Star by Star (78 page)

“I take it we’re under attack,” Jaina said to Zekk.

“Not exactly under attack, but they’re coming,” Zekk confirmed. “Nom Anor is trying to capture us alive.”

A sneer came to Jaina’s lips. “Let him try.” She swung her legs off her makeshift litter and reached for her power blaster. “I’m going to enjoy this.”

In all his decades of kicking around the galaxy, Han had never heard anything quite as eerie as the ululation of an anguished Noghri female. It reminded him of the sound of crumpling durasteel, or of the comm shriek a star gives off just before going nova. Even shielded from the noise by the flight deck door and half the length of the
Falcon
, it sent a shiver down his spine—and drew tears from his eyes. After eighteen years with the Noghri, he still could not say he understood them—but he knew how much he owed them, and it always hurt when one fell defending his family.

Han wiped his eyes, then looked away from the rain of burning ships outside the
Falcon
’s cockpit long enough to check the temperature in the fusion power unit. “We have about ninety seconds before we become just another fireball crashing down on a tower. Think we still have enough pull to recharge at Imperial City? Or should we try Calocour Heights?” He waited one second, five, then ten. “Leia?”

When there was still no answer, he glanced over at her. She was sitting stiffly upright in the oversized copilot’s seat, her hands folded in her lap and her blank gaze fixed on her feet. For
the first time, Han noticed that Chewbacca’s old seat was so large that it left her toes dangling ten centimeters above the floor.

Han shook her arm. “Leia, wake up. I need you here.”

Leia looked up, but stared out the cockpit at the distant smoke plume of a crashing Star Destroyer. “Why would you need me, Han? I’ll only let you down.”

“Let me down?” Han echoed. “That’s crazy. You’ve never let me down.”

Finally, Leia looked at him. “Yes, Han, I have. I went after Viqi Shesh—”

“So did I.”

“But you didn’t lose Ben and get Adarakh killed.”

“Really?” Han sneaked a glance at the temperature of the fusion unit, then glanced around the cockpit theatrically. “Funny, I don’t see them here.”

“
Han.
” Leia sighed the word, then looked out over Coruscant’s smoking, broken-toothed skyline. “You know what I mean.”

“I suppose I do,” Han said. “I just didn’t think you’d go away like I did. I thought you were stronger than that.”

Leia faced him and, for the first time, really seemed to be looking. “How can you say that?” Though her voice remained even, her very calmness betrayed the depth of her anger. “This must hurt you, too—or do you care only for Wookiees?”

“I care.” Han managed to hold his anger in check by reminding himself that her bitterness was a good sign; any emotional reaction was. “And that’s why I’m not giving up this time—not ever again. Anakin and Chewbacca may be gone, and Adarakh and maybe even Ben and Luke and Mara—but we still have each other.”

“That’s about all.” Leia looked back out the window.

“And we have hope,” Han insisted. “As long as we have each other, there’s still hope for us, for Jacen and Jaina—wherever they are—even for the New Republic.”

“The New Republic?” Leia’s voice rose so sharply it rivaled Meewalh’s ululation. “Are you blind? There is no New Republic! It died before the Yuuzhan Vong came!”

“It didn’t!” Han yelled back, no longer able to contain his anger. “Because if it did, then Anakin died for nothing!”

He glanced down at the temperature of the fusion unit again and saw that they were about thirty seconds from becoming a crater. Han said nothing; if his wife had really given up, he did not care to keep fighting himself.

Leia’s mouth opened as though she were going to yell back, then she saw where he was looking, and all of the emotion left her face. Han felt her watching him watch the gauge. He said nothing. The gauge ticked up another bar.

“You’re bluffing,” Leia said.

“I’m betting,” Han said. Jaina and Jacen were still alive, and she would not let her grief make her give up on them.

Leia watched the temperature rise another bar, then said, “Imperial City.”

Han let out his breath. “Calocour’s closer.”

“
Han
!”

Han swung the
Falcon
around and began a silent countdown.

“Go to the chief of state’s landing pad,” Leia said. “We need to see Borsk.”

“You think Borsk is still on Coruscant?” Han gasped.

“Where else? He certainly won’t be going to Bothawui.” Leia pulled a datapad out of the stowage slot on her seat and, with the ease of a practiced statesperson, began to make speech notes. “There’s something I need to do for him.”

With the Orbital Defense Headquarters burning like a second sun as it plummeted across Coruscant’s opalescent sky, the tapered spires and delicate towers of the Imperial Palace were bathed in scintillating orange light. As they descended toward the chief of state’s private landing pad, Leia felt like they were dropping into a forest ablaze. Han brought them down less than a meter behind the tailfins of Fey’lya’s garish Kothlis Systems Luxuflier and shut down the fusion unit even before the
Falcon
settled onto its struts. Leaving Anakin’s look-alike—his true name was Dab Hantaq—aboard under Meewalh’s care, they lowered the boarding ramp and found themselves looking down the barrel of a tripod-mounted G-40 portable cannon.

“Something wrong with the
Falcon
’s transponder, Garv?” Leia asked, not all that surprised by the cautious reception. “We tried to comm, but couldn’t get through.”

“Just being careful, Princess.” A thin man in the uniform of a New Republic general stepped into view. “Sorry about the comm problem. The Yuuzhan Vong are starting to take out the satellite web, so Chief of State Fey’lya has ordered a blackout on all nonmilitary communications.”

“That’s sure to help the evacuation,” Han said.

Garv—General Tomas to everyone except his superiors and former superiors—responded with an enigmatic half nod. Leia had personally named Garv the commander of palace security, and in all the time she had known him, that was as close to a comment on a superior as she had ever seen from him.

“Garv, we ran into a little sabotage problem with Viqi Shesh,” Leia explained. “Would it be too much to have someone recharge
our containment fluid? And I’d like to speak with Chief of State Fey’lya.”

“We can arrange both.” Garv sent a furry-cheeked Bothan aide off to fetch the maintenance crew, then turned back to Leia looking uncharacteristically doubtful. “Forgive me if I’m intruding, but I’ve heard rumors about Anakin. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

“Thank you,” Leia said. Knowing she would need to accustom herself to people offering condolences, she laid a hand on Garv’s arm. “That means a great deal to us.”

Han nodded. “We’re going to miss him.”

“As will the New Republic,” Garv said.

“And speaking of the New Republic,” Leia said, glad for an excuse to change the subject, “I noticed the data towers are still intact. Shouldn’t someone be destroying those records?”

“Someone
should
be,” Garv said. “But Fey’lya refuses to give the order.”

“He thinks he can hold the planet?” Han asked, disbelieving. “The idiot! If the scarheads capture those survey abstracts, there won’t be a safe place in the galaxy to put a base.”

Garv’s expression turned sour. “I
have
mentioned as much.”

“I’m sure the chief of state will give the order when the time comes,” Leia said. With shafts of turbolaser fire starting to strike at hostile vessels from rooftops all across Coruscant, she felt certain the time had come already—but Garv Tomas was too good an officer to exceed his authority even under these circumstances. “Still, it wouldn’t be improper to arm the charges now, would it, General?”

Garv smiled. “Not improper at all.”

He keyed the order into a datapad and dispatched an officer to see it carried through, then led the way through the hangar to the chief of state’s towertop office suite. After a brief dispute with an agenda droid, which Garv won by virtue of a security override command, the general admitted them to the restricted chambers and withdrew to continue his duties. They found Fey’lya bereft of his usual gaggle of advisers and sycophants, standing alone in the heart of his opulent office, studying a holographic display of Coruscant’s crumbling defenses.

The situation was hopeless. What remained of the New Republic fleets were surrounded or cut off from the planet, sometimes both. Half of the defense platforms were falling out of orbit, the rest blinking with critical damage indicators. The atmospheric security force was fighting fiercely in their V-wings and Howlrunners, but the superiority of their air-dedicated craft could not overcome the enemy’s sheer numbers. Yuuzhan Vong drop ships were already forming up to make their runs, and Leia knew this battle would soon be moving to the rooftops.

It took Fey’lya a minute to notice he had guests. “Come to gloat, Princess?”

Leia forced a warm tone. “Not at all, Chief.” Hoping Han’s face would not betray the opinion of Fey’lya he had expressed earlier, she extended her hands and crossed to the Bothan. “I came to apologize.”

Fey’lya’s ears flattened. “Apologize?”

“For not helping with the military,” she explained. “I’m afraid I was too consumed with grief.”

Fey’lya’s attitude changed instantly, and he took her hands between his paws. “Not at all. I am the one who should apologize—to call upon you at such a time!”

“It must have been important, or you wouldn’t have intruded.” Confident that Fey’lya was already considering how he might use her to bolster his evaporated support, Leia shifted her gaze to the display and let the comment hang. “Our position certainly looks tenuous. Can we hold?”

“We must,” Fey’lya answered. “If Coruscant falls, so does my government.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t that be a shame?” Han said.

Resisting the urge to stomp on his foot, Leia smiled and pretended not to notice the sarcasm. “What my husband means to say, Chief Fey’lya, is that you have our support.” She pulled Han to her side. “Isn’t that right, dear?”

“Of course, dear.” Han sounded sincere—or close enough to draw an accepting nod from Fey’lya. “Chief Fey’lya can count on us.”

Leia put on an earnest look. “If you thought a few words from me would do any good …”

Fey’lya’s smile looked more relieved than appreciative. “What
could it hurt? If the military knows you’re with me, they’ll stand firm behind my government. That’s been the problem, you see—all these senators running for home and grabbing a piece of any fleet they can.”

“I know,” Leia said. “I’ve seen the newsvids. Is the comm center still over by the window?”

“That was such an easy place for Baldavian lip-readers to watch.” Fey’lya took her arm and guided her toward what had been, when she occupied the office, a coat closet.

“One body of open water on the whole planet, and you drop our X-wings in it?” Mara said, wrapping an airsplint around her broken ankle. “The
only
one? What were you thinking, Skywalker?”

“Mara, I really didn’t have a choice,” Luke said. The heat of his engine fires had fused the fibers on the back of his flight suit, and he would need a close cut before his singed hair looked human again. “It was put them here or crash them into a tower.”

Mara and Luke were staring across the firelit waters of the Western Sea, a vast artificial lake and multispecies recreation area spread across thousands—maybe tens of thousands—of rooftops. A dozen whirlpools marked where crashes less controlled than their own had punctured the durasteel bed and freed the contents to rain down on Coruscant’s underlevels. All in all, it had not been a bad place to push the X-wings after they ejected, but the bottom was so strewn with discarded droids and junked airspeeders that locating their cherished R2 unit was proving difficult even for Luke.

She pulled the airsplint’s inflation tab and did not allow herself to wince as it compressed her broken bones, then took an injector out of the ejection medpac and gave herself a shot of bacta numb. Mara would normally have avoided any kind of painkiller, but they would be moving fast over the next few hours, and she did not want her injury slowing her down. The Yuuzhan Vong were starting to bring their big vessels down to suppress the rooftop turbolasers, and she could sense that the
Byrt
had not escaped into hyperspace with Ben. They had to find a way back into orbit, and fast.

Luke finally stretched a hand over the water. A distant speck
broke the surface and swelled into the shape of a scorched X-wing. A pair of Yuuzhan Vong airskiffs promptly dropped out of the sun to attack, in turn drawing fire from a nearby turbolaser battery. For a few short seconds, the sky above the lake erupted into a gridwork of streaking plasma balls and flashing energy bolts, then one skiff burst into rubble and the other pulled up, vanishing into the sun with a stream of laser shafts chasing its tail.

Mara waved their thanks up to the battery crew, which was so well camouflaged on a nearby rooftop that she had difficulty finding it until she used the Force. Luke brought the X-wing to shore and lifted a wildly chirping R2-D2 from the astromech socket. Other than heat scarring, the droid looked sound, and the fuss he was making confirmed that his hermetic seals remained intact after both fire and submersion.

Something big exploded high above, momentarily outshining the sun and spraying long tongues of white flame across the sky. Mara and Luke watched until the brilliance dimmed enough to reveal individual pieces of debris fluttering planetward, but there was no way to know whether the vessel had been New Republic or Yuuzhan Vong. Suddenly overcome by the desperation of their situation, she looped her arm through Luke’s elbow and allowed him to take the weight off her broken ankle.

“Luke, how are we going to do this?” They had seen from the air that the hoverlanes were either jammed with traffic or blocked by debris, and they both knew that even if they did reach a spaceport, any spacecraft worthy of the name would be long gone. “We’ll be lucky to get ourselves offplanet, much less rescue Ben.”