• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Ezrakh hesitated a moment, weighing the question, the folds of his leathery gray face tightening. Then he made a sign of negation. “His smell is a human smell. I do not like him either, Lady—I do not like his eyes—but he smells as other humans do.”

Leia nodded, a little comforted. “Will you come with me?” she asked. “And you, Marcopius, if you would.” She smiled to one of the young Academy guards. It wasn’t their fault, she knew, that the hunter-killers of Honoghr could slice a potential assassin to pieces before a human—particularly these youths—could unlimber a blaster rifle, nor was it the fault of the Academy guards that she could not risk any possibility of threat while on this mission. Throughout the trip she had been very careful to keep the Academy guards in their usual position at her side, and to emphasize to them that the Noghri were only a backup, a holdout weapon against unexpected catastrophe.

And as Luke would say, there was no way of telling which group might be her salvation in a crisis.

At the turbolifts she touched the summon switch, and when she and her two guards were within the car, toggled the controls for the shuttlecraft hangar deck.

2

Do not meet with Ashgad.

Down on the Borealis shuttle deck, Luke Skywalker turned the slip of flimsiplast over in his hands.

It was small, about the length and width of two fingers, the semitransparent stuff used for packing and wrapping delicate objects for shipping. It had been carefully but unevenly torn from a larger piece and wadded tight in the innards of a cheap music box in fact. The words were written in graphite marker, such as his uncle had used to mark rocks and scrap metal out in the field.

The tune the box played was an old one, a song about a beleaguered queen and her three magical birds.

The handwriting was Callista’s.

Do not trust him or accede to any demand that he makes. Above all, do not go to the Meridian sector.

Callista

His heart was a slow battering ram against the inside of his ribs.

He barely heard the quick, soft beeping at his side as the astromech droid Artoo-Detoo emerged from around the airfoil of the modified B-wing that rose like a suspended wall in the rear corner of the deck-six shuttlecraft bay. See-Threepio, protocol droid extraordinaire, followed close behind, golden carapace shining in the soft light. “According to Artoo, all systems appear to be in flying order, Master Luke,” stated the protocol droid in his prissy mechanical tenor. “But personally, I should be much happier were you to take a larger craft with greater oxygen capacity.”

Luke nodded absently, “Thanks, Threepio.” But in fact his attention never left the slip of plast in his hand, the bold, firm, slightly old-fashioned writing across its face.

He was seeing the snows of Hoth, and the way Callista’s lightsaber had vied with the ice planet’s dim sunlight for brightness. Seeing the ruined bunker there and how the ice had glittered in the smoke-brown tousle of her hair. Remembering what it had been to fight at her side, more a part of him than his own hand or arm; knowing which way she’d turn, or lunge, or drive the snow monsters into his blade.

With the memories of the snow were the warm scents of night on Yavin Four, and of lying in each other’s arms on the hillside above the jungles, counting stars. Callista had explained to him with great solemnity why it had seemed so logical for her and two other Jedi apprentices, thirty-three years ago—in another body, another life—to try to concoct the illusions of ghosts haunting an old drift station on Bespin to puzzle their Master and why this had turned out to be not such a good idea after all.

He hurt with wanting her. Missing her. Needing her.

I realized I could not come bad to you. I’m sorry, Luke.

The blazing glare of the monster ship, the Knight Hammer, and all the hopes of the renegade Admiral Daala’s fleet, crashing in flames …

His own voice crying Callista’s name.

I have my own odyssey