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Hastily Leia removed the helmet. “Can you send a message, a text message, to Jacen’s monitor so he can read it but Captain Hoclaw can’t see it?”

“Of course.”

“Here’s my message.”

She told him, and as the words registered, she could see his instant decision to send the message on to his commander.

Impatient, Jaina glanced at her chrono. Leia had to be doing a magnificent job of delaying Jacen, but even so they couldn’t stay here forever. Her mouse droid had drunk in much of the raw telemetry data from the shuttle’s memory, but there was plenty more to go.

She saw Jag turn away from helping her father and, blaster pistol drawn, trot over to the hangar’s internal doors. He keyed a command to open them and stayed to one side, pistol aimed. But it was Zekk, still in Alliance armor, who marched in. As soon as the doors slid shut again, the tall Jedi relaxed. Talking with Jag, he caught sight of Jaina. Fist upraised, he waved to her, a gesture of success.

She nodded. One more task down. But they couldn’t relax. Couldn’t lose focus. Could never, ever lose focus.

As Caedus continued expressing his very reasonable demands, words appeared at the bottom of his monitor screen.

JEDI SOLO REPORTS NO BRIDGE OR PERSONNEL NOISES IN ENEMY TRANSMISSION. COMMUNICATIONS HAS ANALYZED AND CONFIRMS. SUGGESTS ENEMY COMMAND SHIP BEARS ONLY SKELETON CREW OR IS AUTOMATED.

Despite the distraction, Caedus did not miss the import of Captain Hoclaw’s last words. He adopted a look of mild confusion. “Step down? Why would I?”

“Because if you do, we might be able to transform this conversation from a simple negotiation to a genuine peace. We might bring an end to this war. I could take the fact of your cooperation to the Confederation as a whole. My sources tell me that a concession like that would earn a lot of favor within the Confederation.”

Caedus felt a flash of irritation. “That’s not on the table, Captain.” He was also growing impatient. Why had the Confederates not sprung their trap? Perhaps they would not until it became clear that the negotiations could not, would not, succeed.

Well, he could make them aware of that right now. “Captain, you’ve heard my terms. I will not budge on any of them. In fact, as I grow annoyed with you, I will make them harsher. I’ll give you ten standard minutes to accept them as is. If you do not, when we begin talking again, you’ll be in a worse bargaining position.” He switched off the monitor and Tebut, alert, cut the transmission altogether.

Caedus turned. The bridge walkway behind him was empty. “Where is my—where is Jedi Solo?”

The intelligence officer gestured toward the doors at the stern end of the bridge. “The guard there accompanied her back into the Command Salon.”

“Ah.” Caedus concealed the sudden chill those words stabbed into his heart. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.” At a trot, Darth Caedus headed aft for what he hoped would not be a confrontation with his mother.

CENTERPOINT STATION, FIRE-CONTROL CHAMBER

As with every such enterprise—the use of an unbelievably complicated, incalculably important piece of machinery in the hands of the military—the involved parties were divided into groups, each of them secretly condescending to and uncomprehending of the others.

In the control areas of this large chamber, where consoles, keyboards, monitors, readouts, and datajacks predominated, technicians were hard at work. They analyzed energy throughputs, calculated damage to systems from anticipated energy spikes, theorized about side effects, and discussed recent hypotheses about the physics of gravity.

In one open area, where once a twice-human-height droid that had believed it was Anakin Solo had lived—and died—military officers in the uniforms of the Corellian Defense Force now waited. One of them, a woman in white instead of the lower-ranking browns, irritably consulted her chrono. Tall and broad-shouldered, she had an intelligent expression and a gaze that moved everywhere in the chamber, cataloging hundreds of details