SIX

Wedge ran me home and offered to stay and talk things over with me, but I let him go. “I appreciate the offer, Wedge, but you’ve got more important things to do than to listen to me argue this from all sides.”

Wedge pressed his lips together in a grim grin. “Nothing I have to do is more important than my friends. Mirax is as close as I’ve ever come to having a little sister, and I definitely think of her as family. You’re a good friend. As much as it bothers you to be able to do nothing at the moment, at least you have some options. I’m even more blind here than you are; but I’ll be ready to help no matter what decision you make.”

I shook his outstretched hand. “Thanks. Believe me, you’ll be hearing from me.”

“I’m counting on it.”

I held a hand up. “One thing, please. Don’t say anything to Booster.”

Wedge frowned. “But he’s her father. He should be told.”

“Yeah, but if Cracken was afraid I’d be a nerf in an antiquities bazaar, just imagine what Booster will do.” I shook my head. “The Errant Venture might not be in the greatest shape, but having an Imperial Star Destroyer show up and threaten a world probably won’t be the best way to get Mirax back.”

“You have a point there.” Wedge smiled. “I won’t lie to him, but I won’t go out of my way to say anything to him until or unless I have some good news.”

“Thanks. See you later, Wedge.” I walked down the steps from the complex’s common landing area and over to the apartment. The door slid open when I punched in the code. I was two steps inside before I noticed there were more lights on than when I’d left. Without a blaster or my grandfather’s lightsaber, I was defenseless against whoever had broken in. I was about to turn and head back out again, when a familiar hooting sounded from the living room.

“Yes, Whistler, it’s me.”

The little green R2 unit rolled over, swiveled his head so his visual monitors could take in the hallway, then turned around and disappeared again. I walked down to the living area and found a variety of bags and containers of food piled on the holopad’s table. The droid’s pincer arm extended from its cylindrical body and elevated a can of nerf and gumes to the top of a shaky stack.

“Whistler, despite what Mirax told you months ago about my dietary habits when she’s gone, I really can feed myself.” I dropped to my knees on the floor beside him and caught the can he dropped in my lap. “Yes, I’m certain this would be good, but I’m just not hungry right now.”

A whistle started low and spiked high.

“Why?” I snorted. “I don’t know how much of this you can understand, Whistler.” I ignored his derisive reply and pushed on, organizing my thoughts as I went. “Since you’re here, I know you pulled the Skate’s port logs and saw Mirax was gone. Fact is, she’s really gone. Someone has taken her and Jedi Master Skywalker thinks she’s being held in stasis somewhere. Why, none of us have any clue.”

Whistler’s mournful tone raised a lump in my throat. He tweetled and hooted a bunch of things after that, but I couldn’t figure out what he meant. I reached out and patted him gently on the dome. His pincer gently tugged on the sleeve of my jacket.

“I’ve just come from talking with Wedge and with Luke Skywalker. They both think my learning to train as a Jedi is the key to finding Mirax, but I think that will take too long. Part of me knows they are right, but another part doesn’t think Mirax can afford the time. I keep trying to think about what I should do, or what my father would do, but I have so many questions that need answering that I’m lost.”

Whistler toddled forward and toppled one of the stack of cans he had created. His dataprobe came out and sank itself into the dataport on the holopad. In an instant the image of my father, standing slightly taller than Mirax had, appeared frozen on the holopad. Whistler hooted insistently at me, but I couldn’t understand him.

“Slow down, slow down. What are you getting at?”

My father’s image faded, replaced by the glowing words, “All you have to do is ask.”

I was about to ask for a further explanation of that line, but the words struck a resonance inside me and I recognized them fairly quickly. Back before we had liberated Thyferra, before Thrawn and freeing the Lusankya prisoners, Whistler had informed me that my father had encrypted and loaded into him a holograph talking about my heritage. Whistler had said the message was recorded back before I joined CorSec. He’d been instructed to play it for me whenever I asked and could provide the encryption key.

I resisted listening to the message back then because I feared it would make me make choices that I didn’t want to make. If my father had urged me to become a Jedi, to seek out a Master and to train, I knew I would have. At the time that would have meant leaving the squadron and leaving Mirax and abandoning the former Lusankya prisoners. I couldn’t do that, so I set aside the idea of hearing what my father had to say.

After that, with Thrawn and everything else, I never got the chance to explore what my father had left for me. Mirax told me the message itself was not the last gift my father had given me. The last gift was the trust he showed in allowing me to choose when and if I listened to his message. I cherished that gift and while I knew I should listen to the message, by putting off the decision I made that final gift last longer.

Even as that thought bubbled into my brain, I realized that listening to the message would not destroy my father’s gift. His trust had been implicit in every aspect of our lives. My father had died in my arms and I had been powerless to prevent his death. Because of this I had allowed myself to imagine that in his last seconds of life he wondered where I was. He wondered why I had not been there to help him. I had to hope, for the sake of my sanity, that he knew I would have given my own life to save his. Somehow I did think that; I even knew it.

I smiled. “He recorded that message long before he died. It was never meant to be a legacy, but a failsafe. If something happened to him, I would not be left without information he thought I needed to know. And I need to remember that he never would have put me into a position to make a choice against my own best interests. I trust him in that, but by not listening to the message I’ve failed to act on that trust.”

I nodded to Whistler. “Please, play the message for me. Decryption code is Nejaa Halcyon.”

My father’s image reappeared and my throat tightened. He’d always been taller than me and, with me kneeling on the floor, I once again had to look up at him. His black hair had been closely cropped, his hazel eyes had golden highlights that sparkled. He wore that easy smile I’d see so often. I’d probably been sixteen years old when he recorded the message—he still had his powerful build and only a hint of the thickening he would fight until the end of his life.

His voice came through clear and strong. “I am making this recording for you, Corran, because there are things you should know. Being in CorSec can be dangerous and I don’t want anything to happen to me that would prevent you from learning about our family. I hope and trust right now that we’re sitting together watching this, laughing at how young I looked when I recorded it. If not, I want you to know I love you and have always been very proud of you.”

Whistler stopped the message as I closed my eyes against tears. The shock of Mirax’s disappearance might have numbed me from feeling anything about her, but the pain of my father’s death came roaring back to fill the void inside of me. I realized I was kneeling now the way I’d knelt in the cantina where he died, cradling his head in my lap. It was almost as if I could feel his blood soaking into my clothes again. The frustration I felt over Mirax compounded itself with the frustration I’d felt with my father’s death and I almost walked away.

But neither of them would.

I sniffed and wiped my nose on my sleeve, then opened my eyes and nodded to Whistler. “Thanks, my friend.”

The message continued with my father smiling broadly. “This will sound like a wild tale, but it is all true. Your grandfather, Rostek Horn, is really your step-grandfather. As you know he partnered with a Jedi before the Clone Wars, and that Jedi died serving away from Corellia, right after the Clone Wars. That Jedi, Nejaa Halcyon, was my father. He served as my Master before he went away. I was all of ten years old when he died, and Rostek Horn saw to it that my mother and I wanted for nothing. My mother and Rostek fell in love and married, and Rostek adopted me. More importantly, when the Empire began to hunt down Jedi and their families, he managed to destroy records and fabricate new ones that insulated us from the Empire’s wrath.

“I know this is quite a secret to keep from you, but the deception was necessary. I know you, Corran, and know you would have been very proud of your heritage. You would have told others of it, sharing it with them, and that would have been your destruction. Lord Vader and the others hunting Jedi have been relentless. I have seen the results of their handiwork. Keeping you ignorant is keeping you safe. It’s a terrible bargain to make, but the only one that can be made.”

My father’s face screwed up in that expression he wore when things were not going exactly the way he wanted. “The Halcyon family is well known among the Corellian Jedi. We were well respected and many were the tributes to Nejaa Halcyon upon his death. You can find no record of them now, of course. What the Empire did not destroy, Rostek did destroy or hid away—he won’t even tell me where the records are, but I cannot believe he would have allowed all traces of his friend to perish. The Halcyons were strong in the Force but not flashy or given to public displays of power. A word here, an act there, allowing people to choose between good or evil at their own speed and peril was more our way.

“And so, here, with this message, I give you a choice. I will be proud of you and love you no matter what you choose. The fact that you say you want to join CorSec has filled me and your grandfather with more pride than you can imagine. There is no greater honor you could show us than to follow in our footsteps. I do want you to know, though, that my choice bridges two paths. While Rostek and my father worked together, CorSec and Jedi, I have used what I learned from my father to work within CorSec. In this way I serve both the Halcyon and Horn traditions.”

My father’s image opened his hands. “If you have the chance, if you feel the need, I hope you will also make yourself open to both traditions. It is not that being a Jedi is better than serving in CorSec—not at all. But there are so few who are able to become Jedi that to turn away from that path is a tragedy. I have been forced away from it. It is my hope that you will not also be barred from it and, if possible, that I will be able to instruct you the way my father instructed me.”

My father smiled and pride burned in his eyes. “There you have it, my son. Now you know more of who you are and what you have the potential to become. The only limits on you are the limits you will place on yourself. I know that whatever you will decide, it will be the right thing. You’re that good, Corran, and that special. I will know great joy if you bring the Halcyons back into the Jedi Order, but even that will be nothing compared to the joy I know in having you as my son and knowing you are happy and well.”

The message stopped and Whistler offered to play it again, but I shook my head. “He wants me to train. He knows it is the right thing for me to do.” I thought for a moment. “And I guess I know it, too. I always saw my service in CorSec as the utmost I could do to prevent the innocent from coming to harm from evil. That’s what it was then, just as flying with Rogue Squadron became later. Now, the utmost I can do is to become a Jedi, like Luke Skywalker and my father’s father. To do anything less is to be unworthy of the trust they all place in me.”

I slowly stood. “To do anything less means I fail in my responsibilities to Mirax. I’m not going to let that happen.”

I walked down the hallway and into my bedroom. I slid back a false panel in my nightstand and withdrew the slender silver cylinder that had been Nejaa Halcyon’s lightsaber. My right thumb punched the black button on it, allowing the silver-white blade to hiss to life. It hummed as I turned toward Whistler and wove the blade through the air.

“Luke Skywalker is looking for students, and I need a teacher.” I smiled as Whistler trumpeted triumphantly. “Keiran Halcyon is born.”