Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order_ Rebel Dreams_ Enemy Lines I - Aaron Allston [50]
She looked him in the eye, all levity gone from her expression. “You’re not going to go in there after him.”
“I might,” he said. I am, he told himself.
“Han, no. Listen to me.” This was not Leia’s voice of command; it was a plea. “You can’t help him. If you go, I’ll lose you, too.”
“I’m as hard to lose as a bad reputation.”
Leia didn’t bite, didn’t respond with any of a dozen glibly appropriate responses, one more sign of her seriousness. “You have to understand. I can’t see the Yuuzhan Vong in the Force, I can’t see Jacen in the Force … but I’m not cut off from the Force. It still shows me things, offers me visions, from time to time. When I see either of us going back to Coruscant while it’s in Vong hands, I see us failing there. Dying there.”
Chilled by the tone in Leia’s voice, Han shook his head. “Someone has to go.”
“Luke. Luke has to go. He has a chance. We don’t.” Leia seemed to deflate, as if the admission that she could offer no help, no comfort to her missing son had reduced her in volume. But she straightened again in a moment. “You can’t help Jacen, but you can help me.”
“How?”
“With politics.”
“You know how I feel about politics. You know how good I am at it.”
Her smile returned. “The Resistance means it’s time for new politics. The kind where, if the fellow smiling at you is planning to put a vibroblade in your back, instead of smiling in return, you shoot him.”
“Really?” He thought about it. “Shoot him just once, or as often as I want?”
“As long as your blaster’s batteries hold out.”
“Sounds wonderful. What’s the catch?”
“I’ve accepted the assignment Wedge talked about the other night. Pending you signing on, that is. Once we’ve got a plan worked up, we’ll be traveling from system to system setting up Resistance cells. Calling in favors. An extension of the Jedi Underground. Probably blundering into Yuuzhan Vong forces and Peace Brigade units.”
“And shooting them.”
“Yes.”
He opened his mouth to ask if this is what she really wanted to be doing while one of their surviving children was missing and the other was in unknown circumstances on an almost hostile world, but then he caught the look in her eye, the gleam that had often graced Rebel Alliance leader Leia Organa’s expression in the darkest days of the first war with the Empire.
The darkest days brought out the best in some people … people like Leia Organa Solo. Now the days were dark again. Now, in spite of the pain and uncertainty she struggled through, Leia was at her best again.
She was back.
“I’m signing on, lady.”
“Good. We need a scoundrel like you.”
“I don’t have to be a nice man anymore?”
She shook her head and leaned in for a kiss.
From behind them, the singsong voice of C-3PO blared, “Master Solo! The mechanic with your new copilot’s chair is here.”
Han and Leia both jolted, then Leia dissolved into silent laughter.
Han glared at her. “As a reactivated scoundrel, I get to shoot Goldenrod, too, don’t I?”
She shook her head.
“So that’s the catch.”
“That’s the catch.”
Danni Quee jumped and straightened in her seat, and in the brief moment after she awoke, she couldn’t remember what had awakened her. But then it came again, a knock at the door. “Come in,” she said automatically, and brushed hair back from her face.
The door slid open and Tam Elgrin stood there, hands held before him as though he wasn’t sure quite what to do with them. He put them on his hips, thought the better of it, crossed them before him, and leaned on the doorjamb. The door hissed partway closed, recognized him as an obstruction, and hissed open again.
“Tam. Hello. I didn’t think you could be on this corridor.”
He offered her