Han gazed at the device that might be an archaic transponder. Putting it to his ear, he thought he could detect a faint humming sound, as if the device were awaiting a long-lost signal.

Chapter eight.

At the Aurora medical facility on Obroa-skai, life-support systems and bioscanning devices chirped and beeped to one another. Gathered around the patient's bed, a group of physicians and med droids evaluated the data and conferred.

"Brain waves indicate an elevation from phase three to hypnopompic," one of the droids reported. "Rapid eye movement has ceased."

"Carefully now," Sompa told the droid, his head tresses writhing in antic.i.p.ation. "He is surfacing, but the transition must be managed delicately." The Ho'Din physician paused to study the readouts, then turned to another of the droids. "Increase the dosage by a factor of point-five."

The droid complied, widening the aperture of a petc.o.c.k that regulated the flow of drugs into the patient's arm.

"Carefully," Sompa warned. He stole another glance at the monitors, finding encouragement in the neuroimaging displays. "I'm confident we will be able to bring him all the way back this time."

The human patient moaned, though not in pain; more as if awakening from a long afternoon nap.

In keeping with Aurora's reputation, the med droids included the best that money could buy: a humanoid industrial Automaton 2-1B; a twenty-year-old Medtech FX series 10 a.s.sistant, upgraded with the lat-est in heuristic processors; two Chiewab GH-7s, whose repulsorlifts allowed them to remain overhead and out of the way; and two MD series 11 medical specialists programmed for neurological a.n.a.lysis. None of the members of the mixed-species team of physicians wore surgical gloves, gowns, or masks; all were dressed in the immaculate jackets, trousers, and skirts that were standard issue at Aurora.

The med droids were on hand to administer drugs and monitor and record the procedures. Chief neurologist Lial Sompa wasn't expecting any surprises. The patient's vitals were excellent, and the chances of his going into shock or cardiac arrest were nominal. He had the heart and lungs of a thirty-year-old-literally-and the kidneys, spleen, pancreas, and liver of someone half his chronological age. For weeks following the most recent nerve splicing and deep neuron stimulation, he had been in and out of consciousness, experiencing sleep-wake cycles, tossing and turning, talking out loud, grinding his teeth, laughing and crying, perhaps in reaction to some of the lucid dreams Sompa had been feeding him for more than a decade now. In effect, the patient was surfacing like a deep-sea diver on a water-world-slowly and methodically, to keep from going into decompression sickness. a.s.sured of success, Sompa had ordered the feeding tube removed.

"You're too sure of yourself," Ril Bezant said. A Twi'lek, she was Aurora's most celebrated psychotherapist. "We've been at this same juncture more times than I can count."

"This time will be different," Sompa promised.

"I find it morally indefensible that you continue to devote half the resources of the facility to a pet project."

Sompa's head tresses took on sudden color. "Need I remind you that you are here only to observe?"

"I wouldn't want it any other way, Lial."

Sompa gazed at her. "Why is it you seem determined to see this man die?"

"No more determined than you are to keep him alive at any cost- if we concede to call this living."

"I want him more than alive."

"You're not omnipotent, no matter what they told yon at the Rhinnal Academy."

"I'm profoundly aware of my limitations."

"Then you've done a fine job of fooling many of us all these years." Bezant gestured to one of the display screens. "Reticular formation damage remains extensive. Segregated corticothalamic networks show limited connectivity and only partial functional integrity . . . Even if he does emerge, the chances for viability are minimal."

Sompa directed his response to the entire team. "We have kept his body alive. His muscles have been stimulated and kept healthy. Failing organs have been replaced. His blood has been cleansed. Cerebral damage notwithstanding, I'm confident we have kept his mind as sound as we have kept his body."

"Meat can be kept frozen," Bezant countered. "Beings can be preserved in carbonite. But the sentient brain isn't a muscle."

"We have given him dreams and memories. His mind is healthy."

"Implanted memories," Bezant said more firmly. "Memories of a life he hasn't lived. Even if he does awaken, he'll be a psychological mess."

Sompa was dismissive. "Side effects we can treat with therapy. As easily dealt with as recurrent dreams."

"He'll be in therapy for the rest of his life."

"Many have who didn't sustain the neural damage he did."

Bezant exhaled in defeat, her lekku quivering. "I'll never understand this, Lial. You already have a shelf full of Faan'er awards."

"This isn't about prizes, Doctor."

"Then, what? You can't possibly believe this approach has universal application. Most of the beings who receive treatments here could scarcely spend what it has cost to keep this one on ice."

"Dr. Sompa," the 2-1B interrupted.

Sompa turned in time to see the patient's eyes flutter, blink, then snap open, blue irises staring up into an a.s.sortment of human, alien, and droid faces.

"Some disconjugate motion of the optical orbs," the same droid said.

"Lower the lights," Sompa said, eyes fixed on the displays dedicated to heartbeat and respiration rates. Leaning slightly toward the patient, he said in a soft voice: "Captain Jadak."

Jadak's irises dilated, and his heartbeat increased.

"Lie still," Sompa continued. "Don't try to speak just yet." Sompa waited for Jadak's vital signs to stabilize. "You're in a medical facility, Captain. You've been here for some time-a very long time, in fact, but we'll speak of that later. As a result of suffering multifocal brain injuries, you lapsed into a persistent vegetative state. As your long recovery progressed, we saw fit to keep you in a coma until we could be certain that your injuries had healed. You've undergone a series of operations and treatments. Your muscles have received steady stimulation to prevent resorption and atrophy, and we've nourished your mind with dreams that may strike you more like memories. In time, however, you will begin to differentiate those from your actual memories."

Jadak blinked repeatedly, tears coursing from the corners of his eyes.

Sompa laid a calming hand on Jadak's shoulder. "I'm going to ask you a series of yes-or-no questions. I want you to respond with a single blink of your eyes for yes, a double blink for no. Do you under-stand?"

Jadak blinked once.

"We have attached a sensitive microphone to your throat. Later, should you feel up to it, I would like you to speak. Do you understand?"

Blink.

"Did you recognize your name when I spoke it?"

Blink.

"Do you have some recall of your life?"

Blink.

Sompa glanced briefly at Bezant, who had her arms folded across her chest.

"Here at Aurora Medical Facility, we specialize in keeping beings alive long past what would be their normal time spans," Sompa went on in the same soft, slow voice, "but you are a one-in-a-hundred-million case-what some might call a medical marvel. Few beings are fortunate enough to have a second chance. Do you understand?"

Blink.

Sompa straightened somewhat. "Do you have any memories of the accident that resulted in your coma?" Jadak blinked twice.

Sompa glanced at the heartbeat display. "That's all right, Captain. Your memory will return in due course. Are you in any pain or discomfort?"

Blink, blink.

"Do you have a physical awareness of your body?" Blink.

"Do you want to try to sit up?"

At Jadak's single blink, one of the med droids triggered a remote that raised the head of the bed. Another proffered a gla.s.s of water, from which Jadak sipped through a straw.

"Do you wish to speak?" Sompa asked after a moment. "Yes." Jadak wheezed and cleared his throat. "Reeze?" Sompa looked to one of the droids for explanation. "The copilot."

"I'm sorry, Captain. Your copilot did not survive the accident." Jadak's lowered his head in grief, then raised it. "The ship." Sompa allowed the same droid to respond. "We have no information regarding the ship." Jadak's forehead creased suddenly, and he glanced down at his body. "I can't feel my legs."

Sompa's head tresses swayed. "Yes, well, that's because we were unable to save your lower legs. We opted not to install prosthetics until we were certain you were going to be able to make use of them."

Jadak absorbed it in silence. "How long have I been in recovery?" he asked finally.

Sompa traded looks with Bezant, who beat the neurologist in responding.

"Sixty-two standard years."

Jadak's blue eyes all but bulged from his head.

Chapter nine.

New legs attached, Jadak floated in a Zaltin premier bacta tank, the translucent bluish gel warmed to match his body temperature and formulated to mimic the salinity of his own fluids. A miracle mix for a miracle man, a Bothan technician had joked on the day of the first long session. Naked except for swim shorts, Jadak wore a lightweight breathing apparatus and face mask that was actually a holoscreen, on which was running the tutorial Sompa and his team had prepared: a summation of the past sixty-two years of galactic history.

For the first two weeks following his emergence from his coma, Sompa had kept him mildly sedated and wouldn't permit him to view or use the HoloNet. He wasn't allowed a mirrpanel, either, though he had managed to get a look at himself in the reflective surface of one of the machines that monitored his vital signs. Aged, but not nearly as aged as he should have been, and full-bearded as well; his still-blond hair was parted in the center and touched the tips of his shoulders.

Nurses and aides, some human, some not, would escort him through the facility's broad, gleaming corridors or out onto the manicured grounds, which seemed to extend all the way to the distant skyline of Obroa-skai's capital city. He would encounter other beings on these outings, many of whom were recuperating from rejuvenation procedures, but all of whom had been briefed to confine their com merits and conversations to the moment. Nothing about the past, nothing about the news. Isn't it a lovely day? Don't the gardens look marvelous? This evening's dinner promises to be a pure joy . . . With his mind slowed by drugs, the daily routine and nightly dreams were almost enough to convince him that all was well, and that he was merely recovering from a swoop race crash, like the one he'd been involved in on Fondor before the war.

That a mere week had pa.s.sed rather than sixty-two years. But the truth would stalk and pounce on him in the middle of the night, in between peaks of whatever time-release drugs they had him on, and he would wake up screaming. Sixty-two years!

Added to his actual age he would only have been ninety-three, but he didn't look or feel nearly a century old. To Hutts, Wookiees, Muuns, and a handful of other species, ninety-three years barely put one past adolescence, but humans were still in the habit of dying in their early hundreds. Unless they were wealthy enough to afford rejuvenation procedures of the sort available at Aurora. Then 125, even 150 years wasn't uncommon. More important, Jadak hadn't simply been blessed with longevity; he had skipped ahead in what seemed to him an instant.

He had jumped.

No matter the time of day or night, Sompa or Bezant was always on hand to ease him through episodes of despair, reminding him that he needed to take things slowly, one step at a time, and to help him differentiate between false and real memories. He didn't really have a wife and kids or own a home on Brentaal IV. He hadn't actually done half the things he half recalled doing.

Despite the support he received, he kept thinking he would simply wake up from the longest, most dream-filled night of his life and find himself in a bunk aboard the Stellar Envoy, with Reeze whipping up breakfast in the galley. Sompa and Bezant refused to tell him anything about the accident that had landed him at Aurora. They conceded that his mind could be compelled to give up the memory, but they insisted that his long term psychic health would be better served if the memory surfaced of its own accord. The last memory he recalled with any clarity was of sitting at the controls of the old YT-1300 as it skimmed through hypers.p.a.ce. But he couldn't place the event in time, didn't know where he and Reeze had come from or where they were headed and why. So how could he be sure he wasn't still in a coma, and that all he was experiencing wasn't simply another programmed dream?

Every day for the first two weeks, Sompa had told him that he was going to be moved to the tank, holding it out like a panacea for everything, not just his replacement legs. Then one morning, without warning, he was inside the tank with the holoscreen mask adhered to his face and the tutorial running, and all doubts about the reality of his situation were laid to rest.

Because no one could have made up the catastrophic events the tutorial led him through.

The war between the Republic and the Confederacy of Independent Systems-the one in which Jadak and countless others had tried so hard to serve the cause of peace and justice-was revealed to have been nothing more than an elaborate ploy to eliminate the Jedi Order and place the galaxy in the hands of a Sith Lord. The Force had triumphed in the end, however, with Emperor Palpatine brought down by the son of a Jedi everyone had once looked to as a hero. But it had taken years of fighting with the remnants of the Empire before a New Republic rose from the ashes of the Old. And even then peace hadn't endured for long. Already beset with problems, the New Republic had been invaded by an extragalactic species known as the Yuuzhan Vong, who brought an unprecedented level of barbarity to the galaxy. Planets had been destroyed or transformed; entire species exterminated. Worlds like Coruscant and Obroa-skai were still recovering from the alien mantle the Yuuzhan Vong had seeded. Even more recently, the Galactic Alliance had suffered a threat from a young Jedi Knight who, like Anakin Skywalker before him, had embraced the teachings and tactics of the Sith in an attempt to foment a new order. And now, irony of ironies, guidance of the Galactic Alliance rested in the hands of a former Imperial officer named Natasi Daala.

The crushing revelations, the entries recounting the brutal deaths of so many of his friends and family members, the utter devastation of cities, worlds, species he had come to cherish, were enough to make Jadak's own problems seem insignificant. though his legs were healing, he came to dread the approach of each immersion session, not be cause of the sickly-sweet aftertaste of the bacta treatments themselves, but for what the tutorials continued to reveal about the tortured state of the galaxy.

For a week Jadak had resisted doing a HoloNet search on himself, and he was sorry when he finally gave in to the urge. The entries were accurate up to a point, but history hadn't been entirely kind to the memory of Tobb Jadak. Initially regarded as one of the finest compet.i.tive swoop and starship racers to appear on the scene in a hundred years-he'd set a speed record of 655 kilometers per hour on the Grandine Swoop Loop-he was, following the Balmorra Invitational, reduced to a might-have-been in the kinder entries, a discredit to the sport in others. Even those entries that told of Jadak's having been forced to throw the race as part of a point-shaving scheme controlled by Hutts aligned with the Rigorra/Groodo Family held him in contempt for having bet widely on himself to lose the race. The fact that not a single entry told the full story weighed on him. But how could it have been otherwise when the HoloNet was all but devoid of references to the Republic Group, let alone mentions of Jadak's service, despite all that had come to light about the so-called Clone Wars and Palpatine's evil plottings?

It was true that the Hutts had ordered him to throw the race. They had promised to engineer a comeback for Jadak, but he knew that a comeback, if it happened at all, would come too late to rescue his reputation or his self-respect. So he could either comply and accept the credits the Hutts were offering as compensation, or be killed along with the rest of his family. But betting on himself to lose had not been Jadak's idea; that was the Republic Group's doing. Having somehow learned of the Hutts' directive, representatives of the group had approached him shortly before the race, saying that they had a fast ship that needed a skilled pilot who was as distrustful of Palpatine as the members of the group were, and from what they knew of Jadak, he fit the bill perfectly. He wasn't surprised. He had never known when to keep his political opinions to himself, especially when some pretty reporter was pushing a microphone toward him. But the Republic Group wasn't looking for an ally so much as a being with a tarnished reputation who could mix and mingle with the galaxy's information brokers without suspicions being aroused. They needed him to play the part of a down-on-his-luck mercenary who would do anything for a credit, but in fact serve the interests of the Republic Group as a spy and courier.

Initially Jadak had refused the offer. Just because he was finished on the swoop and starship race circuit didn't mean he couldn't find piloting work with a police force, a security organization, or a private investigation firm. But as Palpatine's power increased and war began to seem inevitable, he had a change of heart. If nothing else, he could at least put his piloting abilities to some good use.

And then there was that faster-than-all-get-out YT-1300 freighter the group had picked up somewhere . . .

He remembered the prewar and war years, infiltrating the Metatheran Cartel and other crime organizations, the hundreds of trips to far-flung worlds, the encounters with arms merchants, spice dealers, CIS sympathizers . . . more often than not he didn't know what he was carrying or what he was delivering. He simply did as instructed, trusting that he was furthering the causes of the Senate Delegation of Two Thousand and the Jedi Order, fighting the war in his own fashion and taking care of his scattered family at the same time. With Reeze, also recruited by the group, Jadak had piloted the Stellar Envoy through the thick of some of the fiercest battles of the war-on Muunilist, Cato Neimoidia, and other worlds.

With each session in the bacta tank, his actual memories began to resume chronological order. But he still couldn't recall events leading up to the accident. Some HoloNet entries listed his death as having occurred shortly before the official end of the Clone Wars. There were no facts about where his death was supposed to have occurred, but it was undeniable that in some sense he had died then.

A few of the Republic Group Senators to whom he answered had survived to see the Alliance to Restore the Republic-the so-called Rebel Alliance-defeat the Empire, but all of them were now dead. Several had died as early as the Ghorman Ma.s.sacre, and others were lost on Alderaan when it was destroyed by the Death Star. Many more died during the extended conflict with the Imperial warlords. Only a handful had died of natural causes.

By his final sessions in the tank, Jadak was questioning the importance of recalling the details of the accident-especially now that a bigger question had begun to gnaw at him. With all the members of the Republic Group dead, who had been keeping him alive all these years . . . and why?

Chapter ten.

Han and Lando exchanged vigorous handshakes and a warm back-clapping embrace. When it came to greeting Leia, Lando held her in his arms for a long moment, smiling roguishly when she finally pushed him away, shaking her head in amused disapproval.

"The galaxy's one constant," Tendra said, indicating her husband with a toss of her head and hugging Leia h.e.l.lo.

"No," Leia said, "I've got one of those, too."

The Calrissians were dressed casually, in loose-fitting pants, simple pullovers, and sandals, and for perhaps the first time in her life Leia felt overdressed in their presence.

"And who is this gorgeous little creature?" Lando was saying, dropping down on one knee in front of Allana. "It can't be Amelia. Surely she hasn't grown up this much in only one year."

"Someone has to," Allana said while Lando hugged her.

"Hey," he said with theatrical surprise. "Learning your dad's bad habits already?"