on the table. Luke watched her, keeping his face free of any downcast
expression. "Leia, what is it?" he asked.
She looked at him with her dark eyes and hesitated before answering. "Just
feeling sorry for myself, I guess. Han should have arrived on Kessel two
days ago, but he hasn't bothered to send a message. That's no big surprise,
considering him!" But Luke saw more wistfulness than sarcasm in her eyes.
"Sometimes it wears on me not to have my own children here. I've been with
the twins for only a fraction of their lives. I can count on one hand the
number of times I've visited the baby. I haven't had time to feel like a
mother. The diplomatic chores won't give me a rest." Then she looked
directly at him. "And you're about to go off on your great Jedi hunt. I feel
like I'm missing out on life."
Luke reached out to touch her arm. "You could become a very powerful Jedi if
you would only devote some concentration to your work. To follow the Force,
you must let your training be the focus of your life and not become
distracted by other things."
Leia reacted more strongly than he had anticipated, drawing away. "Maybe I'm
afraid of that, Luke. When I look at you, I see a haunted expression in your
eyes, as if a vital part of you has been burned away by the personal hells
you've walked through. Trying to kill your own father, dueling with a clone
of yourself, serving the Dark Side for the Emperor. If that's what it takes
to be a powerful Jedi, maybe I don't want the job!"
She held up her hand to stop him from saying anything until she had
finished. "I am doing important work for the Council. I'm helping to rebuild
a whole republic of a thousand star systems. Maybe that is my life's work,
not being a Jedi. And maybe, just maybe, I might want to fit being a mother
in there, too."
Luke looked at her, unmoved. No one could read his expressions anymore; he
was no longer innocent. "If that is your destiny, Leia, it's a good thing
I'll start training other Jedi soon." They stared at each other in an
uncomfortable silence for a few moments. Luke looked away first, retreating
from that line of conversation.
"But you still need to protect yourself from the Dark Side. Let's work a
little more with shielding and your inner defenses, and then we'll call it a
night." Leia nodded, but he could sense that her spirits had sunk further.
He reached out with his fingers to touch her dark hair, drifting over the
contours of her head. "I'm going to try to probe your mind. I'll use
different techniques, different touches. Try to resist me, or at least
pinpoint where I am."
Luke let his eyes fall half-closed, then sent faint tendrils of thoughts
into her mind, deftly touching the topography of her memory. At first she
didn't react, but then he could feel her concentrating, building an
invisible wall around his probe. Though slow, she succeeded in blocking him
off. "Good, now I'm going to try different places." He moved his touch to a
different center. "Resist me if you can."
As he kept probing deeper, Leia became better at fending him off. She
parried his attempts with greater speed and stronger force as he guided her
to put up barriers. He grew more pleased as he worked with her, touching
random spots in her mind, trying to take her by surprise. He could feel her
own delight with her improving abilities.
Luke reached to the back of her mind, an area of deep primal memories but
little conscious thought. He doubted he could get any defensive reaction
there, but no attacker would be likely to strike at such places. Her
thoughts were like a map laid out in front of him, and Luke touched inward
to an isolated nub in her mind. He pushed--
And suddenly felt as if a giant invisible palm had planted itself on his
chest and shoved backward. Luke stumbled to keep his balance, taking two
steps away from her. Leia's eyes went wide, and her mouth dropped open in
surprise.
Luke said, "What did you do?" in the same moment Leia said, "What did I
Luke tried to reconstruct what he had done. "Let me try that again. Just
relax."
She seemed anything but relaxed as he probed her again, reaching to the back
of her mind, finding the isolated nub among her instinctive centers.
Touching it, he found himself knocked away again with physical force.
"But I didn't do anything!" Leia insisted.
Luke allowed himself to smile. "Your reflexes did, Leia. When a medical
droid taps your knee, your leg jerks whether you want it to or not. We may
have just stumbled upon something a potential Jedi has that others don't. I
want you to try it on me. Here, close your eyes and I'll give you an image
of what I did to you."
"Do you think I'll be able to?" Leia asked.
"If it truly is instinctive, all you need to do is find the right spot."
"I'll try." Her face wore a skeptical expression.
"Do, or do not. There is no try. That's what Yoda always said."
"Oh, stop quoting him. You don't need to impress me!"
Leia touched her brother's temples, and he took a deep breath, using Jedi
relaxation techniques to drop his guard. He had erected so much mental armor
in the past seven years that he hoped he could still let her inside. He felt
the touch of her thoughts, delicate mental fingers tracing the contours of
his brain. He directed her search toward the back, where primitive thoughts
slept. "Can you--' Before he could finish his question, Leia stumbled
backward into the self-conforming seat. "Wow! I found the nub, but when I
touched it, you knocked me off my feet."
Luke felt wonder tingle through him. "And it was completely unconscious on
my part. I wasn't aware of doing anything." Luke touched his lips as new
thoughts raced through his mind. "I need to try this on other people. If
it's completely a reflex reaction, this could be a very useful test for
finding people who have latent Jedi powers."
Next morning, the metropolitan shuttle skimmed over the rooftops of Imperial
City, like a bus on the thermals rising from chasms between the tall
buildings. The strip of buildings newly erected by the construction droids
looked like a gleaming stripe through the ancient city.
Admiral Ackbar piloted the shuttle himself, holding the controls in his
articulated fin-hands as he watched the skies with his widely set fish eyes.
Behind him, strapped into their seats, rode Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa
Solo. The bright dawn spread long shadows in the lower levels of the city.
Ackbar leaned forward to the comlink. "General Antilles, we are on approach.
I can see the construction droid up ahead. Is everything cleared for our
landing?"
"Yes, sir," Wedge's voice sounded clearly from the speaker. "There's a good
spot just to the right of the droid that should be perfect for landing."
Ackbar cocked his head to peer through the curved viewplate, then brought
the metropolitan shuttle in, aligning it with gaps in the buildings,
descending to the unexplored street levels.
Wedge came ou
t to meet them after Ackbar had settled the shuttle beside the
powered-down construction droid. Ackbar emerged first into the rubble-strewn
clearing, tilting his domed head up to look at the strip of sunlight coming
from high above. Luke and Leia stepped out side by side as the vehicle
hummed into it's standby-cooldown mode.
"Hi, Wedge!" Luke called. "Or should I say, General Antilles?"
Wedge grinned. "Wait until you see what the demolition crew found. I just
might get promoted again."
"I'm not sure you'd want to," Leia said. "Then you'd be stuck with
diplomatic duties."
Wedge motioned for them to follow. The construction droid blocked out the
sun. Luke could hear teams scrambling up access ladders and automated lifts
on the outer shell of the droid. Maintenance crews were taking advantage of
the shutdown time to check the internal factories and resource processors,
to modify some of the programming inside the droid's computer blueprint.
The stripped carcass of a large beast lay in the rubble just outside the
opening of the shielded room. Wedge gestured to it. "That thing attacked us
last night, and my team killed it. Sometime when we were up in the
construction droid's pilot lounge, napping and cleaning up, other scavengers
came out and stripped the meat off its bones. Too bad. The xenobiologists
might have wanted to classify it, but now there's not much left."
Wedge ducked inside the breached metal walls of the shielded room. Luke
could hear people shuffling and banging inside. He saw Leia wrinkle her nose
at the strange smells wafting out.
Luke's eyes took a moment to adjust to the glowing yellow illumination of
the floating lights posted around the chamber. Something powerful had gone
berserk in here. At first he saw broken equipment scattered on the floor,
wires torn out, smashed computer terminals. Long claw marks gashed the
walls. A black spherical Imperial interrogation droid lay split open in one
corner. He saw Leia's eyes fix on it, and he sensed a wave of revulsion pass
through her.
Several people from Wedge's team had wrestled a heavy metal grate back into
place against one wall and were now laser-welding it into it's channel. The
grate had been horribly bent.
"More excitement last night," Wedge said. The welders looked up from their
work, waved to Wedge, then bent back to their beams. "The mate of that
rat-creature came back up through the tunnels, found its companion killed,
and smashed everything it could." He frowned. "Ruined most of the old
equipment here, but we still might be able to salvage something. The Emperor
kept the place under tight security. Seems to be some kind of deep
interrogation facility."
"Yes, indeed," Ackbar said, striding through the wreckage. Broken circuit
boards crunched under his wide feet. "We wouldn't want any of this to fall
into the wrong hands."
Luke's attention drifted over to a tangle of wires and flat sheet-crystal
readers on the floor. His forehead furrowed with concentration as he went to
look more closely. "Is that what I think it is?" he mumbled.
"What did you say, Luke?" Leia asked, following him.
He didn't answer her as he bent over the equipment, pulling wires and cables
and trying to sort through the mess. "It looks like there were three
separate units here. They're probably all destroyed." But he felt a growing
excitement within him. Maybe they would be able to piece the components
together.
"What is it?" Leia asked again.
Luke uncoiled one of the cables and found an intact sheet-crystal reader at
the end. It looked like a glassy silver paddle longer than his hand. "I've
read about this in my research on the old Jedi Knights. The Emperor's hunter
teams used it to seek out Jedi who were hiding during his great purge."
He found a second intact sheet-crystal paddle, then picked the control pack
that looked the least damaged. With his cyborg hand, Luke brushed aside some
of the dust, then jacked the cables into either side of the pack, holding
the paddles, one in each hand. He flipped the power switch on the control
pack and was gratified to see a warm flurry of lights as the unit went
through its initialization diagnostics.
"The Emperor's teams used equipment like this as sort of a Force detector,
for his henchmen to read the auras of people they suspected of having Jedi
talent. According to the records, the remnants of the Jedi Knights held this
thing in great fear--but maybe we can use it to restore the Jedi."
He grinned, and for a moment he felt like the fresh, excited farm boy he had
been back on Tatooine. "Hold still, Leia. Let me test this on you."
She stood back, alarmed. "But what does it do?" Both Wedge and Ackbar had
stepped over to watch.
"Trust me," Luke said. He held the sheet-crystal paddles at arm's length,
bracketing Leia. When he tripped the scan switch, a thin slice of coppery
light traced down Leia's body from head to toe. Suspended in air above the
control pack, a smaller echo of the copper scan-line reappeared in reverse
motion, assimilating the data and constructing a tiny hologram of Leia.
It looked different from the small holo of Leia that Artoo Detoo had
projected for Ben Kenobi. Instead, it was a wire-frame silhouette of her
body, with color-coded lines tagged to readings that projected a column of
numbers in the air. Surrounding the outline was a corona of flickering blue,
faint but definite.
"Can you understand anything from that, Luke?" Admiral Ackbar said, peering
closer.
"Let's get another one for comparison." This time Luke pointed the paddles
at Wedge, who flinched as the coppery scan line ran up and down his uniform.
When his wire-frame holo appeared beside Leia's, most of the color-coded
details were similar--but his image showed no blue corona.
"Now let's try you, Admiral." He extended the paddles toward the Mon
Calamarian, adjusting the control pack to take Ackbar's alien physiology
into account. When his scanned image appeared, it too lacked the blue aura.
"Leia, would you do it to me, just so we can be more sure?"
Leia handled the equipment reluctantly, as if uneasy to touch a device that
had been used by those who had designed the interrogation droid. But she
operated the scanner easily, holding the sheet-crystal paddles on either
side of Luke.
His image bore the bright corona.
"This is very valuable," Luke said. "You don't need any particular skill
with the Force to use this equipment. We can find people with Jedi potential
just by scanning them. It will be a great help in finding candidates for my
academy. Maybe some good will come of this device after all these years."
"Very good, Luke," Ackbar said.
Luke pursed his lips. "Wedge, I want to try something. Would you relax for a
minute and let me do a mind touch on you?"
"Uh," Wedge said, then saw his team members looking at him. He straightened.
"Whatever you say, Luke."
Luke wasted no time, reaching out to touch Wedge's temples, running a mental
probe over the surface of his mind, back to
the primitive area, the
surprising nub in the contour of thoughts--
But when Luke touched it, nothing happened.
Wedge probably didn't even know he was being probed. Luke pushed harder, but
he triggered no reflexive counteraction, no uncontrolled push as Leia had
given him.
"What was that all about?" Wedge asked. "Did you do anything?"
Luke smiled. "I just strengthened a theory of mine. We have gotten a lot
closer to bringing back the Jedi Knights."
At least the ship didn't explode on impact.
That was the first thing Han Solo thought as painful consciousness returned.
He blinked his eyes, listened to the hissing of atmosphere streaming through
breaches in the Millennium Falcon's hull. Somehow they had survived a crash
landing. He wondered what planet he was on.
Kessel!
His eyes widened as he saw red splashes across the control panels. His own
blood. His leg felt as if it were on fire, and he tasted liquid tin in his
mouth. As he coughed, more blood splashed out. Han had not managed to strap
himself in before the crash. It was a good thing he had not stayed up in the
gun well. From his skewed vantage he could see that the ship had spun on
impact, with the top gun well crushed beneath them.
He hoped Chewbacca had fared better. Turning his head, Han felt as if shards
of ground glass were rubbing his spine. In the copilot's chair, the Wookiee
lay motionless, his pelt matted with discolored blood oozing from wounds