"Actually," Anakin said. "Let's not go there."
That earned him dirty looks from both his siblings, though Lowie laughed, and Tahiri flashed a grin - the sort of look that told him he'd made the right decision. She always seemed to know when his instincts were going in the right direction, her intuition sensing through their Force-bond when his actions fell into the right pattern, but recently, he was starting to think that she was thinking several steps ahead of him as well.
"I was all set up to swap stories on what we've all been doing and go from there," he explained. "But I don't know that we want to risk entangling each other's timelines with information we ought not to know."
"Not even a little bit?" Jacen's grasp of irony had apparently improved while he was trapped in the past, but his frown belied his casual costume and his balanced body-language. Evidently, the Solo brothers were still able to trigger each other without trying.
Anakin did his best not to show a reaction. "Nope. The important part is that we all need to get back to where we ought to be, and perhaps that means returning us all to the slightly different points in time we were thrown backwards from. Until we figure that part out, we ought to keep quiet about the future."
"Um?" Kyp asked, clearly not sure how this tied in with whatever Jacen and Alema Rar had told him, or the simple fact they'd rescued him from Kessel ahead of schedule.
"You're a special case," Anakin shrugged. "I'll explain that in a moment."
"You're making it sound like getting back's the easy part?" Alema Rar asked, looking genuinely curious.
"Getting back is the easy part. Or might be, anyway. There's a theory that at the speed of time-"
"The speed of time?!" Jaina asked.
"Um, yeah. Just like information can't move across space faster than light without the use of a hyperdrive or a subspace comm, the theory is that it can't move forward faster than the natural pace of time."
"Xathan's Hypothesis," Alema Rar said - not the most obvious source of expertise in high-level hyperphysics, but being trapped in the past had probably done something to motivate her interest. She shrugged her lekku, gesturing at Kyp and Jacen. "Cute as they are in other departments, neither of these two is exactly a hyperdrive scientist, so I wasn't exactly able to do anything practical with the theory."
"Right." Anakin glanced round the table. Jacen was frowning, Kyp was maybe slightly bored.
Jaina didn't look particularly convinced either. "So how does this help us, exactly?"
"Well… in theory, anything we do here should only progress forward at the speed of time, one second at a time. But a hyperdrive does break the time barrier, carrying a ship forward inside its own little shockwave of weirdness - normally, the distortion is rectified with a relativistic compensator so elapsed time is matched more-or-less exactly to the flow of time outside the ship. But, if we hotwire the compensator, we ought to arrive back where we want to be…"
"In the middle of the Yuuzhan Vong war?"
"In the middle of the Yuuzhan Vong war, a whole lot faster than the effects of whatever mess we've created by being here, which will always stay safely two decades in the past as we move forwards. Obviously, no-one's tried this before, because no-one knew how to travel back. Or if they did, they kept quiet because of continuity issues."
"There's a reason I don't let him talk much, normally," Tahiri interjected, smiling.
Blank looks round the rest of the table. Should I be worried that the only ones who don't look confused are the Wookiee, the exotic dancer and the Galaxy's cutest Tusken Raider?
"Is this an accepted science theory, or just a guess of yours?" Jacen asked.
Jaina seemed just as unconvinced. "I don't know. I mean, I understand the concept of recalibrating the compensators, but I'm pretty sure that just makes time on the ship move faster. Speed-of-time!" She glanced at the Wookiee standing behind her shoulder. "Help me out here, Lowie. This sounds crazy to you too, right?"
Lowie laughed, admitting that he'd always liked the hypermathematics of the theory, and thought it was at least somewhere to start.
Jaina gave a rueful look. "Thanks, big guy."
Tahiri sat up in Anakin's lap, and he nodded, because they'd discussed this part already. "Well," she said carefully. "I think hero-boy's plan sounds plausible, and I'm not noticing anyone else having a better one. Maybe it's just because I'm Yuuzhan Vong, but I'd rather be back where we belong…"
No-one else seemed prepared to disagree. But with Jacen in particular, that didn't mean he was going to go along with one of Anakin's plans, and Kyp's surly silence might hide outright hostility.
"Any questions?"
A pause, with Jacen, Kyp and Jaina all looking a little bit uncomfortable.
"Changing the subject slightly," Alema Rar intruded, interloping with her usual casual skill. "And maybe this isn't important, but nothing that I could find seemed to have a good answer. How did we all get thrown back in the past?"
Anakin feigned a shrug, lifting his eyebrows, and looked at Tahiri. For some reason, everyone was looking at Tahiri.
She feigned a yawn. "You think this is a question for the New Republic's resident expert in Yuuzhan Vong weaponry and weird science?"
For some reason, her yawn had become a twist round in his lap, with her arms around his shoulders, and they teased each other with a nuzzling kiss.
"Ah… our very cute resident expert in Yuuzhan Vong weird science," Anakin murmured. "You can tell them... if you want? You're, uhh, cuter than me. They won't look so bored."
"You're pretty cute," Tahiri smiled, then spun round and perched squarely on his leg, assuming a more upright posture and giving his other thigh a squeeze with one hand. Good boy. Good levitation cushion.
Anakin hoped none of the others knew that the way she was posed, with the toes of one foot balanced on the ground and her other ankle hooked back behind his knee, was the formal posture of a ranking Yuuzhan Vong seated on a living throne.
She took a sip of caf. "There is a protocol in the shaper inventory that's supposed to be to do with time travel," she explained. "Basically, the practical part is a set of genetic codes that could be used to gestate the necessary biots. What they actually are, I don't know. The glossa are incredibly obscure, whether because it's a really old version of the language, or because it's a technical terminology everyone's forgotten - like trying to follow Lowie talking about hyperdrives in Thykarran with my limited conversational Shyriiwook - or because the whole thing's meant to be a mystery. But basically, they say that the ritual is designed to create, or access, something called the baanu al'tirrna, which you can use to move around in time as well as space. The name sounds like it means vessel-to-move-between-the-surface-of-planets, but in this context, transport-through-a-higher-dimension-between-planes-of-reality might be a better interpretation. There was a lot of discussion among the initiates on Baanu Kor about whether the protocol actually worked, and what it was supposed to do…."
She paused, as if a little blindsided by the sudden rush of Yuuzan Vong memories, from a past that didn't belong to her, and as far as she was aware had never happened to anyone. She said it was best not to think about them too closely, because the Shaper who'd made her Yuuzhan Vong had been a heretic, and the whole thing didn't make sense if you tried to impose too much definition.
Anakin grinned at her. She'd become stronger and more beautiful than ever, privately accepting her Yuuzhan Vong identity even if she rejected her artificial biography - the personality through which the knowledge was being lensed was pure Tahiri, and she wasn't any less human for it - or any less Tusken, or any less purely Tahiri. If the false memories had included some sort of personality matrix or command-line braintwisting, she'd absorbed that part of her Yuuzhan Vong persona like the Carkoon sarlacc having a snack. But she said that the result of a Shaping was what the person was meant to be, and neither of them objected to the paradox.
She smiled back, looking at him, flirting more than asking questions.
"Go on," he encouraged.
"If anyone's wondering why no-one simply creates the biots to see what happens, that's because the whole thing is interlocked with a really complicate set of accompanying ceremonies for the hierarchs of Yun-Yuuzhan, and Yammka and Ne'Shel. The glossa say that the protocol involves the essential triangular force embodied by the Yun'o…"
"The Yuuzhan Vong religious system," Anakin offered helpfully.
"Right. Anyway, the requirement for a fully consecrated hierarch of Yun-Yuuzhan means it can't properly be performed without the direct involvement of the Supreme Overlord, and even for a heretic… anyway, that would make trying to do it any other way immediate treason of the sort that gets heretics ritually dismembered, so no-one's ever actually heard of it being done - it just sits there in the First Cortex… and that's as much as I can really tell you, I think."
She sipped her caf again and sat back a little, with the frown which indicated that her human personality needed some time away from her Yuuzhan Vong self for a bit.
Everyone round the table blinked at them in bemusement.
"I don't think I ever realised they had conversations quite like this," Alema Rar remark to Kyp. "But at least they both seem to understand what they're talking about."
"Translation?" Jaina asked, looking at Anakin with a sort of smile.
"Short version. We were probably all ambushed by some sort of Yuuzhan Vong creature that's like a cross between a hyperspace interdictor and a time-travel portal, and we need to get back and stop it, because they probably have a longer list of targets."
"Well, why didn't you just say that at the start?"
Because you'd have asked too many questions. "Okay, good. This shouldn't be beyond the combined skills of the group of us. Tahiri can see if she can figure out anything useful from the Qang qahsa we keep on the Turtle. I can help Jaina and Lowie hotwire the hyperdrive compensators. Kyp and Alema Rar can keep each other out of mischief. Jacen - you're now project lead. Can you think of a small animal or something with a measurable biological process that we can test this on…?"
Just like old times, Anakin thought, watching his brother's reaction carefully. Childhood escapades had often involved navigating around Jacen's Hutt-sized ego, finding him something useful to do that made him feel included - or better yet, let him play the role of a team leader while his siblings hotwired computers and machinery and built little droids from scrap. Actually, that wasn't fair. Anakin was just as egotistical - Tahiri used the description Hutt-sized to describe more than one aspect of him, and Jaina could be as headstrong and assertive as a stereotypical kajidic-boss when she wanted to, as well.
The problem was that Jacen's ego was more vulnerable, less stubborn - or just more sensitive. Anakin had never really been a fitter-in, and it had never really bothered him - or been something he noticed beyond the abstract, except when other people were tripping over him. But Jacen needed to feel that everyone was doing things in the same sort of way - and preferably his way, too.
Or maybe I'm just being deeply unfair to Jasa.
Jacen was looking at him with a frown. "There's stuff you aren't telling us, right? About the whole time-paradox idea."
"Right. And I'm going to keep it that way. I don't think I'm breaking anything if I guess that you two went looking for us when we got delayed on our round trip to Kessel, and that you landed two, maybe three years back and picked up Kyp near the start of your adventures. But don't tell me if I guessed wrong. All we need to do - assuming Xathan's Hypothesis is right - is set the correct dates for the points-in-time we want to return to. Whether Kyp comes with us or not is up to him - if the theory's right, that shouldn't really matter either way."
Kyp nodded. Apparently he was starting to get the hang of the paradox.
Jacen looked more doubtful. "And doesn't the fact that we're all in the same timeline suggest that maybe things are more joined-together than you think?"
"Well, the Yuuzhan Vong techniques might work differently, but the simple version is, I think we could have intersected during the process of being thrown back, even if we started at different timepoints. Assuming that whatever threw you back was connected with what threw us back, then we might have taken the same route on the way, and thus got caught up in each other's wake. You were simply thrown back past us, which would make a sort of sense if everything was running in reverse."
"Even if we started out and ended up at different points, we could have been simultaneous during the journey," Tahiri offered helpfully.
Jacen shrugged.
Jaina gave him the look she used when she'd decided there was nothing left to do except turn his latest crazy idea into practical machinery. "So, how exactly does this work? We just recalibrate the hyperdrive and figure out a way to work out if the effects of our weirdness have caught back up with us?"
"Pretty much. We can use the Turtle to test the calibration, send her forward a day or two on a short jump with the compensators hotwired, so we can be waiting on the Ravelin when she gets there…"
Jaina threw him a scowl. "You'll do anything to find a use for that old barge, won't you."
Tahiri flashed a grin at that, so he smiled. "Hey, we already have a use for my ship. Beyond the obvious cargo-carrying as well. But we're going to risk losing our favourite soundproofed bunkspace if this doesn't work. You should be happy…."
Jaina shook her head. "Fine. Well, if no-one's got a better idea, I guess we're doing this… speed-of-time stuff that only Anakin understands?"
"Hey," Tahiri said. Lowie added a growl of amusement. Alema Rar raised a hand.
"Okay, fine," Jaina said. "The kid brother who's more comfortable talking to computers, the Yuuzhan Vong weird scientist and the Wookiee hyperdrive mechanic all think that this makes sense, and even the shameless Twi'lek stereotype seems to be on the same readout." She gave Jacen a reassuring shake of the shoulder, and threw an unexpected smile at Kyp. "Just us normal human beings who don't know what's going on and get to worry where this might all end up…"
"Yeah," Jacen said, returning her wry smile. "Somehow, that really fills me with confidence…"