Besides, he was with Boba Fett. That man could escape anything.
“Where does this come out?” Han panted.
“Leads into the bunker complex. Then two exits out of there to the surface.”
“Two?”
“Two exits are always better than one.”
A long way behind—but not far enough—pounding boots echoed. They were now in a dimly lit tunnel with a hard, tiled floor and large stenciled signs every few meters with helpful messages like GOT YOUR RESPIRATOR? and SECURE ALL DOORS—YOUR LIFE MAY DEPEND ON IT.
“We’re not going to run into company ahead, are we?”
“Not unless we’re really unlucky.” Fett pounded along behind Mirta. “They only staff these places in civil emergencies.”
“Like a war?”
“Yeah, that’d qualify …”
Mirta had her hand blaster held at shoulder level as she sprinted, a testimony to the benefits of unfashionably flat boots and sensible clothing. “They’ll have a real emergency on their hands if they get in the way.”
Doors ahead of them opened automatically and bright lights flared into life on the ceiling. If this was all set to trigger when staff entered, then they had to be alone down here, or the lights would already be on.
Alone except for the guards chasing them, of course. Had to be guards. Han was tuned to the sound of guards’ boots. Fett came to a halt as they entered a lobby with six doors leading from it. Three were marked TRAFFIC CONTROL, WATER & POWER, and CENTRAL E.M. CELL. The other three weren’t marked at all.
“Which one?” said Han.
Mirta stepped behind them, blaster sweeping an arc, while Fett froze. Han realized he was focusing on some display in his helmet’s HUD.
“Two exits via the main E.M. room here, but if we get stuck there are hatches to accessible vents from the other rooms.” He indicated his jet pack. “I don’t do vents.”
“E.M. room here we come—”
The running footsteps behind were much, much louder now. A bolt of blasterfire spattered plaster ten meters from them. Fett broke off and extended his left arm, sending a long jet of flame down the passage behind them that made a loud ha-whompp sound and blew billows of gray smoke back at them. Curses and shouts rang down the passage. The flamethrower had slowed their pursuers but not stopped them.
“Move it,” said Fett.
The E.M. door didn’t open automatically. Mirta hit the heel of her hand on the square red key at the side a couple of times and the doors parted. They were already halfway into the room before Han realized that it was full of desks in rows with comlinks on each of them. The walls were covered completely in holomaps and display boards; the place was ready to handle whatever disaster hit Coronet when the warning sirens sounded.
A bewildered man in a white shirt looked up from a data-pad and stared at them.
“You’re early,” he said. “We weren’t due to staff the—oh, boy—”
A blue streak of blasterfire spat from the doorway and Han, Fett, and Mirta fired at the same time, driving back two security guards. The man ducked, arms covering his head, while they traded blaster bolts and Fett shot out the doors’ lock panel, sending the two halves slamming shut.
“Health and safety inspection,” said Han as the terrified man flattened himself against the wall. “Keep up the good work.”
They burst through one of two doors marked EMERGENCY EXIT and were back in a yellow-lit corridor again, running for their lives. It sloped uphill. Han really noticed that now. His thigh muscles screamed for a rest. Behind them, there was the sound of blaster bolts smashing through doors and the pounding of those boots again. The guards didn’t give up easily.
“Your jet pack isn’t going to be much use to you down here, pal,” said Han.
Fett didn’t break his pace. He got to the end of the passage and spun around, nearly knocking Han against the wall. Then he bent forward at ninety degrees to the ground, hunched his shoulders, and tapped at the panel on his left forearm.
“You reckon?” he said, breathless. “Mind the backwash, Solo.”
A shwoosh of hot air and a blinding flash of yellow light nearly flattened Han as the small missile on Fett’s jet pack skimmed the back of his helmet and shot down the corridor, trailing vapor. The explosion deafened him for a few seconds. Fett grabbed his shoulder and shoved him ahead.
“You know how much these MM-nines cost?” Fett grumbled.
Han’s ears were ringing. “There’s got to be safety regulations on that thing.” But he could hear the thuds and cracks of falling rubble. They ran.
Ahead, a patch of light that was brighter than the yellow gloom of the tunnel kept Han running at an automatic, animal level. Escape. Just escape. Worry about everything else later. He’d expected Mirta to be halfway across the park by now, but she was standing by the exit doors, pumping blasterfire into them until they parted.
Cool evening air washed into the musty passage. The tunnel emerged in the slope of another artificial hill on the far side of the park.
“All clear,” she said. “Go on, run.”
Mirta didn’t strike him as the type to care whether he lived or died. But, like Fett, she had her reasons for wanting him in one piece. Fett could have left them both stranded and escaped with his jet pack, but he didn’t let Han out of his sight.
“Call your wife,” said Fett. “Get her to pick us up. We can’t run all over Coronet at this time of night. Too conspicuous.”
They crouched in the cover of thick bushes near the highway, and for a second Han had one of those out-of-body views of himself in his mind that sometimes left him reeling. Three Mandalorian assassins, fully armored, hiding from the Corellian Security Force in a nice, normal park as a government coup began a kilometer away. He opened the comlink.
What am I doing here?
“Hi, honey,” said Han. “Can you give us a lift?”
Leia’s voice was, as usual, all resigned calm. “Who’s us?”
“Some Mandalorian buddies I ran into.”
“That’s nice. I’m watching a lot of police activity from the apartment.”
“Ah, that’d be Cousin Thrackan …”
“How is he?”
“Dead,” said Han, his stomach torn between nausea and a lifetime’s worth of relief. “Very, very dead.”
GAG HEADQUARTERS, GALACTIC CITY, CORUSCANT.
“What happened to Barit Saiy?” Ben asked.
Shevu consulted the custody file and shook his head. “Not here. No record of transfer to CSF custody, either.”
“But every prisoner should be logged in and out, right?”
“Right.” Shevu stared at his datapad, lips compressed in a thin line. “I don’t like prisoners who disappear.” He managed a smile at Ben. “Maybe he was repatriated and nobody logged him out. We sent back a lot of Corellians in a hurry before the blockade.”
“Yeah …”
“It’s hard when you get personally involved,” said Shevu quietly. “Best to stand clear and do everything by the book.”
“Jacen doesn’t.”
“Colonel Solo is my commanding officer.”
It wasn’t an answer that made any sense on the surface, but Ben was learning fast: Shevu was saying that he wouldn’t give an opinion on Jacen’s behavior, whatever he thought of it. He was angry about Ailyn Habuur. Ben was distressed too. Jacen was all he wanted to be, and then suddenly he killed a prisoner—carelessly, not in anger, but she was still dead—and Ben wasn’t sure he knew him as well as he’d thought he did.
Is this what I want to be?
“I understand,” said Ben, and went off to the now empty gymnasium to practice his lightsaber skills with a remote as a target.
The small sphere danced and spun in the air as he swung and sliced, leaving a faint trail of light behind the blue blade with each stroke. When he became swept up in the movement and stopped concentrating, he always found himself on the edge of one perfect movement after another. It didn’t feel
like a series of actions; it felt like one, his first and last stroke, frozen and repeated over and over again. There came a point as he pursued the darting silver sphere when his mind was completely blank. Not just clear; blank.
And in those moments he saw things.
It was as if his conscious mind had stopped its relentless chatter and left a door wide open. Then his mind wasn’t pure white light any longer but a detailed image with layers of data that he could understand intuitively but not read.
It stopped him dead in his tracks. The remote, responding to him, froze in midair.
Jacen was summoning him.
The remote presence of other Jedi was something he had grown up with, the way other kids heard their parents calling them. But this was different. He was being summoned, not called. It was an order. He felt it.
He retrieved the remote and ran to find Jacen. He could locate him easily these days, as if Jacen had an overwhelming presence in the Force like a signpost when he wanted it. Sometimes, though, he disappeared completely. Ben really wanted to learn to do that, too.
Jacen was sitting in one of the administration offices, staring at a holomap on the wall with his hands cupped over his mouth and nose as if he was thinking about something that upset him.
“Jacen?”
“Ah, Ben. I wasn’t expecting you to come so quickly. I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”
Like I had any choice. But Jacen always treated him like an adult. “Just lightsaber drill.”
“I’m looking at the areas we have to sweep now. We’ve got a running battle going on between Atzerri and Coruscanti in the lower levels, according to CSF, and the bomb disposal teams are investigating ten more suspicious packages. We deal with one problem, and another three spring up in its place.”
“What did you want me for?”
Jacen indicated a chair and motioned Ben to sit down. “It’s time I gave you more responsibility. We only grow when we’re given the chance to.”
Ben tried to imagine what extra responsibility he could be given. He had already gone on anti-terror operations and sabotaged weapons that could destroy whole worlds. It was hard to top that when you were thirteen.
“You can detect weapons and explosives. You’re really good at it.” Jacen jerked his thumb in the direction of the holomap on the wall. “Go on. See if you can sense anything by looking at the map.”
Ben jumped up out of the chair and scanned the map. Like most holomaps of Galactic City, it was multilayered and he could peel away levels of each grid or dive deep into them by touching the light grid with his finger. He passed his hand above the surface to concentrate on the Force and found nothing.
Perhaps it wasn’t on that section of the map. He tapped his finger against the far left of the display, and the map shifted west to take him farther from the Senate Building and toward the business districts. He found himself drawn to a quadrant a few kilometers southwest of the Senate, but he sensed nothing specific.
“In there somewhere.”
“Good.” Jacen stood right behind him and put his hand on his shoulder. Normally that was reassuring, but right then Ben had a sudden memory of Ailyn Habuur. “Go on.”
“Something’s about to happen.” Ben felt he was being tested. “Do you feel it?”
“Yes, I do. And the World Brain’s Ferals report activity there.”
“What is it, then?”
“I want you to work this one out for yourself as part of your training. I’ll be there to help you out if you need it, but I think it’s time you learned to make decisions. I trust you.”
For a few moments Ben was wildly excited at the trust Jacen was placing in him. Then he lapsed back into being torn between fear of failing and remembering Ailyn Habuur.
“Do you trust me, Ben?” Jacen asked suddenly.
“Of—of course I do.”
“Tell me the truth.”
Jacen could sense everything. Sometimes he seemed almost telepathic. Ben knew there was no point lying to him, and he didn’t want to. He wanted answers.
“Okay, I don’t understand how you could hurt that woman so badly,” he said. “You’re not a bad person. You don’t like violence. It scares me, because I don’t think I could ever do that and that means we’re different, and I wanted to be just like you and now I’m not sure.”
Jacen didn’t look upset or offended. It was hard to tell how he had taken the admission.
“I can understand that,” he said quietly. “And we all have to find out for ourselves how far we can go and what we’re prepared to do. You won’t know until you have to do it.”
Ben wasn’t sure that he understood, but he knew he had to go through with this. It couldn’t be that different from what he’d been doing for the last couple of weeks. He knew what he could do—and what he wasn’t prepared to do. He was certain of that.
New black GAG assault vessels—CSF ships in new livery—were waiting for them at the landing pad. Captain Shevu leaned out of the troop bay of the lead ship, hanging on one of the overhead straps with one arm.
“Quadrant H-Ninety’s not secure yet,” he told Jacen. “They’ve barricaded the skylane intersections with speeders.”
Jacen jumped up into the bay and hauled Ben aboard. “Are they still in position?”
“CSF wants a bit of backup before they move. There seem to be a lot of Coruscanti involved.”
Jacen frowned. “You sure?”
“Sure. Not every taxpayer here seems to agree with the Alliance line.”
Ben pondered that as they rose into the air and banked left to head for H-90. It was an ordinary neighborhood as far as he knew: shops, bars, apartments, and a market, with a cosmopolitan population. He’d assumed that it was the non-Coruscanti section that was the source of the growing discord and danger that he’d detected by concentrating on the holomap. It had never occurred to him that the people he thought he was protecting would object to being protected.
Every day brought new revelations about the confusing adult world. Just when he thought he’d worked it out, he found he hadn’t. Jacen and Shevu shouted a conversation above the noise of the drives that filled the open bay. Coruscant lay like a map beneath them, filtered slightly by haze.
“It started when CSF arrested someone for painting anti-government slogans on the local Galactic City Authority offices, sir. There’s a full riot squad deployed now.”
“Any more incidents?”
Shevu paused and put his hand to his ear, concentrating on his comlink earpiece. “Twenty public order arrests. No serious casualties. Pretty quiet.”
“Worse to come, though, Ben?” Jacen asked.
Ben nodded. The wind whipped the legs of his uniform. “Yes.” Shevu simply looked at him with that intense stare that said he preferred hard facts to Force impressions. Confronted with that expression, Ben had his doubts, too.
“I think that’s a safe bet any day of the week,” said Shevu.
The assault ship swooped low over a skylane that was clogged with speeders of all sizes at each intersection. CSF vessels had formed up behind them at a careful distance; the focus of the activity was an apartment block, where a noisy protest was taking place. Someone had sprayed PEACE NOW and STOP KILLING CORELLIA on the awnings that covered sections of the walkways so that the message was visible from the air.
The crowd along the walkways looked like a complete cross section of species, and when the GAG ship dived lower to observe, it was met with jeers and obscene gestures. For a peace protest, it was getting pretty aggressive; Ben kept an eye out for blasters. The crowd seemed on that edge between simmering down and exploding that he was getting used to seeing. The ship lifted higher and hovered above the CSF line until a speeder bike rose to meet it. The sergeant astride it flipped up his visor as he drew level with the bay.
“Tip-off that they might be hoarding weapons somewhere. We’re deciding whether to go in and search the area and risk a full-scale armed riot, or wait until they get bored and go ho
me.”
Jacen, Ben, and Shevu surveyed the scene from a safe height. “Want us to go in?” Jacen asked. “We don’t have to worry about community relations like you do.”
“Yeah, I heard that,” the sergeant said warily. A chant rose up beneath them: The—Empire’s—back! The—Empire’s—back! “Not planning to deploy in white armor, are you? That’d really start them off.”
“Very funny,” said Shevu. He lowered his helmet into place, suddenly becoming anonymous behind the shiny black visor. “Okay, you want us to root out a few?”
Once Ben was physically close to the area, he could feel much more specific disturbances in the Force, little whirlpools of threatening darkness. He felt something else now. “It’s big weapons.”
“We were kind of hoping for small ones, but …”
Ben could feel a growing anxiety that was almost like itching deep in his ears, so deep that it nearly touched the back of his throat. He was close. He craned his neck and looked out as far as he could from the open bay, hanging on to the safety line.
“I know where they are,” he said. He looked to Jacen to confirm his feeling. Jacen just looked at him, waiting. “What do you think?”
“What do you think?” asked Jacen. “Your call.”
“It feels … really dangerous.”
“So decide. Do we go in or not?”
Ben wavered. “If I’m wrong, we might start a full riot and people might get killed.”
Shevu powered up his blaster. The faint whine cut through the rumbling voices and the throb of repulsors. “Ready when you are, sir.”
“You have to make the decision, Ben,” Jacen said. “You have to decide what you think is right based on the intelligence you have now, and then stand by your actions.”
Ben hesitated. He wasn’t sure now if Jacen would stop him if he thought he was mistaken. He had to make his move.
“That block there,” said Ben, pointing down at a stack of apartments over a scruffy restaurant. “Take us in.”
Although Ben was sure—almost sure—that he could deal with blasterfire or missiles hurled at him, he was scared. The crowd below loomed larger, some turning and running away as the assault ships closed in, some rushing toward the vessels. At ten meters, Ben jumped, using the Force to stop him smashing into the walkway. People scattered. He heard Jacen thud down behind him and he didn’t look back as he ran for the door of the restaurant. Black-suited GAG troopers passed him and secured the doorway, and Ben drew his lightsaber simply because he was operating on blind instinct now.