“What’d you find out?” he asked.
The wind from their movement whipped the hood from Leia’s face; it fell against her back. She didn’t bother to replace it. Nor did she bother to conceal her unhappiness. “Maybe we ought to get home before we discuss this.”
“I’ve already waited several hours,” Han said.
“Maybe you ought to park.”
Finally he gave her a close look. “That bad.”
“Worse.”
“Give it to me.”
There was an almost imperceptible pause. Han knew Leia was arranging facts, deciding on order of presentation.
“Some of this I’m guessing, based on things that weren’t said and things that were. Some that I’m sure of is based on things I overheard. I guess I’ll start with the biggest things and go down from there. The Corellian claims that Centerpoint Station was sabotaged by Jedi are true. The station has been seriously damaged, setting the Corellian scientific corps back several years. And the Jedi who did it … were Jacen and Ben.”
Han gave her a sharp look. He saw her eyes widen and he glanced back into traffic. In just fractions of a second, the distraction and the tightening of his hands on the controls had caused his speeder to slide partway out of its traffic lane, toward a tiny high-speed model with an elderly dark-skinned human couple in it. He flashed them a sorry-about-that smile and returned his attention to Leia, but kept better vigilance on his piloting. “Jacen.”
“Yes.”
“And Ben.”
“Yes.”
“Is Luke crazy?”
This time she didn’t answer. She continued, “Jedi teams also made attempts to snatch a few critical Corellian politicians out of Coronet. Jaina was on one of those teams.”
Han’s jaw set and he saw Leia pull back, unconsciously, just a few centimeters. She wasn’t afraid, had never had reason to be afraid of his reactions, but he was reminded of something a colleague once told him-when Han Solo got mad, he looked madder than any human in known space.
“He’s doing it again,” Han said. “He’s throwing my children— our children-into dangerous situations they shouldn’t be part of. What do I have to do to make him stop?”
“There’s more. Are you sure I can’t persuade you to pull over?”
“Is there anything you could possibly tell me that would make me lose my skill as a pilot?” Realizing he sounded testy, and not wanting to pour out his anger on Leia, he forced all anger out of his voice. “Just tell me.”
“The Corellians had ambushes and traps set up for them. Ambushes and traps meant for Jedi.”
They flew along in silence for several long moments. Han held what Leia had told him in his mind like an egg, something too delicate for him to handle roughly.
He noticed, even in his distraction, that the speeder had developed a shudder. Carefully, he experimented with the acceleration, with the controls during turns.
No, the speeder was unchanged. But his arms and hands were shaking so badly that they were affecting performance.
Abruptly he pulled out of traffic, sideslipping with ridiculous, dangerous accuracy into an unoccupied speeder dock at the five-hundred-meter level next to a restaurant-side walkway. The speed of his approach and his rapid, last-second deceleration caused pedestrians on the walkway to shriek and leap out of the way, as though he were going to overshoot and slam through them, but he was at a dead stop centimeters from docking, and let the dock’s grappler beam drag him in the final hand span of distance. Automatically, he inserted a credcard in the adjacent slot.
For long moments, he couldn’t bring himself to look at his wife. His voice was low and shaky when he finally said, “So I did that. I almost got them killed.”
“No.”
“Yes. I should have figured that our kids would get involved in what was going on with Corellia. And I went there and told the Corellians to line up their gun sights on our boy and our girl.”
“Han, you told them your guesswork. But you’re not listening to me. I said they were prepared for Jedi. What, in everything you told the Corellians, would have alerted them to be prepared for Jedi in exactly the situations where Jedi were used against them?”
Han thought about it. “Nothing.”
“That’s right, nothing. So?”
“So … somebody else told them where and when Jedi would be used.”
“That’s right. And the whole thing with Centerpoint Station. The Corellians are being kind of disingenuous about it when they say the Jedi came and sabotaged the place. They neglect to point out that they’d restored it to full operating status, or were on the verge of doing so.”