~9~

Fixer's Liquor


"This ship is boring," Jaina announced, pulling off her helmet as she stormed through the cockpit door with Anakin following suit. It was the second day following their departure from Yavin, and Jaina and Ani had just successfully completed the hyper-jump from Bothawui. The *Jadesaber* was now streaming along the Corellian Passage, blazing ahead towards the Outer Rim with Luke and Mara at the helm.

Lilandra glanced down from where she lay, nestled in blankets on her top bunk. Six hours of hyperspace navigation had taken their toll on Jaina, as well as Anakin – both of them appeared drained, their faces pale and their eyes oddly sparkly under the glow of the lounge lamps. Lilandra noticed that Anakin was staggering, as though he'd forgotten how to use his legs properly. He collapsed upon the bunk beneath Lilandra, and buried his face in the mattress, groaning.

Jaina, although she appeared slightly disoriented, headed to one of the couches and stretched out, long legs perched on the armrest. "I'm bored," she reiterated, tossing the helmet to one side.

Lilandra nodded in silent agreement. She had whiled away the past twelve hours lying in a state of relative catatonia on her bunk, reading history text after history text. Imperial war journals, ragged Alliance tactic guides, hand-bound and falling apart, and endless archived databases of the names of those 'lost' during the war.

She had come across several startling entries – her adoptive parents, for example, who had been killed in an air raid when Lilandra was sixteen – but none that suggested that the bearers of the names had been imprisoned on a secret penal colony.

There was a cause of death listed for each and every one of the names she had found, everything from 'killed in action' to 'tortured', the latter unspecified, leaving the gruesome details to the reader's own imagination.

If the individual had been captured and imprisoned, there was an option referring Lilandra to the database of registered colonies – but most of those persons had either died on the journey, or simply never been found when the colonies had been liberated seven years ago. Whoever Terapinn's clientele happened to be, they were undoubtedly the galaxy's best-kept secret.

Pushing her datapad aside, Lilandra sat up and scrubbed at her eyes. A headache was threatening to explode behind them, and she knew she ought to give it a rest for a bit. She swung her legs down over the side of the bunk, and surveyed the room.

Beneath her, Anakin was lying face up, looking tired, but too stunned to sleep. Seeing through hyperspace for extended periods of time tended to do that to a person. Lilandra had never been able to properly see the dimensions of hyperspace – odd, because Jedi usually made good navigators – but she'd heard stories of what the real professionals saw behind the uncomfortable blur that most people saw.

Hyperspace was a vast, gray mass, dotted with the inverted black pinpricks of stars. The average person would be able to see that much, flashing past the viewscreen at a speed so fantastic that the scene appeared to be nothing more than a dark, mottled blur.

But proper navigators saw another realm. Set against the unnervingly pale backdrop of space seen from the inside out, there were impossible numbers of channels that appeared as colorful, shimmering rips in the foreground of hyperspace. It was important to time a jump just so, in order to slip through one of these channels, which could deposit you across hundreds of thousands of miles of realspace in little more than an hour or two.

The channels were visible only in hyperspace, and only the ones that were colored a deep, inviting blue were safe for passage. Hyperspace navigators possessed the remarkable ability to distinguish color in hyperspace where most people saw only black and white, and understood that a channel colored anything but blue was likely to drop them out in the accretion field of a black hole, or send them tearing straight through the core of a neighboring star.

Timing a jump was nastily exhausting work, however – it required a certain awareness of the future, and the ability to mathematically predict when a safe channel would open to the place you wanted to go in the place you wanted to jump from. That was why Jedi usually made good navigators – their awareness of the energy that hyperspace expended before opening a channel allowed them to prepare many minutes in advance. Han Solo had been one of the rare non-Force-aware individuals who could see and safely navigate hyperspace in his heyday, but consciousness of hyperspace tended to decrease with age. Lilandra doubted that Han was able to see much anymore, which was why he had chosen to train his children in the art of 'Seeing'.

Both Jaina and Anakin were extremely capable navigators, but the jumps still took a lot out of them. Navigation was a highly stressful chore, and sapped a lot of energy from those who attempted it. The experience of hyperspace itself in turn left the navigator bewildered, stunned – hence Anakin's unblinking look of astonishment.

In several years, once Anakin had gained more experience with hyperspace, it would cease to affect him. But until then, it was rather amusing to watch him gaping up at the bottom of Lilandra's mattress, seeing nothing but the miraculous apparitions he had observed while traversing the hyperspace channel from Bimmisaari to Bothawui.

"He alright?" Dave asked, coming in from the cargo hold through a rearward door, his mouth full of nutrition bar, and jerked his thumb at Anakin.

"Just finished a jump," Lilandra explained. "He'll live."

"Ah. No worries. Just looks a little, well … scary, doesn't he?"

Dave wandered to the coffeine dispenser, twirling a mug around two fingers, and began to pour.

"Yeah," Lilandra agreed, hanging off the end of the bed and goggling down at Anakin. He flicked his gaze to her for a moment, but remained silent.

"Good jump, Jains?" Dave asked, ruffling his wife's hair and pushing her feet aside to clear a space to occupy.

"Uneventful," Jaina shrugged. She was much more used to hyperspace than her brother. "We'll be hitting Tatooine within the hour, though."

Tara emerged from the bathroom just in time to hear Jaina utter these casual words, and the temperature in the room seemed to fall several degrees as its occupants noted the look on the doctor's face.

Lilandra had never seen Tara look like that before in the five years that she'd known the girl.

Tara had adopted a rather tragic air during the last few days, floating about the lounge and the cargo bay with an expression of sorrowful whimsy on her pretty face, stopping every so often to heave a sigh. She spent a lot of time alone in her bunk, separate from her boyfriend, with her various texts and journals propped up on the wall before her, but Lilandra often caught her eyes wandering, indicating that the sharp mind behind them had lapsed to thoughts of more emotional matters.

Thoughts of Terapinn and the state of the people they might find had apparently reduced her to a pale specter topped with a mass of loose blonde curls, though Lilandra had suspected there was more to it than her own gruesome imagination.

Now, standing paralyzed in the door to the bathroom, holding a glass of water in one shaking hand, her sorrow had escalated to a crushing fear, underscored by a thick, simmering rage, and it had never been more apparent that it was not Terapinn that had prompted her to sleep in bunk separate from Anakin, avoid any non-perfunctory social contact, and bury herself in the logic of science, but something much more personal.

She looked up at Jaina now, looking more disastrous than usual – and, Lilandra thought, like she might bolt and make a run for the emergency hatch at any given second.

"Tatooine?" she asked.

"What's wrong with Tatooine?" Anakin asked, finally raising his head.

Curious, Lilandra tried to gage Tara's reaction. She and Anakin were a notoriously secretive couple, but her expression when she registered her boyfriend's presence in the room significantly narrowed the field of options as to the reason for her melancholy in Lilandra's mind.

Tara glared, her lips pulled tight and pressed together. "Nothing," she replied tersely. "I like Tatooine as much as the next person."

"You're a weirdo, Jaks," Anakin commented affectionately, sitting up. "Are you getting hyperspace sickness or something?"

Lilandra cast a hesitant glance at Jaina, who shook her head as if to ward off comment. Jaina was much more up-to-date on the Solo-Jaksbin affair than Lilandra was.

"I was just clarifying the Tatooine thing, Solo," Tara replied icily. "I think you're the one with the hyperspace sickness."

"Ooh," input Dave. "Geek warfare!"

An indignant gasp escaped Tara's lips. She ignored Dave.

"So what's the big deal with Tatooine?" Anakin asked, making a concerted effort to stay calm. It could definitely be said that no one could get him riled up like Tara could, and not always in the most positive way. "Aren't you happy to be going home?"

"It's not home anymore," Tara reminded him irritably. "It hasn't been 'home' since I was five years old."

The room was deathly silent.

"Well, then?" Anakin gave her a confrontational look. "No painful memories, no good memories … Jaks, what – "

"I just … don't see why it has to be Tatooine," she murmured, seeing that Anakin was gearing up for a fight. "Ryloth is just as close."

"Close for being butchered! Use your head, Ton-Ara!" Anakin said with such an obviously intentional meanness that both Lilandra and Jaina winced out of sympathy for Tara.

Tara's eyes became misty for a moment, and her fists clenched upon her arms, but she did not speak.

Instead, she shook her head, stood, and picked her way across the floor back to the bathroom.

Anakin shook his head and made a loud noise of dismissive derision, and Tara went suddenly purple in the face, jamming her fists onto her hips.

"I LOVE TATOOINE. TATOOINE'S FANTASTIC. Are you bloody well HAPPY now, you stupid JERK?" she roared, and slammed the bathroom door, while Anakin just glared, and the others looked on in amazement.

"Atta girl," Dave said, giving the bathroom door a fond pat. "Better out than in, that's what I always say."


Silence reigned in the cockpit, far from the slamming of doors and exchange of misdirected words, as Mara sat at the helm of the *Jadesaber*, watching Luke dozing in the copilot's chair next to her.

The mottled sky of a hyperspace channel streamed by outside the viewport, casting an eerie blue glow on the slumbering Jedi's face, the glittering apparitions outside flickering on his pale cheeks and eyelids.

Mara yawned, and turned her attention back to the controls of the ship.

She couldn't remember the last time she'd slept soundly; perhaps fatigue, like pain, once it had passed, became nothing but an invention of the unconscious. Certainly the mild dozing she achieved between the six-hour shifts she and Luke took in turns was hardly enough to keep her attentive, but she was beyond exhaustion now. Even if she tried to sleep, it would be impossible.

How long had she been feeling this way? Not just the hours spent staring out the viewport, a dull nausea resonating in her stomach. It felt like much longer that she had spent her nights worrying. About what, she wasn't sure.

Luke knew. She could see it in every one of their interactions of late, in the sharpness of his voice in casual conversation, in their intermittent screaming matches – where she would scream and he would try hard not to – and in the plain, undeniable hurt she sometimes caught in his eyes when he was looking at her.

Even in bed, when she would curl herself into the crook of his arm and reach for his hands to fold them safely across her stomach, he was always accommodating, always gentle with her, but distant.

And Lilandra – Mara felt a flash of residual anger. When had Lilandra become party to their unspoken troubles? When had he suddenly found himself able to confide in an outsider instead of his own wife?

Mara frowned, shaking her head. Lilandra was not an outside observer. She was impartial, or tried her hardest to be, anyway. She knew that Luke had told Lilandra because he couldn't keep it inside him forever. Because he was growing tired of waiting for her to realize what had happened between them, what had caused this breach.

It was something Lilandra could easily see from her objective stance, being away from the Academy most of the time to the point that any differences, no matter how subtle, became glaringly obvious to her. It was something Luke could see, because he lived it everyday, this thing that put that hurt in his eyes, but was determined to keep from her until she could recognize it on her own terms.

That determination was one of the most singularly infuriating – and appealing – things about him; it was the reason Mara often held back her frustration to the breaking point, where her own emotional barriers would shatter without warning, pent-up tension bursting forth without any appreciable bias to the cause of the release. The damage she could inflict was widespread and serious.

She knew Lilandra harbored no intentions of interfering in her marriage … but she'd been at the point of no return again, ready to plunge forward down the cliff of despair in the reckless manner she exercised in all her endeavors – wholly and with abandon. Lilandra had just been the cause of that effect.

Mara sucked her cheeks into a tired half-smirk, marveling at her own affecting diversity. The hyperspace drop countdown meter was showing one hour.

Did Luke ever tire of her diversions? Did he *ever* harbor ulterior motives when he was with Lil?

One hour, and then Mara could sleep. All she had to do was land the ship on Tatooine, and let Luke do the rest of the work. Fifty-four minutes left.

Lil wasn't malicious enough to ever seduce Luke, and as much as Mara loved to tease her about those tabloid epics linking her with her attractive and eligible colleagues, she didn't really believe that Lilandra was the type to go to bed with somebody new every week and let herself get caught at it.

She wasn't at all like the woman Mara had been at twenty-five. But that was why Mara didn't want to hate Lilandra. She was hoping maybe she could learn by observing the awed, but strangely methodical way in which she dealt with things, the way the most innocent of occurrences seemed to hold some kind of insubstantial wonder for her.

A memory flashed across her drooping eyelids, like a series of photographs: Lilandra, tall and still summer-perfect even in the dead of Yavin winter, disappearing around a random corner, coaxing two wobbly-legged and laughing toddlers towards her; Lilandra, kneeling beside a bathtub with soap suds in her hair, pouring milky water gently over two identical curly heads, deftly wiping the soap from attentive eyes with a waterlogged hand; Lilandra, fast asleep on the common room couch with Mara and Luke's twin children cuddled together on her lap, their tiny limbs tangled around her torso and silky, damp heads heavy on her shoulders. Our Lilla, a child's self-important voice declaring.

Mara opened her eyes, watching the colors of the cockpit lights blur and bleed and shimmer for a moment until she blinked them back into their proper places. Come on, be honest, Mara, she heard Luke chiding her. There were other reasons for her to be envious of Lilandra Ilkhaine.

There was an instinct there, in the young senator, that Mara felt she had never possessed. Or maybe, she thought, she had silenced it. Wasn't it fairer, anyway, to let them be with women who loved them? Lilandra, Cilghal, Leia, Winter … she'd been disowning her children since the day they were born.

Feeling the painful twist of commingled anger and guilt in her stomach, she squeezed her eyes shut, and thought of a high, solid wall, painted black to hide the images that wanted to flash accusingly across it and erected defiantly between her memory and her conscience. With nothing to remember or feel, she soon slipped into a fitful sleep, at the mercy of the senses she had not had the foresight to abandon, forgetting that love, however unwilling, is all-encompassing.

She swore that, as she drifted away from the cockpit and the stark meanness of hyperspace's vast gray landscape, she could feel the questing brush of five perfect, tiny fingers across her cheek, and, shivering, she swept them hurriedly away.


***

The swift, urgent beeping of the hyperspace meter woke her what seemed like mere seconds later. She bolted upright, and scrambled for the controls, keying in with stumbling, desperate hands the planetary coordinates and yanking back on the hyperspace lever. A millisecond later, and she would have missed her destination altogether, or simply ran into the planet. The starlines flared, and the ship fell into the startlingly different scene of realspace.

The parched, yellow-brown sphere that was Tatooine hung in view, not glowing welcomingly, but hovering more menacing and angry looking than ever.

Mara shuddered at the sight of the sandstorms churning across the planetary surface, so powerful that they were visible from space. Little puffs of clouds formed at the tops of the strongest ones, piling high into the atmosphere. Inside, Mara felt scraped as raw as the burning ground below.

"Luke," she whispered, shaking his elbow. "Wake up, we're here."

***

Together, they steered the ship down through the tempests tearing up the atmosphere, Luke's confident hand guiding Mara's wary one upon the controls, and brought it to rest in a dusty field just outside of the town of Anchorhead. A difficult navigational task, since Tatooine was, all things considered, just a large, spherical dusty field.

Luke had a feeling that Anchorhead would be a better place to go for aid than Mos Eisley. As far as he knew, even though the Empire was officially snuffed out, Mos Eisley was still crawling with the real dregs of society – buskers, hustlers, pickpockets, and ex-Imperial stormtroopers and bounty hunters looking for a new beginning.

It was early morning in Anchorhead, and the town's streets were still quiet. By far the most populous city on the planet, it still consisted of only two-level buildings, shops on the lower level, and living quarters on the upper level. All the buildings were made from the tough, white durasteel of the kind manufactured on Sullust, but the outsides were caked with a thick layer of baked-on sand, which collected in thick, discolored sheets in the shadows of the dirty window frames and the low, protruding oblong doorways. The weather was amiable, with a light wind scattering the migrating sand dunes across the sloping roofs of underground dwellings and the twin suns already burning hot in a sky marked with only a brown, ominous haze: a sandstorm, raging on the horizon.

Lilandra descended the *Jadesaber*'s ramp, and the dry desert heat almost knocked her flat. Immediately, she became thirsty, and reached for the small water canteen hanging from her belt. Luke had made sure to equip all of his passengers with one.

"How did you stand this heat for eighteen years, Uncle Luke?" Lilandra heard Jaina ask from behind her.

Luke's response was, "I couldn't."

Tara and Anakin were the last ones out of the ship, having tentatively reconciled their unspoken disagreement, but Lilandra couldn't help but notice Tara's shudder despite the burning heat of Tatooine's suns. The girl's hair had fallen into her eyes, hiding them, but she stared hard at the sand anyway.

Lilandra had a vague memory of seeing her like this before, but in the cool, white luxury of Leia's Coruscant apartment, some months ago. Lilandra had been visiting, the two politicians lounging in the cushy depths of chairs, guzzling tea and talking when the door buzzer had sounded.

The sight of Ton-Ara standing in the hallway, dripping with hard winter rain and shaking with the force of the anger she had just unleashed on Anakin, two blocks away at the college where they were studying, had filled Lilandra with an almost maternal worry.

It wasn't the first she'd heard of Tara's running – how she simply left Anakin when she felt angry or in need of space – but it was the first time she'd witnessed it firsthand. There was something immensely pitiful about seeing the calm and collected doctor in such an anguished state, and Lilandra had asked, innocently, "But where will you go?"

She couldn't remember what Tara had sobbed disparagingly in response, but, glancing sidelong at the doctor now, Lilandra had a feeling that what she'd heard had been the claim to the rock on which they now stood. She chewed her lip thoughtfully, thinking that Tara's display of temper on the ship might actually have some credence if what Lilandra assumed was true: that when Tara ran, she ran here.

Luke was gazing perplexedly around at the clusters of low homes and buildings that was Anchorhead. He appeared to be looking for something. Within minutes, he'd found it, and was steering the group through the deserted streets towards a modern-looking building, taller than the rest, and lined with grimy windows.

"Destination?" Anakin prompted, striding ahead and dragging Tara by the hand behind him.

"Tosche Station," Luke answered, and pointed to the dirty glass building. To himself, he added, "I wonder if Camie and Fixer are still here … "

Mara patted his shoulder in response. "If they were smart, they probably got off this rock the first chance they had."

Luke shook his head. "Not Camie. She was too loyal to her father … and Fixer was too loyal to Camie. They wouldn't leave. Not unless … "

He didn't say under what extenuating circumstances faithful Camie might be persuaded to leave, but Mara suspected strongly that it had something to do with the Empire.

They walked in silence, trudging through the dune-lined streets to Tosche Station.

When they reached the dusty glass door, Luke hesitated, and then pushed it open.

The icy blast of conditioned air from inside the building almost killed them as it washed over their heads, breaking upon the bared flesh of their arms and raising bumps upon the wilting skin, but it was a welcome relief. They all shuffled inside, and stared around at the place a young Luke Skywalker had once called a second home.

The first floor consisted of an electronic pool table, a few tables, and a small bar set up along the back wall. Metal stairs, blocked off with a chain-link rope, curved up the shadowy back wall to a visible loft - clean, quiet, and homey.

Lilandra liked the relaxed air of the place. It spoke of the shared confidences of young men harboring secret dreams of wartime grandeur, and the commandeering presence of testosterone levels elevated here in times long ago. The faint smell of sweet disinfectant, combined with just a hint of sweat and the lingering scent of tobacco smoke made her feel lusty, brash … uncharacteristically masculine. It was the feeling of an alcoholic buzz, a sort of libidinous stupor that was strangely soothing and that Lilandra found herself liking. Her eyes were drawn to the bottles of thick, multicolored liquids hanging from the racks above the bar, the glint of muted sunlight a glowing heart in the bottom of the long, tubular containers.

Suddenly, a gruff-sounding voice came from an open metal door behind the bar, breaking her thirsting reflections.

"We're not open yet – slither off."

Luke was about to protest, but then the identity of the voice's owner dawned on him, and his face split into a boyish grin.

"Fixer? Is that you?"

There was a stunned pause.

"Luke? Luke Skywalker?" The aged face of one of Luke's closest friends appeared around the edge of the doorframe, and the look on both the faces of the men was enough to bring a smile to Lilandra's lips. "Well, I'll be kesseled …"

Fixer's entire body appeared, and he hopped over the bar to wrap Luke in a bone-crushing hug. He was a big, stocky man, darkly tanned with thick arms, thick legs, a thick torso, and a thick mop of dark brown hair lying flat upon his scalp. The only thing thin about him was the dark moustache above his upper lip.

"I thought for sure you'd been killed," Fixer exclaimed when he finally pulled away.

"You always did have boundless faith in me, " Luke said dryly. "Go on. Surely you must have heard about me in the holos." He had a bragging note in his voice.

"Now, why would the newspeople bother with a lowly moisture farmer?" Fixer was teasing him, and both Lilandra and Mara chuckled quietly. Jaina, Dave, Tara, and Anakin just looked on in stunned, bemused silence.

Jaina leaned on Dave. Dave leaned on Jaina. Anakin leaned towards Tara, perhaps unconsciously, but she stepped aside, causing the boy to stumble. He glared at her, hurt, and she shrugged, glaring right back, a secure calm in her blue eyes.

"Ah, you forget that this moisture farmer has saved the galaxy – more than once!" Luke beamed with pride.

"Of course you did," Fixer said congenially. "We're all entitled to those good old delusions of grandeur once in a while."

He gestured to the gathering of Luke's dumbfounded companions. "What's this motley crew all about?" Luke beamed proudly as he slipped an arm around Mara's waist and pulled her toward him.

"Fixer, I'd like you to meet my wife, Mara Jade; my niece, Jaina, her husband Dave; my nephew Anakin, his girlfriend Tara; and one of my close friends, Lilandra."

Lilandra's cheeks reddened just a shade at being called one of Luke's 'close friends'. She'd known she was, of course, but there was a certain sweet triumph to be found in hearing him admit it.

Fixer shook all their hands in turn, his eyes lingering on Mara longer than was probably prudent.

"You've done alright for yourself, Skywalker," he murmured.

"Don't sound so surprised," Luke grinned, raising his eyebrows. "So, where's Camie?"

It seemed only logical to ask – Tosche simply wasn't Tosche without the bright, cheerful presence of Fixer's long-time, much-coveted (at one time, by Luke, mostly) girlfriend.

Fixer jabbed a finger up at the ceiling, indicating the loft above.

"Preening. You know Camie – early to rise, slow to descend … we've been married for twelve years now, and she still won't let the customers see her without her 'face' on."

"Figures," Luke snorted, and patted Mara's arm. "Not this one. Struts around in her nightclothes till afternoon, most days. No shame."

Mara beamed proudly, knocking his hand aside.

"So what's the deal? You working for Camie's dad now?" Luke asked.

Fixer shook his head sadly. "Things have changed a bit around here since you've been gone. Camie's old man ran into some hard financial times after your uncle … well." He paused to clear his throat. "Hydroponic systems aren't exactly a hot commodity without moisture farmers to buy them."

"I understand," Luke said. "So you work at Tosche now?"

"Work?" Fixer laughed bitterly. "Hell, I own the place! We don't exactly do a roaring trade nowadays, though. Everyone within ten miles of this town is either old or dead. We could've pulled out and gone to Mos Eisley years ago, only Camie hates that hole. For good reason, too – place is crawling with Imps." Luke's eyes widened. "Imperials? Why?"

His friend laughed again. "How should I know? Coruscant's in charge of that business. That fool Pellaeon doesn't know which end of a bantha's its head, though, let alone anything about politics."

Jaina suddenly stepped forward. "Tatooine is an Imperial world now," she explained. "It's had that designation for at least six years now. Might elucidate your Imperial invasion."

Fixer looked at her. "I'm not talking your ordinary folk here – think I can bloody well tell a lad's political affiliation just by looking at him? I wouldn't care if it was just a lot of you rampant young confederates running around organizing protests and signing petitions and campaigning and whatnot, but it's all Palpatine's type down that way – shady dealings, I tell you, shady dealings."

Luke frowned at Jaina.

"Does your mother have any idea this is going on?"

"The Imperial territories are Pellaeon's job," Jaina said, raising her hands. "My mother's only in charge of designating worlds for him to govern."

She looked at Lilandra for affirmation. The senator nodded at Fixer, whose eyes widened slightly as a jovial grin appeared on his ruddy face.

"Isn't the designation of worlds the Chief of State's job?" he asked.

"Yeah," Jaina shrugged casually. "That's what I said – my mother's job."

"Your mother's the Chief of State?" Fixer chuckled quietly, not quite believing her.

"Of course," Jaina replied, and curtsied prettily, pulling out the empty pockets of her flightsuit. "Jaina Solo at your service."

"Great gundarks," Fixer breathed. "I thought you looked familiar."

He turned his suspicious brown-eyed gaze on the others.

"Come to think of it, you all do. Are you all related to the Solos?"

"Youngest son," Anakin replied. "Guilty as charged."

"Student," Tara said in turn. "Long-time friend of the family."

"No relation," Dave laughed. "Just the unworthy husband of this fine young lady." He slipped an arm around Jaina's waist.

"That leaves you," Fixer said to Lilandra. "You look *very* familiar. I've seen you on the holos a fair few times, I have. Aren't you that ambassador – "

"I'm a Republican senator," Lilandra assured him hastily, interrupting what she knew he was about to say. "Of no relation to the Solos or the Skywalkers. Just a friend, like Luke said."

Fixer rolled his eyes, presumably at his own lack of up-to-date knowledge of the political world.

"Think I'd better fix you all a drink," he muttered. "Got some catching up to do …"


An hour later, the crew was still perched on bar stools, Luke and Mara engaged in a slightly boisterous discussion with Fixer and Camie, who had emerged some fifteen minutes before to join the fun, while Lilandra, Dave, and Tara guzzled ale and Jaina and Anakin looked jealously on around tall glasses of fizzy.

It seemed that Luke had decided to update Fixer and Camie on the complete chronology of his life since he'd left Tatooine, and unfortunately, Fixer had been drawn into the wonderfully complex way that Luke's life seemed to work, from the people he met to the unbelievable situations they'd been placed in.

Lilandra would've found it interesting to hear if it had not been the umpteenth time she'd heard it all, of course, so Fixer was not to be blamed. But really … there was a need for some serious abridgement at that point. Luke and Mara had both been drinking continually since they'd all sat down, and it was all Lilandra could do to pretend not to notice how slurred their speech was becoming, how increasingly incoherent their words.

Not that she could've done much better should they actually invite her to join the conversation. The room was beginning to look a little darker than it had when they'd come in, and there was a dull ringing starting up in her ears. Three empty pint glasses stood on the shiny surface of the bar in front of her, and a fourth, three-quarters of the way gone, was clutched in her slightly trembling fist.

Beside her, Dave cleared his throat.

"Ar … what's this we're drinking, anyway?" he asked Lil thickly.

"Dunno," she replied drowsily, setting down her glass with a clatter that was louder than necessary. "Something local. Figure I should stop now, or it'll be gross when we jump back into hyperspace."

"May I?" Dave gestured to her glass.

"Yeah, yeah, be my guest."

He tipped the last of the glass' contents down his throat, and belched enthusiastically, patting his chest.

"Goes down sorta nice, dunnit?"

"Yer," said Lilandra, hanging onto the bar. "Bit rich for my liking, though."

She had ceased to feel lusty and bold somewhere between her second drink and her third, and begun to notice the churning in her stomach. If she concentrated hard enough, she could hear the blood rushing in her ears as it hurried on its way to her drowsy brain. Whatever the amber liquid that had previously filled the glasses in front of her had been, it had been awfully powerful, shooting straight through her like liquid heat and rendering her bored yet strangely engaged. She wondered briefly if perhaps this was how alcoholics felt – if, once they reached a certain point of disengagement from society they took to drinking just because it was something to do.

"I'm *bored*," Tara growled, shooting a killer glance down the bar at Luke and Mara. "I can't wait to get off this rock."

"That's beginning to sound like a common theme today," Jaina commented, sucking back some of the liquid in her husband's glass.

"Feel bad for Luke," Anakin said, patting his girlfriend's head in an attempt at further reconciliation.

"Doesn't sound much like he regrets it now," Tara replied sarcastically. "Yak, yak, yak …"

"Hold on," Lilandra said, holding up a hand for silence and leaning her ear down the bar towards where Luke was still talking animatedly, drawing pictures in the air with his hands. "It sounds like he's talking about the galaxy map now."

"What?" Tara asked, her tone dripping sarcasm. "Already? You mean there wasn't a big half-hour lead-in?"

The five youths all turned to stare at Luke. As they watched, he swayed dangerously on his stool, Mara restraining him with her arm, but barely, as she was just as silly.

"Spectacular," assessed Anakin, grinning broadly. "This is one for the history books. I swear, they've both downed about six glasses of that stuff you three have been drinking – each!"

"S'gonna hurt tomorrow," Dave shrugged, a roguish expression on his face also. "I thought Jedi weren't allowed to indulge in such worldly pleasures."

"The rules only apply when we're at home …" Anakin said devilishly.

"Alright, you two, shut up and listen," Lilandra commanded. "We have to strike while they're primed, or we'll be here all night."

" … Some wild colony called Terapinn," Luke was saying, his voice garbled.

"You know, old buddy, that's funny," Fixer said, and promptly hiccoughed, "cause there's been some whispers around here in recent years. You hear a lot down in Mos Eisley, and that name's been kicking around for a while now. Fifteen years at least, since the ruddy Imperials took everything over."

Lilandra shifted her stool closer to Fixer's end of the bar with a pointed look at her friends. This could be the information she'd been unable to find in the history books – information they might need.

"Not a happy mission, of course," Fixer continued. "I heard Palpatine carried out the operation himself, but I'll be damned if I swallow that line. Bastard never did like to do his own dirty work."

Lilandra cut into the discussion, as Luke appeared beyond comprehension.

"You don't know the reason they were imprisoned, do you? Or who they are?"

"Weren't from around here, I can tell you that much," Fixer replied, taken aback. "Why the concern?"

"We're on our way there. Right now."

There was a silence.

"Bit of a risky move, isn't that?" Fixer asked, bringing his bushy eyebrows together. "Wouldn't like to mess around in Imperial business myself, not with the things I've been hearing lately down in Mos Eisley."

"Er … what sort of things?" Lilandra asked nervously.

"Shady dealings, like I said before. Those people, they're hopeless out that way. Lost everything when Palpatine was killed. The last time there was any sort of revival out there was when that old assistant of his – Karina something – popped out of the woodwork and started rallying his remaining troops. Speaking of which, you are the spitting image of the little girl who put a stop to all that. Are you sure – "

"Really, there's no relation," Lilandra insisted uncertainly.

"Anyway, that was all about five years ago, and things have been pretty quiet since. But now and again, like I said, somebody will bring up that old nadir of his, and they call it Terapinn. Palpatine at his worst – it's sort of a last testament to his glory, with them. Something for them to hang on to while they wait to be tried."

Lilandra blinked. The way Fixer put it, it was almost easy to feel sorry for them, Palpatine's old supporters.

"If you ask me," Fixer continued, now speaking only for Lilandra's benefit, for Luke had begun nodding off on his stool, "I would leave it alone, knowing what it meant to Palpatine and now what it means to the people he left in this state. You ruin that, take it away from them, and I daresay you'll have a lot of very unhappy people after you, sweetheart."

Lilandra let that sink in for moment. She couldn't tell for sure, but was Fixer … threatening her?

"Not meaning to scare you or anything, darlin', but maybe you should reconsider if you're all doing the right thing here."

Unbidden, Kerryna's parting words to Lilandra came back to her.

What you're doing is a good thing, but it's not necessarily the right thing …

What did they all mean by that?

Lilandra was about to respond, but suddenly, there was a loud crash, and the sharp tinkling of breaking glass. Horrified, she looked behind her to see that Luke had passed out and fallen off his stool, taking his empty mug with him. Already, Jaina and Dave were upon him, Jaina taking up his arms while Dave supported his legs and Tara ran to help Mara off her own stool.

"Good work, Lil," Anakin grinned, and flashed her a thumbs-up as the foursome hurried out the doors, dragging their elders with them.

"Thank you for all your help, Fixer," Lilandra said, with an apologetic glance at Camie, who had vaulted herself over the bar, a broom and dustpan in hand.

"No problem. Drinks are on the house. Just promise me you won't let Skywalker go and get himself into trouble again," Fixer said sternly. "That goes for yourself as well. Pretty girl like you has got no place meddling in the affairs of the past. Problem with you politicians, you Jedi is, you never know when to just live and let die, do you."

Lilandra offered him a sad smile. "If we did, we'd have all killed each other long ago."

Fixer grinned. "You have a safe journey, now, Senator."

"We will, thanks," Lilandra said, and shook his hand before sliding off her stool and heading for the door.

Hand poised on the latch, she paused, and turned to look at Fixer.

"Hey – you'll watch for me on the holos, right?"

"Long as they're not showin' me a picture of the deceased, I will!" he called back, and waved.

Lilandra smiled, bid farewell to Tosche station and the town of Anchorhead, whose streets were now beginning to fill with people, and strode across the spreading stretch of desert to where the Jadesaber sat.