Leia nodded in silent agreement.
“It feels not like a victory, or even like a loss. It feels like dancing to someone else’s tune.”
“The GA isn’t playing it,” Leia said.
“Nor the Corellians.” The admiral shrugged. “Perhaps it’s random chance. I believe in randomness; I see it often. But one can never think of it as friendly. It never has our best interests at heart.” She turned her attention to Leia. “Colonel Moyan says your tactical recommendations were very well reasoned, very helpful. Though he was surprised to find them a bit conservative, considering your reputation.”
Leia shrugged. “We get older, perhaps we get more protective of those we lead. If I’m more conservative, that’s why.”
“Of course. Will you be returning to Coruscant or Corellia?”
“Corellia, for now. Where I can conservatively argue for peace while the warmakers are strutting around, crowing about their victory.”
“I’ll arrange for a starfighter escort for your shuttle.”
Leia shook her head. “No one’s going to fire upon an unarmed shuttle. This isn’t like the Yuuzhan Vong war, fought in mindless savagery. Both sides … are us.”
“For now.” Even on the admiral’s Duros features, considered expressionless by human standards, Leia could detect sorrow, pessimism. “In my experience, it doesn’t take long for ‘us’ to become ‘them.’ And when that happens, every savagery becomes possible.”
“True.”
The admiral returned her attention to the viewports. “May the Force be with you, Princess.”
“And also with you, Admiral.”
On the shuttle flight back to Corellia, Leia sat wrapped in something like sorrow, and for the first few minutes of the flight she could not understand where it came from, what it meant. Her family had survived.
Then the answer came to her. Her family had survived-but she hadn’t, in a sense. She’d turned into something else for a while. In protecting her husband and daughter, she’d lied and deceived, not even as any politician must, but as a conscienceless manipulator of others. Anyone finding out the truth about her activities could use them as leverage against her, weakening her, perhaps disillusioning others about her.
She tried to think of what she wouldn’t have done to protect Han and Jaina. If she’d had access to a self-destruct code that would annihilate any pilot getting too close to them, would she have used it? If she’d been able to swap transponder codes so that friends seemed like enemies, causing the GA forces to shoot one another out of the skies wholesale, sacrificing a hundred or a thousand lives for one she loved, would she have done so? Would she sacrifice the peace they were so desperately seeking, would she send whole populations to war with one another, to keep her loved ones safe?
She didn’t know, for the answer was mixed within her, and she wasn’t exactly the same person she’d been half an hour before. But there was enough yes to it that it worried her, caused her to imagine what she would become if all her answers were in the affirmative.
That was what attachment was, she decided, the kind of attachment the Jedi had traditionally worked to avoid. It was sacrificing lives that were not hers to preserve her own happiness.
In the future, she would willingly give up her life to preserve that of Han, or her children, or Luke and his family … but she would not give up a life she did not have the right to sacrifice.
She could not keep Han alive forever, nor herself Someday he would die, or she would. That was life. She would do whatever she could to keep it from happening-whatever she could short of evil.
Making that decision was like plunging a blade of transparisteel into her heart, breaking it off so the tip remained within her.
But it was the right choice.
When the pilot finally announced “Entering Corellia atmosphere” over the shuttle’s speakers, Leia was at peace. She was not happy-she could almost feel her heart’s blood dripping from her wherever she walked, pooling beneath her wherever she sat-but she was serene.
STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL
“You’ll give her appropriate rites?” Jacen asked. Lumiya nodded. “She was a noble warrior. I will treat her as such.”
They stood together in the large air lock adjacent to the hangar bay where Jacen’s shuttle waited. The docking tube was pressurized and coupled to the shuttle’s side. Ben, unconscious, was aboard, strapped onto a seat with his lightsaber once again hooked to his belt.
“I know this was hurtful,” Lumiya said. “But you have been strengthened by it already.”
Jacen, pained, looked at her. “Words, Lumiya. He will strengthen himself through pain. They don’t diminish the tragedy of what just happened, not at all.”