Exile Read online

  Captain Uran Lavint was an heir to the tradition of Han Solo.

  That’s how she saw herself, at any rate, and she was indeed a smuggler. Nor was she a small-scale smuggler. Her cargo ship, Breathe My Jets, had hold space large enough to carry several Millennium Falcons. Nor did she always make solitary smuggling trips—some missions, like this one, were small fleet operations.

  Still, she was not rich, not even financially comfortable. Creditors—more successful smugglers, members of organized crime—now demanded their due whenever they could contact her, whenever they could catch up to her during Breathe My Jets’s brief stays in port. She’d been threatened, she’d taken a beating at a landfall on Tatooine, and rumor had it that one creditor had given up and hired a bounty hunter to eliminate her—to demonstrate the folly of not paying on time.

  She needed this mission to go well. If it did, she could pay everyone off, start over. If it didn’t, she might find herself in a position to describe explosive decompression in a firsthand account.

  Now she looked at the distant star Corell through the bridge’s forward viewport as she sat slumped in her captain’s chair. She sagged not out of defeat, but from habit and a deliberate attitude of indifference that gave her a reputation for being cool under fire. Though born to well-fed, well-tended middle-manager parents on Bespin, she now had skin like Tatooine leather and a craggy face that might have benefited from a drooping mustache.

  Grudgingly, she sat upright. Glancing at the undersized, youthful Hutt in the specially designed copilot’s couch beside her, she nodded. “All right, Blatta. Put me on.”

  Blatta flipped a switch on the control panel before him. A display there lit up and showed Captain Lavint’s face, a live holocam feed. He spoke in typically deep, gooey Hutt tones. “Broadcast in five, four, three …” He held up two fingers, silently signaling the continuation of the countdown, then one, then closed his fist to indicate they were broadcasting.

  Lavint stared into the holocam recorder. “Captain to fleet. In a minute I will broadcast the nav data for our final jump. That jump will bring us as close as the planet Corellia’s gravity well will allow, and then one of two things will happen—we’ll be jumped by Galactic Alliance forces, or we won’t.

  “If we’re not, congratulations—the armaments and bacta we’re carrying will earn us tidy profits. If we are, our instructions are clear: break and run, straight down into Corellia’s atmosphere. It’s every ship for herself. You see your best friend being assaulted, you wish him well and get down to ground. Don’t hang back and fight to free him.

  “Good luck.” She gave her viewers a brisk nod, and Blatta cut the transmission.

  “Nav data?” he asked.

  “Send it.”

  He did. The instant he did so, a one-minute chron timer appeared on both cockpit displays, counting down. It was just enough time for the fleet’s captains and navigators to load the data and test it, not enough time for them to waste and increase their jitters.

  More or less as a single body, the thirty-odd ships and vehicles of the fleet accelerated, pointing straight for the distant, unseen planet. Those who had defensive shields activated them. And at exactly the same moment, each cockpit crew saw the stars before them lengthen and begin the axial swirling that was the visual characteristic of hyperspace entry.

  This jump would take only a few seconds—

  It took less than that. They’d been in hyperspace half the time they should have been when the stars stopped spinning and snapped back into distant points of light. Corell was larger, closer, but not as close as the sun should be, and there was no comforting sight of the planet Corellia directly ahead of them. Instead, there was empty space decorated with the occasional fast-moving colored twinkle of light.

  Lavint swore, but her invective was drowned out by Blatta’s shout: “Enemy ships! Chevron formation. We’re toward the point, and the two flanks are falling in on our formation.”

  “Which one’s the Interdictor?” One of the enemy ships had to be some sort of Interdictor, a capital ship carrying gravity-well generators—devices that would project a gravity field of sufficient strength to yank ships right out of hyperspace.

  Blatta highlighted a point of light on his display, and it began blinking on Lavint’s display as well. It was just at the point of the chevron, directly ahead of Lavint’s ship.

  Lavint keyed her comm. “Captain Lavint to fleet. Maintain formation, match speed with me. Our only chance—”

  On the sensor display, the crisp line of her fleet was blurring as each member craft vectored in a different direction.

  “No, no, maintain formation!” She couldn’t keep the desperation out of her voice. The original orders to scatter only made sense if every craft was a short distance from the safe haven of Corellia—didn’t the idiots see that? “We’ve got to run this gauntlet at high speed—”

  “Belay that,” came a voice over the comm. It was female and a bit rough, a close match to Lavint’s own. “This is the real Captain Lavint. Follow your orders. Scatter.” This voice was calm, self-assured.

  Blatta nodded as if impressed. “Sounds just like you.”

  “Shut up.” Lavint put her cargo ship on a new course, vectoring downward relative to her current orientation.

  Blatta offered up a sigh. It sounded like a bantha passing gas. “At least they can’t know which vessel is carrying which cargo. Since we’re not the biggest ship in the fleet, they might not pay us special attention—”

  Breathe My Jets shuddered so hard that Lavint’s teeth clacked together and Blatta shook like a plate full of Corellian spice-jelly. The cockpit lights dimmed for a second.

  Frantically, Lavint wrenched the controls around in a new direction, but Breathe My Jets was not a small, nimble craft. In the agonizing seconds it took the cargo vessel to take a new bearing, she heard Blatta calmly describing their situation: “The ISD at the port tip of the chevron formation is firing on us. The first hit was against our engines. If it hits again—”

  Breathe My Jets shuddered a second time, hard enough that Lavint would have been thrown from her seat if the restraining straps hadn’t been buckled in place. The cockpit lights dimmed again, and the displays all showed static for a second.

  The lights did not come up this time, and the cargo ship stopped responding to Lavint’s handling. The displays cleared of static. Running on emergency power, they began scrolling a list of damage sustained by the ship.

  Blatta watched the data roll by. “Engines out.”

  “Thank you for that holonews update.”

  Blatta shrugged. “It’s been good working with you, Captain. I only wish—”

  “Wish what?”

  “That you weren’t half a year behind in what you owe me.” He switched his main display over to follow the progress of the battle now raging all around them.

  OUTSIDE THE CORELLIAN SYSTEM ANAKIN SOLO

  In the Command Salon of the Star Destroyer Anakin Solo, Jacen Solo stood staring through the forward viewports. He could see the last few twinkles and flashes of laserfire as this abortive space combat drew to a close.

  He chose not to follow the events more closely on the readily available computer displays. Instead he reached out through the Force, sampling the ships and vehicles he could see, looking for oddness, discrepancy, tragedy.

  He found none. The smugglers, outmaneuvered and outgunned, gave up almost to a ship. A few nimble craft got away, making the jump to lightspeed before the warships of Jacen’s task force could cripple them, but most did not; the majority of the smugglers floated, helpless, their engines destroyed by laserfire or their electronics systems rendered inert by ion cannons. Shuttles were now moving from ship to ship, picking up smuggling crews, dropping off the personnel who would bring the captured craft back to GA facilities, directing tractor beams. In another hour or two this section of space would be empty of everything but a few debris clouds that had once been engine housings.

  “Our agent w
ould like to speak with you,” said Ebbak. A dark-haired human woman with skin the color of desert sand, she was short and unremarkable of appearance but had been of considerable help to him since he had been assigned the Anakin Solo. A civilian employee aboard ship, assigned to data analysis, she had demonstrated a knack for knowing what sort of information Jacen would need and when, and for supplying it at useful times. He was considering whether she would be interested in trading her civilian’s post for a commission with Galactic Alliance Guard; he could benefit from someone with her skills if she proved as loyal as she was dutiful.

  She had not quite materialized beside him—he had felt her walk up—but her approach had been silent. Perhaps she would also prove adept at stealth work.

  The question annoyed Jacen; his mind was occupied by details of the capture of the smuggler fleet, and he needed to begin thinking about his upcoming meeting with the Corellian representative. “Why would I want to speak with her? And please don’t call her our agent. She betrayed her comrades for money. She is our temporary hireling. She is their traitor. She is nobody’s agent but her own.”

  Ebbak paused, then evidently decided not to address those last few comments. “She didn’t say what she wanted. But since she’s already proven that she had one piece of information useful to us—”

  “Yes, yes.” Jacen nodded. “Where is she?”

  “Your office.”

  Jacen followed her back through the bulkhead doors aft of the Command Salon. Once in the main corridor beyond, they moved through a port-side door into the office that served as Jacen’s retreat aboard the Anakin Solo.

  Waiting there were two people—a large man, dressed in the uniform of ship’s security, standing, and a woman, seated … though she rose as Jacen and Ebbak entered.

  Jacen looked into the weathered face of Captain Uran Lavint. “Yes?”

  Lavint paused, apparently put off by his distant, brusque manner. “I simply wanted to find out if you had any requests or, more to the point, assignments for me before I left.”

  Jacen repressed a sigh. “First, I’d never prolong a business relationship with someone who sells out her fellows. Second, you’re lying.”

  Lavint flushed, but her expression did not change. “All right. I mostly just wanted to meet you.”

  “Ah.” Jacen paused, and carefully considered his next words. “Lavint, you now have all the time in the galaxy available to you. In betraying thirty-odd fellow smugglers, you have earned enough credits to pay off all your debts and start over, whether as a smuggler or something legitimate. You can cruise, you can frolic, you can relax. I, on the other hand, don’t have time to spare. And you have now wasted some of it. I don’t appreciate that.” He turned to the security officer. “Take her down to Delta Hangar, put her on her ship, and get her off my ship.”

  Lavint cleared her throat. “Breathe My Jets is on Gamma Hangar. And the engines won’t be repaired for a couple of standard days at least.”

  “That’s right. I’m claiming Breathe My Jets for the current military crisis.” Jacen pulled his datapad from a pocket and consulted it. “Your ship is now the Duracrud.”

  “Duracrud?” Lavint practically spat the name. “That’s a stock why-vee six-six-six older than I am. It’s a brick with wings and a hull that leaks gases like a flatulent Hutt. It’s a fraction the size of Breathe My Jets.”

  “And exactly the sort of vessel needed by a smuggler starting a new career.”

  “Our agreement—”

  “Our agreement was that you would receive a sum of credits—Ebbak, you showed her the transfer proof and gave her the data to claim it from the Bespin account? Yes—and that you would be allowed to depart on your ship, minus her cargo. The agreement did not specify which was to be your ship.” He fixed Lavint with an impassive stare. “Now would you care to waste any more of my time?”

  The glare she turned on him was murderous. He understood why. He’d just taken her ship, her beloved business and home, and given her a hovel in its place. His father, Han Solo, would have felt the same way.

  But Uran Lavint was no Han Solo, and Jacen didn’t worry that she might someday return to cause him grief. Her record made it clear that she had no goals, no drives other than the acquisition of credits. She was nothing.

  Lavint turned away, her body language stiff, and marched to the door, her security man behind her. Then, as the doors slid open, she paused. Not turning back, her voice quiet, she asked, “What’s it like to have once been a hero?” Then she left, and the door hissed closed behind her.

  Jacen felt himself redden. He forced the anger away. It wouldn’t do to let an insect like Lavint bother him. But clearly, additional punishment was in order.

  He turned to Ebbak. “My father used to have endless trouble with the Millennium Falcon. The hyperdrive would fail all the time, and he’d tell the universe that it wasn’t his fault, and then he’d fix it and be about his business.” He nodded toward the closed door. “Delay her in transit to the hangar bays. Have Duracrud’s hyperdrive adjusted so that it will fail catastrophically after one jump.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ebbak considered. “Since she’s a smuggler, she’s not going to go anywhere with a single jump. Her first jump will always be to some point far away from planetary systems or traffic lanes. She’ll be stranded.”

  “That’s right. And she’ll become intimately acquainted with her hyperdrive.”

  “She might die.”

  “And if she doesn’t, she’ll be a better person for the experience. More polite, probably.”

  “Yes, sir.” Ebbak moved to the door. It slid open for her. “Sir, your meeting with Admiral Antilles is in one hour.”

  Jacen consulted his chrono. “So it is. Thank you.”

  “And, Colonel, if I can make a personal remark—”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You’re not looking well.”

  He gave her a humorless grin. “Crisis will do that to a man. I’ll be fine.”

  The door slid shut behind her.

  chapter two

  Exactly an hour later, Ebbak returned, escorting Admiral Wedge Antilles of Corellia. The aging military officer, upright and moving as easily as a man half his age, wore the full-dress uniform of an officer of the Corellian Defense Force and a grave expression that concealed his feelings like a mask. Even through the Force, Jacen could pick up little of what Wedge was experiencing—alertness, confidence that might or might not have been forced, a patience born of self-control.

  Jacen rose from behind his desk to shake Wedge’s hand. He gestured for Ebbak to leave, and she did so without speaking. Jacen resumed his chair and gestured to its comfortable, high-backed double on the opposite side of the desk, situated there just for this conference. “Have a seat.”

  “Thank you.” Wedge did, his posture perfect, and Jacen felt a tiny trickle of annoyance. Wedge had to know that Corellia was beaten at this point—he could have the decency not to pretend otherwise.

  “I know you don’t like to waste time,” Jacen continued. “So do you have a position statement for me?”

  Now, at last, Wedge did look confused, if only faintly. “A position statement?”

  “As in, It’s clear the Corellian position is hopeless, so I’m here to talk sense.”

  Wedge chuckled. “I’m here because you suggested a meeting with a top-ranking representative of the Corellian military or government. You’re here because, having achieved a military victory on Hapes—one that has been spectacularly covered in the media, and let me add my congratulations on that—you want to press your advantage and conclude a peace with Corellia to give your brilliant political career one more boost.”

  Jacen felt a flash of anger and instantly clamped down on it. Wedge’s words hit close to their target. If Jacen could negotiate a peace here in the next few days, everyone would benefit—Corellia, the Galactic Alliance, and Jacen himself. “You’re not in a good position to make accusations about other people’s motives and ethics. No
t after signing off on the coup attempt at Hapes.” He knew the anger in his voice was real.

  Wedge was silent for a long, chilling moment. “Because I think you need to know, I’ll tell you something that constitutes a Corellian government secret. I didn’t know about the plot against Hapes. You already knew I had nothing to do with its planning.”

  “How would I know that?”

  “Because it failed.”

  Jacen almost asked whether belligerent cockiness was part of the genetic pattern of all Corellians, but he resisted the urge. His own father was the archetypal Corellian, and if belligerent cockiness were credits, the Solos would be the wealthiest family in the galaxy.

  Jacen gave Wedge a condescending look. “You don’t need to offer a defense yet. War crimes trials haven’t even started. And if your negotiation is particularly skillful, they might not happen at all. So let’s get back to the subject. Admiral, your position is hopeless. The Corellian system is surrounded, blockaded. Despite the fact that numerous planets made noises of support when Corellia took its stance of defiance, not one has rebelled in support of Corellia; you are friendless. And you’re running short of crucial supplies. The smuggler convoy that you expected an hour or so ago is not running late; it is entirely in our hands, with all its bacta, all its munitions now helping the GA cause.”

  Wedge smiled. “First you say we have no friends, and then you say people were arrested trying to bring us essential goods.”

  “They were smugglers, not friends.”

  “Sometimes smugglers become friends. Your father and I were smugglers who joined the Rebel Alliance cause. And now, since you’ve seized those cargoes rather than paying for them, you can be sure that fewer smugglers will become friends with the Galactic Alliance. Are you saying that the GA doesn’t need friends? Or just doesn’t need friends like me and your father?”

  “You’re changing the subject again.”

  “True.” Abruptly Wedge looked weary, reflective. “I’ll be honest. I’d like to see Corellia reunited with the GA. If it isn’t, something very bad will happen.”