good news,” he said, an attempt at humor that, to his own ears, fell flat.

“There’s more. And I don’t know what this means.”

“Go ahead.”

“Ben actually did the main bit of work in sabotaging the station. It was quite an achievement. But he’s not talking about it. He’s reported only to his father, and Luke hasn’t released any of that information. Ben’s not accepting congratulations very well. And when I went to him to offer mine, he couldn’t bring himself to talk to me. He just froze up and sort of nodded, and then made as hasty a retreat as he could. He looked…guilty.”

“He probably figured out how I’d take the news.”

“Maybe.”

Han drew a long, deep breath. “Anything else?”

She nodded. “They’re still going to try to fix everything by diplomatic means. There’s going to be a meeting between Saxan and Pellaeon. Both sides, and the Jedi, will be providing security. Luke asked me to be part of that effort. And he’s hoping you will be, too.”

“Did you accept?”

“I accepted for me.”

He nodded. “Then you accepted for me, too.”

Finally, Leia smiled. “I was hoping you’d say that. And we have one last problem to deal with.”

“Keep it up, my mind is going to crack. What problem?”

“Admirers.”

Han looked up. Just meters away, a crowd of at least twenty people, their attention on Han and Leia, had accumulated on the walkway, slowing foot traffic. When Han looked