Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I (25 page)

“Well, blast. Thought I was going to be able to give my daughter some much-needed flying lessons.”

Jaina didn’t rise to the bait. She just shrugged. “Some other time, maybe.”

With extraordinary gentleness and a reluctance she couldn’t conceal, Mara handed her son to Luke. She bent to kiss Ben’s forehead, then turned away … not swiftly enough for Jaina to miss the flash of pain in her features. Then Mara was walking back to her quarters, her stride long and her boot heels clicking in a manner that seemed
absolutely normal, as if nothing out of the usual had just occurred.

“Come on, Junior Corellians.” Han turned away from the crowd, stooped just a little, and looked back over his shoulder. “Who wants a ride to the
Millennium Falcon
?”

“Me!” That was Myri, closer to Han than her sister. She jumped onto Han’s back; he locked his arms under her knees so she could ride piggyback.

Han scowled at C-3PO. “Come on, Goldenrod.”

“I am as ready to depart as I was at the beginning of this discussion, four minutes and thirty-eight seconds ago.”

“No, you pile of parts, I mean, do what I’m doing.” Han flexed, emphasizing his odd posture.

“As you wish, but I fail to see what will be gained …” C-3PO bent in an imitation of Han’s position, then added “Oh” as Syal, grinning, jumped onto his back.

“That’s it,” Han said. “Syal, don’t be afraid to use the whip, he’s willful and skittish.”

“Sir, I protest. These are adjectives that cannot properly be used to describe my behavior …”

Han set himself into motion, heading down the hallway, but rolled his eyes at Jaina. “I should have known better. She weighs as much as a wampa.”

“I do not!” Myri said.

They passed down the corridor, C-3PO and Syal following. Jaina watched them go. So many times she’d ridden her father’s back that way. The last time … when had it been? Only a few years ago. He’d said she was getting too big, or that his back was getting too old. Probably another Han Solo fib.

The gathering in the hall was breaking up, Leia accompanying Wedge and Iella toward the complex’s main hall, saying, “I need to talk about some additional
matériel.” Luke followed, little Ben in his arms, talking to Kam and Tionne.

And then Jaina was alone. She followed Mara’s path to the door of the Skywalker chamber and knocked. At Mara’s “come in,” she did so.

Mara stood in the center of the main chamber. All the chamber’s furniture had been placed against the walls, giving the room a large open area in the middle, doubtless a place for Mara and Luke to exercise or meditate. Perhaps Mara had just started an exercise; she looked a little flushed, her hair slightly disarrayed.

“I guess it’s a bad time,” Jaina said. She jerked her head back toward the door and the corridor beyond. “I didn’t know all that was going on.”

“It’s all right. They’re taking the Jedi academy students to a new hiding place. Somewhere they’ll be safe while the
Errant Venture
is on-station here. Ben is going with them, and Wedge’s kids, and the boy Tarc.” Mara shrugged, and seemed about to add something, but no more words came.

“Are you all right?”

“I feel like I’ve had the wind knocked out of me. I just can’t seem to find my breath.”

This sudden candor, the way Mara seemed to be just short of in control, was unnerving. Jaina tried to find some words to help but realized the ridiculousness, the futility of it. She didn’t have any experience to compare to it.

Other than losing Anakin and Jacen. It was not the same. On one hand, they were her brothers, not her son; on the other, the loss was permanent. She steered herself away from those thoughts. “You could go with him,” she said.

“Don’t think I haven’t considered it. Don’t think I won’t be considering it until the moment your parents
blast off. Or even after.” Mara swallowed hard. “But my work here, and this mission to Coruscant, is more important than my feelings. If I’m not here to do something I’m supposed to do, the Yuuzhan Vong could take another few strides toward victory. Down the line, when it counts, that might be the difference for us. It might be the difference between Ben having a galaxy he can grow up in … or not having one. If I just do what I
want
to, and go running after your father, Ben could end up dying. Or becoming a slave of the Yuuzhan Vong. I can’t do that.”

Mara’s eyes were closed now, but she was in control—in control of her physical self, anyway. Nothing could control the anguish she was feeling.

Jaina felt it through the Force, an outpouring of pain that roared out of Mara like water through a shattered dam. It washed across Jaina and she was suddenly lost in it—

years alone the cold of space in her heart the Emperor’s hand avenge his death and then Luke what does hate become Ben so small so small was I ever that small will I ever see him again do I deserve to be his mother

It folded Jaina over like a snap-kick to her stomach. She lurched back into the door, but Mara, eyes closed, somewhere deep within herself, didn’t seem to hear.

Jaina resisted the urge to go to her mentor, to put her arms around her, to comfort her. The numbers had to catch up with Jaina sooner or later, as they had with her brothers. Mara would be better off not having her emotions divided as finely as they were. By stepping away, allowing Mara to concentrate just on her immediate family, Jaina would be helping her. She backed into the doorway and out into the hall.

The door slid closed in front of her, but the wash of thoughts and emotions from Mara continued. Jaina
moved away and began to catch her breath, but Mara’s ache still permeated her, mingling with her own ache from the loss of her brothers, and she wished she could keep from ever hurting that way again.

With every step she drew away from Mara’s quarters, she felt the pain slip away. At the end of the corridor, where it intersected with the main corridor leading to the administrative sector, she was herself again … but with her thoughts and emotions still whirling like clouds of piranha-beetles on Yavin 4.

Her thoughts were still not settled minutes later as she went through her X-wing checklist.

All around her, starfighters and larger spacecraft in the special operations docking bay roared, whined, or rumbled into life, the sounds and vibrations cutting through her despite the insulation provided by X-wing hull and flight suit. Normally she found it comfortably familiar, even soothing, as if everyone affected by the noise and vibration were united by them into a single mind with a single objective, but just now it was distracting, intrusive. She couldn’t focus.

The
Millennium Falcon
was in sight off to her port, and she could see her mother and father in its cockpit. Leia caught sight of her look and waved, smiling. Jaina waved back, absently, and forced a smile.

The starfighters of Jaina’s own squadron were arrayed around her, with Kyp and Jag situated nearest. She could see Kyp going through his own checklist, gaze flicking back and forth across the controls. Jag was already done with his, leaning back in his pilot’s couch, anonymous TIE fighter helmet on, his posture relaxed.

Some of these people loved her. Others at least respected her. They would be hurt when she followed her brothers into death, but she had a handle on that,
putting them all increasingly at arm’s length so the sting would be less when she was lost to them.

She could help things further along. Kyp had suggested some time ago that she become his apprentice. If she accepted, it would probably sting Mara a bit, but then Mara would be able to withdraw from her life and perhaps wouldn’t feel the greater sting when Jaina died. And if she became Kyp’s apprentice, she could insist that he maintain the distance suitable to a Master-apprentice relationship and stop expressing his personal interest in her.

That left only Jag. She didn’t know what he might have meant to her had things been different. She suspected that pursuing this question was one of the reasons behind his joining her squadron. But he was disciplined enough, too accustomed to loss to be drastically affected if Jaina died. He’d be all right.

She settled back, a trifle calmer. She had a plan for all the people she could currently affect. When the numbers caught up to her, all these people would be able to endure her loss a little better, a little more easily.

Her comlink clicked. It was Kyp, a direct, pilot-to-pilot transmission routed through their respective astromechs. “You all right? ” he asked.

“Just using a calming technique.”

“I don’t think it’s working. I can feel you from over here. You’re in turmoil.”

“No, I’m not. It just seems that way.” To cut the conversation short, she clicked over to squadron frequency. “Twin Suns Leader to squadron. I have four engines at full power, ready to scramble.”

“Two, four lit and waiting for a target.”

“Twin Suns Three, ready.”

“Four, starboard upper showing its usual power flux, but ready to dance …”

A minute later, the go-code flashed across her board. Twin Suns was first out of the special ops docking bay, its starfighters surrounding one of the kludged, right-angle-shaped craft the defenders of Borleias referred to as pipefighters. They set up on the killing field and waited for the other squadrons to deploy.

Next were the Rogues, reduced in number by the absence of Nevil and Corran, with their pipefighter, and the Wild Knights, guarding theirs. Fourth was Blackmoon Squadron, the renamed E-wing squad that had previously protected Pyria VI’s moon, under the command of Captain Yakown Reth; they escorted the triangle-shaped pipefighter that was the centerpiece of the Operation Starlancer experiments. Finally, the
Millennium Falcon
, its two Rogue Squadron escort X-wings, and a larger freighter lumbered out of the docking bay, practically emptying it.

Jaina switched her comlink over to fleet frequency. “This is Twin Suns Leader to Control. Test-fire mission is ready to launch.”

“Twin Suns, this is Control. Launch at will. Best of luck.”

Jaina led the Twin Suns and their pipefighter up in a gentle ascent through Borleias’s atmosphere. No one was entirely sure how much stress the experimental pipefighter could endure. After every test mission, mechanics descended on the cobbled-together vehicles, with their space station angle segments and their old Y-wing cockpit and engine components, and managed to patch them together for yet another launch. No one was yet suggesting that this was a losing battle, but Jaina knew the experimental vehicles were soaking up a lot of repair and maintenance resources. She hoped the project would be successful enough to warrant the effort.

The squadrons reached high planetary orbit and went
their separate ways, each navigating to a different point in the Pyria system—all but the
Falcon
and the vehicles with her, which remained behind in orbit.

Tam Elgrin scrambled into his quarters on the shuttle and fumbled with his concealed villip. Pain made his fingers clumsy; it took several tries for him to get the device open, to stroke the villip surface itself so that it would correctly expand into the shape of his controller.

“Speak,” the woman said.

“Jaina Solo has just taken off,” Tam said. With every word, his headache eased just a bit. “With her entire squadron. I was able to fling that thing, that bug, at her X-wing as she was flying out of the docking bay. It stuck to the side. As ordered.” He was getting very good at following orders. Not long before, he’d walked to the limits of the kill zone permitted to civilians and used his holocam to record the bleakness of that destroyed landscape, waiting there long enough for Yuuzhan Vong warriors at the kill zone’s edge to throw a packet to him. It was a jellylike gob of transparent material, wiggling, filled with bugs and worms and things that couldn’t escape except when he jammed his fingers into it to pry them free, and subsequent communications over the villip had told him what all the various creatures within it were for.

“Excellent. You’re doing very well, Tam.”

His controller’s words of praise, her encouraging tones, made Tam feel better. He hated himself for it.

“Was there anything else? ” his controller asked.

“Nothing,” he said. His headache was gone now.

“Contact me when you’ve had a chance to evaluate the morale of the garrison once Jaina Solo is taken,” the woman said. Then the villip inverted.

Tam closed its container. He stood in place, shaking.

He now had an idea of how the leash that had been put on him worked. When he failed to carry out his orders, the pain began. It worsened as his failure continued. When he was able to report success, it diminished. But since his controller couldn’t know, until he reported, how successful he was, the only stimulus for the pain could be his own knowledge of failure. Some portion of his brain that lit up when he felt guilt, some hormone discharged into his bloodstream when he was under a specific kind of stress, triggered the headaches.

He had no doubt that the pain, if allowed to grow too great, could kill him. He’d been told so. He’d felt it grow to the point that he believed it signaled an imminent explosion in his head, a fatal aneurysm or other deadly failure within him.

If only he could find some way to think himself around the pain, to feel no guilt or acknowledge no failure, so that the pain never came … but even with that thought, throbbing began in his temples and the pain returned.

He slumped, defeated. He wasn’t even allowed to think such things.

He was a slave and he would always be a slave.

He left the shuttle, head down, to return to his duties.

Han slouched in his pilot’s seat and stared, in unaccustomed contentment, at the stars.

“What are you thinking?” Leia asked from the copilot’s seat.

Han glanced at her. She looked far more comfortable in the Leia-sized seat they’d installed for her. At the very least, she wouldn’t be slipping back and forth during high-performance maneuvers. “You know me,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

Leia nodded. “I
know
you. What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking about what would happen when we finally got rid of the Vong. I was thinking about taking up the old trade again.”