Star Wars_ Millennium Falcon - James Luceno [29]
Nurses and aides, some human, some not, would escort him through the facility's broad, gleaming corridors or out onto the manicured grounds, which seemed to extend all the way to the distant skyline of Obroa-skai's capital city. He would encounter other beings on these outings, many of whom were recuperating from rejuvenation procedures, but all of whom had been briefed to confine their comments and conversations to the moment. Nothing about the past, nothing about the news. Isn't it a lovely day? Don't the gardens look marvelous? This evening's dinner promises to be a pure joy … With his mind slowed by drugs, the daily routine and nightly dreams were almost enough to convince him that all was well, and that he was merely recovering from a swoop race crash, like the one he'd been involved in on Fondor before the war.
That a mere week had passed rather than sixty-two years.
But the truth would stalk and pounce on him in the middle of the night, in between peaks of whatever time-release drugs they had him on, and he would wake up screaming.
Sixty-two years!
Added to his actual age he would only have been ninety-three, but he didn't look or feel nearly a century old. To Hutts, Wookiees, Muuns, and a handful of other species, ninety-three years barely put one past adolescence, but humans were still in the habit of dying in their early hundreds. Unless they were wealthy enough to afford rejuvenation procedures of the sort available at Aurora. Then 125, even 150 years wasn't uncommon. More important, Jadak hadn't simply been blessed with longevity; he had skipped ahead in what seemed to him an instant.
He had jumped.
No matter the time of day or night, Sompa or Bezant was always on hand to ease him through episodes of despair, reminding him that he needed to take things slowly, one step at a time, and to help him differentiate between false and real memories. He didn't really have a wife and kids or own a home on Brentaal IV. He hadn't actually done half the things he half recalled doing.
Despite the support he received, he kept thinking he would simply wake up from the longest, most dream-filled night of his life and find himself in a bunk aboard the Stellar Envoy, with Reeze whipping up breakfast in the galley. Sompa and Bezant refused to tell him anything about the accident that had landed him at Aurora. They conceded that his mind could be compelled to give up the memory, but they insisted that his long-term psychic health would be better served if the memory surfaced of its own accord. The last memory he recalled with any clarity was of sitting at the controls of the old YT-1300 as it skimmed through hyperspace. But he couldn't place the event in time, didn't know where he and Reeze had come from or where they were headed and why. So how could he be sure he wasn't still in a coma, and that all he was experiencing wasn't simply another programmed dream?
Every day for the first two weeks, Sompa had told him that he was going to be moved to the tank, holding it out like a panacea for everything, not just his replacement legs. Then one morning, without warning, he was inside the tank with the holoscreen mask adhered to his face and the tutorial running, and all doubts about the reality of his situation were laid to rest.
Because no one could have made up the catastrophic events the tutorial led him through.
The war between the Republic and the Confederacy of Independent Systems—the one in which Jadak and countless others had tried so hard to serve the cause of peace and justice—was revealed to have been nothing more than an elaborate ploy to eliminate the Jedi Order and place the galaxy in the hands of a Sith Lord. The Force had triumphed in the end, however, with Emperor Palpatine brought down by the son of a Jedi everyone had once looked to as a hero. But it had taken years of fighting with the remnants of the Empire before a New Republic rose from the ashes