Balance Point Page 3

  Gateway was bigger, just older, and much better established than this settlement. Better organized, Jacen guessed, not that he meant to criticize his dad. Han was giving Settlement Thirty-two his all. Thirty-two maintained a pipeline that provided Gateway with water, which was reclaimed from an ancient numbered pit mine. Gateway maintained the communication cable and supplemented Thirty-two’s food production.

  Han thrust his hands into his pockets and eyed Jacen, raising one eyebrow. “You’re not chasing mynocks with a flitterfly net?”

  “I hope I am.” Jacen fingered hair back behind his ears. “I didn’t want to get you worried—”

  “We’re at war. Everybody’s worried.”

  The moment passed without either of them mentioning Chewbacca, and Jacen drew a shallow breath of relief. These days, nearly everyone had suffered at least one loss. Piani’s mate hadn’t reached Gyndine’s capital city in time to catch an evac ship. He was likely dead, or worse. They all had to carry on.

  “What can I do to help?” Randa slithered closer.

  “Nothing,” Han snapped. He turned to Jacen. “Tell me if it’s important. If you need this checked, I’ll see what we can raise on the Falcon.” He gestured toward the dome’s main entry.

  A caravan’s worth of ragtag ships had been hauled from the landing crater by mammoth cross-terrain crawlers—equipment courtesy of SELCORE, designated for reclamation work—and parked under tarps, protected from corrosive fallout. The security guards had just turned Mezza’s young clanmates out of that area.

  Jacen’s worry for Jaina struggled with his administrative concerns as his dad’s assistant—for about three seconds. “Yes,” he said, glancing guiltily at Piani, who belonged to Mezza’s clan and wasn’t much older than the offenders. “It’s important.”

  “Right.” Han pointed at Randa. “You stay here. Let me know what you hear out of Nal Hutta.”

  “Depend on me, Captain.” Randa plucked a bedjie off Piani’s hot plate and dropped it whole into his mouth.

  Twelve minutes later, Jacen perched on the Millennium Falcon’s high-backed copilot’s seat. Han whacked a bulkhead, not in the joking way Jacen had seen him do it so many times, but angrily.

  “Hey,” Han growled, “fossil. Gimme generator, and I don’t mean tomorrow.”

  And in its inimitable way, the Falcon produced a glimmering array of lights.

  Han dropped into his own seat and flicked three switches. “Give her a minute to come up.”

  “Right,” Jacen assured him. I know was what he wanted to say, but he understood. Han had recovered enough from Chewie’s death to have the Falcon modified—including better air scrubbers for ferrying refugees, and a nonreflective black exterior that Chewie would’ve howled over—but he’d never installed a standard copilot’s chair. Just being on board the beloved hunk of junk made Jacen slightly nervous.

  Jacen eyed a wire bundle that hung from a half-opened bulkhead. Han and Droma came out here now and again. Tinkering, Han called it. Therapy, Droma whispered.

  They waited in silence. The weeks when Han’s grief had overwhelmed them all drifted up into Jacen’s memory. He’d happened into a cantina when Han had gone looking for oblivion. And on a worse night, he’d heard Han scald Leia, using words that never should’ve been spoken and could hardly be forgiven. Jacen had never mentioned that night to his mom. She probably hoped Jacen had forgotten.

  Jacen doubted his dad remembered even saying them. He hoped his mother could somehow forget.

  Pain wasn’t always a bad thing, though. Jacen almost wished Jaina’s pain would blast back into his awareness. At least that would mean she was alive.

  They might find out in a few minutes.

  A cascading rhythm of beeps rang in the cockpit as the repeater frequency came alive. Han slapped a tile on the bulkhead. “Solo here, in the Millennium Falcon. Call is for Coruscant, New Republic military. I want Colonel Darklighter’s office.”

  Then they waited again.

  “Jacen,” Han said softly. “What’s scared you off from using the Force? Two years ago, you were as gung ho as Anakin. I haven’t seen you levitate anything since you got here.”

  Jacen gripped the arms of Chewbacca’s chair. “It’s complicated.” His dad wasn’t criticizing. He just didn’t understand. He’d already said he was glad for Jacen’s help, but now that Jacen had bailed out of the larger fight, he was falling farther and farther behind his Jedi siblings.

  “Try me.” Han’s eyes bored into Jacen.

  Jacen had told him what happened at Centerpoint. The powerful hyperspace repulsor and gravity lens had responded to Anakin’s touch, all right. It reactivated just as before.

  And at that moment, the Yuuzhan Vong fleet—the one that the New Republic had hoped to lure to Corellia—appeared out of hyperspace at Fondor instead.

  Han’s cousin Thrackan Sal-Solo insisted that the mighty shield should be used as an offensive weapon. He tried to bully Anakin into firing at the Yuuzhan Vong across the vast distance between systems.

  Jacen begged Anakin not to take the shot. Firing that weapon would have been the ultimate aggression.

  Anakin yielded to Jacen. For one moment, the brothers shared a true moral victory.

  Then Thrackan seized the controls. He blasted the Yuuzhan Vong battle group and decimated the noble flotilla that Hapes had sent to the New Republic’s aid, thanks to Leia Organa Solo’s diplomatic efforts. The Yuuzhan Vong retreated, the surviving Hapans fled home, and now, Thrackan Sal-Solo was being hailed as a hero.

  “I could’ve fired Centerpoint without hitting the Hapans,” Anakin had insisted. Jacen had resisted believing him for almost a week. Then the self-doubts caught him. Maybe Anakin could’ve done it all. Destroyed the aliens, spared the Hapans, saved Fondor.

  When did aggressive defense become the aggression that was forbidden to Jedi?

  Keeping only his lightsaber, Jacen found passage from Coruscant to Duro. If he couldn’t fight alongside Uncle Luke and the others, maybe he could at least help his father manage refugees.

  Now, surely, he was on the right path. “I only know that you can’t fight darkness with darkness.” That didn’t explain anything. He tried again. “So maybe a Jedi shouldn’t fight violence with violence, either. Sometimes, I even think that the more you fight evil, the more you empower it.”

  Han Solo opened his mouth to protest.

  “It’s different for us,” Jacen insisted. “If we use the Force aggressively, that can lead to the dark side. But where does strong action become aggression? The line keeps blurring—”

  The console beeped, rescuing him. “Rogue Squadron,” a tenor voice rang in the cockpit, “Colonel Darklighter’s office. Captain Solo, is that you? We were just trying to raise you.”

  Jacen’s heart plunged through his stomach.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” his father growled. “We’re checking on Jaina.”

  “Good timing,” the voice answered. “This is Major Harthis, by the way. Jaina’s X-wing has been destroyed in a firefight. She had to go EV. A fellow pilot brought her in.”

  “Injured?”

  “Legs, chest. Bacta ought to take care of it.”

  Han grunted as Jacen exhaled in relief.

  “Her pressure suit held, but she was close to an attack cruiser, one of ours, when the drive blew. She got a massive mag-field exposure.”

  Jacen’s blood turned icy. “Will she recover?”

  Han echoed his question into the pickup.

  The voice hesitated. “Tentatively, yes. We’ll update you as soon as we know. We’re also trying to raise her mother. Is Leia with you?”

  “Isn’t she back on Coruscant?”

  “No, Captain. SELCORE administration seems to have lost her.”

  “Lost her?” Han echoed sarcastically. “Sorry. I can’t help with that.”

  Jacen flicked the console’s edge. “I could stay out here,” he offered. “I’ll try to find her.”

  Han’s eyes focused on som
ething in the distance. “Sure,” he said. The pain in his voice reminded Jacen that things were not well between his parents. “You do that.”

  Leia Organa Solo glanced into a dark corner, where her young bodyguard Basbakhan stood like a darker shadow. She hadn’t taken on a planetwide project since … was it Basbakhan’s homeworld, Honoghr?

  She sat at the head of a long synthwood table. Surrounded by bickering scientists, she would’ve liked to cradle her head in both hands, plug her ears, and demand that they stop acting like children.

  Duro did that to people.

  Conditions here were appalling. Still, with Borsk Fey’lya clinging to power on Coruscant, this was one way she could shore up the New Republic, protect the Jedis’ reputation, and wear herself out so thoroughly that every night she dropped onto her cot too exhausted to worry about her own scattered family. Over the past year, she’d been bounced from system to system, caught up in on-again, off-again administrative and diplomatic work, wherever the New Republic’s Advisory Council pretended not to send her.

  Even if she was starting to feel like a nonperson, this Duro project might be the most significant job she ever took on. To remake a world in these terrible times would be an enormous victory.

  Her reconstructive meteorologist clenched a fist on the tabletop. “Look,” the scientist growled, glaring at the huge, furry Talz sitting opposite her. “There were excellent reasons for setting our domes on the dry side of these ranges. The worst toxins fall with the rains. Any settlement placed on a wet side, like our partner Thirty-two, will be utterly unsuitable for spiro-grass rangeland, but ideal for water reclamation. If we try to alter our wind patterns, we’ll set up an environmental catastrophe.”

  “Would anyone even notice a catastrophe?” The Talz sat with his large, lower pair of eyes shut, his small upper pair blinking slowly. “Rangeland needs more water than you seem to think. With all due respect …” He nodded up the table to Leia. “Not only here, but in other areas, we cannot depend on mined groundwater. It’s saturated with soluble toxins and costly to pump.”

  “While we’re here—” A Ho’Din plant-development specialist rested his off-green forearms on the tabletop. His long legs almost didn’t fit under the conference table. “I would like to petition for Sector Four of the reclaimed marshlands. I have several promising vegetative species under development—”

  “I apologize for interrupting my esteemed colleague,” the cereals specialist put in. “But Sector Four was promised to the grains project—”

  “And where’s Cree’Ar?” The meteorologist, Sidris Kolb, spoke Leia’s mind. So far, Dr. Dassid Cree’Ar had missed every one of these weekly meetings.

  Not that I blame him, Leia thought wryly, watching the Ho’Din pass her datapad back to her personal aide, Abbela Oldsong. At each meeting, they downloaded their current research into Leia’s administrative files. Cree’Ar, a plant geneticist, sent his reports via his own datapad.

  Leia had known many truly eccentric people, whose brilliance showed not only in their results, but in odd personal habits—Zakarisz Ghent, the slicer-turned-intelligence expert, came to mind. Fired by her vision of creating a haven for refugees who’d lost everything but their lives, and could yet lose even that, Leia had agreed to work as a liaison between this bickering gang of researchers and SELCORE back on Coruscant. The researchers were happier alone in their labs, or surrounded by a few subservient techs.

  She didn’t put her name on that weekly report. She was sick of dealing with Coruscant’s new breed of bureaucrats and their veiled condescension. They could find her if they tried hard enough.

  Leia couldn’t fault Cree’Ar’s techs for their devotion. His most recent breakthrough, cooperating with the distinguished microbiologist Dr. Williwalt, had been a bacterial sludge capable of topfermenting tanks of toxic, pollution-laden water pumped out of the swamps. It digested the leavings of Imperial war factories, leaving rich organic sediment and a gaseous factor they could collect and use for fuel.

  Under Cree’Ar’s supervision, refugees were pouring local-made duracrete into SELCORE-imported forms, dividing sectors of the toxic marsh that Gateway dome surmounted. They’d created six miniature ecosystems, cleansed six half-klick squares of marshland, added tons of cleansed soil-building material, and created Duro’s first arable croplands since the Duros left the surface.

  No wonder Cree’Ar didn’t take time off for staff meetings. He probably was as tired of bureaucracy as Leia was herself. She had wrung a hefty SELCORE budget out of the New Republic’s Advisory Council as her payment for traveling to the Hapes Cluster and begging for the Hapans’ military aid—her own contribution to the Centerpoint disaster.

  Mustn’t think about that. It wasn’t her fault. Wasn’t even Thrackan’s, really. No one had intended to see the Hapan fleet wiped out.

  It all came down to communication. It bothered her that the paired settlements could barely keep the cables intact. How could she supervise a planetary reclamation project, a symbol of rebirth amidst all this death and loss, when no other settlement reported to her scientists on a regular basis?

  Her cereals man turned to the elderly microbiologist.“What we really need,” he suggested, “is a strain of microbes that will digest particulates out of the air. Then we could take down the domes and move out onto the surface.”

  “That’s true,” Leia said dryly. “Until we scatter, we’re sitting flinks for Yuuzhan Vong sharpshooters.”

  The cereals man’s bushy eyebrows shot up.

  How like a scientist, she reflected, so involved in his own project that he’d forgotten the galaxy staring over his shoulder.

  Abbela Oldsong finally finished taking Leia’s datapad around. Adjusting her pale-blue shoulder wrap, she handed the datapad to Leia, who eyed the readout, then saved new information before returning it. As usual, Cree’Ar’s file was longest. All this would go into her weekly burst for SELCORE. She nodded to her aide, who hurried out with the datapad.

  “Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules. Remember,” Leia added somberly, “anything we do at cross-purposes not only slows our effort but wastes the resources SELCORE is willing to send.” Gateway and Thirty-two were already at odds, co-opting each others’ shipments whenever they could. “I’ll see what I can do,” she promised her rangeland manager, “about getting you a freighter load of those inorganics.”

  “Thank you.” Aj Koenes, the Talz, opened one large eye to glare at meteorologist Kolb.

  Leia emerged from the research building, which was an elegant prefab shipped in by SELCORE. Her own office, due south in the cylindrical admin complex, would take a good stiff walk to reach. She wanted to move and think. Basbakhan followed at a distance, happiest when she ignored him. That way, he could keep his mind on his sworn obligation to protect her. She strode down Main Street, as they’d taken to calling it, swinging both arms.

  Gateway had been erected on the ruins of Tayana, an ancient Duros mining city. Under the new refugee huts, two upturned rock layers came together, one relatively soft and one exceptionally dense. Leia hoped to convert the old hard-rock mines into shelters, in case of breaches in the dome or other emergencies. SELCORE had sent two mammoth stone-chewing machines, and she’d been promised a state-of-the-art mining laser.

  If she paused and stood still, she could hear the big chewers underfoot.

  Chewers.

  Chewie.

  Leia’s chest ached every time she thought of the beloved Wookiee. She strode on, frowning. She couldn’t flinch every time something reminded her of his name. Naturally, it’d taken a falling moon to kill the big Wook. Duro had no moon, only twenty orbital cities.

  On her left, an open-sided barn housed her major construction machinery, used for outside projects and new housing.

  Housing! She’d been warned to expect an influx of Falleen and Rodians.

  Not at Gateway, she hoped. That combination would be explosive. Refugee settlements were springing up all around the
planet’s equator. They nestled like baby Vors under the protective orbital cities, sheltered by their planetary shields.

  A new neighborhood lay beyond the construction barn, a few duracrete-block buildings made from her engineers’ experimental concoctions—local cement, mixed with marsh grass that’d been steeped in an antitoxin brew and then heat-dried. Beyond that, a hydroponics complex gave off the unsubtle odor of organic fertilizer.

  She entered the admin complex by its north door, then plodded up a flight of stairs that circled an interior light-well. A U2C1 housekeeping droid hummed softly, its hoselike arms sweeping back and forth, rattling with the pebbles that constantly fell out of local duracrete. Two stories tall, plus a basement, this building had been constructed on-site by SELCORE before the big ships left.

  Was that only nine weeks ago? Leia opened the door of the sparsely furnished room that served her as office and quarters. Near the north-facing window—which overlooked the research building, construction shed, and a patchwork of refugee families’ straggly garden plots—she’d placed the massive SELCORE desk. A stranger had offered a pair of heirloom wall sconces. “I don’t want to burn down our tent,” she’d explained, so Leia agreed to keep them until that family took permanent housing in the new apartments Leia hoped to build, the projected Bail Organa complex.

  Along the left wall were her cot and a cooking unit. The refresher was down the hall.

  Something smelled odd. C-3PO stood beside the focus cooker.

  His head swiveled. “Good evening, Mistress Leia. I am sorry, this would have been more savory an hour ago—”

  “Not your problem, Threepio.” She sank down at the table. “I’ll eat now, before it gets any worse.”

  Whatever it was—probably soypro cutlets, beside a pile of local greens that had been overcooked to a slimy gel—probably had been tasty once. She made appreciative noises for C-3PO’s sake. His culinary programming wasn’t at fault. Her meeting had gone long.

  He took up his usual position at the routing board, assigning incoming supplies and checking duty lists. He would spend the night working there.