TWENTY-TWO

Frustration largely characterized the week between Master Skywalker’s fall and the arrival of his sister and her family. When Ambassador Cilghal had told her what had happened, Leia Organa Solo had wanted to travel to Yavin 4 immediately, but the demands of her office were not such that they could be so easily dismissed. Ambassador Cilghal suggested she could wait until the medical team had arrived and made its evaluation, and promised to keep her informed of any changes.

This direct link with Luke’s sister made Ambassador Cilghal, our newest student, the de facto leader of the academy, at least from the New Republic’s point of view. Kam Solusar still oversaw our instruction, but he didn’t push to expand what we knew, just perfect it. I understood his reluctance to teach us more in Luke’s absence, but this meant Kam was inclined to be conservative in what he allowed to go on at the academy. He kept us all close to the Great Temple and even asked me to curtail my runs. I flat refused to do that, but found myself a circuit that always kept me relatively close to home.

Frustration set in, because with Cilghal and Kam in charge I really had no standing where I wanted it. When the survey team came to see if the Sun Crusher was still in the heart of Yavin, they roundly ignored me. Some shave-tailed lieutenant told me that all information was on a need-to-know basis, and he’d decide when or if I needed to know. Had he any idea who I really was, he’d have been answering “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir” and not daring to breathe unless I gave him leave to do so, but as a Jedi wannabe, I was just seen as “part of the problem.”

Of course, it would have been child’s-play to meddle with his mind and make him think I was not present in the comm center when he filed his report with General Cracken, but I was fairly certain such a capricious use of my abilities would have left me dabbling in the dark side. While I did want to know what he had to report, I didn’t want to put myself in harm’s way learning it. Still, I did consider myself as having a need to know, so I convinced Luke’s R2 unit to pull the report from the comm center computer.

I could have saved myself and Artoo the trouble if I remembered the first lesson about junior officers: if they know something neat, they can’t wait to share it. If they know nothing, they use ranks and regs to cover their ignorance. This Lieutenant Morrs was about as ignorant as a Hutt is ugly. Because of storms raging in the gas giant’s heart, he couldn’t be certain if the Sun Crusher was there, had been destroyed or had been taken away. His survey results were labeled inconclusive and seemed to have put the New Republic somewhat at ease concerning the Sun Crusher.

While I would have liked to have taken heart in the idea that the Sun Crusher might not have gone anywhere, another development, or lack of one actually, had me worried. Since Luke’s defeat, there had been no sign of the dark man. This scared me a great deal because his lack of activity was somewhat uncharacteristic and made me think we were just on the cusp of the disaster Master Skywalker had foreseen.

I still thought of the dark man as a sociopath, and nothing I’d learned about Exar Kun suggested he didn’t fit that mold perfectly. Sociopathic murderers tend to cycle—they commit their crimes on a schedule that makes sense for them. As their crimes become more and more horrific, the cycle tends to speed up until whatever little control they had over themselves erodes and they get sloppy enough to get captured. The havoc they wreak in that time is nothing short of devastating and brutally cruel.

Gantoris was on Yavin just over two weeks before his death, which could be seen as a cap to one cycle. Kyp arrived a week or so later and was here just over a week before he stole the Headhunter. Inside a week he came back and dropped Luke like a hot rock. By rights the dark man should have been back preying on us within days after Luke’s defeat, but he wasn’t, and this frightened me.

There were ample explanations for why he wasn’t causing us trouble. The first is that he wanted to give us time to despair over Luke’s condition. That would leave us more vulnerable to him. The second reason, and one that chilled me to the marrow, was that he was devoting his energies to controlling Kyp Durron and the Sun Crusher. If it was Exar Kun who had influenced Kyp, I didn’t know what target he’d pick for the Sun Crusher, but I’d hate to be on a world he decided to pay back after four thousand years.

The only vaguely positive explanation for Exar Kun’s dormancy that I could come up with was that his effort to draw the Sun Crusher from Yavin and to down Luke had tired him out. I had no way to determine how powerful Exar Kun could be, but it struck me as possible that he’d expended a lot of energy to defeat a Jedi Master. There was no telling how long it would take for him to recover, but with each passing day the apprentices grew in strength as well.

In blackest night, any light is welcome.

Tycho brought the medical team and my special supplies as quickly as possible. He told me the shuttle he had brought had a fully operational proton torpedo launching system and offered to take me on a strafing run of any Temple I wanted to destroy, but I held back. Proton torpedoes probably would have been the most effective way to deal with Exar Kun’s stronghold, but I still recalled how adamant Luke had been that neither I nor any of the other students travel there. If we weren’t strong enough to deal with the problem, I didn’t want to put Tycho in jeopardy.

“I’ll leave you the coordinates, Colonel.” I tossed him a salute as he boarded the shuttle to leave. “If things go very badly, talk Admiral Ackbar into a planetary bombardment that will raze it.”

“I copy.” He returned my salute. “May the Force be with you.”

The medical team he’d brought went over Luke from top to bottom, inside and out. His systems seemed to be functioning just fine, but there was no one in residence inside him. The doctors and med-techs and droids all listened to us try to explain that fact to them, but they were creatures of science. While they could watch us do simple things with the Force, they sought physical and scientific explanations for what were spiritual phenomena. Trying to explain the Force to them was like trying to explain altruism to a rancor.

Their departure left us with nothing to do but wait for Leia Organa Solo’s arrival. It could have come at any time, so we spent the better part of a week waiting. I’ve probably spent longer weeks on boring stake-outs, but nanoseconds seemed to pass in hours—and long hours at that. And, despite Kam’s best efforts to keep us focused, our spirits began to ebb.

Princess Leia’s arrival worked wonders for us. She looked tired and a bit haggard, but still every bit the exciting and heroic icon she had been during the Rebellion. Her twins, dark-haired and bright eyed, looked around at Yavin 4 with a mixture of wonder and trepidation. Last down the egress ramp from the Millennium Falcon came Han Solo. He looked to me as if he’d lost a bit of weight during his recent adventure on Kessel, but still cut a dashing and vital figure.

Ambassador Cilghal led the Solos to the Grand Audience Chamber. Sunlight filled the room with a golden glow and warmth that belied the cold and stark reality of Luke lying on a bier as if dead. The sight seemed to stagger his sister for a moment. I hung back enough that I could not hear the family’s whispered remarks, but Jaina squirmed down out of her father’s arms and gave her uncle a kiss. All of us hoped that gesture might work where our powers and medical science had failed, and my heart ached when the disappointed child turned away, defeated.

The enthusiasm spawned by the Solo family’s arrival drained away during the rest of the day, leaving us a sullen and worn company by the time for the evening meal. Han Solo did what he could to help out by using the Falcon’s food prep unit to create a dinner of Corellian food—fried endwa in an orange gravy and butter-boiled csolcir with vweilu-nut slivers. While I didn’t think he normally approached cooking with any more joy than I did, being the only person on the moon who was not Force-sensitive had to be rough on him. The conversations we all had were, in retrospect, very self-indulgent and, in the long run, rather trivial. Providing food was what he could do to help the situation that was beyond helping—and it kept him from having to listen to what we were saying.

I picked at the food, not really listening to the others. I catalogued their voices and relied on the recall I’d developed as a detective to let me replay things later, when I could divorce myself from the fears and defeatism some of my colleagues were voicing. It wasn’t really fair to them, but I had spent a week trying to quell fears and had had enough of it.

Leia Organa Solo tolerated none of the self-pitying chatter, and ended it by slapping her hands on the stone table. “Stop this talk!” She berated us for shying from the risk involved with becoming Jedi Knights and reminded us that the New Republic was counting on us. “You must work together, discover things you don’t know, fight what has to be fought. But the one thing you can’t do is give up!”

I wanted to cheer, but a mouthful of endwa prevented me from doing so. I chewed quickly, chewed a bit more and swallowed hard. The endwa slowly slid down my throat—as good endwa will do—and eventually gave me back my voice.

Just in time for me to scream.

Luke Skywalker had told us that at the moment of Alderaan’s destruction, his master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, had said he felt “a disturbance in the Force.” Anyone who could label what I felt a “disturbance” could think of Hutts as cuddly. The hollow shock one feels when told of a close friend’s sudden death slammed into me at lightspeed. My conscious mind searched in vain for an identity to attach to that feeling, finding a way to contain it, but the hollowness opened into a bottomless void. Not only did I not know who had died, but I would never have a chance to know them, and this seemed the greatest tragedy possible.

Flashes of faces, snippets of dreams, laughter aborted and the sweet scent of a newborn’s flesh undergoing a greasy transformation into roast meat all roared through me. Thousands upon thousands, millions upon millions, these images and impressions came in a whirlwind that screwed itself down into my belly. Hope melted into fear, wonder into terror, innocence into nothingness. Bright futures, all planned, proved the ultimate in morphability when a fundamental truth in these lives proved wrong. For these people there never had been a question of whether or not the sun would rise tomorrow, and yet in an instant they were proved wrong, as their sun reached out and devoured their world.

I heard Streen screaming that there were too many voices for him to handle before he slumped to the floor. I envied him in that moment for the same clarity of recall I cherished seconds before meant I watched a vast parade of dead flicker through my consciousness. A mother, acting on instinct, sheltered a child in the nanosecond before both of them were vaporized. Young lovers, lying together in the afterglow of the moment, hoping what they felt would never end, got their wish as they were torn into their constituent atoms. Criminals, triumphant in some small success, were reduced to fearful puling animals as their world evaporated.

I don’t recall leaving the dining hall, but my mind was not my own as the Force carried to me the annihilation of a world far away. When clarity began to return, I found myself outside, on the top of the Great Temple. My throat burned. Trembling arms held me up above a pool of my own vomit and I would have sagged to the side, but strong hands on my shoulders steadied me.

“I didn’t think the food was that bad.” Han Solo set a cup of water down on the stone beside me. “Wash your mouth out.”

I sloshed half the water from the container as I raised it to my lips, then rinsed my mouth and spat the foul water over the edge of the pyramid. “Thanks,” I said. At least I think I said it.

Han half dragged me away from the remains of my dinner. “Leia said it was something horrible. Sun Crusher killed a system?”

I wiped my mouth on the sleeve of my tunic. “Unless you know of another superweapon sitting around that could explode a star.”

A smile started to grow on his face and his dark eyes sparked for a second as a wiseass remark formed itself in his head, but he never let it out. Instead his grin melted into a more serious expression. “It has to be the Sun Crusher—that or there is another superweapon out there.”

The fleeting image of someone who looked like Kyp surfaced in my brain. Through his eyes I saw the slender craft, I felt his joy at seeing his brother again, pain from betrayal that stretched into untold agony as his body melted. “Kyp had a brother?”

Han’s eyes focused distantly. “Imps took him to the Academy at Carida.”

“He’s gone. So’s Carida.”

“I guess they won’t be inviting me back for a class reunion, then.” Han glanced down at me. “New Republic Intelligence will confirm that, but now I know where to start looking.”

I looked hard at him. “You’re going after Kyp?”

“Have to. He’ll listen to me.”

“You hope.”

“Hmmm, your lips move but I hear my wife’s voice.” Han sighed. “I have a history with the kid. He’s angry and he needs someone to trust. I’m it.”

I nodded, then lifted my head. “Take me with you.”

“Look, kid, I work best alone.”

“So I’ve heard.” I projected an image of my old self into his brain. “We’ve met before, Captain Solo. Wedge Antilles introduced us. I’m here incognito at Master Skywalker’s suggestion.”

“Horn, right.” Han blinked his eyes. “You’re a hot hand in an X-wing, but a Death Star couldn’t take out the Sun Crusher. If I needed anyone with me, you’d be the first I’d tap.”

“You’re going after someone with incredible power, and I’m not just talking about that ship. I can’t allow you to go alone.”

Han’s face clouded over. “ ‘Can’t allow?’ My ship, my rules, and don’t try to pull any rank on me. I was a general with the Rebellion before you ever left Corellia. I can handle Kyp just fine. And I’m not so sure it’s Kyp you’re afraid of.”

My eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

“You were CorSec. You just don’t like the idea of someone like me with his hands on the Sun Crusher.”

That brought me up short. I looked at him, then away at the dark jungle. Was I allowing old prejudices to rear up and influence me? For years I’d looked forward to getting a shot at Han Solo if he ever ventured back into the Corellian system. Even after joining the Rebellion I had severe reservations about him. In meeting him the first time I thought I had laid all that to rest.

I looked back at him. “Time once was when you’d have been right. Not now. If I actually thought that, I’d be down there stealing the Falcon and going after Kyp myself.”

Han slowly nodded. “Look, kid, Corran; going after Kyp is the only thing I can do. You’re a Jedi. You can be here and help Luke in ways I can’t. I’ve got to do what I can do, and so do you. I’m going to leave you here so you can take care of Luke; so you can help my wife and watch my kids.”

“You’d allow someone from CorSec to watch over your kids?”

“Getting soft in my old age, I know, but I understand it’s possible to let old opinions die.”

“Thanks.” I narrowed my eyes. “What’s going to happen if …”

“Kyp turns on me?” Han slowly shook his head. “I think I told you, your father hunted me once. I had to run to Carida to escape having a Horn on my tail. Doing what he’s done, Kyp’s destroyed even that haven. If it comes to that, good hunting.”