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By Root 1475 0

would survive, his heart still ached whenever he looked at her. He had almost lost her during the fall of Duro, and a stubborn series of necrotic infections continued to threaten her mangled legs. Even more in doubt was their future together. She had greeted him warmly enough after they found each other again, but Chewbacca’s death had changed too much for their marriage to continue as before. Han felt brittle now, older and less sure of his place in the galaxy. And in the few hours she had been coherent enough to talk, Leia had seemed hesitant, more tentative and reluctant to speak her mind around him.

At the door, Han peered out of the darkened room to find four human orderlies outside flanking the MD droid at the monitoring post. Though they had a covered repulsor gurney and fresh white scrubs, they were not wearing the masks and sterile gloves standard for visitors to the isolation ward.

“… don’t look like orderlies to me,” the MD droid was saying. “Your fingernails are absolute bacterial beds.”

“We’ve been cleaning disposal chutes,” said the group’s leader, a slash-eyed woman with black hair and the jagged snarl of a hungry rancor. “But don’t worry, we came through decon.”

As she spoke, one of the men with her was sliding across the counter behind the droid. Han drew back into the room and retrieved his blaster from a satchel beneath Leia’s bed. Though he had been dreading this moment for three weeks, now that it had come, he felt almost relieved. The enemy had not arrived when he was sleeping or out of the room, and there were only four.

Han returned to the door to find the MD droid standing with darkened photoreceptors, his vocabulator slumped against his chest. The orderly behind the counter was scowling down at the data display.

“Don’t see her on the register, Roxi,” he said to the woman.

“Of course not,” Roxi growled. “Slug, do you think a Jedi would use her own name? Look for a human female with amphistaff wounds.”

Slug, a moonfaced man with a bald head and a week’s worth of stubble on his face, scrolled down the screen and began to read symptoms off the display. “Parietal swelling … thoracic lacerations … double severed sartorius …” He stopped and looked up. “You understand this stuff?”

Roxi glared at the man as though the question were a challenge, then asked, “What was that second one?”

Slug glanced back at the display. “Thoracic lacerations?”

“That could be it.” Roxi glanced at her other companions and, seeing that they had no better idea what thoracic meant than she did, continued, “Well, lacerations sounds right. What room?”

Slug gave her the number, and the four impostors started down the opposite corridor. Han allowed them a few moments to clear the area, then slipped into the monitoring post and used the controls to seal his wife’s room with a quarantine code. The thought of leaving her alone made his stomach queasy, but he had to handle this problem quietly and by himself. Though a Jedi-friendly doctor had admitted Leia under a false name and Han had sent the famous Solo children home with Luke and Mara, the alias would not withstand a CorSec incident investigation. And with a new Yuuzhan Vong base rising at the edge of the sector, no one associated with the Jedi would dare trust Corellia’s always erratic government for protection. Had Leia’s condition not forced them to divert soon after escaping Duro, this was the last place Han would have stopped.

He peered around the corner of the monitoring post and, in the night-shift twilight, saw the impostors disappearing into a bacta tank parlor about halfway down the corridor. Taking a datapad from the recharger on the counter and a breath mask, hygienic cap, gloves, and lab coat from the supply locker, he did his best to disguise himself as someone official and followed.

The intruders were gathered around tank number three in the parlor’s far corner, studying a slender human with a trio of freshly stitched lacerations angling down across her chest. Like Leia’s wounds, the cuts were atypically inflamed and almost black at the edges, a sign that