"They should've pulverized your whole planet, not just stinking Centerpoint!"

The crowd roared and surged forward before falling back again, nearly knocking Ben flat.

He was responsible for what was happening. He'd started this with the raid on Centerpoint.

The falling sensation in the pit of his stomach stopped him in his tracks. He'd never seen people behave like this, but it was all his fault. He had to do something.

Another volley of permacrete shattered on the marble forecourt of the emba.s.sy, and CSF officers piled into the crowd with riot batons. But the more they tried to break it up, the more people seemed to press forward. The riot had a life of its own. Ben tasted a communal reflex rage, and it scared him more than anything he had ever experienced. For a split second he almost pitched in, too, his body very nearly overriding his brain.

In front of the emba.s.sy, a dozen Corellians-Ben a.s.sumed that was who they were-braved the hail of permacrete and s.n.a.t.c.hed the lumps up to hurl them back over the heads of the CSF line. One of the men had a blood-smeared gash across his forehead, but he seemed oblivious to it. A CSF captain moved forward with a squad of officers, and Ben heard the Corellian tell him that they were supposed to be protected here, they were supposed to be safe-and then there was a volley of shots from above like projectile weapons firing and the air filled with acrid smoke.

It burned Ben's eyes and mouth. Dispersal gas: the CSF must have fired canisters from the a.s.sault ship hovering overhead. The crowd should have scattered, but instead people seemed to close in on one another and Ben was caught up in the panic. He fell. He was being trampled. Legs filled his field of vision and just as he curled instinctively to shield his head, a gloved blue arm reached out and grabbed him by the front of his tunic, pulling him free.

"Stupid kid-"

It was a CSF officer. The man had rescued him. Ben struggled to his knees, eyes streaming.

"Come on, get out of here-"

Ben's attention snapped suddenly from his own predicament to a point behind the officer.

He focused on a face he knew, a boy with short blond hair, Barit Saiy, and Ben was staring at a blaster aimed not at him but at the officer's back. He didn't think; he just pulled out his lightsaber with his free hand and saw the bright blue blade collide with a stream of white energy, deflecting it. It took a second, and when he blinked again to clear his streaming eyes he saw Barit disappearing into the melee.

The police officer stared at his lightsaber for a moment, one hand on his own blaster.

"It was a rock," Ben lied. "Someone threw something at you."

The officer pulled him to his feet. His face was streaked with gas-induced tears, too; he hadn't put on his respirator in time. "You're fast, kid. Let's get you back to the Temple, shall we?"

"I'll call my Master. He'll collect me." Jacen wasn't a Master, but the small detail of Jedi life wasn't important right then. Ben wanted to get away and follow Barit. "Thank you, Officer."

"Thank you, Jedi." The officer wiped his nose on the back of his hand and coughed painfully. "You saved me from a pounding, too."

Ben knew he had saved someone from something, but it was more than a man's life. However little he understood of politics, he was sure that a Corellian shooting a CSF officer would turn a bad situation into a disastrous one. Barit was in deep; Ben now felt a personal connection to the widening gulf between Corellian and Coruscanti, and sensed that Barit would play a part in something awful.

He wiped his face on the sleeve of his robe, nose streaming, and opened his comlink again.

"Jacen? Can you hear me?" There was just the usual quiet hiss of a link that wasn't being answered, and the click of the message recorder. "Jacen, something terrible is happening."

Chapter Six.

The bigger the galaxy, the sweeter the homecoming.

-Corellian proverb JEDI TEMPLE PRECINCTS, CORUSCANT.

Ben was trying to contact him, but Jacen had his own problems at that moment. He sensed they were more critical: his mother was in trouble.

He felt her reach out to him. He felt both her fear and her determination, and the latter was winning.

Where is she? What's happening?

Jacen slipped into an alcove flanked by bushes in square ceramic pots and sat down to concentrate. Eyes closed, he could sense where she was, and she wasn't on Coruscant, but very near. It took him a few moments to realize she might be in a vessel.

Listen. Listen.

During his studies, Jacen had mastered a Theran technique that let him use the Force to hear remotely. He slowed his breathing and felt the buzz in his sinuses as if he were being woken too soon from an exhausted sleep. The buzzing filled his head, and then behind it, within it, he could pick out words and sounds.

He heard his mother's voice; and then he heard his father's.

". . . try another braking burn."

"Five seconds . . ."

Metal groaned. An engine boomed and sighed, a rhythmic rising and falling note, and it wasn't a rea.s.suring sound. Jacen reached out with one word, the most that even he could send through the Force.

Together.

He visualized the Millennium Falcon. In his mind, he could see the plates of her underside and the transparisteel of the c.o.c.kpit mounted on the starboard flank. He saw her as she should have been, whole and sound. He could feel Leia straining to use Force telekinesis, but he couldn't sense exactly where she was trying to apply it. He could only hear the tension in her voice and taste her growing anxiety.

And he could feel another presence, too: his sister, Jaina.

They hardly spoke these days, but twins could never cut themselves off from each other for long. She must have sensed their parents' crisis, too.

Whatever his mother was trying to do, Jacen could only guess. And guessing wasn't good enough when one was using the physical might of the Force.

Still in his Theran sound trance, he heard the bip-bip-bip of a sensor alarm, the kind that announced that a hull had been breached-or worse.

" . . . drive's shaking loose and it's going to take the plates with it . . ."

That was what he needed to know. He was certain now that his mother was using the Force to stop the cracks in the drive housing from spreading and ripping the Falcon apart as the ship reentered the atmosphere. It was a ma.s.sive task. She needed help.

Jacen filled his lungs with a long, slow breath and centered himself to try something he had never attempted before.

Mom, I hope you can handle this.

He pictured Leia sitting in the copilot's seat. Her emotions and her presence in the Force washed over him and he visualized himself in her place, behind her eyes, seeing what she saw. For a moment he was simply observing; but then a feeling like a sigh drained out of him and it was as if he were exhaling an infinite breath into his mother-no, through his mother. Now he was no longer sitting in the alcove between two topiary bushes, but staring at an array of lights and readouts and at hands that weren't his. Beyond the console, Coruscant loomed in the viewport.

If Jaina had joined the effort, she was hardly detectable. He had drowned out her presence in his own mind with the sheer strength of the telekinesis he was projecting.

Take this, Mom. Use me. Use the Force I'm channeling through you.

He heard her say "Uh!" as if something had startled her. Then he could feel pressure in his lungs as if he were running hard and fighting for breath. He had no idea how long it lasted. But he had the sense of clutching something tight to his chest, and an awareness somewhere outside his mind and yet at its core showed him the Falcon enveloped in the Force, the hull around her drive a.s.sembly compressed instead of expanding catastrophically.

He was sure he wasn't seeing what his mother was actually looking at, because he had none of the images of entering the atmosphere or landing. The scenes inside the Falcon's c.o.c.kpit were being supplied by his memory. He was simultaneously aware both of that rational fact and that his Force power was being funneled through his mother, helping her hold the drive a.s.sembly in place by telekinesis.

Then relief swept over him like a wave, making his scalp tingle and his heart pound. The Falcon was down safely. He knew it. Now he could open his eyes. When he did, he was almost surprised to find himself still in the grounds of the Temple in broad daylight.

Jacen opened his comlink. He felt Jaina briefly, but his mind was on his parents. "Mom?

Mom, are you okay?"

Leia sounded breathless. "So much for sneaking in discreetly."

"Everything's all right, isn't it?" Jacen could hear his father muttering in the background. "I have to see you both. Stay where you are. I'm coming."

Jedi seldom ran flat-out in public, so Jacen avoided an undignified sprint with robes flapping and limited himself to a slow jog to the nearest taxi platform instead.

He was the new heir to the Sith legacy and he had seen his grandfather behave in a way that had almost shattered his world. But at that moment he was just a son who was more worried about his parents' welfare than the affairs of the galaxy.

Attachment had its place. Jacen let himself succ.u.mb to it and put aside his growing dispute with both his father and Jaina.

But sooner or later, he knew that a permanent rift in the family was a price he might have to pay.

SLAVE I, PREFLIGHT PANEL CHECK FOR ROONADAN.

Boba Fett had rarely carried pa.s.sengers-not live or voluntary ones, anyway. The presence of this strange girl in his ship, which was more of a home than anything he owned made of stone and permacrete, bothered him. And yet he simply couldn't walk away from her.

Mirta Gev had a piece of his past. That mattered a lot when he was running out of future.

"You normally board ships with total strangers?" asked Fett.

Mirta slung her bag over one shoulder. "Are you going to kill me?"

"n.o.body's paying me to."

"That's what I thought."

She boarded Slave I via the cargo hatch and went to follow him through to the c.o.c.kpit, but he turned to block her path and gestured aft. "I don't like copilots. Stay put or I'll lock you in one of the cells."

Mirta didn't show the slightest dissent. She just paused and looked around, then sat down on a crate that was secured to the port bulkhead. She opened her bag and rummaged in it before pulling out a chunk of something that she unwrapped and began gnawing.

Fett stared at her.

"Dinner," she said. "I always carry rations. Just in case."

Fett fought back a reflex; his instinct was to tell her she was a smart kid. "Yeah, I don't do in-flight catering," he said, and swung through the hatch into the main section of the ship. The internal bulkhead shut behind him, because smart kid or not, he wasn't taking any chances with her.

He wasn't quite as agile as he'd been a year before. Just moving around in Slave I's awkward s.p.a.ces was uncomfortable now. It wasn't pure pain, but he felt that before long it would be.

Don't forget you're dying, Fett.

He settled into his seat and fired up the ship's drives. Checking the internal cam circuit that gave him a view of each of Slave I's compartments, he caught a shot of Mirta leaning back against the bulkhead, eyes closed, arms folded across her chest, apparently dozing.

Nothing seemed to faze her. He approved of that. There were always women in the galaxy-and men, come to that-who reckoned they were tough but seemed to think that was about a smart mouth and a fancy weapon. The truly tough ones, Fett thought, were the ones who could take anything in their stride and finish the job. Mirta Gev showed every sign of being genuinely, quietly tough.

Fett didn't like anybody much, but he didn't dislike her, although the thaw didn't extend to having her sit up front with him.

He laid in a course to Roonadan. His stomach rumbled: maybe he should have grabbed some of Beviin's coin-crabs after all. He whiled away the next few hours watching the stock prices from FINE and wondered what he might say to Taun We when he finally caught up with her.

He had no doubt that he would.

Fett dozed, reclining in his seat. When he slept, it was never deeply. The padded rim of his helmet was just soft enough to stop short of cutting into his neck but too hard for complete comfort when he let it take the weight of his head. Sometimes he would drift in a few seconds of hazy disorientation, half awake, sounds magnified, able to see through a transparent barrier; he wasn't in the confines of his helmet but somewhere else he didn't recognize. It was a recurring impression. Taun We had once told him it was the legacy of being gestated in a gla.s.s tank like the other clones, and that they all had distant memories like that.

It was a kinship of sorts. He found his mind wandering, thinking how they must have felt to know their days were numbered, just like his were now. And that was another kinship.

I'm dying. Maybe dying feels like this. I ought to know by now.

The navigation sensors woke him with an insistent pulsing tone to warn him Slave I had dropped out of hyper-s.p.a.ce, and he snapped upright and alert. His joints hurt; he ignored the pain.

In the viewscreen the red-streaked crescent of Roonadan grew larger until it was the entire sky. It was another heavily populated planet whose habitable zones were crammed with cities, but at least it wasn't as grim as Bonadan. Fett punched up the local data on his console and began his descent.

Roonadan still had a few green s.p.a.ces and attractive buildings, and even a few wide rivers snaking through the northern hemisphere. It was the kind of place that was home to a mix of the highly educated scientists who developed products, the people whose task it was to make their lives more pleasant, and the majority who worked in the factories and laboratories that produced the goods that the elite invented.

It was exactly the kind of place Taun We might be, if she could take the sunlight.

Kaminoans didn't like clear skies.

Fett disguised Slave I's armaments with a sensor screen and prepared to land. If anything went wrong, he had the firepower of a small warship to get out of trouble-turbolasers, ion cannon, torpedoes, and concussion missiles. He'd added conventional armor-piercing detonite ordnance on the last refit just in case he was ever low on power and stuck in a tight corner. Leaving things to chance was for amateurs.

Banking over the capital city of Varlo, Fett thought Slave I should be his final resting place. He didn't want her left behind; he had a sudden vision of setting a course out of the galaxy in his final days and letting the ship carry him as far as she could on her fuel cells and then drifting forever where n.o.body would follow. It was rea.s.suring.

Pack it in. You're not dead yet.

But if that's not an admission that you haven't a clue what your life's been about, then I don't know what is.

He picked up the automated air traffic control and set down at the first s.p.a.ceport he could find. Slave I settled gently on her landing struts, the dampers yielding as she sank half a meter and then came to rest. The drive cooled, sending a characteristic decelerating ticking through the hull that eventually fell silent.

"Fett?" He glanced up at the screen that gave him a complete view of the cargo bay. Mirta had stood up and was stretching her arms like an athlete, pulling one arm across her body then the other. "Are you taking me with you?"

"No."

"So you're just going to leave me locked in here while you go off."

"I wouldn't let anything happen to this ship. You're safe as long as she is." He set the intruder defenses and stood up to check his personal weapons. Roonadan didn't have a no-weapons law like its sister planet Bonadan, but it was Corporate Sector and so some restraint was called for. "And don't mess with the controls back there. You won't like what happens if you do."

He waited for an argument, but she just sat down again and started dismantling her blaster. He paused to watch: she was calibrating and cleaning it. The kid certainly took her weapons seriously. Most people just expected their hardware to work properly without maintenance, which was a good way to end up dead. Fett was impressed that she wasn't among them.

He stepped out of the c.o.c.kpit hatch and walked to the terminal building, checking data on the display that appeared in his visor as he walked. The planet was a research-and-development center. Somewhere there'd be a place where people whose job was to keep an eye on what companies did would gather to discuss business. Fett reasoned that it was a good place to start.

And like all commercial planets with plenty of job openings, Roonadan attracted a cosmopolitan population. A man in Mandalorian armor with a jet pack attracted almost as little attention as a Duros, but a lot less than the two blue-skinned Chiss who were wandering around the concourse in blue suits that matched their skin exactly. Fett took the opportunity to slip into one of the pa.s.sport control lanes and select his most benign identicard for presentation to the female official securing the barrier.

The woman scanned the readout on the screen in front of her, then eyed his battle-scarred armor suspiciously. She didn't ask him to remove his helmet. "What brings you here . . .