THREE

Jaina held course, flying straight toward the incoming plasma bolts. At the last possible moment, she threw the vessel into a fast-rolling spiral. The plasma flurry skimmed along the whirling ship, not dealing much damage to any one part. When the scream of plasma grating against living coral ceased, she fought the ship out of the roll and kept heading straight toward the oncoming skip.

“Lowbacca, get up here,” she shouted. “Clear me a lane, Ganner.”

The Jedi gunner hurled plasma at the coralskipper directly in their path. As its dovin basal engulfed the missile in a miniature black hole, Ganner released another. His timing was perfect, and the skip dissolved in a brief, bright explosion.

Jaina quickly diverted the dovin basal to the front shield, and instinctively flinched away as a spray of coral debris clattered over the hull. She glanced back over her shoulder in Zekk’s general direction.

“Zekk, you play dejarik much?”

“Play what?”

“That’s what I thought,” she muttered. While Zekk had concentrated on avoiding each immediate attack, the yammosk-coordinated fleet had been thinking several moves ahead, and had neatly maneuvered the stolen ship into a trap. She’d never been fond of dejarik or any of the other strategy games Chewbacca had insisted upon teaching her, but for the first time she saw the Wookiee’s point.

Lowbacca padded up and howled a query.

“Get on navigation,” Jaina said, jerking her head toward a rounded, brainlike console. “Hyperspace jump. Destination: anywhere but Myrkr. Can you input coordinates?”

The Wookiee settled down and regarded the biological “computer,” pensively scratching at the place on one temple where a black streak ran through his ginger-colored fur.

“Now would be good,” Ganner prompted.

Lowbacca growled a Wookiee insult and tugged the cognition hood down over his head. After a moment, he extended one of his retracted climbing claws and carefully sliced through the thin upper membrane. With astonishing delicacy, he began to touch neural clusters and rearrange slender, living fibers, grunting in satisfaction with each new insight.

Finally he turned to Jaina and woofed a question.

“Set course for Coruscant.”

“Why Coruscant?” Alema Rar protested. Her head-tails, which were mottled with darkening bruises and practically quilted together with bacta patches, began to twitch in agitation. “We’ll be shot down by Republic guards long before we reach the planet’s atmosphere, unless the Peace Brigade gets to us first!”

“The Peace Brigaders are enemy collaborators. They have no reason to attack this ship,” Ganner countered. “On the other hand, the Republic has no reason not to.”

Tenel Ka shook her head sharply, sending her disheveled red-gold braids swinging. “Sometimes a live enemy is worth a hundred dead ones. A small ship like this offers no real threat. The patrol will escort us in, hoping to capture a live ship and curious to know the motives of the crew.”

“That’s my thinking,” Jaina agreed. “Also, Rogue Squadron has a base on Coruscant, and there are people in the control tower who know all the pilots’ quirks. If I can put this rock through some distinctive maneuvers, there’s an outside chance that someone might recognize me. How’s it coming, Lowbacca?”

The Wookiee made a couple of deft adjustments, then signaled readiness by bracing massive paws on either side of the console and uttering a resigned groan.

Jaina kicked the ship into hyperdrive. The force of the jump threw her back into the oversized seat and strained the umbilicals attaching her hood and gloves to the ship. Plasma bolts spread out into a golden sunrise haze; stars elongated into brilliant lines.

Then silence and darkness engulfed the Jedi, and a floating sensation replaced the intense pressure of sublight acceleration. Jaina pulled off the hood and collapsed back into her seat. As the adrenaline surge ebbed, Jaina felt the returning tide of grief.

She sternly willed it away and focused on her fellow survivors. The nervous twitching of Alema Rar’s head-tails slowed into the subtle, sinuous undulation common to Twi’lek females. Tenel Ka shook off her flight restraints and began to prowl about the ship—a sign of restlessness in most people, but the Dathomiri woman was most at ease when in motion. The Wookiee resumed his study of the navibrain. Ganner pulled off the cognition hood and rose, smoothing his black hair carefully back into place. He headed toward the back of the ship, most likely to check on Tahiri.

Jaina jerked her thoughts away from that path. She did not want to think about Tahiri, did not want to envision the girl’s vigil, or—

She sternly banished the grim image these thoughts evoked. When Zekk approached the pilot’s seat, she sent him a small, grateful smile. And why not? He was her oldest friend and a timely distraction—and he was a lot easier to deal with than most distractions that came her way these days.

Then his green eyes lit up in a manner that had Jaina rethinking her last observation.

“For a while, I thought we’d never see home again,” Zekk ventured. He settled down in the place Ganner had vacated and sent Jaina a wink and a halfhearted grin. “Should have known better.”

She nodded, accepting his tentative apology—and it was very tentative indeed. Her old friend tried to shield his emotions, but his doubts and concerns sang through.

“Let’s get this over with now, so we aren’t tempted to break up into discussion groups during the next crisis. You didn’t want me to fly the ship because you don’t trust me,” she stated bluntly.

Zekk stared at her for a moment. Then he let out a long, low whistle and shook his head. “Same old Jaina—subtle as a thermal detonator.”

“If you really believed that I haven’t changed, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“Then let’s not. This isn’t the time.”

“You’re right,” she retorted. “We should have settled this days ago—all of us. Maybe then we wouldn’t have come apart down there.”

“What do you mean?” he said cautiously.

“Oh, come on. You were there. You heard Jacen obsessing over Anakin’s motives and methods, trying to make him question himself at every step and turn. You saw what happens when Jedi stop focusing on what we’re doing to quibble about how and why.”

A small, humorless smile touched her face. “It’s like the old story about the millitile who could walk just fine until someone asked how he kept track of all those legs. Once he started thinking about it, he couldn’t walk at all. Most likely he ended up as some hawk-bat’s dinner.”

“Jaina, you can’t blame Jacen for what happened to Anakin!”

“I don’t,” she said quickly. Since this was Zekk, she added, “At least, not entirely.”

“And you can’t blame yourself for Jacen, either.”

That, she wasn’t ready to concede and didn’t care to discuss.

“I was working my way toward a point,” she told him. “Jacen was distracted by this nebulous vision of a Jedi ideal. And you were distracted by your fear of the two Dark Jedi we freed.”

“For good reason. They took off and left us. They hurt Lowbacca and kidnapped Raynar. For all we know, they’ve killed him.”

“They’ll answer for all of that. Can I make my point?”

One corner of Zekk’s lips quirked upward. “I was wondering when you’d get around to it.”

The wry comment was so familiar, so normal. For a fleeting moment, Jaina remembered who they’d been just a few years ago—a fearless, confident survivor and a girl who ran toward adventure with heedless joy.

Two more casualties of the Yuuzhan Vong.

“It’s like this,” she said quietly. “For the last two years I’ve listened to Anakin and Jacen debate the role of the Jedi and our relationship to the Force. In the end, what did any of that amount to?”

Zekk leaned forward and rested one hand on her shoulder. She shook him off before he could speak empty words of consolation, or repeat cyclic arguments she’d heard too many times between Kyp Durron and her uncle Luke.

“Anakin started to figure it out,” she went on. “I sensed it in him after Yavin Four. He learned something there the rest of us don’t know, something that could have made all the difference, if only he’d had time to figure it all out. If there is such a thing as destiny, I think that was Anakin’s. He has always been different. Special.”

“Of course. He was your brother.”

“He is—” She broke off abruptly, shook off the stab of grief, and made the necessary adjustment. “He was more than that.”

Jaina took time to consider her next words. She wasn’t introspective by nature; this had been in her mind since Anakin’s exploits on Yavin 4, and she still couldn’t get her hands around it.

“With Anakin’s death I lost a brother, but the Jedi lost something I can’t begin to define. My feelings tell me it’s something important, something we lost a very long time ago.”

For a long moment Zekk was silent. “Maybe so. But we have the Force, and each other.”

Simple words, but with a layer of personal meaning offered like a gift, if only Jaina chose to take it.

“Each other,” she echoed softly. “But for how long, Zekk? If the Jedi keep having ‘successes’ like this last mission, pretty soon there won’t be any of us left.”

He nodded, accepting her evasion as if he’d expected it. “At least we’re going home.”

She managed a faint smile, and privately marked yet another difference between her friend’s perceptions and her own. Zekk had been born on Ennta and was brought to Coruscant when he was eight years old. He made his own way in the rough lower levels of the city-planet. Jaina’s parents had kept living quarters in the city’s prestigious towers for most of her life, but she had spent surprisingly little of her eighteen years amid Coruscant’s artificial stars.

To Jaina, Coruscant wasn’t home. It was merely the next logical move on the dejarik board.