Star Wars_ Tales of the Bounty Hunters - Kevin J. Anderson [128]
You can pinpoint moments when change occurs. Not always; some changes are like the tide, slow and barely perceptible until they have come, or gone.
Sometimes, though—
Han did think about this, and with, oddly, increasing frequency, as the event itself grew more distant in time: the Death Star was coming; and it was going to destroy the Rebel base, the Rebels themselves, and their plainly doomed Rebellion. Han had taken Chewie and the Falcon, and had gotten out with time to spare—
Chewie was furious; Han could tell. Chewie wanted to fight. They’d sat here, together, in the Falcon’s control room, with Chewie not talking to him. Han had made not one, but two errors, calculating the jump to hyperspace. Finally he had his trajectory—and he hadn’t been able to run it.
“All right, all right, let’s go fight,” he’d yelled at Chewie finally, almost twenty years ago, convinced they were both heading to their deaths—
He sat in the cockpit of the Falcon, almost twenty years later, and wondered what might have been: Leia would have been dead; and so would Luke. His children would never have been born. The Empire would still rule the galaxy, and he and Chewie would be traveling from world to world, one step ahead of the Imperials, one step ahead of the bounty hunters.
No, thought Han. Not ‘one step.’ Someone would have caught me. Boba Fett, IG-88—someone—and I’d have had no friends to come and rescue me from Jabba.
Twenty years.
To this day Han could remember with perfect clarity … how close he had come to punching in that trajectory, and leaving Leia and Luke behind. He woke up at night, sometimes, in cold sweats, thinking about it.
How very close.
If his parents were still alive, Han thought, they’d be impressed by the man he’d grown into—and not the least bit surprised at how close it had come to not happening.
Mari’ha Andona tapped a stud when the hail came.
“This is Control.”
“This is General Solo.” Mari’ha grimaced at the use of the title; Solo was certainly entitled to it, but Mari’ha had been running flight control over this sector of Coruscant long enough that she knew Solo only used it when he was going to be pushy about something.
“I’m going to take the Falcon up for a bit. Any chance I could get you to pipe me a flight path?”
“Yes, sir. What’s your destination?”
“Haven’t got one.”
Mari’ha said calmly, “Excuse me? Sir?”
“I don’t have one. I don’t know where I’m going yet.”
Mari’ha sighed, looking across the screens that showed all the flights in her sector. There were so many of them that it was hard for a human to pick out any single blip as belonging to an individual ship.
She thought, The flight droid is going to pitch a fit. The flight droid always pitched a fit; it had acquired a dislike for General Solo many years ago now, when—
“Which part of this are you having difficulty with, Control?”
“I’m going to need a couple minutes,” she muttered into the comm unit. “The flight droid doesn’t like you.”
“You need,” said Solo, “to clear a corridor and give me a flight path and do it right now before I have to go down to the tower personally and charm you to death. Do you copy that?”
“I copy you, General.” She finished composing his request for clearance, punched it in, and then sat there punching Override, over and over again, at the flight droid’s objections. “And … here you go. Have a nice trip, General. Don’t hurry back.”
“Try not to miss me too much, sweetheart. A pleasure as usual. Solo out.”
Not long after that, her supervisor’s holo sprung into existence, one-sixth sized, in the viewing area off to her right.
“This is most irregular,” he said severely. “Did General Solo give you a flight plan?”
“Nope.”
“Estimated time of return?”
“Nope.”
It was almost a shriek. “Destination?”
“Couldn’t tell you. Nowhere in-system, though. He entered hyperspace about twenty minutes ago.”
Strange things happen in the course of a lifetime:
When he had started