—Del Rey Books, May 2014
Turn the page or jump to the timeline of Star Wars Legends novels to learn more.
ONE
As she sat in the chair that was hers by right of death, she raised her eyes to the cold faraway stars. Checklists buzzed distantly in her mind and her hands moved over the controls, but her thoughts flew elsewhere, amid the chill infinitude. Searching …
Nothing.
Her gaze fell and there she saw, on the controls at the adjacent pilot’s seat, her husband’s hands. She drew comfort from the sight, from the sureness and power she knew was there, in those strong hands.
Her heart leapt. Something, somewhere in all those stars, had touched her.
She thought: Jacen!
Her husband’s hands touched controls and the stars streamed away, turned to bleeding smears of light as if seen through beaten rain, and the distant touch vanished.
“Jacen,” she said, and then, at her husband’s startled look, at the surprise and pain in his brown eyes, “Jacen.”
“And you’re sure?” Han Solo said. “You’re sure it was Jacen?”
“Yes. Reaching out to me. I felt him. It could have been no one else.”
“And he’s alive.”
“Yes.”
Leia Organa Solo could read him so well. She knew that Han believed their son dead, but that he tried, for her sake, to pretend otherwise. She knew that, fierce with grief and with guilt for having withdrawn from his family, he would support her in anything now, even if he believed it was delusional. And she knew the strength it took for him to suppress his own pain and doubt.
She could read all that in him, in the flicker of his eye, the twitch of his cheek. She could read him, read the bravery and the uncertainty, and she loved him for both.
“It was Jacen,” she said. She put as much confidence in her tone as she could, all her assurance. “He was reaching out to me through the Force. I felt him. He wanted to tell me he was alive and with friends.” She reached over and took his hand. “There’s no doubt, now. Not at all.”
Han’s fingers tightened on hers, and she sensed the struggle in him, desire for hope warring with his own bitter experience.
His brown eyes softened. “Yes,” he said. “Of course. I believe you.”
There was a hint of reserve there, of caution, but that was reflex, the result of a long and uncertain life that had taught him to believe nothing until he’d seen it with his own eyes.
Leia reached for him, embraced him awkwardly from the copilot’s seat. His arms went around her. She felt the bristle of his cheek against hers, inhaled the scent of his body, his hair.
A bubble of happiness grew in her, burst into speech. “Yes, Han,” she said. “Our son is alive. And so are we. Be joyful. Be at peace. Everything changes from now on.”
The idyll lasted until Han and Leia walked hand in hand into the Millennium Falcon’s main hold. Through the touch, Leia felt the slight tension of Han’s muscles as he came in sight of their guest—an Imperial commander in immaculate dress grays.
Han, Leia knew, had hoped that this mission would provide a chance for the two of them to be alone. Through the many months since the war with the Yuuzhan Vong had begun, they had either been apart or dealing with a bewildering succession of crises. Even though their current mission was no less urgent than the others, they would have treasured this time alone in hyperspace.
They had even left Leia’s Noghri bodyguards behind. Neither of them had wanted any passengers at all, let alone an Imperial officer. Thus far Han had managed to be civil about it, but only just.
The commander rose politely to her feet. “An exceptionally smooth transition into hyperspace, Captain Solo,” she said. “For a ship with such—such heterogeneous components, such a transition speaks well of the ship’s captain and his skills.”
“Thanks,” Han said.
“The Myomar shields are superb, are they not?” she said. “One of our finer designs.”
The problem with Commander Vana Dorja, Leia thought, was that she was simply too observant. She was a woman of about thirty, the daughter of the captain of a Star Destroyer, with bobbed dark hair tucked neatly into her uniform cap, and the bland, pleasant face of a professional diplomat. She had been on Coruscant during its fall, allegedly negotiating some kind of commercial treaty, purchasing Ulban droid brains for use in Imperial hydroponics farms. The negotiations were complicated by the fact that the droid brains in question could equally well be used for military purposes.
The negotiations regarding the brains’ end-use certificates had gone nowhere in particular, but perhaps they had been intended to go nowhere. What Commander Dorja’s extended stay on Coruscant had done was to make her a close observer in the Yuuzhan Vong assault that had resulted in the planet’s fall.
Vana Dorja had gotten off Coruscant somehow—Leia had no doubt that her escape had been planned long in advance—and she had then turned up at Mon Calamari, the new provisional capital, blandly asking for help in returning to Imperial space just at the moment at which Leia had been assigned a diplomatic mission to that selfsame Empire.
Of course it wasn’t a coincidence. Dorja was clearly a spy operating under commercial cover. But what could Leia do? The New Republic might need the help of the Empire, and the Empire might be offended if its commercial representative were needlessly delayed in her return.
What Leia could do was establish some ground rules concerning where on the Falcon Commander Dorja could go, and where was strictly
