I spied an area that looked to have been a victim of collateral rather than deliberate damage and put down in a denuded patch of ground, in hot, teeming rain. All around me buildings and houses were engulfed in flames-the fires energized by whatever fuels the indigenous human population used. Everywhere I looked I saw bodies being pulled from raging torrents of water or cascades of thick mud. As I emerged from the ship, a human of perhaps forty standard years disengaged from a group of others in the process of collecting bodies and approached the ship.

"Thank you for responding to our distress call," he yelled over the driving rain in thickly accented Basic. When I told him that I hadn't received any distress signals, he said: "Through your ship, you mean." I confirmed it, but he only nodded. I was here, he told me, and that was what mattered. His name, he said, was Noneen.

I followed him into the rain, asking if he knew why the attack had been launched.

"The Imperials didn't explain," he said calmly. It emerged, however, that the governor of the planetary sector was believed to have angered the Emperor, and Hijado was being made an example. It sounded all too familiar, and what with the number of dead surrounding me I must have allowed my despair to show.

But Noneen only said: "Don't mourn for us. There was no dying here; only going."

At the time I interpreted the words as merely poetic, little realizing the import they would take on in the coming weeks, months, and, ultimately, years.

In what amounted to a local week, I a.s.sisted in the retrieval of more than five hundred bodies, all of which were ritually burned in the remains of a place of worship. When not rooting about and helping to haul corpses, my droids and I tended to wounds, burns, and broken bones in the small clinic the Falcon became. It took some time to set in, but gradually I realized that I had yet to encounter an elderly person among the injured or the dead, and I asked Noneen about it.

At first he didn't understand my question. Then he pointed to a woman perhaps a bit older than he was and said: "Magan has one hundred one stellar cycles." Then he pointed out a slightly older-looking man. "Sonnds has one hundred forty cycles."

Since I already knew that Hijado's year was roughly equivalent to Coruscant's, the ages Noneen quoted had to be wrong.

"How many cycles do you have?" he asked me. When I told him twenty-eight, he said that he would have thought I had many more.

Now, I don't know many young women who enjoy hearing that they look older-much older-than they actually are. But Noneen was right. Those of his people who were my chronological peers looked much younger. Still, I found it difficult to accept. Data on Hijado wasn't very extensive, but it was an established fact that the planet's human population had migrated from the Core several millennia earlier. So either Hijado's humans had evolved into longer-lived beings, or there was something about the now ravaged planet that had granted them unusual longevity.

Within a month of my arrival Noneen and the others were already rebuilding their homes. If they had grieved for the dead, they had done so in private, for I had yet to see so much as a tear shed by anyone. Then one afternoon while I was collating the data I had compiled on the group's rapid ability to heal-physically and emotionally- Noneen and several others returned from a trek into the forest with a dozen or more huge vats of tree sap, all of which had been colored with fruit extracts, clay, and ground minerals. Without bothering to consult me, they were soon painting the Falcon with the saps, turning her from white to deep red, and replacing the medical symbols with enigmatic sigils. When they were done, the ship sported a snarling mouth and a row of fanged teeth, clenched fists at the tips of the mandibles, and flaming feathers covering her dorsal surface. The laser cannon had become a kind of fiery flower; the c.o.c.kpit an angry eye.

When I finally asked Noneen for an explanation, he told me that the Falcon was being prepared. "Prepared for what?" I asked.

His response was matter-of-fact: "Vengeance for those who went." If he meant literal vengeance on Hijado's Imperial base, he had some news coming, and I provided it. "First of all," I told him, "I'm a healer, not a soldier."

"I am also a healer," he said. "What difference does that make?" I told him that I dealt in saving lives, not sowing death. "By avenging those who left," he said, "we will be saving lives." I told him I wasn't a combat pilot, and that the droids weren't capable of executing more than basic maneuvers.

"But you can fly us over the Imperial base," he said. I admitted I had enough skill for that, and then I lowered the boom. I told him that the laser cannon wasn't operational.

That seemed to stop him cold, but only for an instant. He said: "If it was constructed to be a weapon, then it will function as one."

My mind raced. I hadn't seen a single weapon among Noneen's people. Tools, of course, but no weapons, and certainly nothing that was going to power a discharged laser cannon. So I asked myself, what was the worst that could come of my executing a fly-by over the Imperial base? The Imperials' scanners would show the Falcon to be harmless-even wearing the ferocious mask Noneen's group had applied. They would warn us to steer clear of the base, and that would be the end of it.

"If I agree to do this," I said, "will you permit me to live among you for a period of time?"

He a.s.sumed I had no home of my own, which was true of course, but had nothing to do with my request. I told him I wanted to learn how it was that he and his people lived as long as they did.

"There is no technique," he said, surprising me. "We simply live as long as we wish to live."

I didn't reveal my suspicions that there was a lot more to it. I was still convinced that the secret was in the food or the water, or lurking in some endocrine gland Noneen had that I didn't. I did make it clear that I wanted permission to take blood and tissue samples- permission to break the seal, as Noneen would have said. And he agreed to it.

The Imperial base was several hundred kilometers distant, close to many of Hijado's hardest-hit areas. Noneen stood in the c.o.c.kpit behind me and one of the droids, while six others sat in a circle on the deck of the main hold. I had already observed one of these communal rituals, but neither then nor now was I able to determine the intent. Fifty kilometers out from- the base, the Falcon let me know that the Imperials were scanning the ship, and shortly a voice barked through the comm, demanding to know who we were and where we were headed. By voice and telesponder I identified the Falcon as a medical ship and transmitted a bogus flight plan that would take us five kilometers north of the base. The comm went silent for a moment, then a different Imperial said: "Judging by the look of your ship, you've become a witch doctor."

"Just trying to blend in," I told him.

We were warned to maintain our heading, which was precisely what I planned to do. But Noneen said it was crucial that we fly closer to the base. Announcing that he was going up top, he hurried for the ladderwell that accessed the laser cannon turret, leaving me to come up with an excuse.

"My scanners indicate a storm along our heading," I told the base, and requested permission to come about to a vector that would put us within three kilometers of the Imperials. Their response was just what I expected.

"There is no storm," I was told. The Falcon's scanners were in error. I was warned a second time to maintain my course, and advised that I would be shot from the sky if I didn't obey. Chiming from the instrument panel had already apprised me that the ship was in weapons lock, but I also knew that by disappointing Noneen I would ruin my chances of being allowed to remain among his people. So I did something I'd never done before: I gave the Falcon full throttle and flew straight for the base.

I still have no idea how I managed to evade the Imperial laser bolts that streaked for the ship, particularly because I had my eyes closed for a good part of the run. I think, though, our luck had everything to do with the Falcon's astonishing speed and the Imperials' overconfidence.

After all, it was just an old freighter.

Before I knew it, we were fifty kilometers south of the base and Noneen had returned to the c.o.c.kpit. I was so busy checking the threat screen for signs of pursuers that I scarcely heard him when he said that the mission had been successful, and that the base was gone.

I directed his attention to one of the scanners that showed the base to be exactly as and where it was when we left it, but he was adamant. The base was destroyed, and his people were avenged. If my way of looking at the world didn't restrict me to seeing in the moment, I would realize that the Imperials were gone.

I remember telling him that everything dies in time. And I remember him telling me that the base had left before its time.

On our return to the village, the Falcon was scrubbed clean of her mask, rubbed with oils enough to make a protocol droid envious, and adorned with flowers, inside and out. In small ceramic pots placed throughout the ship, sticks of fragrant incense burned. Though Noneen never said as much, I believe the ship became a kind of temple for his people. They would find the slightest excuses for visiting me aches and pains, minor cuts and rashes-and they would submit without complaint to blood draws and scans performed by the medical droids.

My studies over the course of the next year turned up some remarkable findings. Noneen's people seemed to know beforehand when someone was about to die-though the term they used was leave. Noneen would sometimes say that this person or that was gone-even though I would be looking directly at the person, sometimes speaking with him or her. And sure enough, the person would die soon after, often without evidence of disease.

I asked him if his people had known before about the Imperial a.s.sault, and he said that they had. They saw the village gone. Was this precognition the result of the Force? I wondered. Noneen's answer was it might be.

Shortly into my second year of living among them, the entire village began to lapse into an uncharacteristically somber state. When I finally asked Noneen the reason, he told me that I was going. It was understood that I didn't realize I was going, and so everyone had kept it to themselves.

While I refused to believe it, I subjected myself nevertheless to every imaginable scan, all of which showed me to be in near-perfect health. Noneen, however, was insistent. I was going. But if I would allow a ritual to be performed on my behalf, it was possible that my leaving could be postponed for a time. I eagerly agreed to it, and when the ritual was completed Noneen told me that it had been partially successful.

Almost immediately I became terribly ill.

Had they done this to me? I asked myself. Was it a plan all along? Tests carried out by the droids eventually revealed that I had a congenital disease that had somehow gone unnoticed in almost thirty years of medical scans. By all rights I should have been dying, but I wasn't. Something was holding the disease in check. But for how long? I wondered.

I realized then that I was destined to remain with Noneen and his people for however long it would lake to unravel the secret of their uncanny abilities. I became positively giddy with grandiose dreams. With all the progress the human species had made in the realms of science and technology, the secrets that would allow us to see into the future and perhaps extend our life spans had yet to be unlocked. And here I stood, poised to solve the mystery. Save for one problem.

For months, I had been working up the nerve to ask Noneen how long he and his people would live, though I phrased the question differently. I said: "Are you here to stay?"

He gave his head a resigned shake. "We are going."

"When?" I pressed, my voice betraying my utter sense of loss. "Soon. Long before you leave."

I doubled my efforts to learn everything I could about Noneen's people, but without success. And in the face of failure I'm afraid I morphed into more of a mad scientist than a medical pract.i.tioner. Another year pa.s.sed.

The Millennium Falcon had in large measure become part of the village landscape. But then one day the entire village turned out to clean the ship from stem to stern, removing the flowers and incense before coloring her with tree sap of the brightest hues I had ever seen them use. At least it wasn't war paint, I a.s.sured myself. Still, I found the sudden attention to be as worrisome as it was baffling.

By way of explanation, Noneen told me that the Falcon had disappeared.

"Gone like the Imperial base?" I asked him. "Simply gone," he said. "Moved on." There was nothing I could do. She had left. Each morning for the next month I was amazed to find the Falcon resting on her landing gear, gaudy with paint but still there. I don't know what I expected to happen, but it wasn't until the Molpol Circus arrived on Hijado that I began to understand. Dax Doogun took one look at the ship and decided that he had to have her. And in fact the Falcon couldn't have looked more perfect for a circus. Dax's offer was generous beyond my wildest imaginings-more than enough to finance the medical and research center I dreamed of establishing on Hijado.

And how could I refuse, in any case, when the Millennium Falcon had already moved on?

"'The research team I a.s.sembled remained on Hijado for ten years," Parlay Thorp said from one of the garden benches. "Long enough, I might add, to see the Imperial base destroyed-an event Noneen and his people took in stride, since to them it had been long gone."

"I take it you've put your discoveries to good use here at Aurora,"

Leia said.

Thorp smiled faintly. "How I wish. But the truth of the matter is that we never discovered the key to their precognitive abilities or their longevity. In an effort to find some link to other long-lived species- Hutts, Wookiees, Gen'Dai, and Falleen-we carried out exhaustive studies, but found none. We considered the possibility that Noneen's people were tuned into the same sort of circadian rhythms to which many insectoid and saurian species respond, but the results were inconclusive. We thought that their health and longevity could be attributed to a naturally occurring form of bacta or bota, but found no evidence of that."

Thorp looked at Leia. "I never entirely let go of my belief that they had the Force."

Leia said nothing.

"After a group of Rebels destroyed the Imperial base, the Empire returned to make a further example of Hijado." Thorp glanced at Allana. "I ... don't know what became of Noneen and his people."

"Maybe they were already gone," Allana said, climbing up into Leia's lap.

"Perhaps they were," Thorp said with a smile.

"And maybe they did have the Force."

"Well, who knows," Thorp said. "Perhaps someday we'll chance upon a sentient species that will provide us with the key to immortality. Until such time, there's little we can do but continue to rely on technology to extend our lives year by year." She brightened somewhat. "Doctor Sompa recently had a human patient emerge from a coma that lasted for more than sixty years. The exception to the rule, of course. Even with beings frozen in carbonite."

Han stirred uncomfortably in his chair, "Getting back to the Falcon ..."

"Ah, yes. You're wondering how such a ship should find her way into the life of a young physician."

"Someone gave it to you!" Allana said.

Thorp's eyes widened and she laughed. "You're absolutely right, Amelia. Someone actually gave it to me. He said it was a donation."

"He," Han said, sitting forward.

Thorp turned to him. "At the time he refused to tell me his name, but I eventually found out. Someone had done a poor job of clearing the Falcon's registry, which listed the owner as Quip Fargil. I've no idea where he ended up, but he was on Vaced when he gave me the ship. And I remember having the distinct impression that he was a soldier."

"An Imperial?" Han said, steeling himself for bad news.

Thorp shook her head. "He had the look of a Rebel."

"I'm telling you, Lestra, it's the same ship," Lial Sompa's 3-D image said from atop the holoprojector built into the hardwood floor of the mansion study on Epica.

Oxic's expression of incredulity didn't change. Muting the study's audio feed, he glanced at Koi Quire. "Any history of mental illness in Sompa's family?"

"None that I'm aware of. We should at least hear him out." Oxic reenabled the audio pickups. "Lial, Corellian Engineering manufactured more than ten million YT-Thirteen-hundreds just in the first years of production."

"I'm aware of that," the Ho'Din said, showing some indignation.

"But both Jadak's Stellar Envoy and Han Solo's Millennium Falcon came off the line at the same time. You don't find that the least bit significant?"

"I find it circ.u.mstantial," Oxic said. "What's more, hasn't Solo had that particular YT forever?"

"No, he hasn't. He and his family are looking into the origins of the ship. That's why they visited Aurora-to ask Parlay Thorp if she knew who had owned it previously. Is it so hard to accept that Captain Jadak was one of the former owners?"

Oxic considered it briefly. "You're making a case that while Jadak has been searching, for the ship forward in time, Han Solo has been searching into the past?"

Sompa shook his head tresses in exasperation. "Exactly."

"There is an appealing symmetry to it," Quire said.

"Here's another thing for you to consider, counselor" Sompa said, "Jadak was a professional swoop racer. Any freighter he piloted would have been a fast one, and the Millennium Falcon is known to be one of the fastest ships of its kind in the galaxy."

"Appealing and somewhat convincing," Quire said.

Oxic muted the audio once more. "Do we have a clue as to Jadak's present whereabouts?"

"Not a whiff of a clue. If he contacted Rej Taunt, he did so by comm."

"Have we checked incoming and outgoing communications?"

Quire laughed. "You can't be serious. Check Rej Taunt's communications?"

Oxic made a dismissive motion. "Forget I asked." Audio reactivated, he turned to the three-quarter holoimage of Sompa. "Was Dr. Thorp able to provide Solo with any useful information?"

"Of possible use. She was executing one of her mercy missions on Vaced when she was given the ship by a human named Quip Fargil."

"Vaced?" Oxic said, looking at Quire.

"Out past Bilbringi, I think." She frowned in thought. "I'll have to check."

"That, in any case, is where the Solos are headed," Sompa said.

"Thank you, Lial."

Oxic deactivated the holoprojector. Pressing the tips of his fingers together, he brought them to his lips. "How astronomical would the odds be?"

"That the Stellar Envoy and the Millennium Falcon are the same ship, or that Jadak and his partner are bound for Vaced?"

"Take your pick."

Quire shrugged. "If they are the same ship, then just about anything is possible."

"Let's suppose for the sake of argument that the ships are one and the same. If we could get our hands on the Millennium Falcon before Jadak does ..."

Quire nodded. "Then Jadak would be forced to come to us to get what he needs from the ship."

He watched Quire closely. "At worst all we'll have done is steal the wrong ship. Or would that be a problem for you?"

She thought for a moment. "I've always thought of the Falcon as Han Solo's ship. But he happens to be married to the woman who in some sense rescued my species. Were it not for Leia Organa, my people might still be drifting among the stars in stasis or enslaved on some remote world."

Oxic narrowed his eyes. "If I knew your real name, I could compel you to help me."