Crash and Burn

It could have gone worse, Leia thought.

She had succeeded in convincing just enough of the other Senators to agree to send a team of six pandemic specialists to Chery, with two medical ships hovering in the outskirts of the system. The ships would be manned mostly by droids, and only droids would go to the surface, first to transmit visual and auditory data to the medical scientists, and then to bring back samples of tissue from the dead, encapsulated in impermeable plastic. The droids themselves would be left outside the ships for an extra measure of safety. The Senate refused, though, to send anyone or anything to the doomed Doldur asteroids or to Dantooine, citing too much danger, and if they were all under quarantine for the same reason, then Chery would yield enough information for them to make further decisions after they knew what was there.

Now she just wanted to go back to her apartment and be alone. Luke was waiting for her just outside the doors of the towering Senate Hall, and she flatly relayed the conversations from the meeting as they went out towards his waiting speeder car. "It was better that you weren't there after all," she said. "Some people are beginning to mistrust the Jedi. It is hard for them to trust what they don't understand, and right now the two things that they understand the least are the Stellar Imperium and the Jedi Order."

"We are still welcome when we have have information to share, I hope," he said.

"At this time, even information from pirates is taken at high value, so if you run intro trouble, then the problems we have run deeper than a conflict with the Stellar Imperium."

Luke glanced around at the dozens of other beings, many of which were looking at him. "Should we separate and have you go home another way?" he asked quietly.

"There's no reason to hide my connections to the Jedi. Everyone knows of them or can easily find out, especially since those who oppose Jedi involvement in matters of war are more than willing to bring it up." She saw one such person - Senator Prille Quoll of the Angwel Collective - standing a few meters ahead. Quoll was about Leia's age, and details of the new Senator's personal life were sketchy. She had been elected only the previous year to represent a loose collective of five star systems in the Outer Rim. Now she carried a girl of around two years, who was dressed in a frilly, lacy gown long enough to prevent her from walking without tripping on the hem, and stood with a tan-robed man whose face was deeply scarred under neatly trimmed and combed blond hair and a hood that covered his eyes. The small child vaguely resembled the young man in his unmarred features, and Leia guessed they might have been Quoll's children.

Leia thought of Anakin, and grabbed Luke's arm, but she kept her expression steady, if stiff.

Senator Quoll turned around and faced Leia. She stood several centimeters taller than Luke and wore some kind of contact lenses over her eyes, covering iris and sclera alike. Leia made a clumsy poke through the Force, wondering if the woman might have been a well-disguised Miraluka, with the younger child likewise in disguise or not really hers; given that the man's eyes were covered, it seemed likely that one or the other of those was true, or perhaps both. Leia determined, though, that Quoll was decidedly human, and very dim in the Force, barely a glimmer, as though she was very ill or drained.

"Senator Organa-Solo." Quoll nodded, and glanced briefly at Luke. She spoke with a very faint old-Imperial accent. "I did not expect to see you at the meeting today. It was very brave of you to join us."

"Why is it brave of me to do my job?" Leia asked evenly.

"I have heard the news." Quoll lowered her voice and stepped closer to the Skywalker twins. "Not publicly, but through a discreet source. I am deeply sorry about the loss of your boys. This kind of tragedy is precisely why I am hoping for a diplomatic solution to the trouble with the Stellar Imperium. No more fighting, and no more death."

Leia ground her teeth and used her limited abilities to keep her composure. "Jacen is alive," she said. "My daughter Jaina knows this, and I believe her. I, too, would know if anything happened to him. He is only missing."

Quoll smiled sadly. "Then perhaps he will be found. In any case, you are not alone in your grief. I lost my only sister in battle just this year. There has to be a better way than fighting. Let the Stellar Imperium control and quarantine the areas they have polluted, as terms of negotiation, and we should let them have those systems when they are cleansed. Nothing more than that. Empress Shira may agree to it, and if there is indeed trouble with a plague that escaped her control, it would be best for all."

"She will agree to nothing of the sort while she has more intel than we do. Until we know what weapons she has and how to deal with them, we are negotiating from a place of weakness."

"And if she is merely exporting her own troubles to the New Republic, then we are playing into her hands. We are a government entity, Senator Organa-Solo, not a charity organization. If the Jedi wish to function as such that is their own business, but we cannot have the New Republic answering to spoon benders... No offense intended, Master Skywalker, but your agents have fared no better than ours. I do not understand how you use this Force energy, but as more systems fail, it becomes clear to all that it is not working." She sighed and shifted the baby from one hip to the other. "There, I have opened my mouth and spoken too openly. Many apologies; I was always better at planning strategies than dealing in conversation."

"A little more honesty might do more good than carefully chosen disingenuity," Luke said.

"Truth has been spoken. We might disagree on matters of policy, but if two people are alike in mind, then one of them is unnecessary. Good day, Senator Organa-Solo and Master Skywalker."

"Bye-bye," the little girl added, waving as Senator Quoll walked away.

Leia turned to Luke when Senator Quoll and her small entourage were gone. "What did you sense?" she whispered.

"She was shielding, and so was her... her son? Her aide? I'd keep a close watch on them."

"You don't think-"

"No, I don't think she's with Empress Shira, unless the Empress wants to surrender under unfavorable terms. That doesn't make sense, and you said the Senate votes almost swung towards ceasing the fighting and bringing Empress Shira to a meeting to discuss terms of a possible permanent end to the conflict. It came too close to passing to be their work. However, I still don't think Quoll is trustworthy. In any case, we need to keep going with our private investigations. There is still something darkening the Force, and we know that it wasn't Darth Trefitz on his own. There are more Sith, and we have no idea where they are in Empress Shira's organization or what they are planning."

They climbed into the unmarked speeder car and Luke wove a twisting path through the Coruscanti skylanes so that they would get lost in the crowds, no longer a target for snipers or chasers. "There's more that you're not telling me," Leia said.

"It's been confirmed that the Doldur asteroids are full of the plague that swept through Chery and most likely Dantooine," he said. "We have the last comm transmission from Alema Rar after she infiltrated the asteroid belt and broke into one of the refugee camps. It's the same thing that you saw on Cherzor: everything that was alive is dead. Absolutely everything - every sentient, every animal, every plant, and every parasite. Bodies in states of very slow decomposition even after lying in hot areas for days. It makes sense; if all life is susceptible, then that includes bacteria. Nothing is feeding on the dead."

"Did anything survive? Anything at all, even a weed?"

"Not that we know of." Luke sighed and suddenly looked as though he aged ten more years. "The most telling thing might be her report of the disease's progression in a Force-sensitive individual. The ability to alter the Force diminishes, followed by sensing. After a matter of hours, one is weakened and drained, as though one's Force power is completely stripped. Then the weakness becomes more and more severe, and one can't maintain a high body temperature. The Force is in every living thing - and this disease seems to be working by completely choking the life essence of everything. Species doesn't matter."

"That means she's..." Horror crossed Leia's face. "Not Alema, too!"

"Alema has been lost," Luke said. "Numa doesn't know yet, and I'm going to have to tell her later today. But if everything I've heard is true, then Jacen and Anakin may both be safe. If Anakin had the plague of Dantooine and was dying, you wouldn't have been able to feel him in the Force at all. You did, and he may only be injured. Maybe they were forced to take refuge before getting to Dantooine, or maybe they've found a way to keep themselves sealed off from whatever's been killing everyone."

"I almost don't want to believe it." Leia wiped her eyes. "If I do believe he's alive and he's gone... he's my son, Luke. I don't think you can understand this."

"I wouldn't give you false hope, Leia. With what we know, I think Jacen is safe and Anakin's state is not known. There a hundred or more reasons why they might not have contacted us yet, and I feel that they're still alive and hiding somewhere."

Leia said nothing more, but sobbed quietly, and they rode the rest of the way back to the Solos' apartment in silence.

She walked into the apartment without saying anything to C-3P0 or Han, pushing past them gently and going to the bedroom. Leia closed the door behind her, and no one went to bother her.

Luke waved Jaina outside and they took a walk downstairs and outside, through the large flowered courtyard behind the apartment complex. "I have a mission for you," he said. "We need all the Jedi to do their parts, and I've decided on one for you to take."

Jaina put her hands in her pockets and looked up at her uncle. She'd been wanting something, anything to do since she got back from Chery, and was grateful even for this short opportunity to get out of the oppressive apartment. Han wouldn't let her go out alone, even though she was already nineteen, and the thick sadness in the air was choking her. She couldn't get away from it, even when she locked herself in her own room and sat down with a pile of broken droid parts to puzzle out and put back together. Here, at least, she could breathe again.

"What do you want me to do?"

"We need another Jedi stationed on Yavin 8. Right now there are several of our younger members hidden there, with Sannah's people and Zekk, but I'd feel better with a second full Jedi Knight watching over them. So I want you to go to Yavin 8. Tahiri, Valin, and Sannah are there, with Valin's little sister Jysella; you'll mainly be looking after Jysella until I can contact her grandfather and make other arrangements for her."

"What's the danger, besides the usual?" Jaina asked. "Zekk is capable, and the Melodies have their own young, and they could keep Jysella almost as safe as I could."

"In times of peace, yes, but there would be no reason to keep anyone hidden if this was relative peace time. It's unlikely that anyone would detect Jedi children on Yavin 8, but if they do - there is still reason to think there are Sith hidden in the Stellar Imperium - then it will be your job to make sure no harm comes to the trainees. I would feel better with two of you there instead of only one; if the Sith come to cause trouble, they'll be facing two trained Knights."

Jaina's mouth dropped open. "You're sending me to Yavin 8 to baby-sit Jysella when Zekk is already doing that?" she cried. "Uncle Luke, who's a better pilot than me, besides you and Kyp Durron? Nobody. Who has been flying with experienced New Republic pilots since she was sixteen? I have been. And now I'm being shipped off to be a four-year-old's nanny?"

"I'll recall you if we need you elsewhere. But right now you're one of the only Jedi Knights that isn't busy on another mission, and there's a backup job that needs to be done. You're the only one available on such a short notice, and if I didn't trust you completely, I wouldn't put the lives of four apprentices in your hands."

"If Yavin 8 was such a dangerous place, so bad that Zekk couldn't handle it, then he wouldn't be there with the children. You're just trying to stick me somewhere far away from the action because of Anakin." She scowled. "I don't want to be safe, Uncle Luke. I want to be fighting. I want to be doing everything I can to stop the Stellar Imperium and find Jacen!"

"Your grief isn't the only grief in the galaxy, Jaina," Luke said firmly. "I believe that there is a chance that both of your brothers are alive, but I can't know for certain if this is true, or even if either of them have survived. No matter what the true story is, they're missing. Your parents have lost two of their three children and we don't know where they are, if anywhere. Two of my nephews are gone - I'm not going to tell my sister that her last child was killed in a dogfight."

"I," Jaina said angrily, "am not going to die in a dogfight. And it's hardly fair to make me useless because a decision you made went in a way you didn't plan. "

"You won't be killed in a space battle because you'll be on Yavin 8, on the ground. I made this decision and am not interested in arguing about it. And I think the time will do you a bit of good; your anger concerns me, and you won't be feeding it as much."

"And if I refuse to go?"

"Then I'm going to have to ask you to hand over your lightsaber and take a long, hard look at yourself. Decide if you really want to be a Jedi or not."

Jaina stopped walking, and she balled her hands into tight fists. Only after a minute did she slowly relax her hands and let them fall to her sides. "Fine," she said through clenched teeth. "I will go to Yavin 8 and look after the Horn girl. But if there is a call for pilots, I want to be informed of this and allowed to leave."

"If we need you, Jaina, then I promise to call you back. I can't give any more than that."

Jaina nodded stiffly, then turned around abruptly and marched back into the apartment complex to pack. She said nothing further to Luke, but silently fumed all the way to the lift, keeping one step ahead of the sorrow by focusing on who was to blame: Empress Shira and her Imperium. One way or another, she was going to get her brother back, even if she had to tear the Stellar Imperium apart brick by brick to get to him.