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In the mirror she looked at herself. Leia no longer spent the meticulous time with her hair that she had when she was a princess on Alderaan. Since then she had borne three children, the twins, who were now two years old, and recently a third baby. She was able to see them only a few times a year, and she missed them terribly.

Because of the potential power carried by the grandchildren of Anakin Skywalker, the twins and the baby boy had been taken to a carefully guarded planet, Anoth. All other knowledge of the planet had been blocked from her mind, to prevent anyone from prying it out of her thoughts.

During their first two years, Luke said, Jedi children were most vulnerable. Any contact with the dark side could warp their minds and abilities for life.

She activated the small holodais that projected recent images of her children. The two-year-old twins, Jacen and Jaina, played inside a colorful sculptured playground artifact. In another image Leia’s personal servant Winter held the new baby, Anakin, smiling at something out of view. Leia smiled back, though the static images couldn’t see her.

Part of that long loneliness would soon be over. Jacen and Jaina could now use some of the Jedi powers to protect themselves, and Leia could shield the twins as well. Within little more than a week—no, it was exactly eight days—her little boy and girl would be returning home.

Knowing that the twins were coming to stay lightened her mood. Leia eased back into the self-conforming chair as she turned on the entertainment synthesizers, playing a pastorale melody written by a famous composer from Alderaan.

The door chime sounded, startling her from her reverie. She glanced down to make certain she had remembered to dress herself, then went to the entryway.

Her brother Luke stood in the shadows, cowled in his brown hood and cloak. “Hello, Luke!” she said, then gasped. “Oh, I forgot completely!”

“Developing your Jedi powers is nothing to take lightly, Leia.” He frowned, as if scolding her.

She gestured him to come inside. “I’m sure you’ll have me make it up with extra practice sessions.”

When seen from a distance, the huge construction droid moved at a plodding pace, lifting its immense support pods only once every half hour to shuffle a step forward. But standing right beneath it, General Wedge Antilles and his demolition teams saw the construction droid as a blur of motion, its thousands of articulated arms working on structures to be disassembled. The walking factory plowed deeper into the morass of collapsing and half-destroyed buildings in an old sector of Imperial City.

Some of the droid’s limbs ended with implosion wrecking balls or plasma cutters that sent explosive jolts into the walls. Collector arms sorted through the rubble, yanking out girders, shoveling boulders and steelcrete into dispensing receptacles. Other raw wreckage was scooped directly into the churning mandibles and conveyor belts that brought the resources down to elemental separators, which in turn pulled out the useful substances and processed them into new building components. The heat rising from its internal factories rippled in miragelike waves, making the immense machine glow in Coruscant’s star-filled night.

The construction droid continued to work its way through the buildings damaged from the devastating firefights during the recent civil warfare. With so much to repair or destroy, sometimes the droid’s collector arms and debris nets were not sufficient.

Wedge Antilles looked up just in time to see a packed receptacle split from its moorings. “Hey, keep back, everybody! Under cover!” The demolition team scrambled under the protection of an outcropping of wall as the debris fell twenty stories.

A rain of boulders, transparisteel, and twisted rebars crashed with explosive force into the street below. Someone yelped into the comlink, then promptly silenced himself.

“Looks like this main building is going to go any minute,” Wedge said. “Team Orange, I want you to keep at least half a block away from that thing. There’s no telling what that