Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I (31 page)

Maal Lah nodded. He, too, said, “It will be done.”

That
, the warmaster thought,
should send the priests of Yun-Yuuzhan into a fit, and if there truly are conspirators within their orders and the shapers are against me, I will soon know it
. He glanced down at his left arm.
I will soon feel it
.

“It has all the characteristics of a major push,” Tycho said.

He, Wedge, and Iella stood before the control chamber’s hologram display. It showed the compiled readouts from all the garrison’s ground-based sensors, including the gravitic sensors Luke’s Jedi had planted in the jungle beyond the kill zone, and incorporated live feeds from starfighters out on patrol.

At the center of the display was the large friendly signal marked “Base.” Out at a distance of a few hundred kilometers, in every direction of the compass, were masses of red blips; Iella counted sixteen separate groups. “What are they doing?” she asked.

“One or two groups are landing personnel, vehicles, everything an invasion force needs,” Wedge said. “The others are distractions. We’re supposed to divide up our attention among them in a desperate attempt to figure out where their landing zone is, and we’re supposed to become nervous because we’re not succeeding.”

“ ‘Supposed to,’ ” Iella said. “Meaning that you’re not? Not doing either one?”

Wedge shook his head. “Oh, we’re sending out scouts to all these sites, but they’re under orders to show up, stay alert, and then make a run for it if anything comes after them. We don’t want to lose pilots acquiring information we essentially don’t need.”

“So you don’t care where their landing zone is?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Why?”

“Because, sometime in the next day or two, they’re going to attack us
here
—and that’s exactly what we want them to do.”

“And when they do,” Iella said, “who are you going to face them with? The New Republic or the Rebel Alliance?”

Wedge and Tycho exchanged a look, and both grinned.

“Neither,” Wedge said. “We’re going to face them with an enemy they’ve never had the displeasure of fighting. We’re going to hit them with the Empire.”

“They’re not going to like the Empire,” Tycho said.

And they told her about Operation Emperor’s Hammer.

This time, when the
Millennium Falcon
arrived on Borleias, it did so in the middle of the night, to no fanfare,
no welcoming committee other than a handful of refuelers. Leia saw Han breathe a sigh of thanks, celebrating the absence of ceremony.

Han took Tarc to find him some quarters—the rooms that had been assigned to the underaged Jedi students, where Tarc had previously been staying, would have been reassigned by now, and Han, though he liked the boy, didn’t want him in their own quarters. Leia went in search of her daughter.

Jaina’s X-wing was in the special operations docking bay, a mechanics crew working on it, but Leia could not find her daughter in her quarters or in the former incubation chamber that now served the special operations squadrons—Rogue, Wild Knights, Twin Suns, and Blackmoon—as an informal lounge.

Leia couldn’t call Jaina on her comlink, couldn’t give her the impression that she was keeping tabs, even though that’s what she desperately wanted to do. Eventually, having had no luck in her search, she returned to her own quarters.

And it was there she found Jaina—stretched out on the bed, lying on her side, in her pilot’s jumpsuit, her boots and other accoutrements kicked off to the foot of the bed. Jaina was asleep, and Leia took a moment just to look at her.

Though in engagement after engagement Jaina had been at the controls of one of the New Republic’s deadliest fighter craft, racking up kill after kill against savage enemies, her features were now relaxed in sleep, and she looked as innocent as a child. But she was no child now. She was a young woman, her childhood suddenly, irretrievably gone, and an ache constricted Leia’s heart.
We should be away from all this now
, she thought.
Han and Jaina and Jacen and Anakin and I. And Luke and Mara and little Ben. In a field of flowers. On Alderaan
.

Moving slowly and quietly so as not to awaken Jaina, Leia lay down on the bed and put an arm around her. It was a closeness, a protracted closeness that Jaina no longer permitted her in times of wakefulness. Too soon, she heard Jaina’s breathing change as her daughter awakened.

Jaina looked up into Leia’s face and offered a slight, sleepy smile.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“It’s all right.” Jaina reached up to pull Leia’s arm more tightly around her. “Since you left, I’ve come here sometimes because I knew I could smell you and Dad here. You’d be all around me even when you weren’t here.”

Leia managed to keep an expression of incredulity off her face. Those words seemed so unlike Jaina—so unlike the person she’d become across the last couple of years. “Are you all right?”

Jaina shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She lay her head down on the pillow again. “I don’t think I know who I am anymore.”

“Is it this goddess thing—?”

“No. That doesn’t confuse me in the least. It’s just a confidence game. No, the problem is all being a Jedi, which seems so crystal clear in what you should do and what you should say at any given time … and then being the rest of me, where nothing is clear.” Her expression, what Leia could see of it at this angle, seemed bleak.

Leia chuckled. “Jaina, I’ve been wrestling with the same question since I was only a little older than you are now, and I
still
don’t have a good answer. Sometimes I’m Jedi and sometimes I’m not. Jedi teaching says that you must turn away from fear. But as a politician, I have to experience fear. Not just my own. The fear of my allies. The fear of my opponents. If I can’t feel it—if I can’t
become
it, in a sense—I can’t predict which way they’re going to jump when trouble hits. Sometimes being a Jedi just runs completely counter to your other goals. The methodology is just too different.” Softly, she stroked her daughter’s hair, silently willing her daughter’s torments away.

“That’s part of it, too,” Jaina said. “It took me a while to figure it out. I’m afraid.”

“It’s all right to be afraid. You’re surrounded by fearsome things. Being afraid will keep you alive.”

Jaina shook her head. “That’s not it. I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid of
surviving
 … and getting to the end of the war and discovering that I’m all alone. That everyone I knew and cared for is gone.”

“Jaina, that won’t happen.”

“It’s already been happening. I mean, it was like having part of me cut off when Anakin died, but with Jacen it’s even worse. As far back as I can recall, no matter what was going on, no matter what was wrong, I could turn around and Jacen would be there. We could be on some distant hideout world or lost in the underbelly of Coruscant or wandering around on parts of Yavin Four no thinking creature has ever seen, and there Jacen was. I never had to be bored, I never had to be afraid, I never had to be alone. When we lost him, I was cut in half. Half of me is gone.” Now the tears came. Jaina wiped them away.

Leia shook her head. “Jacen’s not dead. I know he’s in trouble, but he’s alive. I would have felt him go. I felt it with Anakin.”

The tension in Jaina’s shoulders didn’t ease, but she chose not to argue that point. Instead, she said, “I keep having these thoughts. That I should be planning for the future. Just recently, they’ve gotten, well, even more frequent. But I can’t bear to do that. I can’t plan to have a
home on a world when it might not be there tomorrow, or for a career in a service that might be gone, or to spend time with people who keep throwing themselves against the Vong until they stop coming back.”

“I know. That’s what it was like all those years ago, when Palpatine seemed to be an unstoppable force and we were always on the run, and your father was just this ridiculously attractive man who always seemed to be on the verge of leaving us. And do you know what I learned?”

“What?”

“At times like that, you plan for your future by bringing people into your life. You know that they can’t all survive what you’re facing. But those who do, they’re part of your life forever. No matter what, when you fall, they’ll catch you; when you’re hungry, they’ll feed you; when you’re hurting, they’ll heal you. And you’ll do the same for them. And that’s your future. I’ve had whole
worlds
taken away from me … but not my future.”

Jaina was silent, seemingly thinking about Leia’s words, for long moments. Finally she rolled over onto her back to look into Leia’s eyes. “Actually, I’m glad you got back tonight. Part of why I kept coming here was because I wanted to tell you something. I wanted to let you know that I finally get it.”

“You get—get what?”

“I had a talk with Mara a few days ago and it really bothered me. It took me until after that really bad furball in space, the one where we almost lost Jag, to figure it out. I finally understood about you sending us, Jacen and Anakin and me, away when we were little. Having to be away all the time even when we were on Coruscant. I’m not stupid, I always knew why. Responsibilities.” Jaina looked off into the distance of time for a moment. “But I never really understood how badly it had to have hurt you.”

“Oh, baby. Of course it hurt. I tried to tell you, time after time. But there aren’t even words for that kind of pain.”

“I know.” Jaina sat up and Leia let her. “I’ve got to go. Reports to write. Goddess stuff to do.” But first she embraced Leia, squeezing her with fierce strength. “I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, Jaina.”

Wedge, in Luke’s X-wing, transcribed a lazy arc through vacuum in low planetary orbit. Far below was the near-continuous Borleias jungle. He gave the yoke a hard pull and his course suddenly became a tight circle. He went through 360 degrees of arc, starry sky giving way to jungle outside his canopy, then becoming starfield again, as centrifugal force in excess of the X-wing’s inertial compensator tugged him deeper into the pilot’s couch.

He smiled as he leveled off. “Good to get out once in a while, even when you’re not flying missions, isn’t it?”

R2-D2’s beeps of response came across his comm board. They sounded like an agreement, but not an enthusiastic one.

“Don’t worry, Artoo. Luke will come back. There’s no one in the galaxy who knows how to survive bad places better than Luke Skywalker.”

R2-D2 beeped again, his tones sounding somewhat more encouraged.

Then a voice broke over his comm system, Tycho’s. “General, this is a heads-up.”

“I read you.”

“For the last half hour or so, we’ve had some odd
traffic on the sensor board. Anomalous readings out beyond the kill zone. Becoming more frequent.”

“Your guess?”

“I’d say the push is on. They’re coming in from all directions.”

“About time. Alert Luke’s team to prepare for departure; they’ll leave during the confusion of the attack. I’m coming in.” Wedge put the X-wing back on a course for the biotics building.

“You’re sure about this.” Luke gave Lando a skeptical look.

Lando nodded, his manner easy. “I’m sure. Every so often I need to remind the universe that I’m a damned good pilot. With people like you and Han and his daughter around, everyone tends to forget.”

They stood in the killing field before the
Record Time
, the troop transport that had been part of the first invasion wave to reach the planet’s surface.

Seven weeks before,
Record Time
had been an antiquated cargo vessel working reliably through late middle age. Then it had seen one combat mission, the Borleias landing, and had been shot nearly to pieces. Now, after weeks of as-time-allows repairs by the garrison’s mechanics, the skin of its two main sections was so irregularly patched as to look scabrous, and reinforcing bars welded to the narrow section connecting the two ends merely accentuated the fact that the whole thing looked ready to break in half at any moment.

“Who are you trying to kid?” Luke gave him a skeptical look. “You’re one of two men who blew up the second Death Star. You don’t have anything to prove.”

Lando shrugged. He ran a hand down his tunic to smooth it. It was a rust-red, long-sleeved garment, delightful to the touch, and had cost more than he’d made in
lean years. It perfectly complemented the cream-colored hip cloak he wore. He wanted to look good for his funeral or his triumphant return to Borleias, whatever would come. “All right, you’ve got me. It’s about the scam, Luke.

“People hear about me, they see what I do, and they think I’m all about the profit motive. And, sure, I like wealth. I like it enough that sometimes I’ll even do honest work to get it.” He offered Luke a mock shudder. “But that’s secondary. The
trick
is what makes everything sweet. Take someone who thinks he’s got you, put him through the machinery of your mind and your skills, and bring him out the other end stripped of all his goods, but absolutely convinced that he’s had the better of you—so convinced that he’s even willing to be nice to you, to be generous to you—and you’ve accomplished something great.” He gestured at the ship. As if on cue, a hatch cover near the top of the bridge, beside one of the sensor arrays, popped free; it rolled down the bow’s sloping hull and then dropped to the duracrete with a tired clang. “This is a scam. We’re going to take this heap of junk in and the Yuuzhan Vong are going to think our hopes are pinned on it. They’re going to blow it up and think they’ve wrecked our hopes. They’ll be doing exactly what we want them to—they’ll be our personal servants for those few moments, which would kill them if they knew—and they’ll never realize just how much they’ve helped us. Until we choose to tell them. That’s sweeter than any wine, Luke.”

“If you say so.” Luke took a hard look at the bow, doubtless cataloging where the hatch came from so a repair crew could fix it in the little time they had left. “Who’s your copilot on this?”