Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [32]
Shysa nodded. “You must be talkin’ about Solo.”
LEIA BROKE INTO A TROT AS SHE ENTERED THE DOCKING bay cavern, but stopped short when she registered the absence of a familiar silhouette that should have been in the repair bay beyond the lines of shuttles and fighters. She pushed her way through the deck gangs to the place where the Falcon had been docked. There was nothing to be seen there except some grease and coolant stains, a few scraps of hull plating and random electronic components, and one lone gauss wrench with a dented head. Setting her jaw, she swept the gauss wrench up and weighed it in her hand. But then she lowered her arm and just gazed balefully out into the dark of space beyond the docking bay’s particle shield.
She should never have sent Han in the first place. She should have made him stew in that stifling conference room listening to C-3PO struggle to find polite translations of that Mandalorian’s sneers. He hadn’t been gone ten minutes when she’d realized what a mistake she’d made. And why.
It was because she didn’t take herself seriously enough.
Even after all these months, she couldn’t make herself entirely believe that actual Jedi blood ran in her veins—not only Jedi blood, but the blood of arguably the most powerful Jedi in history. She had never entirely gotten her mind around the truth that her instincts and intuitions and premonitions were much more than psychological phenomena: that they were, really and truly, the whispers of the Force itself. She had sent Han because, deep down, she’d really believed that he’d just run on up to the communications center and check on the real-time subspace status reports coming from Luke’s task force, and when he found out that all was well, he’d just run on back and tell her so. With maybe a bit of teasing about some static today on the Feminine Intuition Channel, huh?
Coming to grips with their Jedi heritage must have been easier for Luke; growing up on the Outer Rim, he’d barely even known what a Jedi was. Leia, on the other hand, had been raised in a household that was steeped in reverence for the Jedi Order and everything it had stood for. The man she still thought of as her father—Bail, the Prince Consort—had had an inexhaustible fund of tales of the Jedi, not just from the Clone Wars but from the whole history of the Republic. He had never spoken of any Jedi with less than absolute respect for the way they had devoted their lives wholly to the cause of peace and justice, sacrificing everything in the tragic Clone Wars.
Was it any wonder that she couldn’t quite believe it? That one of those legendary heroes had been Anakin Skywalker, her real father … and that this legendary hero had somehow been transformed into the most ruthless, homicidal, and terrifying enforcer of the Empire’s tyranny … and that the eager puppy of a Tatooine farm boy who had burst into her cell on the Death Star to rescue her—without the faintest ghost of a plan beyond a naive faith in the essential justness of the universe—was her twin, who now expected her to follow in his, and their father’s, footsteps …
It was all just too preposterous. She might, just barely, be able to believe it could possibly have happened … to somebody else.
Right up until something equally preposterous would happen. Like sitting in a bleak conference room on an airless asteroid and suddenly knowing, just flat knowing, that her brother—thousands of light-years away—was so deep in danger that even he didn’t have a chance of surviving on his own.
But then she’d still had to hack through the thickets of Oh, I’m just being silly second thoughts; what finally cleared her mind and righted her course was the added premonition, after some fifteen minutes spent fitfully waiting for his return, that now Han was also in danger. Even then, after she’d become alarmed enough to mutter a lame excuse to the Mandalorians and leave the room, she’d had to go all the way up to the communications