Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Rebel Dreams_ Enemy Lines I - Aaron Allston [49]
I will bring Nen Yim to me.
Borleias Occupation, Day 11
Luke Skywalker sat cross-legged on the floor of the Millennium Falcon’s forward cargo hold, which was empty of cargo. It was one place, in this overcrowded military base, where he could be alone, one place where what he was doing was less likely to distress his son.
He opened himself to the Force and floated within it. He did not think of the question he hoped he would answer—thought was counterproductive to intuition. But this time, the currents of the Force took him where he wanted to go.
He could feel an enduring manifestation of the dark side. It was not waiting for him, not beckoning to him; it had an agenda that had nothing to do with Luke Skywalker. And in the brief moment before he lost his awareness of it, he knew that it still roamed the broken pathways of Coruscant.
Han Solo watched his wife come slowly back to life.
Not long before, the loss of Anakin and Jacen had shattered her, convinced her that all her works and efforts were meaningless. Once she had realized, at an intellectual level at least, that this was not so, their daughter Jaina’s troubles in the Hapes system had reminded Leia that she had duties, obligations. She began to carry them out in her customarily brisk and efficient manner, but without the spark of enthusiasm or the wicked humor that were so much a part of the Leia he loved.
At any time of day or night, her thoughts might return to Anakin, the way he had suffered and died on his mission to the Yuuzhan Vong worldship above Myrkr. Her breath and color would leave her and she would have to lean into Han’s arms or curl into a ball wherever she was sitting until the pain eased. Han, too, felt the stab of Anakin’s loss, but held himself upright, trying not to show it—he was determined to be there for Leia, to never again let her down the way he had after Chewie’s death.
But now, as Leia spent her time with her datapad linked to various ships’ libraries and her personal archives aboard Millennium Falcon and Rebel Dream—cataloging politicians who owed her favors, reconstructing the measures she and the other founders of the Rebel Alliance had taken when laying the groundwork of their movement more than two decades before—a semblance of enthusiasm was returning to her. The pain from Anakin’s loss and uncertainty from Jacen’s disappearance were still there, undiminished … but when they did not completely occupy her, she seemed more vital, more alive. More herself.
Han welcomed the change without entirely understanding its cause; as far as he could tell, she was merely doing the sort of political work she’d been doing for decades.
Leia’s exclamation startled him out of his studies: “What happened here?”
He turned and grinned up at her, at the blank expression she directed toward the open space where Chewbacca’s seat had been. “I’m having something Leia-sized put in today.” The grin was half genuine amusement at her surprise, half mask to hide his own lingering feelings of dismay; replacing Chewie’s chair, one of the last tangible mementos of the Wookiee’s life, had been among the hardest things Han had ever done. “Are you through reorganizing the galaxy for now?”
She shook her head, finally turning her attention to her husband. She moved up beside him. “I still have some solar systems to move, and I’ll be laundering the Hapes Cluster—”
“It could use it.” Han dragged her over and onto his lap. “We can start with Isolder, the walking headache—”
But Leia’s attention was focused elsewhere, on the planetary data now displayed on the Falcon’s computer screens. “Han, what’s this?”
“Coruscant.”
“I know it’s Coruscant. I mean, what are you doing studying it?”
He shrugged as though he didn’t know the answer, a delaying tactic as he tried to sort among any number of lies he could tell. None of them seemed likely to fool her. Finally he said,