Heirs of the Force

4

“There,” said Jaina, mentally relaxing her hold on a large mass of tangled wires and cables. It came “to rest in a more or less contained jumble atop one of the newly tidied stacks of electronic components in her room. “That should do it,” she added with a satisfied nod.

“Does that mean we can go to morning meal now?” Jacen said. “You’ve been at this half the night.”

“I want Dad to be impressed.” Jaina shrugged.

Jacen laughed. “He never stacks his tools this neatly!”

“Guess I did get a little carried away,” Jaina replied, matching his grin. “We’ve still got a few hours before they get here.”

Jacen snorted and stood up from the floor, where he’d been sitting next to his sister while they worked. He brushed the dust off his jumpsuit and ran long fingers through his dark brown curls. “Well, how do I look?”

Jaina raised a critical eyebrow at him. “Like someone who’s been up all night.”

He hurried over to peer anxiously into the small mirror that Jaina had hung above her cistern. She realized that her brother was just as nervous and excited about seeing their father again as she was.

“It’s actually not too bad,” she assured him. “I think raking the twigs and leaves from your hair really helped. Here, put this on.” She pulled a fresh jumpsuit from a chest by her bed. “You’ll look more presentable.”

When Jacen went into the next room to change, Jaina took his place at the mirror. She wasn’t vain, but, as with her room, she preferred to keep her personal appearance neat and clean.

She ran a comb through her straight brown hair and stared at her reflection. Then, with a quick peek over her shoulder to be sure her brother wasn’t looking, she pulled back a handful of strands and worked them into a braid. Jaina would never have gone to this much trouble for an ambassador or some silly dignitary—but her father was worth the effort. She hoped Jacen wouldn’t notice or comment on it. Finished, she stepped through her doorway and poked her head into Jacen’s room. “All the animals fed?” she asked.

“I took care of that hours ago,” he said, emerging in his clean, fresh robe. He heaved a long-suffering sigh. “At least someone’s had their morning meal.”

Jaina gnawed her lip, anxiously scanning the sky for any glimmer that might herald the arrival of the Millennium Falcon. She and Jacen stood at the edge of the wide clearing in front of the Jedi academy, where the hideous monster had appeared the day before. The area’s short grasses had been trampled down by frequent takeoffs and landings.

Jaina smelled the rich green dampness of the early morning in the jungle that surrounded the clearing. The foliage rustled and sighed in a light breeze that also carried the trills, twitters, and chirps that reminded her of the wide profusion of animal life that inhabited the jungle moon.

Beside her, Jacen shifted impatiently from one foot to the other, a frown of concentration etched across his forehead. Jaina sighed. Why did it seem like everything took forever when you were looking forward to it, and things that you didn’t want to happen arrived too soon?

As if sensing her tension, Jacen suddenly turned to her with a mischievous look in his eye. “Hey, Jaina—you know why TIE fighters scream in space?”

She nodded. “Sure, their twin ion engines set up a shock front from the exhaust—”

“No!” Jacen waved his hand in dismissal. “Because they miss their mothership!”

As was expected of her, Jaina groaned, grateful for a chance to get her mind off waiting, even if only for a moment.

Then a comforting hum built and resonated around them, as if the sound of their mounting excitement had suddenly become audible. “Look,” she said, pointing at a silver-white speck that had just appeared high above the treetops.

The glimmer disappeared for a few moments and then, with a rush of exhaled breath that she hadn’t realized she’d been holding, Jaina saw the Millennium Falcon swoop across the sky toward the clearing.

The familiar blunt-nosed oval of their father’s ship hovered tantalizingly above their heads for a moment that seemed to stretch to eternity. Then, with a burst of its repulsor-lifts, it settled gently onto the ground in front of them. The Falcon’s cooling hull buzzed and ticked as the engines died down to a low drone. The scent of ozone tickled Jaina’s nostrils.

Jaina knew the shutdown procedures for the Corellian light freighter, but she wished that just for today there was some way to speed things up. When she thought she could wait no longer, the landing ramp of the Falcon lowered with a whine-thump.

And then their father bounded down the ramp, gathering the twins into his arms, ruffling their hair, and trying to hug both of them at once, as he had done when they were small children.

Han Solo stepped back to take a good look at his children. “Well!” he said at last, with one of those lopsided grins for which he was so famous. “Except for your mother, I’d say this is the finest welcoming committee I’ve ever had.”

“Dad,” Jacen said, rolling his eyes, “We are not a committee.”

As her father laughed, Jaina took a moment to study him, and was relieved to note that he had not changed in the month that they had been gone from home. He wore soft black trousers and boots that fitted him snugly, an open-necked white shirt, and a dark vest—a comfortable, serviceable set of clothes that he sometimes jokingly referred to as his “working uniform.” The battered, familiar shape of the Millennium Falcon was unchanged as well.

“How do we look, Dad?” Jaina asked. “Any different?”

“Well, now that you mention it…” he said, turning his gaze to each of them in turn. “Jacen, you’ve grown again—bet you even caught up with your sister. And Jaina,” he said with a wicked grin, “if I didn’t think you’d throw a hydrospanner at me for saying so, I’d tell you that you’re even prettier than you were a month ago.”

Jaina blushed and gave an unladylike snort to demonstrate what she thought of such compliments, but secretly she was pleased.

A loud, echoing roar from inside the ship saved her the embarrassment of having to come up with a response. A large form thundered down the boarding ramp. Huge heavily furred arms reached out to grab Jaina and threw her high into the air.

“Chewie!” Jaina shrieked, laughing as the giant Wookiee caught her again on the way down. “I’m not a little kid anymore!” After Chewbacca had repeated this greeting ritual with her brother, Jaina finally said what she and Jacen were thinking. “It’s good to see you, Dad, but what brings you to the Jedi academy?”

“Yeah,” Jacen added. “Mom didn’t send you to check if we had enough clean underwear, did she?”

“Nah, nothing like that,” their father assured them with a laugh. “Actually, Chewie and I needed to come out this direction to help my old friend Lando Calrissian open up a new operation.”

Jaina had always had a great fondness for Lando, her father’s dark and dashing friend, but she also knew him well enough to realize that her adopted “uncle” Lando was always involved in some crackpot moneymaking scheme or another. She held up a hand to stop her father.

“Wait, let me guess. He’s—he’s starting a new casino on his space station and he needed you to bring him a shipload of sabacc cards.”

“No, no, I’ve got it,” Jacen said. “He’s opening a new Nerf ranch and he wants you to help him build a corral.”

At this Chewbacca threw back his head and bleated with Wookiee laughter.

“Not even close.” Han Solo shook his head. “Corusca gem mining deep in the atmosphere of the gas giant.” He pointed up to the great orange ball of the planet Yavin in the sky overhead. “He asked us to come and help him set up the operation.”

“Oh, blaster bolts!” said Jacen, snapping his fingers. “That was going to be my next guess.”

Another faint Wookiee-sounding bellow came from inside the Millennium Falcon. Chewbacca turned and strode back up the ramp.

“What was that?” Jaina asked.

“Oh, I forgot to mention,” Han said. “When Luke found out we had to come here anyway, he asked us to stop by Chewie’s homeworld of Kashyyyk and pick up a new Jedi candidate. He’s going to be your fellow student.”

As Han spoke, Chewbacca thumped back down the ramp, closely followed by a smaller Wookiee, who was still taller than Jacen or Jaina. The younger Wookiee had thick swirls of ginger-colored fur, with a remarkable swirling black streak as wide as Jaina’s hand that ran from just above his left eye up over his head and down to the middle of his back. He wore only a belt woven of some glossy fiber that Jaina could not identify.

“Kids, I’d like you to meet Chewie’s nephew Lowbacca. Lowbacca, my kids Jacen and Jaina.”

Lowbacca nodded his head and growled a Wookiee greeting. He was thin and lanky, even for a Wookiee, with gangly fur-covered arms and legs. The young Wookiee fidgeted. Chewbacca barked a question to Han and waved one massive arm in the direction of the temple.

“Sure,” Han said. “Go ahead—take him to Luke for now. The kids can get to know each other later.”

As the two Wookiees headed off to find Luke, Han said, “Wait here, I have something for you,” and ducked back into the Falcon. He returned in a few moments, his arms laden with a strange assortment of packages and greenery.

“First,” he said, tossing each of them a small message disk, “your mother recorded these personal holo letters for you. There’s another one from your little brother Anakin. He can’t wait to come here himself.”

Jaina looked at the glittering message disks, anxious to play them. But she slipped them into one of the pockets of her jumpsuit.

“And now…” Han said, holding up a large bouquet of green fronds sprinkled with purple and white star-shaped blossoms. Grinning, he waggled the flowers.

“Oh, Dad, you remembered!”

Jacen ran forward ecstatically. “My stump lizard’s favorite food.” He took the leafy bundle gratefully and said, “I’ll feed ’em to her right away. See you later, Dad.” Then he ran off in the direction of the Great Temple.

Jaina stood alone with her father, looking expectantly at the last bulky package he held in his arms. He set it on the weedy ground of the landing clearing and stepped back so that Jaina could pull aside the rags that covered it.

“Great wrapping job, Dad,” she said, smiling.

“Hey, it works.” Han spread his hands.

Jaina gasped as she removed the coverings, then looked up at her father, who grinned and shrugged nonchalantly. “A hyperdrive unit!” she said.

“It’s not in working condition, you understand,” he said. “And it’s pretty old. I got it off an old Imperial Delta-class shuttle they were dismantling on Coruscant.”

Jaina remembered fondly the times she had helped her father tinker with the Falcon’s subsystems to keep it running in peak condition—or as close as they could get. “Oh, Dad, you couldn’t have picked a better present!” She jumped up and hugged him, wrapping her arms around his dark vest. She could tell that her father was pleased—and maybe even a little embarrassed—by her enthusiasm.

Her father looked down at her and raised one eyebrow. “You know, there’s a couple more components on the ship. If you wanted to help me bring ’em out here, your dad could show you how they all go together.”

She ran after him into the ship.