Realizing his situation, Aabe grabbed Wyn and shoved her forcibly between himself and Jacen; then he turned to run for the open iceway carriage door, his only chance at obtaining freedom. Jacen took three long strides to bring himself within reach of the fleeing man, his lightsaber raised, tensed and ready to strike.

A single exertion of will, backed up by the Force, wrenched the carriage doors closed. Aabe crashed into them at full tilt, toppling back onto the ice at Jacen's feet, his blaster flying out of his stunned grasp and clattering across the floor. Wyn was quick to pick it up and point it at him.

"There's nowhere to run," Jacen said, the steady thrum of his lightsaber sounding in the cold air.

He felt Wyn watching in amazement as he stood over Aabe, willing the man to give up. Defiance lingered in Aabe's eyes, but then suddenly flickered and died. The man sagged back to the floor with a defeated sigh.

Jacen stepped back, lowering his lightsaber, glad that the crisis was over-and that n.o.body had been hurt.

He activated his comlink, and it bleeped immediately. It was his uncle.

"Jacen? Is everything all right?"

"It is now," he answered.

"And Wyn?"

"She's fine. I'll fill you in on all the details later."

"Well done, Jacen. You've defused a potentially difficult situation."

"Thanks, Uncle Luke," he returned, deactivating his lightsaber and reattaching it to his belt. Irolia was already busy speaking into a wall communicator, calling for backup. "How's everything there?"

"Under control. We've heard from Tekli; someone made a halfhearted attempt to break through Jade Shadow's air lock, but they failed and haven't come back. Port security is already looking into the incident. It looks like we've weathered the storm rather well, don't you think?" As Jacen watched the guards hoist Aabe onto his feet, he found he could only nod in silent agreement. A failed attempt to put them out of the picture would almost certainly bring the Chiss more firmly behind them-as well as Fel. The real leaders behind the attempt-a.s.suming Aabe wasn't as high up as they went-would no doubt lie low for a while, fearing reprisals from either Chiss loyal to the existing command structure, like Irolia, or the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances, which was bound to take an attack on peaceful diplomats poorly. It might also mean that the two-day deadline would be extended.

"How long do you think before you'll get back?" he asked his uncle.

"Probably within the hour," Luke said. "We'll resume our search, then." Jacen nodded to himself again, glad to be able to put the incident behind them and get back to work.

"And Jacen?" Luke said. "Don't a.s.sume that everything that happened here has been unimportant. The smallest action can have the largest consequences. The good work we've done today may have far-reaching consequences-consequences we can only guess at right now."

"I know, Uncle Luke," Jacen said. "I'll see you when you get back, okay?"

"Take care, Jacen."

"You, too." He closed the line and returned the comlink to his belt, reflecting upon the simple truth of his uncle's words. He couldn't help but wonder at what the consequences of this day would be. Perhaps saving Wyn would enable her to achieve her ambition of seeing Coruscant.

One day, when the war was over, the girl could easily follow in her brother's footsteps and leave Chiss s.p.a.ce in favor of the Galactic Alliance. He sensed strength and determination in her, as well as a keen intellect. If she wanted to do something badly enough, he had no doubt that she would find away.

What will become of you, Wyn Fel? he wondered to himself. Only time would tell, he supposed-and if he could give her nothing else, he would do his best to give her that, at least. The time to realize her potential: her and the Chiss, as well as the galaxy itself.

He shrugged off the train of thought, forcing himself back to the present. Wyn was standing to one side, the blaster in her hand trembling slightly. She was staring at him with something approximating awe.

"Are you all right?" he asked her.

She nodded once. "A little shaken, but I'll be okay." She couldn't seem to take her eyes off him. "Thank you for coming when you did. You were amazing!" He felt himself flush slightly, at the compliment as well as the girl's obvious admiration for him that had prompted it. But he forced himself to ignore it. There were much more important things to concern himself with. Bigger than Wyn or Aabe-bigger even than himself.

The search for Zonama Sekot was of paramount importance. Everything else was just a distraction.

"All in a day's work," he told Wyn, with a smile that he hoped would hide his discomfort at her adoration. "The life of a Jedi is not a boring one." Mom? Mom!

In the aftermath of the explosion, Jaina's mind was filled with psychic pain. She sent her mind out among the wounded and dying, searching for her mother. She found her mother and father down in the thick of it, fighting their way through the panicked crowd, trying to get to where help was needed the most.

Jaina sat up in the gloom of the room's emergency lighting. The locker was filled with dust, but it had remained intact-just as Harris had antic.i.p.ated it would. Malinza was climbing to her feet, shaking her head grog-gily. Vyram and Goure were clambering upright, too, both coughing violently as the dust caught in their throats. Salkeli lay curled in a ball, looking up with a grin on his face, triumphant that their best efforts to stop the bomb had failed. Harris remained where Jaina had left him: out cold in the corner.

She collected the comlink from the floor where she'd dropped it and quickly activated it.

"Mom?" She opened the locker door to reduce the interference. "Mom, can you hear me?" It took a few moments before Leia answered. "I hear you, Jaina." Relief rushed through her at the sound of her mother's voice. "Are you all right?"

"I'm okay. But, Mom-Tahiri!"

"I know; I felt it, too."

"Do you think she's okay?"

"I don't know, Jaina."

"I'll never forgive myself if she's-" Leia didn't let her finish.

"You aren't to blame for anything that has happened here, Jaina." Jaina knew that wasn't true. If she hadn't been so closed off to the girl in the first place, if she'd tried to help her confront her problems earlier instead of...

She broke away from the guilt-ridden thought.

"How bad is it up there, Mom?"

"It's utter chaos. The blast took out the Prime Minister's stalls.

Security is trying to clear the area now." Jaina caught flashes from her mother: frightened faces, tangled wreckage, and blood- lots of blood.

Before she could ask if there was anything she could do, Salkeli took the opportunity to gloat. "You look a little concerned there, Jedi,"

the Rodian said with a half smile, half sneer. "Not so sure of yourself now, are-" Vyram didn't ask this time; he just shut the Rodian up by stunning him with the b.u.t.t of his blaster. "What do we do now?" he asked, stepping up to Jaina.

"We go topside to help," she answered. "Besides, security has to know about these two."

"I'll go," Malinza said.

Jaina shook her head. "They might not believe you."

"No," the girl said, "but they will listen."

"And 1 can stay here and keep an eye on these two, if you like,"

Vyram said.

Jaina thought about this for a moment, then nodded. "Okay, and I'll back you up when I get there."

"Wait a minute," Goure said. "Where are you going?"

"To find Tahiri."

"Then I'm coming, too," he said. The Ryn had a look in his eye that Jaina recognized from her father-the kind that said there was no point arguing.

Jaina shrugged helplessly and let him follow her out as they retraced Tahiri's steps through the damaged corridors, updating Leia as they went. The stadium's structure had held, but it was going to require an extensive overhaul. The closer they got to the center of the blast, the more damage there was. Ceilings had come down, ferrocrete had cracked, stanchions were twisted, and the air was full of dust.

"Through here, I think," she said, following the vague impressions she'd received from Tahiri's mind. Everything had looked so different then, with the smooth, clean corridors. Now they were in ruins, open to the sky. The cries of the wounded were very real from such close quarters, and the smell of smoke and dust was powerfully strong.

At the heart of the destruction, they found a clear s.p.a.ce about two meters across. The blast had destroyed everything around the area, but nothing within it. And there at its center lay Tahiri, curled up like a child hiding from a nightmare.

Jaina came to a halt at the edge of the unaffected area, her heart pounding sickeningly fast in her chest. She tried reaching for the girl through the Force, but she still couldn't find her.

"What happened here?" Goure asked.

"She must have put a Force bubble around herself," Jaina said. She looked around, surveying the damage more closely. " Looks like it deflected the bulk of the blast away from above." She reached out cautiously with her hand, feeling for the bubble, and was surprised to find nothing there. "It must have closed when she pa.s.sed out." Goure moved to the girl's side and rolled her over. Tahiri turned without resistance and lay on her back with her eyes open. "Tahiri?" The Ryn felt for a pulse in her throat when there was no response. "She's alive."

Jaina tried to reach her through the Force one more time. Tahiri?

Nothing. Jaina had never felt anyone so empty before. The girl felt hollow in the Force, almost - She stopped the thought, not wanting to introduce the idea into her mind. But it was too late.

Almost invisible, she thought. Like the Yuuzhan Vong!

Jaina's comlink beeped.

"Jaina?" Her mother's voice came again over the comlink.

She turned away from Tahiri and raised her comlink. "Yes, Mom?"

"Rescue teams have reached the epicenter of the blast." Looking up, she could see movement through the hole. "We're directly below. Are you with them?"

"Yes. They've started pulling bodies out of the rubble." A sickening sensation swept through her. If she'd only acted faster, not wasted time a.s.suming the bomb could be defused...

"How many?" she asked.

"Four so far. And-" Leia's hesitation told her there was worse to come.

"What is it, Mom?"

"It's Prime Minister Cundertol. He's dead." Jaina looked down into Tahiri's empty, almost accusing eyes. The hollowness she exhibited was catching.

"Jama? Did you hear me?"

"I heard you, Mom. I'm on my way up." Goure took Tahiri into his arms and together they negotiated the rubble. As they reached the surface, Ma-linza's words about the Cosmic Balance came back to haunt her. Good works lead to evil results. Jaina had been trying to do the right thing, but it had all gone so terribly wrong. Salkeli had betrayed her; Zel and Jjorg were dead; Tahiri was unconscious; the Prime Minister had been murdered-all of this, despite her best efforts.

It wasn't just her, either. Uncle Luke had liberated the Bakurans from the Empire only to see them turn their backs on the Galactic Alliance. The New Republic had created the Bakuran Defense Fleet to protect the planet from the Ssi-ruuk, but half of it had been destroyed elsewhere in the galaxy, leaving Bakura vulnerable again. Bakura had never been the aggressor, yet bad things kept happening to it. No wonder its people were eager to look for alternatives.

And what if the treaty with the P'w'eck did turn out to be legitimate? she asked herself. What then? What evil might that reap farther down the track for the planet?

They clambered out into the daylight and saw the small knot of people gathered around the Prime Minister's body, looking down in shock and horror. The large man lay sprawled out on a repulsor gurney, the scorched remains of his ceremonial robes torn down the center, where a meditech had struggled unsuccessfully to revive him. Leia's attention was fixed on the Prime Minister's body and the activities taking place around it, but she looked up to acknowledge Jaina. She was pale beneath sooty smudges that covered her face. Her expression was one of abhorrence, and her eyes were filled with tears and pain.

Reports were garbled from below, but the sense of disaster was all too vivid for Jag's liking. Relayed from commentators and unofficial sources through Selonia to him, there was a lot of room for misinformation. There had been some sort of explosion during the consecration ceremony. Something had m.u.f.fled the blast, though, according to commentators on the ground, and thankfully the damage to the intended target wasn't as extensive as it could have been.

Nevertheless, two Senators were dead, along with half a dozen guards and a couple of guests. Forty more had incurred wounds, with injuries ranging from hearing loss to loss of limbs. And, of course, there was Cundertol himself.

"Ktah," he spat. The Chiss rarely expressed emotions vocally, but they did have words for it when the occasion arrived. a.s.sa.s.sination was an ugly tactic, no matter who employed it, and if this turned out to be the work of ter-rorists hoping to disrupt the consecration ceremony, he was sure that retaliation would be swift and brutal.

It hadn't been terrorists, some of the uglier rumors said, but the Deputy Prime Minister himself...

Jaina's reappearance had brought some comfort, briefly. She had only confirmed everyone's worst fears: Blaine Harris had set the bomb, hoping to incriminate the Galactic Alliance and make a martyr out of Malinza Thanas as well as getting Cundertol out of the way.

The implications of this stunned Jag, and he shook his head at the thought. With Cundertol dead and Harris likely to face any number of charges, Bakura had effectively been stripped of its highest levels of command... On the heels of that thought came an announcement from Pride of Selonia: "We've just had word from Sentinel" Captain Mayn said.

"General Panib has declared martial law. He's requested that, no matter what happens, we don't take any direct action. Word is filtering down the chains of command on both sides. He's not exactly sure what the Keeramak will make of this yet, but we're picking up activity on the Salis D'aar s.p.a.ceport where the P'w'eck ships are parked. My guess is they're not going to sit around and do nothing while bombs go off around their precious leader." Jag agreed. It made sense that they would pull out and try again later. There had been no mention that the ceremony had to be performed at a specific time, so presumably there'd be no problem with picking up and carrying on from where they left off later. "What do you want us to do?" he asked Mayn. "Just back off a little. This is a touchy time. Whatever this 'honor guard' is really about, we're just going to have to leave them to it for a while." '"Understood." He relayed the order to his pilots and changed the vector of his own wing, letting the trio they'd been following drift slowly away. Now more than ever, he wanted to ask for permission to land-not only to help out with things on the surface of the planet, but also, and more importantly, so that he could be with Jaina.

As soon as Tahiri was strapped safely onto a repulsor gurney, Goure joined the rescue effort. Han raised an eyebrow at the sight of the Ryn, but was too grateful for the extra set of hands to question his presence.

Two people had been caught under the rubble and, with the help of hastily improvised repulsorsleds, their rescue was only slowly unfolding. Jaina lent her efforts where she could-using the Force to search the rubble pile for weak points, applying pressure where those on the outside couldn't reach, and shoring up the healing energies of the victims who couldn't be treated immediately-but it didn't feel enough. In the first minutes after the explosion, as panic prompted a ma.s.s evacuation of the area, chaos and confusion kept emergency services at a distance. The few who did get through, some of them dropping down from aircars with medpacs on their backs, worked harder than they probably had in their entire lives.

Beneath a foreboding sky, darkened further by a thick pall of smoke hanging over the stadium, the P'w'eck bodyguards had tightened their ranks around the Keera-mak. The multicolored Ssi-ruuvi mutant watched on from the safety of this vantage point, its expression unreadable as it surveyed the carnage.

Jaina had barely had the chance to do more than hug her mother and father in relief at seeing them again. It was only later, when medical reinforcements arrived, that she had time to actually step back and take a proper look at the world around her. Everyone was covered in dust and splattered with blood; where the two met, they made a dirty red paste.

The survivors had a shocked look in their eyes, even those who helped in the rescue. Senators and security guards were suddenly on the same level, united by the terrible tragedy that had taken place around them. No one paid any mind to the thunderstorm that was brewing overhead; it seemed almost irrelevant in the face of what had happened.

But there was something else that wasn't as easy to ignore-a sound that nagged at her from below the rumbling of the crowd. It was a strange and haunting wail, an ululation that seemed in search of a note of despair but couldn't quite find it.

Her father looked up, frowning. "You hear that, Leia?" Leia turned in disbelief. "They've started again!" Jaina followed her gaze to the heart of the stadium. Sure enough, the ceremony had recommenced. She could see lithe reptilian aliens dancing in a circle, and one multicolored shape prowling the center, uttering noises that sounded like the angry song of some mighty bird.

"What is this? "she asked.

"They're going to finish the job," Han said, the stubble on his chin flecked with dust. "You've got to admire their persistence, don't you?" Admire them? Jaina thought. Hardly. If anything, it was incredibly insensitive. Even over the sound of rubble shifting and the moans of those in pain, the strange sounds coming from the P'w'eck set her teeth on edge.

"I don't understand," she said. "Why would the Keera-mak finish it now when it would obviously be safer later?"

"They're aliens," a nearby meditech said. "Who's to say what goes on in their heads?"

"Threepio," Leia said, "translate for me, will you?" The protocol droid stood up from where he'd been lifting chunks of rock and placing them into a hamper. He tilted his head to listen properly to the growing cacophony.

" The gulfs of s.p.a.ce are not home to us,' " he translated, " 'and neither are the barren worlds. The worlds of fire and the worlds of ice are not home to us. Where oxygen burns and water flows, where carbon bonds and ozone protects-there we plant our roots. The seed of our species is fertile; all we require is the soil in which to plant it.' "

"More of the same, in other words," Han said. "But I still don't understand their urgency to get the ceremony finished with all this chaos around them!" Jaina remembered what Harris had said earlier about the similarities between the Ssi-ruuk and the Yuuzhan Vong. The warriors of the Yuuzhan Vong wouldn't consider going into battle without making appropriate sacrifices to Yun-Yammka. The Ssi-ruuk in turn were loath to risk their souls on a world that hadn't been consecrated. Perhaps the sudden carnage around them made them want to get the ceremony finished as quickly as possible, just in case more attacks were to follow.

She found it hard to understand the logic that drove such notions.

The Force didn't demand sacrifice, nor favor one location over another.

It simply was, in and surrounding all things.

Jaina's thoughts came back to Malinza's words on the swinging of cosmic scales. She had to bring her parents up to speed on what had happened to the young activist, and she also wanted to ask Goure where he fit into everything. There were other, more pressing matters to consider, too-not the least of them being what the Bakuran government would do once things settled down. Would they put Malinza Thanas back behind bars? Or Jaina herself for having helped the girl escape? Without objective witnesses to Harris's treachery, an investigation could drag on for ages.