“Own goal?”
“Blew up while the terrorist was handling it.”
“So we have a room to go on. Then we ought to have an identity for the guest.”
“We’re checking that out.”
“We can’t afford to guess at this.”
Captain Shevu looked down his nose at Luke, polite but clearly irritated by the suggestion. “I don’t guess about anything, sir. We’re working with hard information that’s coming in from Tactical and Operational, and where there are gaps, they stay as gaps until we have data.”
“And what will our response be if this turns out to be Corellians?”
Omas seemed to take exceptional interest in a status board showing the list of premises affected by the explosion with red points of light indicating whether they had been checked and secured yet. “If this isn’t shown beyond doubt to be the responsibility of the Corellian government, then our response must be to treat it as any other crime.”
“I think Master Skywalker means the less formal response,” said a voice behind Luke.
He hadn’t even felt Jacen enter the room. The fact that Jacen could startle him was disturbing. Mara turned, too, and even though Jacen was standing there in front of them, Luke couldn’t feel him, and-judging by her expression and her little flare of anxiety in the Force-Mara couldn’t, either. Then, like scent suddenly wafting up from a blossom, Jacen’s presence was there, all around them, magnified. So he wants to show me how powerful he is. Luke regretted the hostility in his thoughts. But it did nothing to reassure him.
“Sorry, Uncle,” said Jacen. The tension was, of course, invisible to a roomful of non-Jedi. “I got caught up in the blast. I came to see what I could do.”
“I’m glad you’re okay.” Luke picked up on his original question. “Yes, Captain, I mean the informal response. Retaliation, escalation.”
“Victimization,” Shevu suggested quietly, still watching the status boards. “That’ll make life in the city very awkward. Latest tally from Immigration Control says we have nearly twenty million Corellians living here.”
“Most of whom are harmless,” said Luke.
“And not easy to identify except by ID docs,” said Jacen. “They look just like us.”
“They are just like us.”
Omas put his hand on Jacen’s shoulder and steered the conversation into calmer waters with the ease of a professional statesman. “Shall we continue this discussion elsewhere? We’re getting in Captain Shevu’s way. He has an incident to manage.” He gestured to one of the dozen small rooms off the main chamber, each marked with a board above the doors: FIRE AND RESCUE CELL, CSF CELL, MEDSERVICE CELL. Omas ushered Mara, Luke, and Jacen toward a room marked INFORMATION CELL. “I’d like to discuss how we handle this with our public affairs people. Perception at times like this is everything. It’s the difference between one hundred dead in a speeder bus crash and one hundred dead in a terrorist attack-one is a tragedy and the other is the beginning of a war.”
Luke glanced at Mara, who met his eyes but showed no outward sign of her anxiety. Most of the troubles they had faced in their lives had been big, truly big: invasions, alien armies, Dark Jedi, each of them well beyond the scope of tidy incident management by Coruscant’s civil servants. This was a small event in global terms, but like a snakebite-small, painful, and with the potential to poison a whole planet.
Jacen walked ahead of them, his presence in the Force betraying nothing but calm determination.
UPPER CITY, TARIS.
Boba Fett didn’t care if anyone recognized Slave I as his ship.
There wasn’t much they could do about it: stealth was fine in its place, but he didn’t have to hide. And the restored shell of once glorious Taris was so far off the beaten track these days, that there really was a chance that nobody here knew who he was.
It was a useful base for the time being. The galaxy seemed to have forgotten it existed, which was no bad thing seeing as it had been razed to the ground four millennia ago in the Jedi civil wars. Fett savored the irony: he’d come to think of most galactic wars as Jedi feuds, because they almost always came down to Jedi versus Sith. The Yuuzhan Vong had almost been a refreshing interlude.
Things never change, do they?
He also found it interesting that the total restoration of a ravaged planet resulted in pretty much the same social order as before, the world once again reflecting the huge gulf between its classes in literal architectural levels.
People never learn, either.
He set the defense shield on Slave I and walked along the promenade, drawing cautious glances from some of the smartly dressed residents out for their evening stroll. The Upper City was again an echo of Coruscant, soaring towers inhabited by the solidly rich. The Lower City was a cesspit, and the subterranean levels-well, he vaguely recalled pursuing a bounty down there, years ago, and it had been very ugly even for a man who had seen the ugliest of the galaxy’s faces.