Star Wars_ Millennium Falcon - James Luceno [23]
“ 'Cause Grandpa has always fixed it.”
A pained yowl erupted from the compartment.
“Perhaps,” C-3PO said. “Though not without requisite contributions of Captain Solo's flesh and blood.”
Leia appeared from the cockpit connector, smiling at Allana, then stroking the seven-year-old's long red hair as she settled down beside her on the rim of the hatch.
“Grandpa and his shortcuts.”
“I heard that,” Han said. “You're going to blame me for an uncharted gravity sink?”
“I can't very well blame the sink, Han.”
“Yeah, well, it could be worse. We could have been drawn directly into it.”
Leia had learned long ago that things could always be worse. Still, the sink had yanked the Falcon from hyperspace with such force that the power core had shut down, leaving the ship in danger of being drawn ineluctably into the sink, and certain catastrophe.
“That seems to be exactly what's happening, darling.”
Han's head and shoulders emerged from the hatch, a lopsided, mirthless smile on his face. “Always looking on the bright side. That's why I've kept you around all these years.”
She returned the look in kind. “I love you, too.”
Han scowled and disappeared back into the compartment.
Sighing, Allana stood up and walked to the dejarik table's semicircular bench, humming to herself and gazing around. “Grandma, how long do you think we'll be here?” she said finally.
“Not long.” Leia stood up and joined her at the hologame table. “What's a family outing without an unexpected twist or two?”
Allana nodded, mostly for Leia's sake, and Leia watched her go into self-entertainment mode, humming once more and touching this and that.
She was a remarkable child; precocious to be sure, but adventurous and infinitely patient, and Leia felt as close to her as she had to Anakin and Jacen, and continued to feel to her and Han's surviving child, Jaina. Allana was actually the daughter of Jacen and the Hapan Queen Mother, Tenel Ka, but that was a secret known only to a select few. Allana was known to most as Amelia, a Hapan foundling adopted by the Solos following the tragic death of Jacen, who by then had assumed the Sith title Darth Caedus. Or the tragedy that Jacen had become. Which was it? Leia frequently wondered. That he had died at the hand of his twin sister made it all the more unbearable. But try as she might, Leia could not purge her memory of those dreadful years.
I will always miss you, despite what you became.
As Tenel Ka's daughter, Allana was Chume'da—heir to the throne—of the Hapes Consortium. But after what Jacen had put the child through, and out of fear that her true paternity might one day be discovered, Tenel Ka wanted her removed from danger, as well as from political intrigue of the sort that was commonplace in the Consortium. And so Allana's death by a strain of targeted nanovirus had been faked, and Han and Leia had assumed custody of her. More, they had embraced her, and felt blessed by every moment she spent in their company.
The original plan had called for the Force-sensitive Allana to attend the Jedi academy, which had been relocated to Shedu Maad, near Terephon in the Transitory Mists, but thus far the plan wasn't working out. Tenel Ka felt Allana would be safer with the Solos than off at the academy. And Allana and the academy were hardly a perfect fit. Free-spirited and kinetic, Allana had trouble sitting still for lessons and seemed less interested in honing her abilities in the Force than in following her instincts and investigating life's mysteries in her own fashion.
You were like that as a child. Sometimes it pains me to see so much of you in her. Pains me, and yet fills my heart to overflowing.
Allana rarely spoke of the father she had scarcely known. At the height of Jacen's misguided attempts to control the destiny of the galaxy, he had abducted her in an effort to force Tenel Ka to support his evil machinations, and Han and Leia had been instrumental in rescuing her, learning only then that Jacen was her father. The child had known danger all her life—from Hapan conspirators,