Vision of the future

'It's funny, you know,' Mara murmured from beside him. 'Ironic, really. Here we are: the woman who's spent ten years trying to build a new life for herself, and the man who's spent those same ten years rushing madly around trying to save the galaxy from every new threat that reared its ugly face.'

'That's us, all right,' Luke said, eyeing her uneasily. The twisting darkness in her was growing stronger... 'Not sure I see the irony, though.'

'The irony is that with the New Republic ready to tear itself apart, you rushed off to save me,' Mara said. 'Ignoring your self-delegated responsibilities in order to save that one woman and her one life.'

He felt her take a deep breath. 'And that one woman,' she added, almost too quietly to hear, 'is now the one who has to sacrifice that new life she wanted. To save the New Republic.' Abruptly, a distant flash of pale green light illuminated her face. A face carved from stone; a face gazing with terrible pain and loneliness into the night. 'Looks like you got here just in time,' she said as a faint thundercrack echoed in the distance.

There was a second green flash. With an effort, Luke tore his eyes from her tortured face and turned to look.

The towers were firing. Even as he focused on them, another pair of green turbolaser flashes lanced out from the top of one of them across the sky, followed by a pair from one of the other towers. Firing across the landscape in the opposite direction from where he and Mara sat. 'Ranging shots, probably,' Mara said, her voice the deceptive calm of an overly taut spring. 'Trying to gauge the distance. It won't be long now.'

Luke looked back at her. The pain within her was growing, pressing outward against her mental barrier like flood waters against a dam. 'Mara, what's going on?'

'It was all your idea, you know,' she continued as if he hadn't spoken. 'You're the one who wanted so much for me to become a Jedi.' She sniffed loudly, the sound of someone fighting back tears. 'Remember?'

And then, from the fortress, a flurry of turbolaser shots abruptly burst out, the green fire accompanied this time by a counterpoint of blue from Chiss-style weaponry. All four towers were firing now, firing madly and persistently, all in the same direction. Luke craned his neck, trying to see, wondering what in the worlds they could be shooting at. Had Karrde sent in a backup force after all?

Had the New Republic found them, or the Empire? Or one of those hundred terrible dangers Parck had talked about? He looked back at Mara—

And in that single, awful heartbeat, he knew.

'Mara,' he breathed. 'No. Oh, no.'

'It had to be done,' she said, her voice trembling. In the backwash of light from the enemy fire Luke could see she was no longer even trying to hold back the tears. 'It was the only way to keep them from taking all of this and handing it to Bastion. The only way.' Luke looked back at the fortress, the knife of Mara's grief digging in beneath his own heart, a sudden frenzy of thought and urgency swirling through his mind. If he'd woken up earlier—if he'd forced his way through her mental barriers back in the fortress and learned her private plan—if he even now stretched out with the full power of the Force—

'Don't,' Mara murmured, her voice infinitely tired. 'Please, don't. It's my sacrifice, don't you see?

The final sacrifice every Jedi has to go through.'

Her fumbling hand reached out to touch his. It felt very cold. 'There's nothing you can do. Nothing at all.'

Luke inhaled raggedly, the cool night air digging like the ice of Hoth into his lungs, his hands and mind and heart aching with the overwhelming desire to do something. To do anything. But she was right. He could hate it, he could bitterly oppose it; but down deep, he knew she was right. The universe wasn't his responsibility. Decisions made by other people—their actions, their consequences, even their sacrifices—they weren't his responsibility, either. Mara had made her choice, and had accepted the consequences for it. And he had neither the duty nor the right to try to take it away from her.

Which left only one thing he could do. Moving closer to her on the ledge, he put his arm around her.

For a moment she resisted, old fears and habits and loneliness mixing together with her roiling pain to stiffen her muscles away from him. But only for a moment. Then, as if that part too of her life had now been lost, she melted against his side, her so carefully constructed barriers bursting aside as she finally poured out the grief and loss she had held so deeply and privately inside her. Luke wrapped his arm tighter around her, murmuring meaningless words as he fought with her through the storm of pain and misery, absorbing what he could of it and offering what comfort and warmth he could in return. In the distance, the firing from the towers increased—

And then, above the edge of the cliff, he saw it. Cutting low over a distant hill, its hull burnished by the surrealistic effect of full shields operating in atmosphere, it twisted and writhed like a living thing as it evaded or dodged or simply shrugged off the withering firestorm savaging the air around it, firing back steadily but uselessly in return at the impenetrable black stone rising before it. Drawn like a mynock to a power cable by the beckon call Mara had spliced into one of the alien ships' comm systems, it was driving its single-minded way toward the open hangar entrance, the one single weak point in the entire fortress. Mara's personal ship, the one thing in the universe she truly owned. The Jade's Fire.