Jumping at Ghosts


Leia's steps were loud in the corridor—pounding—as she flew at top speed to the starboard briefing theater. Late. Very late.

Because Han had made her so.

Her hair was frazzled—wisps curling at the nape of her neck and around her ears—but it always seemed to be that way at this hour of her shift, anyway. Patting her shirt with her free hand she made sure she was wearing it properly. Had she thrown her left boot on her right foot? She wasn't entirely sure. There hadn't been any time to reapply her makeup, either. She knew her lips were bare—absent of their usual red—but her lip color had rolled into some mystery nook on the Falcon and it wasn't like she could just stop anywhere on a warship and pick up another.

She felt undignified and graceless, like every being she passed was looking through her generally acceptable appearance and into her secret life as… What had Han called her? Some stupid Corellian slang.

My main squeeze.

She rolled her eyes as she skidded to a quick stop, taking a moment to steady her breathing into its normal rhythm. Corellian was a ridiculous language. What did it mean to be someone's main squeeze, anyway? Was it laced with vulgarity, a slipping, dripping way of referencing sex and physical gratification without any emotional connection? But no, that wasn't how Han had said it, loaded with colloquialism and affection. It was probably more like the Alderaanian phrase alhora mynasse, translated roughly into Basic as my heart outside the chest.

Leia had not translated it to Han yet, though she'd whispered it into his throat and chest on more than one occasion. She knew what his reaction would be. Her lips turning up into a soft smile, she imagined his amused expression: his wiley grin, the light in his eyes as he teased her. Heart outside your chest, huh? Sounds serious, Worship. Should I take you to Medical?

But enough of that. Squaring her shoulders, she squeezed the datapad in her hand and entered the theater. Cold air hit her as the hatch hissed open, biting into the tips of her ears and the pads of her fingers. The room was dark, one panel of fluorescent lights operating over an ancient plastisteel conference table. And, yes, that's what it reminded her of: an operating theater. A table at the center surrounded by wizened beings under enormous pressure, making life and death decisions with the fortitude of ego-stroked old men.

"Sorry I'm late," she apologized as she hurried to her seat. "A situation required my attention."

You taste like sweetcake, she heard. A memory. Like honey.

She pursed her lips, banishing the dark delight of Han's voice in full sexual thrall, the aforementioned situation she had had to handle. Hush, you, she thought to the Han in her head. And behave for once.

"Princess," Carlist said, nodding his respect. "We were just analyzing the updated specs on the probe from Diagnostics."

She cleared her throat, placed her datapad on the table in front of her. "And?"

"Inconclusive," Jan Dodonna said as he sat back in his chair. "The transponder seems broken but the antennae was active as recently as last standard month."

She scanned the lines of technobabble on her datapad that she was only half-able to comprehend. "A month?"

"A critical intel package was dispatched thirty days ago," Dodonna replied.

Carlist shook his head. "That still doesn't mean it is an Imperial probe. We only have 90% confirmation on that."

"Whose else could it be?" Admiral Gilad Ackbar asked.

"Smugglers," Leia answered him easily. "Pirates. Any number of unallied systems with a militia or defense force. Objects get tossed around in these gravity wells, we know that."

"And if it is an Imperial probe, there is no guarantee that the intel package was received," Carlist added. "I think some of us are jumping at ghosts."

Leia was inclined to agree. Dodonna and Ackbar were conservative, strategic commanders, and they tended to be more settled in their decisions. But everyone here—everyone currently stationed on Home One, in fact—was flitting around their business on a razor-edge. Between food rationing and the setbacks in establishing Echo Base, their lines were pulled taut and High Command was no exception.

They needed clarity. They needed logic. Thank goddess Carlist was of the same mind.

"The question is whether or not we are willing to risk the vast majority of our forces on what amounts to a hunch," a deep female voice said. "It seems… odd we only found the probe this morning."

Leia's heart seized to hear the heaviness behind the steady tone. She doubted anyone else could discern it but she had spent too much time with the woman behind the receiver to miss the heavy anxiety in her words. Hours in dark offices, hammering out senatorial resolutions against the staunchest of Imperial blockades, the moral ambiguity of politics. And then other conversations not in the easily-bugged Coruscanti offices, in which spycraft was discussed, the future of the galaxy in the hands of renegades and rebels. The intelligence that needed to be stolen and sent to clustered caves of anarchists throughout the galaxy. How a nineteen year old senator could change the galaxy for the better.

Turning her head, Leia saw for the first time a holocube sitting in front of Dodonna. "Good evening, Councilor," she greeted.

Mon Mothma's voice held as much warmth as it did chill, a perfectly even temperature. Light-years away, out of danger, hidden in one of Bail Organa's many rebel safehouses, the leader of the Alliance sat and listened to strategy meetings that did not directly affect her safety at all. Leia imagined her in white robes, unsullied by the oil-stained gears of war, metering out her opinions freely and without the weight of her own survival on her shoulders.

Leia frowned at that thought, blanched at the blunt cynicism of it, thinking it sounded so much like Han that she fought the brief instinct to turn and see if he was standing behind her. Unhelpful, she reprimanded herself. The Alliance needs a leader and she needs to be safe to continue the fight if we fail here.

"Your Highness," Mon Mothma replied. "I hope the situation you were managing wasn't dire?"

I'm going to be late, Han, her own voice whispered. You are going to make me

"Nothing I couldn't handle," Leia responded, cool and calm, betraying nothing. "Do we know where the intel package was sent?"

Dodonna clasped his hands on top of the table, vying for the authoritative air in the room. It was a clear indication that he felt torn between reasonable steadiness and overreaction. "No. It was sent at sublight speed."

She pursed her lips. "Sublight? From a probe hidden in an electromagnetic cloud that we barely navigated?"

Carlist shot her a tight look but she ignored him and continued.

"You're assuming a great deal. The package probably never left the system."

Dodonna squared his shoulders. "What if someone was nearby to receive it?"

"We have never seen a single Imperial scout in this sector," Leia contended. "Who would be nearby?"

"We have no trajectory for the transmission, either," Carlist said. "No way of knowing that it wasn't being blasted to the universe at random. The odds of the Empire receiving it are astronomical."

The gravity wells surrounding Zone 332 were regularly scouted; no Imperial ships had been found on any of their scopes within the past two months. In point of fact, no Imperial ships had ever been found in Zone 332, a good enough argument against evacuation. She supposed there was a slim possibility that an Imperial scout could also be in the vicinity, one who had dodged their scanners… Except that Imperial scout-ships had fewer critical life-support systems than an X-wing did, which was why High Command had to pull their scouting runs short for that very reason. There was no way any Imperial ship could have sustained itself long enough in hiding, only to hear a transmission from what might be a random probe droid leftover from the Clone Wars.

She supposed an Imperial probe could just happen to come across the Alliance fleet as they awaited their base in the Anoat system, but that was a near mathematical impossibility. The galaxy was hundreds of thousands of lightyears across and the Empire would have needed to send out thousands of probes, wandering aimlessly through empty space, looking for the Alliance.

And, too, the data package sent at sublight speed wouldn't reach the nearest star system for another year, possibly longer. The coalition of forces currently hiding in the nebulae would be long gone by then; Echo Base was three weeks away from being declared fully operational and Home One, along with her small fleet of Alliance-allied ships, would have been evacuated by the time any intel package could be received.

"Then we agree," she said. "No need to evacuate."

A muffled hush descended over the theater—light but so tense she thought the air might break—and Leia realized she was missing something important.

"We are defenseless out here," Ackbar broke the silence. "Evacuation might be our best recourse."

"If someone receives the data package and catches us unawares, we might sustain significant damage," Dodonna added.

Leia frowned. "Significant damage from what?"

"The gravity wells," Dodonna said. "New data seems to indicate they are not as stable as we originally thought."

"We are caught in an opposition zone," Ackbar explained. "The gravitational pull of one well is stabilized by the others. But if the Empire finds us—if more ships enter the zone—we can't predict how the wells will react. They might shift."

"So an evacuation might be impossible in that situation?" Mon Mothma asked.

"Might be," Carlist said. "We truly don't know. All of the data is theoretical at this point."

Leia shared a look with him and knew that he had a similar sense of desperate optimism when it came to critical decision-making. The Alderaanian heritage seemed to be one of carefully deducing the horrors of reality and at the same moment pulling oneself back from the edge by one hopeful, desperate fling for galactic mercy. Nothing compared to planetary genocide, after all; nothing could ever be as bad as their current, lonely path. Han had the correct word for it—nihilism. Leia had been equally shocked that he knew the word. Caridian life lessons, he'd claimed, cadets learn 'em fast. Nihilism. An emptiness where their self-preservation should be.

"Let me get this straight," Leia said, arching an eyebrow around the table. "You want to evacuate because we found a probe that might or might not be working and might or might not be of Imperial manufacture, because it sent a data package to an unknown destination at sublight speed a month ago?"

"Yes, but—"

She interrupted Dodonna with a fierce look. "Where precisely would you evacuate to?"

Ackbar shifted to look at her. "Lieutenant Zend has told us of her contact on Nar Shaddaa. We might be able to—"

"We are not bringing Prisht into this," Leia said between gritted teeth. "The Distributary is not a hostel for lost rebels."

The table quietened, hushed by her command, and Leia felt a tick of satisfaction that her opinion still seemed to matter in this small body of military and political leaders.

"Echo Base has not been given the green light, has it?" Mon Mothma asked into the charged quiet.

Carlist shrugged. "It is technically built but we've had some unexpected complications with the cold."

"What complications?"

"Well, the cold itself," he offered, voice dry as a midday toast on Tatooine. "That's pretty much the sum of it. Tech is not adapting well and speeders haven't been successful even in the daylight hours, much less at night. There is a real question about perimeter defenses, as well: if the shield generator can sustain the amount of power it would need to be fully functional."

Dodonna leaned in, jutting a finger into the seam of the plastisteel in front of him. "Our advance team is self-sustaining, Carlist. They report significantly fewer losses than during the initial weeks."

The Han-voice in her head offered his own opinion on that comment: I ain't going to Base Ice-Ball Hell until there're no fucking losses.

"That is a thirty-person team," Carlist pointed out. "Very different from the entire crew of Home One and her current contractors."

"We can easily lose the contractors," Dodonna said, lofty and unworried.

Leia felt a flicker of anger but pushed it down deep, biting her tongue. No need to start another fight on the subject of the unlisted—and yet utterly invaluable—personnel. At the very least, the two contractors she most worried about had officially joined.

"Malignant hypothermia is a real concern, as are the reports of a larger predatory species living in the caverns—"

"I propose we wait to evacuate until we know more," Leia interrupted, steering the conversation back on course. "Echo Base is not ready and the threat of Imperial attack is significantly less than we originally thought."

"Seconded," Carlist said. "Let's see if we can find a trajectory for the transmission before we leap to Hoth."

Ackbar rustled a stack of flimsies to his left. "I disagree. Adamantly."

Dodonna nodded his agreement with the Mon Calamari. All heads turned to the holocube, awaiting a final vote from a leader hidden somewhere where blaster bolts and ion cannons were a vaporous myth.

"Leia? Carlist? You truly believe the base is not ready?"

Leia sighed, feeling the first hints of Mon Mothma's capitulation. "We wouldn't freeze: the heaters from Nar Shaddaa are effectively keeping the advance team alive while they work, but the resources are simply not there yet. We would spend a fortune in contractor fees to sustain a base three weeks premature to complete self-sufficiency and we simply do not have those resources. The food ration is proof enough of that."

Mon Mothma seemed to weigh her words. Leia imagined her looking closely at an old scale, two plates connected by a chain, watching the hypnotizing dance of options and their costs. Life or death. Survival or annihilation.

Then, with a crackle, the voice. "Stay. Gather more information and study the gravity wells. But stay."

Leia caught Carlist's eye, nodded and stood up as the holocube deactivated and the meeting was dismissed. The briefing theater cleared quickly and within moments the two Alderaanians were alone. She leaned against her chair and held her datapad to her chest.

"Thank you for the back-up," she said to him. "I don't know why they insist on reactive commands."

"They're worried," Carlist said.

"We're all worried. That is no excuse to make impulsive decisions."

Carlist smiled a weary, ancient smile, and Leia was reminded that everyone was reeling from the losses of war, that a shroud hung over them all. Brutal and cold, the rebellion they fought was strapped for resources and suffocating under the weight of Imperial might. Could she truly blame Dodonna and Ackbar for feeling unsettled and vulnerable? She herself had risked an enormous amount to retrieve the heaters for the base on Hoth because she knew the Alliance could not sustain itself in the wilds of space forever. Perhaps impulsive decisions was too harsh a judgment.

"Princess, may I ask you a question?"

Carlist's voice was quiet, tempered, and she wondered why he needed to preface that question when it was just the two of them. They weren't in the habit of standing on ceremony any longer—the drums of war had beat them enough not to worry overmuch about social class or politeness—and aside from maintaining the habitual Your Highness, Carlist rarely bothered with niceties any longer. This wasn't the Winter Palace, after all, and he wasn't her father's chief tactician.

"Of course. Ask away," she replied, and sat back down in her chair.

He seemed to struggle with himself, with the question or maybe how to ask it, and Leia's stomach broke into nervous flutters.

"I did not include any intel about the electromagnetic interference in my initial briefing. I only heard about it myself after a full interview with Commander Solo," he said. "A full interview that happened after I initially debriefed High Command."

She blinked, swallowed. "Really?" she asked in a neutral tone.

"How did you get that intel?"

"You know how information spreads on this ship, Carlist," she said. She made an empty gesture with her hand, wispy, thoughtless, all while her brain shouted insults at her carelessness. "Half the crew knows more about our battle plans than we do."

Stalling. She was stalling and they both knew it. Carlist didn't set conversational traps: he was one of the most honest men she'd ever met, if not as rough with the truth as Han or as lilting and virtuous as Luke. Carlist lived somewhere in the middle, in a useful and mindful gray that engendered trust and respect. The kind of man who tempered his natural curtness with kindness and his intractable boldness with consideration. He could and would strike with a sword—and when he did, it would kill—but only after he'd decided it was necessary.

"I didn't ask about the Alliance gossip network," he said. "But if there is an intelligence leak in Green Squadron, I need Commander Solo to fix it immediately. And if there isn't a leak..."

He left the sentence unfinished and Leia scrambled, heart thumping wildly in her chest. Han had told her about the electromagnetic cloud and he'd told her when she'd snuck off to speak with him between High Command's two briefings on the subject. While others had gone to eat or hassle Diagnostics or draw up evacuation plans, she'd run to talk with Han, to tell him how proud she was of him, to…

"Your Highness," Carlist said, then reached a hand to her shoulder, grasping it with the warmth of a father. "Leia. I'm not prying. This is about military intelligence, nothing else."

"Are you sure?"

She regretted her tone immediately. Too sharp, too defensive, downright incriminating.

Carlist grimaced, kind eyes crinkling at the edges. "Yes. Unless there is something else I need to know?"

She tried to rein in the flood of anger and fear that spread through her system. Like a blanket of molten rock, it moved in slow, even progressions outward from her chest where her need to protect Han nestled. She offered logic as a gift to the fear: it was not against the Alliance code of conduct for a member of High Command to fraternize with a member of the commissioned ranks as long as the officer did not directly report to them. And it wasn't an intelligence leak, either. Her rank superseded Han's and she had a right to that knowledge. The only reason Carlist hadn't already disclosed the information to her in the first meeting was because Han himself hadn't yet reported it.

She saw a flurry of images then, a risque and damning constellation of skin and hair and lips and the fire of sex when it was loving and passionate and trusting. When she could escape the weight of the galaxy with someone who made her feel whole without the mantle of responsibility. How necessary it had seemed to visit Han in that moment, the draw to make sure he was safe and unrattled, unflappably the man she loved. Even as she saw the footage, even as she heard that the Millennium Falcon had arrived back to the docking bay without damage, even as she'd found him on that ramp, bullish and stubborn and victorious.

Leia licked her lips. She could deny Carlist's vague insinuations, could say she'd run into Salla or Chewie and they'd mentioned the electromagnetic cloud in passing. She could even say she'd run into Han himself and he'd told her; it was well-known around Home One that they were at the very least friends. Or perhaps Han had told Luke and Luke had told her—?

"Commander Solo told me," she said, lifting her chin and making a bold decision. "When I went to see him between briefings."

"Is that so?"

"Carlist," she began, a ready emphatic diatribe on her lips about her privacy and her own right to allocate her time and attention wherever she deemed it necessary, but stopped at the look on his face, the stubborn glint in his eyes, the set of his lips.

"Princess."

A stand-off between the two Alderaanians, cold air hissing and harsh overhead lights casting their faces into shadow. Leia kept her face unreadable but once again caught the glimmer of bemusement on Carlist's face as he tried to do the same.

She narrowed her eyes. "You know."

He pursed his lips, shook his head. "I don't know anything," he said. "I suspect."

"Based on what?"

"A few things," he said. "Some clues Solo's left. You, too."

Leia eyed him carefully, judging how much he knew and how much he was fishing for information. Carlist truly wasn't interrogative by nature but he did have a soft spot for Han. She'd seen it often since Han's commission and could even think of many situations before Nar Shaddaa when Carlist had defended her former smuggler to High Command.

But that soft spot was a glimmer in comparison to how much Carlist cared for Leia. As the last princess of his destroyed world and daughter of his good friend, she was held in higher esteem than anyone else. Of course he was watching her closely enough to catch the signs of a relationship.

"Is it possible that you are paying more attention to those few things than you should?" she asked.

After all, Carlist was a general in the Alliance. Surely he had more on his mind than the love life of his former regent and a wayward officer under his command?

"As I said, Your Highness, I don't know anything. I suspect. I might even hope."

Leia almost laughed, felt it bubble in her chest. "There is no way you hope, General."

"I'm a simple man," he answered. "I like my people happy."

She dropped her eyes, overwhelmed. She knew Carlist, had known him nearly her entire life. He was a pillar of her childhood, a staple of the House Organa. To have his blessing was the closest she would ever come to getting her father's.

"Thank you," she murmured, quiet voice in a quiet room. She reached out a hand, squeezed his elbow, smiled her thanks.

"Now, that doesn't mean Solo is above the rules, you make sure he knows that," Carlist warned, and his voice turned gruff, playful. "I'm still his commanding officer."

"Yes, sir," she said.

"If he keeps showing up late to my meetings, I'm still giving him KP duty. Him and his whole flight."

"I'll make sure he knows."

"Even if he did a damn good job for us today," he continued. "Even if I think certain people should also be proud of him."

"Certain people are very proud of him. Certain people made sure he knew how proud of him they were."

Carlist made a face but didn't reply, gathered his things and turned on his heel in what Leia suspected was a mostly playful military about-face. She grinned and, sinking into the chair, exhaled a long-held breath. The relief was different than the relief she'd felt after their dinner with Luke. Then she'd felt dread, had worried her relationship with Han would somehow spoil her relationship with Luke or Luke's relationship with Han. She had agonized that their dynamic would fall apart, jealousy or exclusion igniting tinder she hadn't known she'd laid beneath all of them. The calm acceptance she'd felt when Luke had embraced their new reality had been warming, energizing.

The relief she felt in this moment, though, was more like dropping a weight she'd been carrying on her shoulders. She felt lighter; Carlist's tacit acceptance of her relationship with Han was a good thing, of course it was, but it also exhausted her, the strain of carrying around that secret. She was emotionally-winded; her muscles didn't want to keep her upright.

The fight could wait outside the briefing theater for a few moments longer.


It had started as a self-congratulational celebration for the Mercs. Cheap bottles of ale had been liberated from Teso's illegal stash and the Mercs had opened their arms to any and all pilots, crew members or mechanics who wanted to join. Even—and this had surprised Luke to no end—his own squadron, who had loosened up on the ruthless initiation pranking to genuinely admire a good scouting run.

The Mercs and the Rogues had spent the past few weeks endlessly torturing each other, a rivalry he and Han had done nothing to stem. Failed sim scores had been scrawled on hatches and a ripoff version of the Rogues' emblem had been sewn into flight suits back from the Home One valets; nicknames took hold—sometimes cruel ones—and there had been a few tense exchanges in the mess halls. Still, outright sabotage hadn't been attempted yet. The commanders of the two flights had watched carefully for it and had drawn the line short of dangerous risk to life or limb. To be totally honest, they both thought the contention might push each flight into better runs in general, as was the usual course for fighter pilots. Ego reigned supreme. Might as well play it to their mutual advantage.

Luke wasn't naive enough to think the Rogues fully accepted the Mercs now that they'd shared a party with them. Despite all its rebellious fervor and claims of egalitarianism, the Alliance had its fair share of hierarchical bias. But the blasters seemed to have been holstered for the evening, the tricks toned down in favor of ale and whatever music it was Salla Zend was playing loudly from her main hold.

By the time Luke had discovered the festivities, it had grown massive. Not just Mercs and Rogues but Blue Squadron and quite a few off-duty crew members, too. The docking bay was now a sprawling mess of chatter and music, a veritable cesspool of sentient camaraderie; flimsy plastex card tables had been produced out of thin air and people milled between them. Luke guessed at least a hundred pilots, crew, contractors and even some command staff were hanging out in the bay's central space among the spacecraft docked on the port side of Home One.

Luke felt good about this party. Some good news wasn't going to hurt them and the food rationing had created more resentment than usual. A night of celebration was probably good for morale and it assuaged his lingering guilt over the Rogues' treatment of the Mercs.

He scanned the bay again, eyes finding Salla leaning against the starboard hull of her ship as she watched her squadron-mates set up an impromptu sabacc tournament. She held a bottle to her lips—not one of Teso's and Luke wondered if she had her own illegal stock—and appraised the scene with narrow, almost-parental distrust. Her long, lithe body curved in her dark blue flight suit like a bow, poised to strike and release hours of tension in a velocity few could anticipate.

She caught him looking. Trying to seem friendly he lifted a hand to wave, but she continued staring at him without any reaction. Luke sighed, launched himself off his perch against a ready hull near the huge bay doors and walked straight toward her. Hands up, smile broad, eyes alight, he turned on the trademark Skywalker charm.

"Hi!" he shouted over the din. "Congratulations!"

She raised an eyebrow but didn't otherwise move.

Luke's smile didn't falter, though he had to fight to keep it in place as he joined her against the Intruder's hull. "On the run, I mean. Beautifully handled."

Salla eyed him, flatly annoyed, before she looked away and crossed her arms over her chest. "Thanks, Skywalker."

Luke made a momentous effort to shake off whatever mood she was in and maintain the sunny persona he tried to project. It wasn't a lie—he was a true believer in the cause and he skewed optimistic at the very core of who he was—but Salla had that same gift that Han had of making Luke lose his cool. The loner act, the weird sense of pessimistic superiority, the jaded smuggler facade: all of it was straight out of Han's playbook and sometimes…

Sometimes Luke just couldn't stand it.

But he'd seen Salla grin like an idiot. He'd seen her let loose. They'd settled into a kind of contentious friendship, animosity in every exchange but mostly just for show. It was the opposite of his early interactions with Han, when the older man had been a pain in the ass in front of others but let his humanity show in quiet moments. Salla was more likely to be friendly in groups and more awkward and hostile in private. That was just who she was; affection seemed to be lined in the harsh words she sometimes spoke, the brutal honesty she used to tell people she cared about them.

A light, soft feeling enveloped him as he watched her, similar to how he'd felt when he first saw Han and Leia interact in the medbay after their mission to Nar Shaddaa. Light, but tinged in fear, the sense of danger lurking behind the blueish-silver haze of his usual Force impressions. He was getting used to this feeling: the Force whispering vulnerability in his ear like it was the key to understanding others. Something he'd worked out himself, not a lesson from Ben and not anything he'd ever had explained to him, his own intuition informing his Force-sensitivity. Or vise-versa. He didn't know and he didn't particularly care, either.

Simple fact: Salla was nice around other people. So this was a rare display of public mulishness. She must be feeling something different, and feeling it loud enough that the Alliance's only Jedi initiate could sense it.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. "Someone's got a holo of the maneuvering. I took a look. You guys looked good."

"Yeah."

"That big-top formation?" He whistled.

Salla nodded her head but didn't reply, the shroud of blueish-silver haze swirling around her now like a menace. Not calming in the slightest, it looked instead like it was gaining momentum. Like it was strengthening with every word he spoke.

If she thought he would leave her to her emptiness and her grimacing, she was sorely mistaken. He'd made most of his friends in his life by sheer stubborn kindness and an almost herculean sense of his own innocent charm. After all, she was the one currently blasting "Ragin' Bolts" from her sound system like the Hutts were about to take her ship from her. She was watching over this whole gig. Some part of her must have wanted him to break through the haze, even if she herself couldn't see it.

"What's wrong?" he asked. Simple. Kind. And direct. In Salla's language of brutal assertiveness. Brutal and therefore kind.

When she didn't answer he stuck his foot out and kicked her shin. She scowled at him or at his antics—he wasn't sure which—and said through gritted teeth, "Go away."

"I don't think so. No XO looks so glum at a party for their own success."

"This one does," she said quick and fast, like the swing of a lightsaber.

Luke made a show of scanning the bay, sweeping his hand out to encompass the whole scene. "Come on. You're sucking the joy out of the room."

Salla inhaled, blew out her breath like it took all of the energy she had and then sank back against the side of the Intruder. Luke felt more than saw the blueish-silver haze retract, pull tighter into her body, leaving him enough space to interact with her. A window and therefore one that would hurt him. Like a trap before a great treasure; if he could handle her next words, he could win her honesty.

Luke braced himself.

"You know how high the reward for your capture is?" she said, not looking at him.

Luke shrugged.

"A million. A cool million. For capture." She waited a beat and then looked at him. "Doesn't that bother you?"

"Not really," he answered. "I'm either safe or dead here. Or I'm safe until I'm dead. It doesn't really matter either way."

Salla eyed him, narrow and cold. He got the impression that there was more behind her anger, more to her question than she was offering, and it took him a moment to figure out what it was.

He blinked. "You're worried about the probe?"

And when he said it, the blueish-silver haze exploded, encompassed everything around them: the plastex card tables, the ships, the beings, the bottles of ale. It fell over everything, a wash of psychic dust, and Luke felt a chill go down his spine.

"Fuck, Skywalker. Yes, I'm worried about the probe," she answered, turning to him fully, bearing down on him. They were almost the same height but somehow she felt larger than life. Terrifyingly tall. "Why aren't you worried about it?"

He waited, tilted his head. "Because this has happened before?" he asked when she didn't continue, quirking his lips to the side. "We've found all sorts of space trash out there that we thought was Imperial and it never brought them to our doorstep."

"There's a first for everything."

"Don't be such a pessimist, Salla," Luke said. "We're safe."

"From who?" she asked. "The Empire?"

Luke tilted his head but didn't answer, sensing she needed to say it herself. There was power in speaking a forbidding name, of voicing a fear. A tense, long moment descended, almost like a duel. Waiting to see who took the first step, who yielded first.

But he knew how these battles went. He'd been involved in them before. Tranquility bested anxiety every time. In a challenge between gnashing teeth and calm certitude, calm won. Always.

"He wants you alive," she finally said.

Luke's heart stuttered in his chest, icing over with the frost in her tone. Him. The shadow that haunted his days and prowled through his nights. The man—no, not man—who had cut down Ben Kenobi without a single moment of hesitation. The thing who had murdered Luke's father before Luke had ever known him. The nightmare who had destroyed Leia's entire world, who had helped exterminate the Jedi Order, who preyed on the hopes of a galaxy that deserved better than slavery and tyranny and death.

Him.

"He is willing to pay a million credits for you," Salla said, low and deep. "Why?"

Luke fought for nonchalance. "I'm a Jedi."

"And he spent two decades killing Jedi, right?"

He didn't react, reached for his emotional center with the grip of a man reaching for a lifeboat.

"I grew up on Nar Shaddaa, Skywalker," she said, and her voice was hushed and her eyes were haunted. "I heard people talk. He spent millions of credits to find and kill Jedi. And he was good at it. Good enough that hardly anyone has ever met someone like you."

"And yet here I am," he said, summoning his pilot's ego. "Vader isn't perfect."

"Do you know any Jedi who survived the purge?"

"Ben Kenobi," Luke answered readily, impatience lining his tone.

"What happened to good, old Ben Kenobi?"

He shut his mouth, anger simmering at the tips of his fingers, at the set of his shoulders. Ben's heroism had been well-documented in the Alliance reports, even if his sacrifice wasn't well-known outside of the rebel ranks. Salla knew what had happened. She knew. The only reason she asked was because she wanted Luke to say it, and he refused to let his mentor exist only as a dramatic reveal.

"No? No guesses?" she taunted. "Let me help you: Vader killed him. Vader. And now he wants you."

Another silence, heavier. Luke's bright flame wavered, winded. Salla's aura wavered, too. He didn't like the nature of this conversation. At least she wasn't relishing her brutishness, and he clung to that, the authentic horror she felt.

What she felt she felt honestly, and Luke couldn't disrespect that.

Then her voice got quieter, fuller, like brimming tears that didn't dare fall. "Leia, too."

The blueish-silver haze turned red, glowing like Vader's lightsaber, and Luke wondered what that meant, what truth the Force found in Salla's words. What do you mean, Leia too? he wanted to ask. Was dying to ask.

He felt then like his brain had hit a block, like a fissure broke between that single, first thought and the next. One moment he was opening his mouth to ask Salla what she meant about Leia, and the next… The next the urge had dissipated into the air, thin and uninteresting.

"We're safe here," Luke said emphatically, like speaking it into the universe would make it so. "The probe was just a probe. He—they—are not coming here. We're safe."

I'm coming, he heard. A whisper at the back of his neck.

Salla's eyes narrowed. She licked her lips and her right hand twitched as if she was ready to pull her blaster from its holster and shoot him there on the spot. And then the shield snapped back into place, a more pleasant expression settling on her face, and she was again the roughly-pleasant XO of Green Squadron watching over her pilots. The din of the party rose and suddenly their conversation had structure, had a place and sound, and frivolity reigned once again.

"Sure," she said. "Safe."

She patted him on the shoulder as she left, as she ambled along the line of sabacc tables like she was inspecting them the way she inspected the ships she led.

Luke watched her zig-zag through the bay, watched the blueish-silver haze disintegrate into her form like it had never existed at all and felt a crude, unformed thought take root in his brain. And Leia, her voice whispered, silky and smooth, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. And Leia what? he thought, eyes shifting down and to the right, oblivious to the sound of the cantina music rising, the cheers as someone struck out spectacularly on one of the sabacc tables. The roar turned into a dull background symphony as he stood against the Intruder, listening to Salla's voice condemning Leia to his own fate over and over again.


A festering, dark universe. No starlight, no planetary body. Empty and cold, the sector bore no witnesses, told no lies. Nothing lived here, nothing died here. A spinning mess of gravitational whirlpools, a network of tethered wells pulling and pushing against each other in a suicidal, murderous wave of violence.

Vacancy. Endless nothingness. A vacuum of meaning, meaning nothing. No rise, no fall; no dark, no light. Only viciousness. Chaos.

He loved it.

Darth Vader stood on the bridge of the Executor, feet planted wide, assessing the dark as if it were a feast. The emptiness was scintillating; fetching, almost, in a way he couldn't identify. The ghost of Anakin Skywalker could—how she'd smiled, the fathomless breadth of her political convictions—but Vader had no such inclinations.

"They are here," he said.

His voice was like the start of a race, an ancient pistol with a real bullet shooting into the air. The bridge of the Executor burst into activity, their solemn vigil over their terrifying commander broken, silent but for the murmur of naval officers reporting gravitational abnormalities. A collective exhale as duty overtook the disconcerting quiet. Vader knew the crew feared his stillness more than his activity. Death was an inevitability for everyone; suffering was not always so. Suffering had dips and curves, a texture to the undercurrents of power, as vast as the void in front of him.

He had so much dark appreciation for the sheer lunacy of the Alliance's choice to station themselves here, in the brittle bottleneck of a sector with no escape. What desperation, to stop here. Filled with foolish, ranting proponents of anarchy and chaos, they flouted order for their own ends, like excitable children, distinguishable from each other only in how much Vader despised them. And yet, he saw beauty in their frantic attempt to hide from him here, in a place that reminded him of his own armor: dark and impenetrable. Inspiring fear.

Inside the mask, his lips tugged upwards in an old, unused smile.

I'm coming, he thought.

I'm here.

"Prepare for the assault," he said and then whipped around and stalked off the bridge.


Author's Note: Chapter 5 will be posted Saturday, February 1st, 2020. And on that note: Happy New Year! I hope your 2020 is joyful and full of beauty. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for all your love and support in 2019.

Special thanks to my beta for this story, AmongstEmeraldClouds, who works harder on this story than I do and is the steel-spined challenger I need. Thank you for holding firm and for striking an important balance between supporter and collaborator. Specter is as much me as it is you. Much love and thanks!- KR