Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 06_ Balance Point - Kathy Tyers [4]
And the relentless Yuuzhan Vong kept sweeping across the galaxy, destroying whole worlds, enslaving or sacrificing planetary populations. Lush Ithor, lawless Ord Mantell, and Obroa-skai with its fabulous libraries—all had fallen to the merciless invaders. Hutt space and the Mid Rim worlds along the Corellian Run were under attack. If the Yuuzhan Vong could be stopped, the New Republic hadn’t figured out how.
Han Solo stood with his left hand on his hip, arguing with Mezza, who led the larger of two Ryn clan remnants, but keeping one eye on the transgressors, a group of youths about Jacen’s age, with fading juvenile stripes on their cheeks. The Ryn clans occupied one of Settlement Thirty-two’s three wedge-shaped arrays of blue-roofed huts. The synthplas dome arched overhead, as gray as the polluted mists that swirled outside.
Jacen had been blessed—or cursed—with a sensitivity that he once hid behind labored jokes, and he did find it easy to see both sides of almost any argument. Part of his job here was to help his dad negotiate. Han tended to cut to solutions, instead of listening to both parties’ points of view. Han had chased the Ryn over half the New Republic, trying to gather his new friend Droma’s invasion-scattered clanmates. As world after world closed its doors to refugees, the Ryn had been beggared, duped, and betrayed. They’d taken terrible losses. They needed a sponsor.
So a reluctant Han Solo registered with the burgeoning Select Committee for Refugees. “Just long enough to settle them someplace.” That was how he explained it to Jacen, anyway.
Jacen had fled here from Coruscant. Two months ago, the New Republic had called him and his brother Anakin to Centerpoint Station, the massive hyperspace repulsor and gravity lens in the Corellian system. There’d been hope that Anakin, who had activated Centerpoint once before, could enable it again. Military advisers had hoped to lure the Yuuzhan Vong into attacking Corellia, and they meant to use Centerpoint as an interdiction field, to trap the enemy inside Corellian space—and then wipe them out. Even Uncle Luke hoped the station might be used only in its shielding capacity, not as a weapon.
The New Republic might never recover from the catastrophe that followed.
Jacen could see stress in his dad’s lined face and his labored stride, and in the gray growing into his hair. Even after all these years of hobnobbing with bureaucrats and tolerating his wife’s protocol droid, patience clearly wasn’t his strong suit.
Standing on the dust-beaten lane outside the Solos’ hut, Mezza’s opposing clan leader twisted his own tail between strong hands. The fur on Romany’s forearms, and the tip of his tail, stood out like bleached bristles.
“So your clan,” Han said, pointing at Romany, “thinks your clan”—pointing now at Mezza—“is likely to hijack our transport ships and strand everybody else here on Duro? Is that it?”
Someone at the back of Romany’s group shouted, “I wouldn’t put it past them, Solo.”
Another Ryn stepped forward. “We were better off in the Corporate Sector, dancing for credits and telling fortunes. At least there we had our own ships. We could hide our children from poisoned air. And even more poisonous … words.”
Han stuck his hands into his dusty coverall pockets and caught Jacen’s glance. Jacen could almost look him in the eye nowadays.
“Any suggestions?” Han muttered.
“They’re just venting their frustrations now,” Jacen observed.
He glanced up. The gray synthplas dome over their heads had been imported in accordion folds and unfurled over three arched metal struts. The refugees were reinforcing it with webs of native rock fiber, roughly half the colony working double shifts to strengthen the