them."
"Stop that, before the children hear you," she said, punching his
shoulder and then resting her head against it.
Han wrapped an arm around her. "I might let him off if he takes it
back." After a long pause, he added, "But he has to mean it." There
was another pause, during which his tone turned serious. "And, what
you said--before the children hear him."
Leia said nothing then. But as she cuddled with Han and watched Jaina,
Jacen, and Anakin playing by the waterfalls, four words burned in her
ears before the chil dren hear. When she returned to the fifteenth
floor, she quietly asked Alole to find her a sample of the messages
received in recent days on the ministry lines. Not long after Alole
provided them, Leia called Nanaod Engh.
"I've thought some more about what you said," she said. "Please see
what can be done."
"We'll get after it right away," Engh promised.
Young and old, fresh and seasoned, the Grannan and the Mon Calamari
left their Fleet speeder and walked in unconscious lockstep across the
parking apron toward the red-and-white snub fighter sitting high on its
skids a dozen meters away.
"Here's what I wanted to show you," Admiral Ackbar said. "Have you
ever seen one of these before?"
"Yes," Plat Mallar said, ducking under the locked foils a nd studying
the wingtip spars. "In my grandfather's enemy vessel silhouette drill
set. It's some variation on an Incore T-sixty-five X-wing, isn't
it?"
"Correct. But notice the wider profile through the fuselage, and the
side-by-side cockpit."
"Dummy laser cannon on the wingtips, too," Mal-lar said. "Trainer?"
Ackbar nodded. "This is a TX-sixty-five primary trainer. The X-wing
may no longer be the Fleet's front-line fighter, but every pilot in the
Fleet took his first hundred hours in one of these, and every new pilot
probably will for some years to come."
Mallar crouched and peered under the fuselage. "A lot different from a
TIE interceptor."
"Indeed. Including one difference you should be able to particularly
appreciate---hyperdrive."
A wry smile creased the boy's face, then vanished.
"One of these crashed the day I came out of the tank, didn't it? I
heard the medics talking."
Ackbar turned and pointed across the field. "Right over there, on
taxiway twenty-two. Not the first, or the last," he said with a little
shake of the head. "Sometimes, despite everything we do, they come out
of the simulators with the idea that if they make a mistake their
mentor pilot will just reset the exercise."
He shrugged. "And sometimes ships just break."
"My engineering instructor liked to say that stopping isn't hard,
stopping gently is--and anytime you leave the ground, you'd better
check twice to make sure all the nuts are tightened, because gravity
flunks all the incompletes."
"It sounds like your instructor knew his business."
"Yes," Mallar said. "Bowman York did know his business. I miss
him."
A fat-bodied military transport rose from the field beyond and roared
overhead on its way to space. Wearing a wistful expression, Plat
Mallar turned his head to watch it until it vanished from sight.
"So effortless--so much power, under such precise control." He looked
back to Ackbar. "That's all I cared about before the Yevetha came, you
know. Not the bombs and the laser cannon. Just flying. Just the
ships, so graceful, dropping out of the clouds, disappearing into the
sky. They came and went every day when I was very young. Mom said I'd
sit at my window for hours and watch for them, and call out to the
whole house when I saw one."
Ackbar inclined his head toward the trainer.
"Would you like to go up?"
"I've been trying to convince myself that it would only make me feel
"How did you do?"
"Failed miserably. Yes, I'd really like to. Can we, sometime?"
As his answer, Ackbar climbed up the boarding ladder, reached inside
the open cockpit, and tossed a flight helmet down to a surprised Plat
Mallar.
"Now?"
"Why not?"
"Don't I need something more than this?"
"You need a mentor pilot," said Ackbar, reaching into the cockpit again
and retrieving another flight helmet.
"That's me."
"I meant--wait, we're just going for a ride, aren't we?"
Ackbar clambered down the ladder with his helmet under his arm. "You
meant like a flight suit?"
"Well--yes."
"In the cargo area of the speeder," Ackbar said, nodding toward it.
"Why don't you get them?"
Mallar hurried off to the speeder, returning quickly with an armful of
folded brown fabric. "Which one's mine?"
"On top," Ackbar said. "The one with your name on it."
For a moment Mallar stared blankly, uncom-prehending.
Then Ackbar's bundled flight suit fell to the ground as Mallar shook
his out and pawed over it with shaking hands, searching for the
namestrip above the right pocket. When he found it, he looked up at
Ackbar wonderingly.
"On your own merit," Ackbar said firmly. "On the merit you showed the
day the Yevetha came to Polneye--the kind that counts more than any
test score or transcript.
And I mean to teach you the way I was taught, with an eye to what you
already know, and a light hand on the stick. In the worst days of the
Rebellion, we were putting pilots in combat on ten hours of simulator
time, because we were at war. Well, Polneye is at war with N'zoth.
And if it's still important to you, and there's any way it can be done,
I will have you ready to go back to Koornacht before that war is
over."
"Yes," Mallar said with a quiet fierceness. "Yes, I want it."
Ackbar nodded. "There is a corridor in pilot country-you will see it
later--lined with small metal plaques, one for each pilot who's died
flying out of this base. The walls and the ceiling of that corridor
are nearly covered in metal.
And if we were to hang a plaque for every pilot who came through here
as a trainee and died somewhere out there, under enemy guns or in a
ship that just broke, we'd have to cover the entire face of the
tower."
"I understand," Mallar said.
"You only think you do-like everyone your age," Ackbar said, shaking
his head. "Just listen to me for a moment. When old people start
wars, young people die.
And every hero every war has ever made went out that morning with
comrades who were every bit as brave, but not quite as lucky. You've
used up a lot of luck already getting here, Plat Mallar. And no one,
no one anywhere, would ever say a word to you if you were to choose not
to put on that flight suit, and chose instead to make a life here. You
stole that life back from those marauders. You need not offer it up
again."
"I know," said Plat Mallar, standing as tall as his frame would
allow.
"And I thank you for remi
nding me that there is a choice. But my
choice is to wear this, and hope for a chance to do something that
makes a difference--to me, if not to anyone else."
"Very well," Ackbar said. "Then let us begin. You have a great deal
to learn."
Chapter 13
As the last holo-image of the Yevethan attack on Morning Bell faded and
the lights came back up in the Defense Council's hearing chamber, Leia
studied the senators seated at the V-shaped table.
There was one new face among the eight, reflecting a small shift in the
balance the human Tig Peramis of Walalla was gone, and Nara Deega of
Clak'dor VII, a Bith, had been seated in his place. After the
confrontation at the activation briefing for the Fifth Fleet, it was a
relief not to have to face the fiery Peramis, who had removed himself
to a legal limbo by presenting articles of withdrawal for his
homeworld.
But the intimidatingly intelligent Deega was, like the majority of his
species, deeply committed to pacifism. A ruinous civil war had left
Clak'dor VII an ecological nightmare, inhabitable only in domed
cities.
Because of those memories, Leia did not expect to find Deega any more
tractable than Peramis had been.
Leia walked into the middle of the space defined by the , and all eyes
turned to her. On the recommendation of Engh's image specialists, she
had forgone the flowing robes of Alderaan's royal house in favor of
what Han had called street-fighting clothes--a simple garment
suggestive of a flight jumpsuit. But she wore just one of the medals
and honors she was entitled to the small blue-fire crystal talisman of
House Organa.
"The question I bring before you is a simple one," Leia said the first
words she had spoken in that room that day. "What shall we do about
what you've just seen?
"These images document both the murderous brutality and the
expansionist mentality of the current Yevethan government," she went
on. "They've committed unspeakable acts of xenophobic genocide and
been rewarded for it with new worlds to settle and new resources to
exploit. Their success can only whet their appetite for more--but even
if they are content now, they're profiting from crimes against peace
and morality.
"Excluding the Koornacht Cluster, Farlax Sector contains more than two
thousand inhabited systems, some three hundred of which are members of
the New Republic. Not one of them is strong enough to resist the
Yevetha on its own.
"We've already accepted our responsibility to protect the peaceable
inhabitants of Farlax by sending the Fifth Fleet to stand between them
and the Yevetha.
But that's no more than a stopgap solution. We cannot undertake a
permanent deployment at battle-group strength. Eventually we will face
an unappealing choice between abandoning those systems, reinforcing
them, and taking on the Yevetha for them.
"I think we must face that choice now, while the initiative remains
with us--before the Yevetha find a way to force our hand. We must find
some way to alter the Yevethan calculus, or what you saw just now will
only be the beginning. We should try first to change their willingness
to wage war, but we should be prepared to deny them the means to wage
war.
"That's why I'm here today--to ask for your counsel in devising a plan
to deal with the Yevetha, and your support in carrying it forward."
Leia's presentation was the only part of the meeting she could control,
and it proved to be her best moment of the morning. As soon as she
returned to her seat, Behn-kihl-nahm spoke briefly but supportively
before laying out the ground rules for the discussion to follow.
But as soon as that discussion began, the division in the Council
became evident, and Leia's opponents began chipping away at the
foundation she stood on.
"What is the source of these images you have presented to us?" asked
Senator Deega.
Leia stood at her seat. "Senator, they were recorded by the Yevetha
and intercepted by a ferret patrolling the perimeter of Koornacht
Cluster."
"Then they are completely undocumented?"
"What do you mean, Senator? I can, if there's a legitimate reason to
do so, bring someone in here who can testify to the time, manner, and
location in which those images were recorded."
"You have misunderstood, President Solo," Senator Deega said
patiently.
"If you did not make th e recordings, you do not know what was being
recorded. You have said that these images document the eradication of
certain settlements within Koornacht Cluster. But, objectively viewed,
they document nothing. What planets were those? Who was aboard those
ships? When did those events take place? Who assembled those images
in that sequence?"
"If the Council feels it hasn't seen enough and chooses to commit the
time, I can present the entire unedited intercept--all eleven hours of
it."
"You still misunderstand, President Solo," said Deega. "For all you
can prove, those images were recorded during the Rebellion, light-years
away from Koornacht Cluster. If they were recorded at all--the quality
of the images does not exceed the capabilities of the best image
editors."
Chairman Behn-kihl-nahm intervened at that point. "Senator Deega,
inasmuch as you're new to the Council, I'm aware that you haven't had
much experience evaluating military intelligence. Much as we would all
like to have absolute certainty in these matters, technical espionage
does not often allow us the luxury of the exacting standards a
scientist has for evidence, or a mathematician for a proof. Sometimes
we just have to trust our spies--or, if that asks too much, trust our
eyes."
That brought chuckles from Senators Bogen and Yar, and effectively
silenced Deega. But Senator Marook stepped up to fill the void.
"I have no doubt that terrible, shameful things have happened in
Koornacht Cluster," said the Hrasskis, his air sacs pulsing slowly. "I
do not question what Princess Leia has shown us."
Leia waited, knowing not to take his words as a vote of confidence.
"In truth, I found the presentation sufficiently real that I should not
like to see any more, or see any more closely. It's enough to know
that the dying are scream-ing--I don't find that listening to it adds
anything to my understanding," said Marook. "What I question is the
Princess's claim that this is a matter of great urgency.
Perhaps she can help me understand."
"I'll do my best," Leia said, wary.
"These recordings--to the best of your knowledge, they were made days,
even weeks ago, yes?"
"That's true."
"So what you've shown us is history. None of these tragedies can be
prevented, or even tempered."
"Then how is this any different from the unavenged atrocities of the
Imperial era? Why are we not meeting to discuss how and when to invade
the Core in search of the agents of Palpatine's rampages? Isn't the
real urgency here the waning of your political power, and your
desperate need for a dramatic victory to restore your prestige?"
That brought Tolik Yar roaring to his feet in Leia's defense with
accusations of his own. "Bold talk from a traitor who secretly visited
Aramadia and plotted with Nil Spaar against his own.
You have never explained what you were doing there--besides shaming
your people and betraying your oath--" Marook answered with a lunge and
a clenched fist, which brought Senators Bogen and Frammel into it as
peacemakers and sent Deega fleeing from the room.
Meanwhile Senator Cundertol of Bakura and Senator Zilar of Praesitlyn
sat back in their chairs, treating the contretemps as an object lesson
and an entertainment, respectively.
"You see?" Cundertol said, leaning toward his companion.
"These aliens are always fighting, on the least provocation. It's in
their nature. You can't stop them--so why should we try? Why are we
obliged to protect the weak against the strong? Why not let the weak
fall, and then make our alliances with the strong?"
It took all Behn-kihl-nahm's persuasive skill to bring everyone back to
the table and the session back to order. But by then, unanimity was