The E-wings had pivoted into a flank escort formation that made them look like an honour guard, and the TIE Defender flew across the dusty, rolling plains, towards Capital City - an unimaginative name for a bright modern metropolis in the Revival style, a victory salute of clean white skytowers rising abruptly from a compact ring of low-rise suburbs, and a long straight road leading out towards the spaceport to the north.
Jaina's gaze flickered over the city, observing its location between the edge of the empty plain and the curving shoreline a bay or lake - was that something she'd forgotten, or simply never noticed? And what exactly were the little groups of rocky outcrops scattered here and there in the landscape she'd just flown over? Rounded and pointed, with the smaller ones leaning over at odd angles around their larger companions, they looked as much like clutches of massive fossilized alien eggs as natural upthrusts from the underlying geology, and something about them was nudging forgotten memories in her mind, as if she should have recognised them from somewhere. She wondered once again about the subtleties she'd missed on her previous visits to Lothal.
She pressed her lips behind the helmet. Maybe that was just her Imperial conditioning doing the thinking. Did the Grand Admiral give me some of his art-criticism skills for fun?
Or maybe the Force was just being weird, like the swirling notes of the winds that were trying to twist around her TIE.
She swung around over the spaceport - less busy than she remembered from her childhood visits on the Falcon, with only a few small freighters looking idle, and some neat lines of militia fighters - and landed in the slot indicated by the ground controler, bringing the TIE Defender down on repulsors until the lower edges of the wing panels were hovering just a few centimetres off the surface of the landing pad. She watched with a little amusement as a civilian ground crew including an Ughnaught, two Rodians and an Ithorian pushed out an old yellow boarding ladder towards her cockpit.
"Welcome to Lothal," she said, hearing her brother throwing open the TIE Defender's hatch, and the sound of him and his girlfriend scrambling out behind her, laughing at something she probably didn't want to understand. "Capital City offers a wide range of soundproofed hotel rooms…"
Jaina stayed in the cockpit, looking at the landing pad through the gunsight of her forward viewport - aware of just how easy it would be to shoot up the smart rows of A-wings and K-wings from where she was. She powered down t he controls, checking that the wing panels were picking up enough ambient energy to keep her fighter on a sustained hover, then removed her helmet and her body armour, tugging down the fastener on her jumpsuit to the belt, to show the white undershirt beneath - an informal look that would allow her to pass for a civilian while remaining within Imperial regulations, and allowed her to smarten up in an instant if required.
She emerged from the cockpit, did a gratuitous Jedi flip onto the ladder, and clambered down to join her brother and his girlfriend on the landing pad.
Anakin had already removed his helmet, and was shouldering on a gunnery jacket over his borrowed jumpsuit, which hid the Imperial badges on the shoulders, and also gave him somewhere to conceal his lightsaber. Tahiri was still in her inky-black Vong vac-suit, which was drawing worried stares from the ground crew, but as Jaina watch she rubbed the side of her nose, and the hood abruptly rippled back and somehow flowed away into the body of the garment, followed a moment later by the sleeves, baring her head and arms and shoulders - she tugged her alien breather off, revealing reddened cheeks and a glossy smile, then quickly scrubbed her braids out of her hair and unfolded a soft, tan-coloured poncho from her hip pouch, wrapping it round her body - Jaina suspected it might be some lightly furred Yuuzhan Vong material rather than a proper piece of fabric, but she looked suddenly like a fashionable traveller in a shawl and leggings.
"See, Jedi," she said, as she tossed her lightsaber in her hand. "There. I feel human again."
With a wry grin, Anakin handed her a pair of slouchy, soft-soled jerba boots he must have had stashed in a pocket somewhere. She shook her head and pulled them on, then and the illusion was complete.
"The disguises I have to use when you take me to new planets," she teased. "I'm not the only one who finds it weird that we're here because of a tip-off Grand Admiral Thrawn gave us two decades in the past, right?"
Jaina frowned. "Don't forget he gave us a personal message for General Syndulla, too."
"That was a fake-out," Anakin objected. "Thrawn obviously knew mom was in the Rebellion, and I'll bet you he probably even knew about General Syndulla's kid being her hold-son, too. Add in the glaringly obvious fact fact that our brother shares the same name as him, and it's not exactly hyperphysics to take a wild guess that she's one of our own absurdly long list of hold-parents."
Jaina frowned as she paced beside her fighter. If there's one thing about us that's Alderaanian, it's the number of hold-parents we have. "Be that as it may," she murmured. "Jacen and Alema Rar had been looking up the nav coordinates of this place on the Turtle, trying to work out if they could adjust the temporal deflector to make a direct jump here."
"Which Thrawn already knows because you sent the entire systems readout to him as well as to Fiver. This is totally a fake-out. We don't even know we're back in the same timeline."
Jaina frowned again at that, resisting the urge to answer back. There had been no trace of the Yavin Turtle when they dropped out of hyperspace at Darlyn Boda after their time-jump, but the freighter's absurdly low-powered engines meant that any lingering energy signatures would have already gone cold. Somehow, Anakin's ship always contrives to be annoying, even when it's doing something that might actually be useful for somebody…
"Well, we'll soon find out if we can find this archaeological excavation that we were told to look for," Tahiri added optimistically.
"Hopefully it's all in a museum somewhere." Jaina wasn't sure what she'd feel if Thrawn had correctly predicted a dig that was going to take place two decades after he'd tipped them off.
She looked up at the skytowers of Capital City again, as a speeder drew to a halt beside them.
"Jedi Solo?" the pilot asked.
Jaina blinked, and hesitated for a moment. She wasn't sure she ought to respond to anything except Lieutenant or Flight Officer.
"We're here to see General Syndulla," Anakin confirmed, taking charge. Jaina shook her head and followed, sitting quietly as they sped towards the city, half-listening to Anakin and Tahiri talk. The approach to the city was like she remembered, open avenues and spacious buildings, the towers of the uptown district becoming huge in front of them.
Even more than Mon Calamari, people liked to say that Lothal had been the first system to truly join the New Republic. The Rebels had successfully kicked out the local Imperial garrison during the early Domino campaigns - even Jaina felt no sympathy for the former Imperial governor, a brutal and incompetent protégé of Tarkin's named Moff Pryce - and began rebuilding even before the Battle of Yavin, braving the risk of an Imperial reoccupation to create the bright new cityscape while the Rebellion was still being fought.
They had established a pattern that had subsequently been extended all the way to Coruscant - demolishing the squat towers of the ore refineries and barrack-blocks that had been constructed under Imperial control, and whatever wreckage had been left of the older pre-Empire city after the Rebel uprising, and creating something modern and forward-looking in its place.
Jaina felt a little ambivalent about that now, but she'd always liked the locals - she hoped that the Yuuzhan Vong weren't going to undo all their hard work.
She looked at the cityscape - uncompromisingly urban, a statement that you could build a society entirely from a geometry of artificial materials, without anything the Vong might find redeemable - and frowned.