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When she was gone, Lando turned back to 1-1A. “Remind me again of the rewards of being virtuous?”

“I have never reminded you of this before.”

“That was a rhetorical question.”

“Nor have I ever told you of such rewards prior to not reminding you.”

“It was still rhetorical. I really need to give you an upgraded conversation module if you’re going to be talking all the time.”

In the distance, they heard Alema calling, “Captain, captain, wherever you are! You can come out now!”

Borleias Occupation, Day 30

Han came awake with Leia shaking him. Their chamber was dark, and he could feel that only a few hours had passed since they’d gone to sleep. Grogginess lay over him like a second blanket. It occurred to him that perhaps Borleias had never become a true colony world because everyone who lived there was continually sleep-deprived. “What, what?”

“The control center just reached me on the comlink,” Leia said. There was a breathless excitement to her voice, a happiness Han hadn’t heard in a long time. “Jaina’s insystem and headed this way. Get—”

Han was suddenly on his feet, the grogginess evaporated like a snubfighter shield hit by a laser cannon. He lurched toward the footlocker that held his clothes.

“—dressed.”

Luke watched them spiral down from the sky, a battered-looking X-wing and a disk-shaped Hapan freighter, landing in the same portion of the field that had briefly served the Advisory Council’s vehicles.

Jaina Solo—heir to some measure of her father Han’s lankiness, with features as deceptively delicate as her mother’s, her brown hair clinging to her scalp after hours in a helmet—descended the freighter’s boarding ramp and was immediately enfolded in the embrace of her parents. Behind her was Lowbacca, nose lifted as if trying to scent friends among the crowd; he offered a rumbling Wookiee growl of welcome as Tahiri, Zekk, and other academy friends bolted from the fringe of onlookers to embrace him.

Kyp Durron descended from the X-wing cockpit. Slender and dark-haired, with sharp features that seemed sculpted to convey anger and discontent but currently were calm, he was, for once, not dressed in stylish civilian clothes, but instead wore an anonymous pilot’s jumpsuit.

Luke moved up to join Kyp. Mara didn’t keep pace with him; Luke knew she was waiting for an opening to talk to Jaina. Luke gave the problematic Jedi a nod he hoped looked friendly. “Kyp.”

“Master Skywalker.” Oddly, there was neither irony nor anger in Kyp’s voice.

“You seem tired.”

“No, I don’t,” Kyp said. “Just different.”

They brought out a dark-hours meal for the latecomers and heard their story—a free-form recounting, to be sure, made somewhat random by the way Jaina, Kyp, and Lowbacca tended to interrupt one another with corrections and elaborations—of the days the three had spent on Hapes after the departure of Han and Leia. Wedge, acting more or less as master of ceremonies for the meal, brought in one more participant; Luke was startled to see Jag Fel enter the chamber.

Fel was a tall, wiry young man with close-cropped black hair, a scar running from his right eyebrow upward and then being echoed in a white lock of hair. He was Wedge’s nephew and, not surprisingly, a brilliant pilot, having inherited reflexes from both the Antilles and Fel families and having been raised among the militaristic, blue-skinned Chiss, among whom his parents had chosen to live. Fel’s black uniform harked back to those of old-time Imperial TIE fighter pilots, but was cut along different lines, with red piping along tunic and pants. Luke had been aware that Jag had been on Hapes with Jaina, but thought he’d departed from there for distant regions of space.

Han tried to find seats near Jaina, but, curiously, Leia chose places far enough away to give her a little distance, a little perspective on their daughter.

“So the Yuuzhan Vong are clustering around Hapes, but Tenel Ka is in charge there as Queen Mother,” Luke summarized. “Some good, some bad. Even with her fleets so badly reduced and her danger so close, Hapes could