As if to parallel the amount of time in which she was in labor, Jaina had to wait roughly eight hours in an unoccupied system of the Transitory Mists before a GLEN-34 Hapan rescue transport dropped out of hyperspace several hundred meters in front of her. A moment after the GLEN-34 appeared, Jaina was hailed and she promptly opened up the frequency.
"JQR12 transport, identify yourself and state the nature of your emergency," the authoritative female voice came from the speaker grille.
While Jaina didn't like the idea of making her baby feel uncomfortable, she sent a little unpleasant thought—that of a baby bantha getting shot by a Tusken Raider—through his mind to start him wailing. Then, as she changed the pitch of her voice so that she didn't quite sound like Jaina Solo, the woman who stood trial for two single-handed massacres during the Chiss War, she said with great desperation, "Please! I need help! I have a baby here and our hyperdrive isn't working! Come, quick!" Combined with Zekk's cries, Jaina hoped that she wouldn't immediately be identified by voice alone.
"Are either of you hurt?" the authoritative voice asked with less harshness.
"No, we're just scared," Jaina responded with her continued feigned fear. "I wish I knew how to fix things like my husband, but after he died, I-"
"Hang on," the authoritative voice cut in. "We're on our way; standby to dock airlocks."
"Thank you, thank you, you have no idea how grateful I am," Jaina practically gasped.
About a minute later, the GLEN-34's airlock-facing side latched onto the JQR12's side passage as Jaina stood in the cockpit waiting; by now, the pilot whose neck she had snapped just a day ago had been disposed of before the scent of death could have pervaded the ship, so there was no sign that there had been a murder having occurred here. And the fact that she had tinted her vessel's viewport so that her "rescuers" wouldn't be able to get a good luck at her as they passed by would make her appearance to them all the more surprising; had she not been so convincing in her performance of a desperate mother with a broken hyperdrive, they might have been more suspicious.
After the JQR12's passage opened, two Hapan women—one light-skinned with dark hair, the other dark-skinned with red highlights in her hair—dressed in Hapan Navy uniforms stepped inside. They both halted in shock and fear as soon as they saw Jaina standing there with a satisfied smirk while Zekk now slept comfortably in her arms.
"You will do what you came here for," Jaina intoned as she waved her free hand in front of the other women. "You will help a mother in need."
The targets of Jaina's mind-trick almost instantly slackened in posture while their faces softened to that of hypnotized trances.
"We will do what we came here for," the light-skinned Hapan said monotonously.
"We will help a mother in need," the dark-skinned woman concluded in the same tone.
"Take me directly to Hapes," Jaina commanded.
She received no resistance against that order.
. . .
"This is a message to Luke Skywalker and his Jedi Order," the holographic projection of Sith Grand Lord Darish Vol said. "At the end of this message, there will be a set of coordinates directing you to a system where a messaging beacon will be located. Upon arriving at this beacon, you will activate the holographic transceiver there and you and I will speak about where we will meet for an alliance against Abeloth. Bring no one else—no Galactic Alliance vessels, no other third parties—when you come to us. If you do, the beacon will automatically self-destruct and there will be no alliance against Abeloth. You have exactly one day to respond, or this deal with be null and void. I hope I have made this clear." The recording ended there.
Having viewed this public broadcast message over the HoloNet on his datapad in his quarters aboard the Solo Quest II, Luke sat back along the sofa in thought. But before he could really begin to mull over the implications of Vol's announcement, the door chime to Luke's quarters rang; he looked over and said, "Come."
The door slid open and Jacen stepped inside. "I think I have a lead on Jaina's whereabouts," he said promptly.
"Where?" Luke asked. "Is she still somewhere in the Chiloon Rift?" Like Jacen and virtually everyone else in the Jedi Order and Galactic Alliance, Luke knew about the ten million-credit bounty on Jaina's head that was put out by the Chiloon-based Galactic Exploitation Technologies.
Jacen shook his head. "By now, she would've already been gone; knowing Jaina and the fact that she has a baby now, she's smart enough to have left the Chiloon Rift. No, I think she may have gone to the Hapes Consortium."
"The Consortium?" Luke asked as he stood up. "Why? Were you able to break through her block in your twin bond and find this out?"
Again, Jacen shook his head. "Sadly, no. This is just intuition; I think she's going to leave her baby with Tenel Ka."
Luke's eyes narrowed in confusion. "But we know that Tenel Ka evacuated Hapes with Allana only a week after Abeloth became a serious problem; she isn't there anymore."
Indeed, after Tenel Ka was informed of the apocalyptic danger posed by Abeloth and what exactly she was motivated by—a desire for control, something that a Queen Mother of the Hapes Consortium had a considerable amount of—she had fled the Hapan capital world with her and Jacen's daughter in secret and left several decoys to live in the Fountain Palace. The ruse had paid off, as only two weeks ago, Abeloth had invaded Hapes, which had prompted the Orbital Forces to bombard much of the world, especially the capital city of Ta'a Chume'Dan and the Palace, into glass. As a result, Tenel Ka continued to rule what was left of the Consortium—that is, what wasn't infested by Abeloth—via HoloNet as she moved through the Transitory Mists in an unknown moving base.
"Yes, but Jaina probably won't know that, what with her isolation from the galaxy in what would've been nine months for her," Jacen said. "Probably not until she gets there, anyway."
"And that's assuming she didn't have a decent HoloNet connection. But still, why Hapes, even if it was as it was prior to Abeloth's escape from the Maw?"
"Think about it, Master Skywalker; who else would she be comfortable with leaving her child? Sure, our mother and father have a place on Denon, but you know how very little they actually use it, what with them spending most of their time on the Falcon and all. So they wouldn't exactly be easy to find even if Abeloth weren't a problem. And I doubt Jaina has much love left for the Jedi Order as an institution if she was willing to abandon us to look for the Dagger of Mortis after just leaving us its coordinates."
Luke nodded as he came to understand Jacen's deduction. "Thus, Tenel Ka, who would already have experience raising Allana, who used to be one of Jaina's friends, and who spends the vast majority of her time on Hapes, would be the only other logical choice to raise Jaina's baby."
"Precisely."
"Then assuming you're right, we can beat Jaina there if she hasn't arrived already. How far away are we from Hapes at the moment?"
"About two days travel, last I checked."
"Two days?"
"Yes, why?"
Luke fell into a pensive silence before he answered. "If Jaina is there, I'm afraid we might have to miss her anyway."
Jacen looked in askance at his uncle. "Why's that, Master Skywalker?"
"Did you not hear?"
"Hear what?"
Luke approached Jacen, brought up his datapad, and proceeded to show him Vol's message. When it was done, Jacen said, "Master Skywalker, you can't seriously be considering-"
"I am," Luke interrupted sternly. "I don't much like the idea, either, and quite frankly, I don't really see how it can help much where the Dagger of Mortis has failed us so far."
"Then why consider it at all?"
"Because even if this potential alliance doesn't lead to a solid way of truly vanquishing Abeloth, it may give us an opportunity to finally defeat the last of the Lost Tribe."
"But that'll also give them-"
"This discussion is closed," the Grand Master said sternly. "Now take me to the cockpit and show me how far away we are from those coordinates, Jedi Solo."
Jacen gave no argument as he obeyed, though Luke could sense his nephew's thinly veiled reticence through the Force. When they got to the cockpit, where the forward viewport showed the stretched starlines characteristic of travel through hyperspace, it took Jacen a few moments to search the Quest's navcomp and find out where they were.
He looked back at Luke and said, "It'll be close, but we're less than a day from those coordinates if I drop out in the next few moments."
"Do it," Luke said with only two seconds' worth of hesitation.
"But, Master Skywalker, the Sith could be playing a tri-"
"Do it," Luke intoned.
Jacen's outward expressions and Force-presence became muted, though Luke didn't need the knowledge as Grand Master of the Jedi Order to know how truly disappointed his nephew was with him.
Still, the Jedi Knight sat himself in the pilot seat and dropped them out of hyperspace into an empty system before he promptly oriented the Quest to the coordinates that were given by Vol.
"I hope you know what you're doing, Uncle Luke," Jacen muttered under his breath.
Luke pretended not to hear that; had he been surer of this quick decision to answer a Sith Grand Lord's call, he might have retorted with, "What was that?" or something along those lines. But as it was, even though he was making a decision that could very well help in eliminating Abeloth for good, he couldn't help but share in Jacen's doubts.
However, a thought came to him, prompting him to stop Jacen from pulling down the hyperdrive lever by saying, "Wait."
Jacen looked back up at his uncle with hope clear in his eyes.
"Send an encrypted message to the Millennium Falcon," Luke said. "Tell them to get to Hapes as soon as possible."
The disappointment was less palpable in Jacen's facial expression, as it was tinged with some satisfaction over the knowledge that Luke wasn't just going to drop Jaina as a priority for a potentially fatal alliance with the Lost Tribe of the Sith. So, as he turned back to type out encrypting the message, Luke exited the cockpit to inform the rest of the Jedi aboard the Quest about what would no doubt be considered by them to be a controversial decision.
. . .
After the GLEN-34 dropped out of hyperspace to enter the Hapes system, Jaina, who stood between the occupied pilot and copilot seats, stared out in shock and horror through the forward viewport at the devastation to the system's namesake planet that was visible even several thousand kilometers away from orbit. She chided herself for not considering the idea that Hapes would have fallen under Abeloth's power even as she felt a great pang of grief for what was left of the homeworld of whom she realized to be her only remaining childhood friend, Tenel Ka.
As if sensing his mother's shock and heartbreak through the Force—and Jaina had no doubt that that was the case—baby Zekk started wailing once again in the crook of her arm. Jaina tried to soothe him back to his restful slumber with some more calming Force-sentiments and cooing, but to no avail; not when she herself felt assailed by her own feelings of what happened to the world where she had nearly fallen to the dark side of the Force during the Yuuzhan Vong War and where her younger brother Anakin's funeral had taken place.
When she finally gave up trying to calm Zekk down, Jaina exclaimed over her baby's crying, "Is the Queen Mother dead?"
Both of the mind-tricked women looked over their shoulders at her with that entranced look that had never left them since Jaina had taken over their wills.
"She is alive," the light-skinned woman—whose name was Huellette, Jaina had learned during the hyperspace transit—reported obediently. "But we do not know where she is."
"Nobody in the Consortium or outside know where she is," Sue-Elle the dark-skinned woman elaborated. "She only makes her presence known to us through encrypted HoloNet transmissions at least once per day, at seemingly random intervals, since Hapes was attacked by Abeloth."
Jaina grimaced as she fell into thought even while Zekk still cried, though his wailing became more subdued; then her expression lifted in confusion as she asked, "Wait, if Abeloth is this well-known at this point, how come you two were so trusting of my intentions? How did you not know that I wasn't an avatar of her or something?" During the transit to Hapes, she had learned about what Abeloth had been doing in the months that had been so much longer for her while she was in the Bubble of the Lost.
"She has never known to have resorted to such a tactic," Huellette explained. "She has only ever resorted to large-scale invasions of worlds."
"Yeah, but surely, someone must've figured out that she was getting onto ships somehow," Jaina posited worriedly. "I mean, for all you knew, maybe I could have been one of her avatars."
"We still have a job to do as Hapan Rescuers," Sue-Elle countered despite the hold that Jaina held over her. "We cannot just leave others to die in space because we have not yet found a way to detect or counter Abeloth."
Jaina sighed as Zekk finally fell back into snoring silence. "Well, I guess you two should count yourselves lucky that I wasn't Abeloth, at least." And myself and Zekk, too, obviously, she thought. Then her expression became determined when she asked, "So, seemingly random encrypted broadcasts, eh? Well, let's see if we can catch one of those transmissions and find out how long it'll take to dec-"
Jaina was suddenly halted from speaking any further when an all-too familiar presence appeared in the system. She looked out through the viewport and saw, several degrees to starboard, the black-hulled form of a very special YT-1300 begin sailing over to the GLEN-34.
A few seconds later, the Hapan transport's comm console beeped for attention.
"Get that," Jaina ordered Huellette.
The other woman obeyed, and then the voice of Jaina's father said, "Hapan GLEN-34 transport, this is Captain Han Solo of the Millennium Falcon. Jaina, your mother and I know you're aboard that ship, so, please, give up now and don't make this any-"
"Mom, Dad, I'm so glad to see you!" Jaina said with genuine joy as she cut into the transmission. "Especially with the surprise I have for you!"
Baby Zekk had been roused again from his slumber, but this time, he only cooed with vague infant satisfaction.