Star by Star (75 page)

“Get down, sweetheart.”

The smell of ozone and ash wafted down on a hot wind. A corvette-sized fireball roared overhead and impacted half a kilometer up the durasteel canyon, vaporizing forty floors of a residential tower and blasting the walls out of three adjacent buildings. The shock wave cleared the hoverlane of traffic, then hit the bridge and turned the air as hot as a Tatooine drought. Adarakh and Meewalh dropped the luggage and used their own bodies to cover Han and Leia, C-3PO skidded three steps across the walkway before both he and the potted ladalum he was carrying were caught by the YVH war droid Lando had given them, and Ben’s TDL nanny was swept off the bridge along with a hundred screaming pedestrians.

“How dreadful!” C-3PO peered over the safety rail. “She’ll be smashed beyond components!”

“And so will we if we don’t get off this bridge,” Han said, rising.

Still holding Leia’s arm, he started to push forward through the crowd. With the battle for Coruscant now being fought in an orbit so low the weapon discharges looked like a colossal sky-dazzle show, the planet was being bombarded with a steady rain of flaming spacecraft. The kilometer-long walk from the apartment had been one long smoke-stroll, and twice they had been forced to detour around impact craters where the bridge came to an abrupt end a hundred meters above the stump of a truncated building.

The closer they came to the docking facility, the slower the crowd seemed to move. Han finally saw why as they drew to within a few meters of the building. A pair of burly Defense Force soldiers in full biosuits and headgear flanked the half-closed access gate, carefully scanning identichips and waving pedestrians through one at a time. It seemed a ludicrous endeavor given the circumstances.

One of the guards turned his dark-visored gaze on Han and held out his scanner. “Identichip.”

“You don’t know?” Han asked, presenting the group’s chips. Not being in disguise, he and Leia had been the subject of countless whispers and pointed fingers along the way; at times, only the menacing presence of Lando’s YVH war droid had kept frightened citizens from besieging them with questions they could not answer and bringing their progress to a halt. “Where’d they recruit you guys, Pzob?”

“Procedure …” The soldier looked at the datareader on the back of his scanner. “Solo. I read only four chips. There are five of you.”

“Give me a break,” Han said. He felt the YVH war droid easing up behind him and quietly signaled him to stay back. “The baby’s only four months old.”

The soldier continued to stare out from behind his visor.

“It takes
six
months to get the chip,” Han bluffed. If this guy didn’t recognize him and Leia, chances were he wouldn’t know Coruscant documentation law either. “Until then, the kid travels on a parent’s chip.”

“Of course.” The soldier lowered his scanner, then pointed down an exterior walkway to a large balcony packed with droids.

“You may enter, but your mechanicals must remain. There is no room to evacuate them.”

“Remain?” C-3PO echoed. “But my place is with—”

Han waved the protocol droid silent. “They won’t be taking a public berth. We have our own vessel.”

“Which you should use to evacuate living beings,” the second guard said, stepping over. “Not these lifeless—”

“Please remain calm,” the YVH war droid said, pushing an arm between Han and Leia. “This is a military emergency.”

Han started to turn. “What—”

A pair of blaster bolts streaked past his face, burning holes through the chests of both soldiers. Leia shrieked and Ben wailed, and an astonished murmur rustled through the crowd. C-3PO, still holding the pot with Leia’s blast-stripped ladalum, began to distance himself from the larger droid.

“Really, One-dash-Five-Oh-Seven, that was uncalled for! Your primary programming must be garbled.”

The war droid squealed something in machine language that made C-3PO take a step back, then turned to Han. “I apologize for the identification delay. The biosuits were obscuring the criteria.”

“Criteria?” Han broke the seal on one of the helmets and found an ooglith masquer already peeling away from the face of its host. “And I thought you just didn’t want to be left behind.”

Bureaucrats, businessbeings, and bankers, the people pouring through Gate 3700 of the Eastport Docking Facility were not the ordinary sort of refugee. They swirled into the terminal area escorted by droids, sentient assistants, and hoversleds loaded with art treasures and portable gem vaults. Most were protected by hastily armed servants, bodyguards of various intimidating species, and even Ulban Arms S-EP1 security droids. But only one family had Noghri luggage porters, a protocol droid carrying a heat-blasted ladalum, and a fully operational YVH 1 war droid providing crowd control. As ever, the Solos were the most conspicuous of the conspicuous.

Pores still raging against the ooglith masquer she had been wearing since the failed kidnapping at their apartment, Viqi Shesh turned to the child standing with her at the observation
deck safety rail. With a mop of unruly brown hair and big blue eyes as round as Old Republic valor medals, he could have been a twin to the twelve-year-old Anakin Solo portrayed in newsvid archives. He ought to have been; it had cost Viqi a small fortune in cosmisurgeon and bacta tank fees to make him look that way.

“You see them, Dab? The ones with the big war droid?”

“How could I miss them?” the boy answered. “Everybody in the galaxy knows the Solos. You didn’t say they were the ones.”

“I didn’t say a lot of things,” Viqi said. Thanks to a thumb-sized Yuuzhan Vong leech-creature lodged in her throat, Viqi’s once-silky voice was now almost reedy and quavery. “But if you and your family want passage off Coruscant with me, I won’t need to.”

The boy looked away. “I understand.”

His mother and two sisters were already aboard Viqi’s yacht, which was berthed under a false name on the other side of the
Falcon
, just beyond a public starferry named the
Byrt
. She studied the boy, wondering if she had perhaps misjudged the urchin’s character when she spotted him in the underlevels rifling the pockets of a salted Arcona. If the child turned out to have a sense of honor—or even the shadow of a conscience—she was as doomed as Coruscant itself. After the HoloNet had reported her failure at the Solos’ apartment, Tsavong Lah’s villip had everted just long enough to say as much.

“I hope you
do
understand, Dab,” Viqi said. “I will not suffer failure lightly … I will not suffer it at all.”

Leave it to the Eastport docking master to squeeze a ronto into a rabac hole. By keeping the dome irised open and landing the
Byrt
nacelles-down inside a magnolock hull-hoist, the remarkable Shev Watsn had squeezed a two-hundred-meter starferry into a berthing bay designed for yachts and light transports.

Leia could have slapped him with a lightsaber.

Ten thousand terrified people stood waiting to board a vessel that would hold five thousand at best, most standing in front of Docking Bay 3733 where the
Falcon
was kept under an assumed name. As much as Leia wanted to board their ship and get off Coruscant with Ben, she knew they would be mobbed by desperate refugees the instant they tried to push through the throng.

For now, the best thing to do was wait at the edge until the
Byrt
began to board, then work their way over to their berth as the crowd pressed forward.

Leia hoped they would have enough time. Through the narrow crescent of sky visible above the Byrt’s nose, she could see a steady stream of government yachts rising out of Imperial City—the New Republic’s dedicated senators and loyal government officials abandoning their posts. So far, the Yuuzhan Vong were still too busy with the New Republic military to harass fleeing civilians, but that would change soon. She had even heard of senators asking admirals from their own sectors to escort them home, and in far too many cases those requests were being honored. She found it difficult to believe this was the same New Republic she had helped found—and for which Anakin had given his life.

“General?” The voice that asked this was reedy and quavering. “General, is that you?”

Leia turned with Han, the Noghri, and the droids to see a luggage-burdened woman with a large nose and tired eyes pushing through the crowd toward them. Trailing along at her side was a sandy-haired boy of about twelve, also struggling beneath a mound of baggage.

“General!” As the woman said this, she suddenly found her path blocked by Adarakh and Meewalh. “It
is
you!”

“I haven’t been a general for a long time.” Han spoke quietly and tried not to be too obvious as he glanced around to see who might be eavesdropping. “Do we know each other?”

“You don’t remember?”

The woman used a bag to sweep her son forward, and Leia was struck by just how much he looked like Anakin at that age. It was more than just the upturned nose and the ice-blue eyes; his whole face was shaped the same, and he even had the same round little chin. Her heart went out to this boy and his mother.

Han studied the woman and her son, then said, “No, I
don’t
remember.”

The woman did not seem offended. “Well, of course, I’m sure it was more important to me than to you. After all, you were the general, and Ran was only a flight officer in Rogue Squadron.”

“Ran?” Han asked. “Ran Kether?”

“Yes,” the woman said. “I was only his girlfriend then, but I met you twice on Chandrila—”

“Okay,” Han said, warming instantly. He motioned the Noghri aside. “I’m sorry I don’t remember you. How is Ran?”

The woman’s expression fell. “You didn’t hear?”

Han shook his head. “I’ve been, uh, out of touch.”

“He was flying refugee transports for SELCORE. We lost him at Kalarba.” The woman glanced at Leia for the first time. “I understand your daughter was injured there, too.”

“She recovered quickly.” Balancing Ben on a hip, Leia reached out to squeeze the woman’s hand. It was the first time since Anakin’s death that she had felt sorry for someone other than herself, and in a self-centered sort of way it was almost a relief. “I’m so sorry about Ran. There’s too much of that these days.”

“Thank you, Princess.”

“Leia, please.” Leia touched the shoulder of the boy who looked so much like Anakin. “I’m sorry about your father, young man.”

The boy nodded and looked uncomfortable. “Thanks.”

“This is Tarc, I’m Welda.” The woman smiled at the child in Leia’s arms. “The gossip vids haven’t said anything about you being pregnant, so I assume this beautiful boy is Ben Skywalker?”

“Actually, we’re trying to keep that quiet,” Leia said. She cast a meaningful look around the crowd. “You understand.”

“I’m sorry.” Welda’s tone was abashed, but she did not blush. “How foolish of me.”

A loud clunk sounded from five meters up the
Byrt
, and a cloud of vapor shot into the air as the boarding hatch broke its seal and opened. Although the boarding ramp had not yet been lowered, the crowd immediately began to compress forward.

“It looks like they’ve worked out the artificial gravity alignment problems.” Welda looked at the still-growing crowd, which now had to be closer to twelve thousand than ten. “I hope there’ll be room for us all.”

Han looked behind the woman’s head and raised his brow at Leia. She nodded. They would be taking as many refugees with them as the
Falcon
could carry anyway, and she had no intention of leaving this pair behind.

Han smiled crookedly and leaned close to Welda’s ear. “Actually, that won’t be a problem.”

The boarding ramp came down. The crowd started to ascend rapidly, each group being detained at the hatch long enough for an epidermal scan to ensure they were not Yuuzhan Vong infiltrators.

The Noghri took advantage of the movement to start easing the group toward the
Falcon
’s berth. There were a few angry glares and muttered comments about pushy Solos, but the presence of a war droid and the fact that the group was not cutting forward limited the objections to the nonphysical kind. Leia was careful to keep Tarc and Welda close at hand, and the group reached the entrance to Docking Bay 3733 intact. Now came the tricky part—getting inside without being trampled by desperate refugees. Han quietly stationed YVH 1-507A in front of the durasteel door and reached for the security pad.

“If you’re trying to slice the security, save yourself the bother,” a gravelly voice said. Leia turned to find a horn-headed Gotal in a gaudy scintathread tunic speaking to them from within the crowd. “Whoever owns that junk heap couldn’t afford the berthing fees. The umbilicals are all disconnected.”

“What?” Han cupped his hands to the viewing panel and peered inside. “You’ve got to be kidding! There’s containment fluid all over the floor.”

Even after sitting idle for several days, the
Falcon
could be cold-started in only a few minutes—but not without a fully charged fusion containment unit. Too devastated to ask the helpful Gotal what he had been doing looking at the
Falcon—
she had no doubt he had considered trying to slice the security panel himself—Leia turned to apologize to Welda.

The woman was no longer beside her.

Something metallic hit the floor a couple of meters away, and Leia glimpsed Tarc pushing through the crowd. She switched Ben to the other hip so her weapon hand would be free, then YVH 1-507A clanged past toward the sound, his powerful arms batting people aside as gently as possible.

“Remain calm and please seek shelter,” he intoned. “There is an active thermal detonator in the area.”

Of course, the crowd did anything but stay calm. Determined to board the
Byrt
at any cost, someone kicked the detonator and
sent it skittering across the floor, and the mob began to push toward the boarding ramp even more urgently.

“Do not kick the detonator,” YVH 1-507A ordered. “Remain calm and step away.”

Someone booted it back at the original kicker, and the droid skidded over a family of Aqualish trying to change direction. Incredibly, the crowd continued to shove forward, between the Solos and to both sides of them. Determined to avoid becoming separated from Han, Leia snapped her lightsaber from beneath her jacket and turned back toward the berth. She found Welda blocking the way, raising a small hold-out blaster and pointing it at Leia’s chest.