THE ASCENSION OF THE QUEEN

by

ami-padme

and FernWithy/JediGaladriel,

Part Three

This was why she had entered politics.

This was what made all the meetings, all the stress, all the frustrations worth it. It even covered some of the personal pain she had endured because of her various positions in various governments. Not all of it - Leia wasn't here, and nothing could quite take care of that - but she couldn't help but revel in a moment like this one, where everything finally came together.

She had felt it when she had first woken up early that morning. She had enjoyed a long, heavy, dreamless sleep after joining Ani in his chambers, and had risen feeling calm and refreshed. She had opened her eyes to find him watching her quietly, and lightly holding her hand. He was concerned - she wished she hadn't worried him the night before, and decided that she would plan out their living arrangements in advance of these trips from now on - but he soon saw that she was fine, and ready for the day's event. The two of them had breakfast with Luke, and she had chatted happily with them about the Guard's installation, about making last-minute changes to her speech, about returning to the pod arena. She told Luke an animated version of Anakin's triumph at the race, and both of them enjoyed the hearing the story again, and looked pleased to see her happy.

They had left for the arena shortly after their meal, and had stayed in the staging area in the back with her guards and handlers while the crowds gathered and final preparations were made.

She could hear the people out there. She felt as though she could touch every one of them - as though she could touch every person on Tatooine, and effect some change that would better their lives.

When she was younger, and more naïve, she had thought that most of her work in politics would be like this. She was disabused of that notion with an almost cruel swiftness, of course. But that didn't make it any less rewarding to think of those people filling the stadium, to think of those people throughout the Outer Rim that she was helping.

And to think of those closest to her...of Ani and Luke. After everything that had happened to them here, they were now experiencing the triumph of returning to fix their broken home. She thought it was a great gift, for her to be able to give that to them.

She looked in the mirror and smiled at herself. If she could fix Tatooine, there wouldn't be a place in the galaxy that she couldn't handle. And that knowledge would give people hope.

What more could she ask for than that?

The buzz in the arena was increasing, and the crowd - which seemed like the full population of Mos Espa - knew she would be out there soon. There was also a charge that came from the arena itself. The entire place had received an upgrade, and the improvements could be seen all over the stadium. The crumbling and damaged walls and stands had been rebuilt or shellacked over. The remnants of the racing days - pods, spare pots, pit droids, had been cleared out completely (she suspected that Ani might be hiding an interest in where it all went). Flowers were placed throughout the stadium, and scarlet decorations adorned the stage and the stands. It was a fairly remarkable transformation from the place she visited all those years ago.

Her attendants began fussing at her again, straightening her dress and touching up her hair. For a second, Amidala felt a pang tug at her heart.

She should be here.

Why couldn't Leia be here, helping her? Sitting with her before the speech?

Tatooine wasn't as important to Leia as it was to the rest of the family, but she could have shared this with them. And after this, Amidala did plan to do something equally as significant for the Alderaanian refugees. Would she be forced to do that without her daughter there?

Why couldn't Leia see that they were on the same side, fighting for the same things? Did it matter if their methods were different? Just because Leia wouldn't necessarily choose to set up a Guard, or give them the power to do what was needed to restore order...

Amidala shook herself from that thought. They wanted the same things. They were family. No other...disagreements mattered in the face of that.

And none of it mattered now. "It'll be fine," she whispered to herself. She waved off her attendants, and they left her alone.

Ani saw this and made his way over to her. She gave him a radiant smile.

"Are you ready, My Lady?" he asked. "It's nearly time."

"Absolutely," she replied.

He signaled to Luke, who was standing several yards away, speaking quietly with her personal guard contingent. He left them to join his parents, and Amidala rose from her chair. "If you're ready, Mother, we will escort you out to the stage." She nodded, and Luke turned to lead the way. Her husband stayed closed behind her. The guards flanked her, moving ahead and behind her, and along both her sides.

Eventually, they came out into the suns and into the clamor of the crowd, which increased greatly once they noticed her standing just off the stage. It was a bright, clear day out, and Amidala squinted against the sunlight as she looked to the sea of people in the stands.

Her guards walked past her, spreading out into their positions behind her podium. Anakin and Luke waited beside her.

She took a deep breath, and pulled herself up into her most regal posture, and then moved toward the podium. Her son and husband followed, and stood beside one another, a few feet directly behind her.

The crowd's cheering hadn't let up. Amidala wondered briefly if the sound system would even let her be heard above it.

"Thank you," she finally called out. Her voiced echoed through the arena, and seemed to carry out into the desert. "Thank you."

The crowd slowly began to quiet, and she waited for the volume to go down enough for her to start her formal speech.

"Citizens of Tatooine, your day has finally come."

Another cheer went up, and she happily waited it out.

"Never again will you be ignored. Never again will you be denied your rightful place in galactic affairs." A constant undercurrent of applause was accompanying her words now. "From this point forward, Tatooine will receive the full protections and rights that any planet should expect as a member of the Empire.

"The criminals and slavers and raiders who have terrorized you will now pay the price for their lawlessness, and will no longer be allowed to lord over you with impunity. The Guard being established here is the largest one I've ever created, and has every means at my disposal to serve each city, each settlement, and each farm on this planet. They will be both visible and vigilant, working each and every day on my behalf to give your lives the order you have longed for and that each of you deserve."

She let the echo of her voice play out, and gave a couple of seconds for the applause to slow. It became as quiet as it probably could in the stadium. Then she continued. "As you all know, my family has a long history with this world. We have not forgotten it. And we have not forgotten you. We will never forget. We join you in rescuing this world.

"Right now, troops all over the planet are receiving my deployment orders. They will begin their patrols as soon as I -"

She cut herself off abruptly as she felt Ani's hand, heavy on her shoulder. She barely had an instant to turn around to look at him before his hand tightened painfully on her and she was yanked back from the podium and nearly thrown to the ground.

She could see the shot, a flash streaking well over her head and sailing behind her. Then came the explosion.

It was loud and bright and close...even with Ani crouched over, protecting her, she could still feel the flames and smell the smoke coming from the back of the stage. She could see security people running into the stands, trying to settle the crowd and go after the shooter. Blaster shots rang out.

Amidala had a sudden desire to break free of her husband and retake the podium, and tell everyone to stay calm and remain where they were. No assassin, no Rebel would disrupt this event. Not like this.

But Anakin was already barking out orders to protect her and control the crowd, and was pulling her quickly off the stage. She scrambled to keep up with him and stay on her feet. She could see people in the crowd firing blasters, but they were no longer aimed at her or the stage. A firefight with the guards was on now. Some in the crowd were trying to help the guards and were fighting the troublemakers. The rest of the people were fleeing the arena.

"Luke!" she cried out. He was already following them out.

Anakin headed through the preparation area and out of the stadium toward her small, private ship. She tried to get a last look in at the growing chaos behind her, but her husband impatiently nudged her inside the vehicle. He and Luke joined her inside, and Anakin immediately sped them away, back toward the headquarters.

"Anakin -"

"We must protect you, my love," he said abruptly. "We will deal with this problem once your safety is assured."

She decided not to waste her time arguing. Instead, she turned around in her seat, and watched the arena shrink behind her as she was hurried away.

"Keep away from the stands!" Han yelled into his communicator as the motley collection of armed speeders, swoops, and speederbikes swarmed into the arena, providing cover for the foot soldiers who had first broken the line. All of them were wearing patched together uniforms, with Beta Squadron's symbol drawn clumsily on handmade armbands. Leia insisted on uniforms for anyone who was going to be fighting in civilian areas, to make sure the Empire didn't start shooting randomly. Han didn't know how much good the precaution was going to do today - who knew how the Empire was going to respond to anything these days? - but he reinforced it anyway. "They're civilians up there, no matter whose side they're on."

"Gotcha, General," someone responded, almost cheerfully. They were all cheerful. The atmosphere at the makeshift base this morning had been nervous but upbeat, as though they were athletes preparing for a major competition.

Han didn't like it. He didn't want them losing their morale, but he didn't like this at all. "Don't shoot anyone who hasn't started fighting," he said.

"We got it!"

The Empress' guard was pouring into the arena now, firing indiscriminately at the Rebels. To Han's dismay, members of the crowd were joining in - on the Imperial side. As he watched, a civilian grabbed a blaster from the hand of a fallen soldier, and blasted a speederbike out of the sky. It was too far away to see who was on it. Whoever it was jumped, but the fall was from nearly five meters up. He lay on the ground, dazed, and the civilian shooter lowered the blaster and shot him at point blank range.

A speeder - it was one of the modified snowspeeders rescued from Hoth, so it had to be one the Rogues who hadn't accompanied Wedge's doomed mission - swooped down and fired. The shooter fell.

It was time to join the party.

Han revved the swoop he'd bought in Mos Espa, and flew down into the arena, shooting at the small fleet of Imperial guard vehicles that had been brought in, mainly for show. Two of them exploded beneath him - and then seemed to explode further in laser blasts coming from within the debris cloud.

Han dodged them and dove again. Four figures, all wearing the thigh-length red tunics of Amidala's high guard, had been hiding among the vehicles, and had used their destruction as cover for a fierce counterattack. Han had dodged the bolts, and simply assumed they were meant for him, but apparently the attack hadn't been quite so focused. Three Rebel speederbikes had fallen from the sky.

"General!"

Han's head snapped around. Beside him in the air, a young Mon Cal recruit was gesturing in a panicked way toward the staging area.

"What is it?" Han asked.

"Mobilizing," the Mon Cal got out between sharp breaths. "They're coming in."

As he said it, the entrance to what had once been the garage exploded with TIE speeders and stormtroopers, all firing into the mass of Rebels.

Han did the math. They weren't going to hold the arena, and that had never been the object. They were supposed to cause enough confusion to give the other squads time for their assaults.

How long, Leia?

He didn't know if they'd been fighting long enough. Time was funny in a battle - every second seemed longer than it was, but there was never enough time to get things done.

He flipped his communicator to long range, and hoped that the other attacks were far enough underway that he wasn't giving anything away.

"Yeah, we're underway all right," Lando muttered into his communicator. "If you decide to dump the arena, bring anyone you can get here. I need you."

"No can do, Lando. We have to hold Mos Espa."

Lando fought an urge to curse. "You do that. Calrissian out." He snapped off his comlink, madder than he had a right to be at Han. Han had his own nexu to declaw. But no way was Gamma Squadron going to be able to do this alone.

Oh, sure... the Guard facilities themselves had gone down already. More than half of their staff hadn't arrived yet. Lando had ordered Gamma Squadron to attack when Leia's order had gone out - at the beginning of the Empress' speech, he guessed - and the Mos Eisley Guardpost had fallen within a few minutes.

The problem was everything else in Mos Eisley.

The Tuskens hadn't appeared at the camp at the appointed time. Lando felt relieved about it at first - he really hoped they would opt out of the invitation on their own - but the more he thought about it, the less relieved he felt. They were a wild card. They knew what was happening. And he had a feeling that if they did show up, it wasn't going to be easy giving them orders.

Chewie, good as his word, had gathered up the smugglers and pirates gotten them to put down the few other Imperial holds that had managed to take root.

But Mos Eisley wasn't just spicers and spacers, gamblers and rogues. Mos Eisley was also slaves and farmers left homeless by raids, living destitute in the city's slums. Mos Eisley was war orphans and war widows who could no longer afford to go elsewhere. Among these, the only ones who did not love the Vaders were those who had been loyal to Palpatine, and they would rather spit on a dying Rebel than help him. The rest had joined the battle, and they weren't on Lando's side. Amidala had already provided them with some relief, and promised them more. And the damning thing was, she meant it. As long as they worshipped her, they'd never have to starve another day.

Is that such a bad deal, really?

Lando shut the voice out of his mind. He couldn't listen to it anymore. Dictatorship was never a good thing. No matter what it accomplished, no matter that it did it more efficiently than -

Stop it. Don't do this to yourself in the middle of a battle.

There was an almighty roar to Lando's left, and the wall of a building blew outward in a rain of yellow stone and yellow dust. The small group of Rebel soldiers who had been guarding the intersection disappeared under the rubble. Six teenage boys scrabbled to the top of it and started throwing chunks of rocks at Lando.

"We don't want you here, Rebel! You and your scum are done in Mos Eisley! It's ours now!"

Lando backed into an alley and dashed onto another street. He wasn't going to start shooting at kids with rocks, but he wasn't going stay there until they killed him, either. "Chewie!" he called into his comlink. No answer. That's right. He'd turned it off. He flipped it back on. "Chewie, we lost the safe area. Get your part of the squad out onto the road. Meet the Guard before it gets into town!"

Chewie barked something. Lando only caught the gist of it, but his impression was that Chewie's group was involved in a skirmish.

Please, let it be with some big, tough farmers, Lando prayed vaguely. And let them be armed farmers, he amended. With blasters.

"Get out of here, Rebel!"

Lando looked back at the alley mouth as a rock blasted into the wall beside him. The boys had made their way down and were chasing him.

I am not drawing my blaster.

Another rock came hurling at him. This one grazed his shoulder. A sharp edge drew blood. He turned to try and find cover.

The wind suddenly picked up.

Something clattered behind him. A rock. Dropped onto the street.

One of the boys cursed softly in Huttese.

Lando looked up.

From here, he could see the forbidding rise of rock that overlooked the valley where Mos Eisley had been built. A sandstorm seemed to be coming down from it, unforgiving, implacable.

As it drew closer, Lando could see the figures inside of it, like demons made of the sand itself.

The boys ran.

Somewhere in the city, an alarm began to sound.

Red Squad was stationed alongside the road to Mos Eisley, but no one really noticed the passing sandstorm half a klick to the east. Fighting was fierce and bloody, and the Imperials were a better match than they'd been anticipating. Some of them were Rebel trained.

Senber Tof and three of his squadmates had taken cover behind a boulder, and were exchanging blasts with a group of the Guard who had disappeared behind a standing rock formation on the other side of the road. The rest of the battle raged - it looked almost hand-to-hand from here - about fifty meters back on the road.

"I like space battles better," Isa Verhi grumbled, rolling back after taking a shot. Her short blond hair was matted with sand. "Cleaner."

"No joke, little girl," Senber said. "I got sand in places I'm never going to get it out of."

She laughed, but they both knew it wasn't the sand, and it wasn't the heat. It was the bodies. In space, you didn't have to worry about the bodies. They blew apart from decompression, usually, if they weren't incinerated in their ships. There was nothing left that you could recognize when you saw it lying there. Nothing that you could wonder about... was it part of a guy who used to sit in the mess hall with you? Or maybe a girl you'd stolen a kiss from at one unsanctioned party or another?

Then a blast shivered the rock, sending pebbles tumbling down. The firefight started again, and there was no time to think about it.

Gold Squad had executed a perfect ambush, and the fighting was over in less than an hour. About half the Imperial Guard was dead, and the other half was in custody.

Kinlo Tems was suspicious of the easy victory, but there didn't seem to be any subterfuge in the prisoners. Red and Blue squads were reporting full engagement - Red actually seemed to be having trouble. Blue Squad, on the way to Mos Espa, had lost communications while he was speaking to them. He hoped the rest of their battle was going better.

But here, in the open desert, he had only forty Imperial soldiers, immaculately dressed for the ceremonial parade, sitting slumped in the sand with binders on their wrists.

He had no idea what he was supposed to do with them, and neither did any of his squadmates.

"Hey," a Guard leader called. "You, Rebel!"

Kinlo turned, trying to assume the air of a winning commander. "What?"

"I'm local," the Imperial said. "There are caves. If you're holding my people, maybe we'd all be a lot more comfortable in there. There's water in them."

"And maybe you have a back-up arsenal?"

"In caves where the Tuskens can pick it up? Not likely."

"I don't know... "

"Look, if you're going to kill us, do it with blasters. But leaving us tied up out here is a lousy thing to do. And if you're planning on staying, you might have a long wait right here with us. I can tell by looking at you that you're not ready for desert camping."

Kinlo was suspicious, but couldn't think of any other reason not to get out of the suns. Gold Squad outnumbered the prisoners significantly, if they tried anything. "All right," he said. "People! We're moving into the shade."

A muted cheer went up, and the assorted troops moved away from the road.

Blue Squad had chosen a spot just beyond sight of Imperial headquarters, as far from Mos Espa as they could get, to avoid drawing attention before the strike on the arena. Princess Leia and Alpha Squadron were camped out with them, but hadn't taken part in the ambush. They were needed for another battle.

This was easily the biggest operation that Ordo Ryn had participated in, and it was exhilarating in some sick way.

A lot of the Mos Espa Guard had gone in early, to help the city guards with the Empress' security. But those who were left for the ceremonial entrance were fighting well. Whatever else had happened since the Empire had changed its face, it seemed that military training had gotten a very quick overhaul.

All the deserters, Ordo thought, remembering empty stations, belongings left on chairs or in ships, as the Rebellion had slowly bled to death before Palpatine fell. Now we know where they are. Must've decided that joining up with Lady Vader wasn't really treason, not like joining up with Palpatine was.

Traitors. Filthy traitors.

It didn't matter. Ordo and Blue Squad weren't there to take revenge. They were there to disrupt this Guard unit, and if they could finish this battle early, maybe they could go in and help General Solo hold Mos Espa.

"Commander!" A young lieutenant scrambled over to Ordo, looking winded. She saluted. "Alpha Squadron has launched. They're on their way to headquarters."

"Great. Put a local dampening field out. I don't want any of our Imperial friends putting word out on them."

There was a flash of something, brighter than the suns, then someone yelled, "Watch out!"

A towering rock formation shivered, then, with a terrible grinding sound, began to crumble in a dusty landslide.

There was no time to watch out. Ordo jumped as far as he could, but the falling rock was too fast to outrun and too large to escape.

The last word to cross his mind before the sky went dark and solid was, Traitors.

The alarm signal sent from one the Guard's captains had gone off less than ten minutes ago. The communications had started breaking up nearly five minutes ago. In Piett's mind, those minutes had stretched out into a taut tension. It filled the Command Center, and he knew that everyone there felt it.

He, along with nearly all the Command Staff, had gathered in Imperial Headquarters just off the Palace to watch the Empress give her speech. On their largest projector, they saw the Tatooine crowds and the Empress' procession as she arrived at the arena. As they waited for her speech, other officers kept regular contact with the Tatooine headquarters, and received updates from the commanders of the Guard units. Lord Vader had sent a brief message that morning, confirming that everything was going according to expectations. They were only awaiting the new communications system, which would go online within seconds of Her Majesty announcing it in her speech. The Command Center was ready for the enormous amount of information they would receive at that point. Piett was looking forward to seeing the system work for himself. It was quite an achievement, to have even individual soldiers linked up to the Imperial network.

The Empress had come out to the adoring crowd and begun her speech. Everyone was watching her now. Piett thought she was doing wonderfully.

He almost didn't believe it when he saw the explosion flare up behind her. He even had asked a nearby lieutenant whether she had seen the same thing. The picture became fuzzy and pixilated shortly after that. The sound was intermittent.

From all over the Command Center came sounds of battle, reports of down comlinks, shouted orders, and general confusion and fighting from nearly every location of consequence on Tatooine.

Piett ordered someone to focus exclusively on trying to raise the royal family or a member of the Empress' personal guard. She was his first concern, and the last pictures on the planet had not made her personal situation clear.

"Sir, our communications with the planet are sporadic. Her Majesty's channel is operating and open, but there's no response. I have been unable to raise her guards."

Piett nodded. He would assume that meant that they were too occupied to respond. He hoped they had moved her to a safe position.

"Admiral," the captain continued, "there's been no clear indication of what's happened on the planet."

"Continue to speak to anyone you can raise. Find out what's going on."

"Yes, sir."

"Raise the Imperial ships and bases closest to Tatooine. Make sure they are aware of the situation and are monitoring it. Tell them to be prepared, and await orders from the Empress on the planet."

"I will contact as many ships as I can, sir."

Piett frowned, worried. The new communications system had not gone online yet, and it seemed the Rebels were already making headway in disrupting their normal communications. He needed to speak with the Empress.

He relieved an ensign at the nearest station, and began trying her personal frequency himself. He was still met by an open, but silent, link. He kept trying.

As he waited for a response, Piett found himself hoping - against both his good and his common sense - that this problem wasn't the result of Leia doing something terrible. That it was something, anything else...perhaps one of the many problems on Tatooine that had necessitated the establishment of the Guard in the first place.

Piett wished, yet again, that he had been better able to make Leia understand, make her feel as though she did fit in here. It might not have been his place to do so, but he felt responsible for what he assumed must be happening on the planet now.

A crackle snapped from the terminal. It could have simply been more of the static he had been getting anyway, but Piett jumped on it, convincing himself it sounded different. He began adjusting his frequencies, chasing it. "Ensign, boost the signal on this console immediately. Raise it to the full limit."

"Yes, sir!"

Suddenly, the signal from Tatooine came in fully, and the comm screeched from the overcompensation of his adjustments and the signal boost. Piett scrambled to fix the problem, and soon the noise was replace with the Empress's voice.

Piett was utterly grateful to hear her speak.

"High Admiral Piett, please respond."

"Your Majesty, it is a joy to hear your voice. Our communication with Tatooine has been intermittent at best since you were attacked during your speech. May I inquire as to your status, Empress?"

"I've been returned to the Main Headquarters. I'm fine," she said tersely. Piett could hear orders being given in the background, including several being called out by Lord Vader. "The Rebels have been attempting to put out a dampening field, but we've been working around it." Piett's heart sank with the confirmation of what had happened, and who was behind it, but he chastised himself for the reaction. He had known it was Leia all along. "It appears as though all of our interests are under attack. We are trying to ascertain the size of the Rebel forces, and organize a counter-attack as quickly as possible."

"Your Majesty, I have reason to believe that nearly the full Rebel force is on Tatooine."

"Explain."

Piett sighed and reluctantly launched into what he had found. "In the past few days, I have been reading reports from our scouts on the possible locations of the Rebel base. None of the information is definitive, or wholly reliable, but I think I've found the most likely location of their base."

"Yes, Admiral?"

"Ledaga," he said. "A planet in the Outer Rim."

"I'm not fully familiar with that world, Piett."

"It does not fall within the Empire," he explained, "and the native population is small, and not technologically advanced. The information I received points to members of that population taking over a nearly abandoned military base."

"Then why do you believe the Rebels are still using it as their active base of operations?"

"It's the largest base that's been reported on, and an underpopulated, far-off world would be an attractive spot for the Rebels. Their low numbers on the planet are simply an indication of the attack they were planning against you, Your Majesty."

She didn't answer right away, and Piett could almost see the expression on her face. Thoughtful. And worried. Perhaps a bit sad. "She wouldn't hide behind civilians, High Admiral. My daughter would not do that." Her voice didn't leave room for discussion of the subject. Piett agreed with her on the point anyway.

Still... "Your Majesty, the fact remains that this is the best lead we have on the Rebels. If we were to act now, we could cripple their ability to wreak this kind havoc against you in the future." He waited for her response. Then, he cautiously added, "Also, Your Highness, it seems certain that Princess Leia is on Tatooine. Attacking now would allow us to avoid...certain dangers that would otherwise be inherent in any assault on the Rebels."

He hoped he had been tactful enough to get his point across with upsetting her or angering her. She responded guardedly. "Admiral, I have gone great lengths to avoid the unnecessary deaths of civilians. This would nullify everything I've had our military work toward since I came into power. And while I do trust your analysis, the information isn't certain."

"With all due respect, Your Majesty, we may not be able to get certain information before the Rebels switch camps again. It is unlikely they will stay in the same place after committing an assault of this size. I share your concerns, Your Majesty. But I believe this may be our best chance."

The silence was longer this time. Much longer. He could sense that she was close to giving him the order he needed, the one that could truly, finally, end this war - and would do it without costing her the daughter she loved so dearly. He was being honest about worrying for the civilians - he had no desire to kill any innocents, and was feeling repulsed by the circumstances the Empress found herself in. But his job was to give the best tactical analysis he had, even when that left few options, and no good ones.

"I will wait to see the outcome of the situation here, first, Admiral."

"Your Majesty?"

"Wait for my orders before taking any action." A pause. "If, for some reason, the situation here becomes so...catastrophic...that you feel action is warranted, I'll trust your judgment, Admiral Piett. But I have no real desire to see things happen this way."

"I understand, Empress."

Something that sounded like an explosion cut off whatever she was going to say next. A general proximity alarm added to the noise.

"I must go, Admiral."

"Understood. Be safe, Your Majesty. Piett out."

They know.

Leia guided her speederbike behind a tall rock formation, her breathing quick and shallow. Almost fifty meters below, as small as insects, her family ducked into the shadows of the Imperial headquarters. Mother and Father were easily identifiable, Force or no Force, from any distance. And Luke... Oh, Leia knew his presence. He might dress like a member of the high guard, but she could feel him, like an echo in her nerves. And did he glance up? Did he sense something?

No. He just continued walking.

To her surprise, she was overcome by neither anger nor hate, but by a deep sadness that seemed to resonate in the marrow of her bones, making her limbs heavy and her head throb. And, though it shamed her to admit it even privately, it stirred a sense of longing in her. She didn't want to join the Empire, not even in her most secret mind... but she longed to see Mother's face, or feel Luke's hand on her arm, or hear Father's carefully modulated voice. Just for a moment. Just to remember who she was.

But I am not that person. I am not a daughter of that family, to be petted and prodded as they wish, and trained to attack over the causes they fight for.

True.

But still.

Mother's face. Luke's touch. Father's voice.

I am a part of them. I wonder if they think of me and miss "Leia's tongue."

"Princess Leia?"

Leia pulled herself out of her thoughts as her family disappeared into the vast Imperial base so far below. A high altitude landspeeder hovered beside her speederbike, piloted by an adolescent Dug named Revanik. He wore the makeshift uniform of Alpha squadron, which was no more than standard Tatooine gear with a handmade armband. She hoped that would be enough - the Rebellion had very little financial support, and there was certainly not enough discretionary income to support such niceties as uniforms... but Leia would not allow the Rebellion to go to war in the guise of civilians. Ever. She needed neither Obi-Wan nor Yoda to tell her that such a thing was cowardly and unfit for a sentient being, let alone one with Jedi training.

She hadn't even needed Father to tell her that, though he had repeated it often enough during their training sessions (he had, in fact, been almost obsessive about the subject, for reasons he had never clarified and she had never inquired about). And Leia had decided long ago that she would rather sleep on a bed of spikes over a pit of flesheaters than fight dirtier than Vader.

For her own part, she had kept the wrap-around top of her desert wear and wound her hair into a common fashion, but she had done so out of practicality - both fashions made sense in the environment. She had exchanged the drab skirt for drab leggings tucked carefully into her boots, but to her own mind, she still looked too much like a civilian for comfort. Her armband seemed insanely small. But at least she could count on being recognized. No one would mistake her.

She manufactured a greeting smile. "Yes, Ensign?"

Revanik circled her playfully. "We're all in place, Your Highness. Waiting for your orders to take out the comm system. And anything else we can."

Leia's jaw tightened. "Your orders are to take out the comm system. We're not assassins."

To Revanik's credit, he looked genuinely shamed. "Yes, Your Highness. I'm sorry." One long toe circled aimlessly in what appeared to be a nervous way. "Your Highness?"

"What is it, Revanik?"

"You were meeting with Ryn when the battle started in the arena... "

"Yes?"

"Well, we were tracking and... "

Leia tried to control her frustration, using a calming technique that Yoda had taught her. "What do you need to tell me, Ensign?"

He closed his eyes. "Someone took a shot at the Empress herself."

Leia managed to control the swing of her temper enough that she didn't explode, didn't scream, didn't hit anyone or anything (which was a good thing, given that she was so far up on a lightweight machine). But she couldn't control her face, and she felt her eyes pull open to their widest point, and her lips draw back into what felt like a snarl. "They had explicit orders not to-"

"I know, Your Highness. But a shot at the Empress herself... If we could... "

"We aren't assassins," Leia said again, keeping her voice cool. She could hardly get control of frayed Rebel tempers if she couldn't keep control of her own. She would not use her temper as Father did, as a cudgel to keep her subordinates in line. "All right, Ensign. What's done is done. Let's go."

Revanik sighed with relief, and looped his speeder around toward the ground. Leia followed him.

Alpha Squadron was gathered at the base of a mesa, waiting quietly in the shadows. Leia glided the speederbike down to them and took up a position near the center in front of them. "Our main objective is the communications system," she said, though they didn't need to be reminded. "We've been sending out low-level dampening fields, and it is my hope that they've assumed we're mimicking their tactics from Naboo."

Steely silence from the troops. The Naboo attack was fresh in their minds. They didn't seem to blame Leia for it - yet - but they wanted to avenge the fallen Rogues. Shouldn't have brought that up.

It was too late to take it back, so she just went on. "So far, it seems to be the way it's interpreted. I've been watching the base for an hour, and no one has stepped up security on the main comm station. I want to keep it that way. I'm going to go in and do it myself. The rest of you - I want you to make it look like our main objective is their mobility. Take out all the vehicles you can, and if that's drawn enough guards away from the arsenal, hit that. Don't take unnecessary casualties. That's an order. Don't inflict unnecessary casualties. That is also an order. You're a diversion."

Commander Athuli, a scarred veteran with only thin remains of blonde hair on his sunburned head, cleared his throat. "Your Highness, perhaps someone else would be more expendable... "

Leia frowned at him. "Commander, no one is expendable. I am going to the comm system because I worked with it. I know it well. When I destroy the mainframe, that will disrupt Imperial communications throughout the Tatooine system. But before I do that, I'm going to send out a small disruptive program. There's a back door that it will work through, and I know about it - but I don't think they know I do. The disruptive program will work its way through the Imperial network and cut off all communications that piggyback off of it."

"That sounds like Imperial technology," Athuli said. "Centralized to death."

She started to say, Luke's been meaning to get to that, but hasn't had a chance with all his public appearances, but decided that it would be better not to mention Luke at all.

"All right then," she said. "Commence attack."

She watched the Squadron lift off on their various vehicles, then zip out of sight around the mesa. A moment later, the shooting began.

She waited only long enough to be certain that the Empire was engaged, then flew low and fast around the other side of the mesa. She stowed the speederbike in a crevice at the bottom of the mesa, several stories beneath a small arched window.

Was someone in that room? Waiting? Did she have the element of surprise, or would Father see this coming?

Use the Force.

She frowned at nothing, knowing perfectly well that either Kenobi or Yoda was somewhere nearby. Using the Force was well and good in theory, but risked drawing attention to her actions as surely as would announcing herself at the front door.

Then again, leaping headlong into a room that might well be full of soldiers was a pretty bad idea, too.

Yoda had taught her several blocking techniques, and she reached for the ones she had learned best. He'd told her that she had a natural ability for it... she could even hide from him. So maybe...

But Father. Father would know she was here.

You hid from Vader for the first twenty years of your life. He is not a demigod. He is just a man, just part of a man at that. Part of a man named Anakin Skywalker who is no more omniscient than you are.

It had to be done.

Leia reached into the Force for strength, then quickly used the blocking technique, hoping against hope that it would hide her. Then she felt her way up through the rock, toward the window. There were few soldiers on this side. She had not been spotted. Luke and Father were elsewhere in the base, with Mother. There were two... three? ... soldiers on duty at the comm station. Nothing she couldn't handle.

Opening her eyes and coming back to herself, she drew the blaster she had found on Naboo, aimed it at a ledge two meters above the window, and fired the tow cable.

The harsh side of the mesa flew by her, then the momentary flash of the window. Then she was stopped, a few inches beneath the overhanging shelf of rock where her cable was secured. She let herself sway in the wind for a moment, getting her bearings, then swung to an even smaller ledge off to one side. She dislodged the tow cable and put the blaster back on her belt.

For a moment, she felt like laughing. All that worry about using the Force to check for guards, and she'd never thought about the fact that her plan was flatly impossible without the assistance of the Force at all. She was going to have to risk it. She'd planned this little raid with the assumptions of a Jedi rather than the assumptions of a field commander. She couldn't back off from those assumptions now.

It was time.

Using only the Force to navigate, she made her way down the nearly sheer rockface of the mesa. The window had been overhung with a flat plate of duracrete to keep the suns off the delicate equipment. Her feet found it, and she crouched there, taking one last moment to breathe cleanly. Then she drew her lightsaber with her natural hand, gripped the edge of the duracrete with the mechanical one, and flipped backward into space.

At the arc of her turn, she changed the tension in her arm to shoot herself through the window. She ignited her lightsaber as she drop-rolled into the room.

The first guard to stand never had a chance - the lightsaber cut through his midsection in a sickeningly easy way. Leia had never used this sort of weapon in combat before, and there was something about the closeness of it that just... how was this more civilized?

The second guard came at her, blaster drawn, and she sliced the weapon from his hand. While he was still surprised, she raised her empty hand and pushed him with the Force, hard. He was thrown across the room, where he crashed into the wall near the ceiling, then fell to the floor, stunned.

The third was reaching for his comlink. Leia called it to her with the Force, and sliced it into two small pieces in the air.

Five seconds had passed since she'd come through the window.

Blaster fire came at her furiously as she advanced toward him. She missed one block and a burn etched itself along her upper arm, but that didn't matter now.

The guard didn't back down and he didn't try to run. He kept coming.

Her only option was to strike.

She did.

He fell.

She was alone with the stunned guard now, listening to his shallow breathing as it counterpointed the hum of the communications equipment.

In the Force, she could feel that there was a dim awareness of her presence now. She'd used too much power to keep her shields up. She needed to work quickly.

The mainframe was, as she'd known it would be, the same make as the model she'd used in Theed, on her endless and ridiculous quests to find Mother's old propaganda. She hadn't been perfectly honest with Athuli - she didn't just know about the back door. She'd put it in herself, tired of going through the labyrinthine security systems every morning just to hear Mother's speech before Chancellor Valorum, or Mother's second coronation address on Naboo, or Mother's installation as Senator. It wouldn't have been removed because she had neglected to tell anyone that she was using it.

She entered the code quickly, and the system opened up to her. A quick command was all it would take. It would take maybe twelve hours, but the entire communications structure within the New Empire would go down, and it would take at least a week to fix it.

She gave the command.

As soon as it was accepted and forwarded through the system, she drew her lightsaber, raised it high, then brought it down across the front of the mainframe. Circuits fried, flames erupted, acrid smoke blew through the room. A second thrust melted wires in the heart of the machine, and a third, sustained one sent molten metal streaming down the side.

She stepped back. Even Father wouldn't be able to fix that one, at least not right away.

The bodies of the two guards she'd killed were becoming lost in the smoke, and the breathing of the third was getting harsher.

Leia looked around the small room, surprised and a little ill at how much damaged she'd done this quickly by herself.

It needed to be done.

The Empire couldn't get a foothold in the Rim. It had too many footholds already.

Her heart heavy, she went back to the window, lowered herself with the tow cable, and picked her way back to her speeder bike.

She'd done her part as a Jedi.

Now, she had a battle to command as a soldier, and if Revanik was telling truth, it was already starting to get out of hand.

Redenou was beaming as she handed out rations to Rebels and Ledagans alike as they converged on the camp's mess hall. They took their food with a nod and a thank you (thank you - at least she had finally learned two words in their language, finally), and moved to the next table, where a cheerful Ledagan woman was handing out some orange, leafy vegetable that grew in their burrows underground. Redenou had tried them, and thought they were all right, but knew that anything was better than another ration pack. The Rebels took the leaves gratefully before trying to work their way to an unoccupied table or chair - that was no easy task now. And Redenou thought she might be the only Rebel on the base that was honestly glad of that fact. The rest had understood that the Ledagans had needed a place to go, and that Han had left instructions to help them, but Redenou wasn't bothered or put out by the arrival of their guests, and couldn't pretend to be. In the last two days, she had found herself in the center of activities on the base, and was now living in a place filled to capacity with people, aliens, creatures, and who-knew-what-else. How could she complain? Instead, she gave out more rations and continued to beam, meeting every quizzical glance from a stressed Rebel with a smile.

She was glad that there were no - well, almost no - adults or officers left hanging around to supervise her, and try to "protect" her. She loved the Rebels and the Rebellion, but since Han left, she had gotten her first taste of true involvement and of true freedom. She had been careful to put it to good use, sticking herself into situations where she knew she could really be of help to everyone. Like now, when even the standard dinner hour had become an adventure.

The Ledagans had been in the camp for barely two days. They had quickly insisted on adapting to the Rebel's schedules and habits as a sign of respect and gratitude. It was a gesture that Redenou could appreciate, but one that had caused unexpected issues to pop-up throughout the base. The Rebels had expected their guests to essentially keep to themselves in the barracks they had been assigned. But now, they had a planet's population trying to get into the mess hall. The Ledagan leaders had been showing up at the command rooms, offering their help, limited as it might be. Some of the children had gotten wind of the fact that the Rebels were in need of clothing and uniforms, and had immediately pulled out their supplies and fashioned crude versions of the garments they had seen worn on the base, taking very seriously any suggestion or correction made, and leaving the clothing in the bunkers with the rest of the clothes and supplies.

Kind gestures, all of them, but they had still caught the command staff here - such as it was - unprepared. Redenou had appointed herself an unofficial liaison between the Rebels and the Ledagans...she had taken one of the few translator droids around and kept it by her side at all times, and had run back and forth between the leaders in each groups, explaining (and occasionally...suggesting) what each side needed or wanted done, trying to help things run smoothly. The Ledagans had liked her right away, and the officers had even started taking her seriously, figuring that she was the path of least resistance when it came to keeping things running smoothly, so they could focus on whatever was happening on Tatooine.

So here she was, in the mess hall, staring at the Ledagan men, women, and children, wondering at the small pets they seemed to bring with them everywhere (they were clearly domesticated, but were small, and fanged, and vicious-looking, and they made her nervous, despite their gentle demeanor), and speaking with other young and low-ranking Rebels. She was already formulating a plan on taking inventory of any food or supplies the Ledagans had brought with them from their underground lairs. They were obviously willing and eager to share what they had, and the Rebels would be smart to be thinking of ways to combine it with their own supplies, and find ways to organize and maximize everything.

She couldn't wait for General Solo to return, and to see how much she had done, how big a help she had been. Maybe even the Princess would be impressed.

Two Ledagan children trilled at her as they took her food, and they handed her a not entirely bad shirt. They were beginning to get human measurements right - they had had an easier time with other alien species - and Redenou tried to mimic the thank you she had heard dozens of times from people in the line. They twitched their whiskers at her, and approximated a smile through their fur.

Redenou thought about ordering one of her friends to take the shirt to the rest of the new clothes and begin the inventory, but changed her mind. She might have the ideas, but she hadn't exactly earned the authority to order anyone to do anything. She had tried it once, sort of, as a way of trying to get information on what was happening on Tatooine. She'd been summarily dismissed. She had the feeling things had gotten started, and were going well though. She hoped she was right. Redenou decided to start the inventory herself, later.

She gave a friendly smile to the Ledagan woman next to her. She gave a wave or salute back, but stopped abruptly. She looked at the ground. Redenou saw the other Ledagans nearby do the same.

Her heart sank. As the native population, the Ledagans were much more in tune with what was happening, and had sensed the first big earthquake and all the aftershocks just before the Rebels' seismic sensors were able to pick up on the signs that they were coming.

She didn't waste time, and didn't worry about orders she wasn't supposed to be giving. She jumped up on her table and yelled, "Get into position! I think another one's coming guys!"

The Rebels quickly moved away from the windows, and several of them went back to the command rooms to protect the equipment and the comm. The Ledagans were already scurrying underneath the tables, bringing nearby Rebels with them. Redenou turned on her translator droid, who had wandered off a short distance from her as she'd handed out the food. He answered before she could say anything.

"She says that the gods beneath are again coming forth, and that their cries will shake the land."

Almost on cue, a low rumble began under her feet, and she took cover under her table and the shaking began. Utensils clinked and clanged as they banged against each other and fell to the ground. Ration boxes rained down noisily. As had happened with the first real earthquake two days ago, consoles shorted out and sparked up, and the comm system screeched and cackled over the mess hall's speakers.

Redenou covered her head and waited for it to stop, hoping that nothing would be damaged so badly that she wouldn't be able to get a sneak report on the Tatooine fighting whenever they got an update from everyone out there. Redenou was looking forward to the base celebration whenever they got word that the raid was successful. She had a feeling the Ledagans would make good party companions, even if they didn't full understand what they were celebrating. The kids would have a good time, definitely

The shaking let up a little, and the aftershock continued at a more manageable rate. Ledagans were already starting to poke their heads out from under the tables, and cleaning up the mess. There might be too many of them at the camp, but Redenou knew they were good people to have around. She pulled herself up and began to help, smiling again at her Ledagan friend at the next table.

She couldn't wait for that celebration.

After the chaos in the arena, Han had expected Mos Espa to be a rough battle, maybe even a losing one, but it seemed that, once the novelty of being in a war had worn off (and novelties wore off quickly in Mos Espa) most of the people had opted not to fight. The Imperial Guard was largely engaged in the fighting outside of town - out where Leia is, Han couldn't help thinking miserably - so the Rebels had been able to sweep into town and establish control within two hours of leaving the arena.

Of course, "control" was about the best it could be called.

Han Solo - smuggler, rogue, outlaw, and general anti-authoritarian - found himself administering martial law.

And no matter how he worked it around in his mind, he couldn't think of what else he could possibly be doing.

He'd split Beta Squadron into six teams. Four of them were doing security patrols. Once everyone got inside, their main job had been catching frantic people running out of their houses to find loved ones, sending them back inside, then finding the loved ones and escorting them back to the one who'd been worried. There were still a few energetic teenagers fighting the good fight for Her Ladyship with rocks and kitchen knives, but the security squads were able to capture them uninjured for the most part, and separating them from their little gangs did wonders for their attitudes.

Han wondered, in a not-quite-disinterested way, if he would have been one of them, if this thing had happened ten years ago. He could see himself through their eyes easy enough - blustering around and giving orders to people he'd never seen before. Would he have really ended up under Amidala's spell, if he hadn't met Leia first?

He wanted to say no, but if all he'd seen was today...

He wasn't sure. He really wasn't. The Empire wasn't exactly distinguishing itself, running out to defend HQ while the bad guys were left to sack the cities, of course, which Han suspected was part of the easy capitulation. The Empire, if nothing else, promised protection to Loyalists, and it wasn't coming through.

The problem was, they still saw the Rebels as someone they needed to be protected from. That was why the security teams were under strict orders to keep the fighting clean and help civilians whenever they could. That, and the fact that it was the right thing to do.

One of the remaining squads was on repair detail. Only one building - an open-air restaurant - had been demolished entirely. Others had sustained various degrees of damage, most easily fixed. Across the dusty street from the demolished restaurant, four members of the repair team were taking orders from the oldest Toydarian Han had ever seen. One of the soldiers looked over at Han with a Get-me-outta-here-please expression that might have been comical under other circumstances as he re-mortared the bricks in the walls of the old junk shop.

Han shrugged at him. Given the general condition of the wall, the damage most likely pre-dated the battle, but it was a chance for the Rebellion to be seen doing something constructive, and they might as well do it.

The last and most important team was overseeing the temporary hospital that had been set up in a wide square in the middle of the business district. Small tents made of poles and blankets held two or three patients each, and everyone in Beta Squadron with any medical experience was rushing around with bacta and bandages, tending everyone who had been hurt in the battle, whether they were on the Rebel side, on the Imperial side, or just bystanders.

His inspection circuit of the city mostly finished, Han headed over there.

He could hear a good deal of moaning and yelling before he actually saw the hospital, most of it too robust to be coming from people who were seriously injured, which was a relief. Monsha Rooklin, his head medic, had told him that most of the injuries were superficial, but it was good to know she was right.

Beta Squadron's medical team was still hurried and harried, running from tent to tent when he got there. Monsha looked up sharply from her patient - a more serious injury than most; this was a woman who seemed to have several shattered bones from a fall - and blew a stray hair off her forehead. "This is hardly a sanitary environment," she quipped.

Han shook his head. "You're not going to get much better at the base. If you were, I'd tell you to take them back there."

"I know. I'm just grousing."

"I know. I'm just telling you not to. This is the best we can do."

Something clattered on the stone across the square, and Monsha grimaced. "I've about had it with them."

Before Han could ask what she meant, he found out for himself. A bleary yell rose over the general din: "Get your filthy Rebel hands off me! I don't need your help!"

Han looked at Monsha. "It's been like that for awhile?"

"Almost long enough that I'm tempted to respect their wishes." Her patient groaned, and she made a liar of herself by immediately bending over and trying to ease the position of the broken bone she was working on. There was no chance of Monsha Rooklin walking away from her patients.

Han went toward the tent that housed the complaining patient. A young human with a tight jaw was picking up instruments and bandages from the ground. "These are going to have to be sterilized," he said. "That's going to take time."

"I know." Han glanced around. "You guys could use some help. I'll see who I can dig up."

"They won't take it."

"I'll find someone without filthy Rebel hands."

"Great." The boy went back to picking up the instruments, cursing under his breath as he did it.

Han shook his head. This was beyond ridiculous.

He picked his way back to the wrecked junk shop, figuring that its owner was probably old enough to know who did what in this asylum of a town. The work team was just finishing up with the re-mortaring.

"Aagh," the Toydarian said, "kids today don't do nothing right." He shook his head mournfully at the wall. "Everything's wrecked."

Han cleared his throat. "It's less wrecked than it was when we came."

"Bah. You people break things like they grow back on their own."

"That's why we're trying to fix things up, make it better." The Toydarian didn't turn around. Han grabbed his shoulder and turned him. "Look, we got your wall fixed, and it's staying fixed. I need your help. Who do you know who knows anything about healing? And isn't a Rebel?"

The ancient wrinkled face twisted. Resentment? Or was he just thinking? Finally, he gave an approximation of a sigh. "Oh, all right. Look for Amee and Seek. They've been watching out for the slaves since they were freed. For free, if you can believe it." He shook his head, as though he'd never heard of anything so crazy. "They're still staying in the slave quarters. They actually bought one of the places from me. I had no use for it," he finished quickly, as if Han were about to accuse him of sentimentality.

"And they're not Rebels?"

"Rebels? Nah. They're not Rebels. They were with Vader before the Empress came back." His grin widened, and it wasn't entirely unfriendly. "The Queen's been in my shop," he said. "Stood right where you're standing now, too."

Han took an involuntary step back, cursing himself for superstition even as he acted on it. This was Vader's home. He was bound to run into someone who knew them. He had no interest in following up on Leia's family history. She was obsessed enough with it for both of them. He turned back to the subject at hand. "Where are their quarters?"

"They might not like helping you."

"They're not helping me. They're helping the same people they've been helping."

"All right." The Toydarian waved vaguely down the street. "Take the first left. Their building's third on the right. They're on the second floor. Only door without a Master's key slot. They had that taken right off, you better believe."

Han thanked him and headed off in the direction he'd indicated. The apartment wasn't hard to find. The door was open. There was a crowd already there, mixed humans and aliens, speaking softly. Han caught a few words about fighting and making stands. Great. But they seemed to be in the talking stage, not the fighting stage.

A skinny middle-aged man with thick red hair was sitting on a high stool, a blaster over his knees. He raised it as soon as he saw Han, and the conversation died immediately. "What do you want, Rebel?"

Han raised his hands in a gesture of good faith, hoping that if shooting started, their reflexes were considerably slower than his own. "You've got injured people in the town square," he said. "If you're Seek, an old Toydarian told me you knew about healing."

The man's eyes narrowed. "I'm Seek," he said. "How many did you shoot?"

"No one who wasn't shooting at us. Look, they don't want help from Rebels, but they need help. We've got supplies and equipment. We just need extra hands. Preferably ones they won't refuse."

There was silence.

A woman worked her way through the crowd. Her hair was prematurely white, and rolled in thin braids at her temples, and a thick braid at the base of her neck. "I'm Amee," she said. "You realize that we're not Rebels?"

"That's most of the point, ma'am. I don't care if you're Palpatine Imperials or Hutt loyalists. There are people who need help."

She laughed softly. "We're not Hutt loyalists," she said. "You can be assured of that." She turned to Seek. "I'm going," she told him. "Whatever the politics are, I have sworn to look after the people of Mos Espa. We can argue later about whose fault it was."

Seek grunted. "That's not an argument, Amee. That's just a fact." He stood up, blaster still in his hands, but not pointed at Han anymore. "You're right. We'll all go."

"Thank you," Han said as he passed.

"Don't you ever thank me, Rebel. I'm not doing it for you, and if the shooting starts again, the last thing you're going to see is the muzzle of this blaster pointed right at your eye. Got it?"

Han nodded. He led the group back to the tents and got them started on it. It was tense, but it was workable.

Mos Espa was under control. It was time to check up on the rest of the battle.

Leia's comlink was still on silent - he guessed she was somewhere she didn't want to be called. Chewie only growled a harried acknowledgment that he was still alive. Han could hear a vicious battle in the background. He switched over to Lando's frequency.

The battle was louder. "Calrissian here!"

The abrupt shout took Han by surprise. He'd heard the battle, but he really absorbed it now. Things sounded out of control. "Lando? What's going on here?"

"All hell's broken loose," Lando said. "The Tuskens dropped by for the party."

"What's happening?"

"They're raiding the shops and the houses. They're killing people. We're fighting against them, but somehow it's gotten out that we called them. You have to get Leia. Tell her what's happening. We need to know what she wants us to do. This isn't what she had in mind!"

"I can't reach her on the comlink. It's on silent."

"Override it. She needs to know about this, Han. And if you can't override it, go get her!"

Something near Lando's comlink exploded, causing a whistle of static. "I have to go," he said. "Get Leia. Calrissian out."

The comlink fell silent.

Han stared at it for what seemed like a long time.

Lando shut off his comlink and looked around, almost in a panic, for a place that would give him some cover. Of course, the alleyway he was eyeing had just exploded, and there didn't seem to be a corner that wasn't being shot at, so...

His blaster was firing, almost automatically, at any Tusken or Imperial he could make out in the melee happening just ahead of him in what passed for Mos Eisley's town center. He wasn't having much effect - the entire squadron wasn't having much effect. Lando felt that everybody with a weapon was attacking the Rebels, but in all honesty, everyone just seemed to be attacking one another at this point, going after the person next to him if they weren't immediately recognizable.

Lando suddenly spied a junkshop that seemed to be both abandoned and ignored, and he dove for it, rolling behind several old speeders and pieces of transports. The fight wasn't far enough away for Lando's tastes - he thought he could have boarded a ship right now for the other side of the galaxy and it wouldn't have been far enough - but he wasn't in immediate danger, and that gave him a few minutes to think, and to observe the battle.

One of his captains saw him, and ran to join him. Three others followed, and they crouched from their hiding places, shooting into the crowd when they thought they could provide cover to the Rebels and the civilians.

Lando cursed under his breath with every shot. What the hell was he supposed to do?

"Sir!" said a young man next to him. Lando thought his name was Kimani. "There are civilians attacking us out there. They don't want our help. There's no way we're going to take or hold Mos Eisley... Sir, you need to order a retreat!"

Lando wasn't quite listening. He was watching the fighting.

There were a large number of Tuskens in the square. They had dismounted their banthas near the edge of the settlement, and had all but thrown themselves into the thick of the battle. The Imperials, who had their hands full with the Rebels anyway, had panicked. So had the settlers, who were having a hard time amongst themselves deciding who it was they hated most - the Imperials (though a large number were Vader sympathizers), the Rebels, or the Tuskens. Pure, utter chaos.

"We can't just leave!" yelled a woman whom Lando only knew slightly. He couldn't think of her name. "We did this, we have to help!"

"Do you know how long they've been fighting the Tuskens?"

"Do you know that we asked the Tuskens to come?" That was Captain Micha.

Lando frowned suddenly, knitting his brow, still only giving half an ear to the discussion.

Yes, the Tuskens were here, and yes they were fighting fiercely. But that was wrong on its face somehow. The Tuskens wouldn't care about mixing it up with the settlers, or the Rebels, or Lady Vader's forces. That wasn't what they were here for, and the battle in the square couldn't be anything more than a distraction to them.

The settlement was near anarchy. Their opportunity to raid and...and whatever else...was better than it had ever been. So why bother with a pitched battle out in the center of town?

Lando tried to give a quick count of how many Tuskens he could see. There were a lot of them, almost enough to account for the size of the camp he had visited. Almost.

It wouldn't take many Tuskens to make a few runs through the rest of the settlement. Especially if the majority of the armed settlers were occupied here.

"Dammit!" He whipped his head around to the officers behind him. "We're not retreating, it's not even an option, and we don't have time to argue about it." Only Kimani looked annoyed. The other three wore expressions on their faces that wavered between relief and determination. They understood, and they knew that they had to help.

"When we get back out there, I want you each to round up as many Rebels as you can. Leave the square and head for the other parts of town. The homes, the slave quarters, the shops and businesses. We need to get out there."

"Sir," the woman said, "you want us to just leave the battle? The Imperials aren't going to just let us take off."

"And the civilians don't seem to like us much either," said Colin, one of the youngest officers that had been allowed to come to Tatooine. "Shouldn't we stay here and try to fight the Tuskens anyway?"

"I'm telling you, there are more problems with Tuskens in other places," Lando said tersely. "Now go!"

The four officers took off immediately, and began calling out to their fellow comrades as they ran firing into the fray. Lando pulled out his comlink, and opened it to Gamma Squadron. "This is Lando - everyone who can break away, get a group and move into the other sections of Mos Eisley. Protect the citizens and civilians first. Whether they want it or not. That's our priority."

Kimani, for his part, had gotten a few people together and was focusing on attacking Imperial troops who were about to join the fighting. Colin was giving orders left and right - Lando had to admit, he was impressed with the kid - and was fighting his way through in the direction of the shops. The woman was headed for the slave quarters with a fairly large group. Micha was still trying to hold things together in the square.

Lando moved quickly around the edges of the battle, ducking and shooting the whole way. He barked, "You're with me!" to five men with armbands as he went by, and didn't even bother to look back to see who they were or even if they had followed him as ordered. He wanted to get to the nearest living quarters - a small, tightly packed neighborhood where the houses were nearly on top of one another up and down a slew of long, narrow streets.

He rounded a corner, and came to the first of the streets. He could already see some houses burning - all the houses would be on fire soon - and there were already bodies in the street. Ransacked homes pointed the way ahead of him. Windows broken and doors swinging off their hinges, clothes and furniture and other property trailing out.

The Tuskens were ahead of him, nearly at the opposite end of the street, about ready to move up the next street of homes. Their banthas trailed behind them, and several of them were already overloaded with the loot that had been stolen. It was a small group, as Lando had suspected, but they would be a handful for six men to stop.

Lando raised his blaster and shot straight down the street. He hit the ground just behind one of the banthas. It barely budged - the beasts were used to Tusken raids, and it took a lot to rile them - but the blast was enough to get the attention of several of the raiders, who turned sharply and gave that awful shriek.

But they didn't try to attack or make any aggressive moves up the street. They stayed focused on their looting, passing along bags and slinging them upon the banthas. They were finishing up the last houses.

"Help!"

The scream was so loud and close that it literally hurt Lando's ears. He barely had time to register it and turn around before a pair of hands grabbed him by the shoulders so tightly that he stopped running dead in his tracks. Then he was being shaken.

"Please...please...my daughter, my daughter is hurt, you have to help...she's dying, help her, please!"

She was an older woman, and was hurt badly herself. A cut somewhere on her head was bleeding down over her face and into her eyes. There were bruises on her face and arms...almost anywhere that Lando could see. She was hysterical and shaking. Lando didn't want to think about the kind of shape her daughter must be in.

"Ma'am," he began, trying to gently pull her hands off his arms, "ma'am please -"

"Help her! Please!"

Lando came close to ordering one of his men to go with her, but his eyes were still on the Tuskens. He couldn't take them on with less people, he probably didn't have enough as it was. And they needed to keep moving, to hurry before the Tuskens got to the next homes.

"Ma'am, I'll radio for someone to come help you. I have to try to protect -"

"No! No!"

"I -"

Before he could finish, the woman suddenly swayed, and jerked, and then collapsed.

She was still alive, and Lando could see her still mouthing the word "help" to herself.

"Sir?"

Lando forced himself to look away from her. "Radio for help. Tell any medics we've got to get down here." His voice sounded strange in his ears, but he tried to ignore it. He motioned to the rest of the men and resumed his pursuit. They fired constantly, eventually hitting a bantha and causing it to buck up wildly. The Tuskens cut around a bend, onto the neighboring street.

Over one of the men's radio, Lando could hear the sounds of other battles happening in the city. The Rebels had gotten some help from the shop owners, the slaves had mostly joined up with the Imperials, which at least meant they had some protection from the Tuskens. The rest of the reports were harried and erratic, and Lando couldn't guess how things were going.

He wasn't sure what to tell people about what was happening on his end. He was trying not to know, not to look. Lando was beginning to feel detached. He had heard many horror stories since joining the Rebellion - those were the most common reason people signed up, and were willing to risk their lives in the hope of bringing down an Empire. Some of those stories, he couldn't even really picture, and others had stayed with him permanently. But he knew that his own life hadn't been terribly hard, especially for someone who found himself on the wrong side of the law so often. Smuggling and other crimes had provided him with a life that suited his personality and taste. Once its appeal had faded, he had wound up living a fairly respectable life on Bespin. He was always surrounded by the finer things, and he always enjoyed them, no matter what kind of life he was leading.

Still, he had never really thought of himself as having led a privileged life, even after hearing those stories from the other Rebels. But now that he was seeing one of those stories himself? Living one? He had lived a privileged life, he knew that now. He had never been in a situation like this before.

It was only one street. But the burning buildings - the burning people - the destruction and death, the injuries and the pain...he couldn't even look in the direction of anything that resembled a child and he saw women in far worse shape than the first one who grabbed him...and men with their blasters still in their hands...

Why couldn't they have just stolen what they wanted and then left?

Lando forced himself back to reality, and decided he couldn't fight in a cloud of anger and revulsion. And he had decided that one street would be the end of it. The Tuskens would get any further, no matter what he had to do to stop them.

He led his men into a sharp turn and through a small sliver of space between two houses. The came out in front of the Tusken group, cutting them off.

Lando looked at his men, and nodded.

They charged.

Leia's here.

Luke felt the muscles in his back stiffen as he blocked a laser blast from the Rebel troops fighting in the motor pool.

Leia's here, but she's not with them.

The harsh sound of energy deflected exploded right behind him, and he whipped his head around to find Father, his lightsaber still raised from the block. The mask, of course, made his expression unreadable, and his presence in the Force was too dominated by combat to give a good indication, but Luke could guess what he was feeling well enough - the same irritation he'd felt earlier. Another missed observation. There would be another lesson. A painful one, no doubt. But he had blocked the shot. Luke nodded an acknowledgement. "Thank you," he said.

"Be aware of your surroundings," Father said, then whirled to face an oncoming Rebel on a speederbike. The bike veered off, steering column smoking, and crashed into the solid wall. He stopped. "Your sister is here."

"That's what I felt."

Father nodded, and gestured to Colonel Ellsov, who ran over, firing his blaster into the mass of Rebels as he ran. "Yes, m'lord?"

"You are in command, Colonel. Lord Skywalker and I must return to the command center."

"Yes, m'lord."

Father waved at the small access door behind them in an impatient way, and they ran back inside as soon as it opened. Luke waved it shut behind them.

When they had gone out to join the battle, Mother's command center had been on high alert, but relatively stable. It had seemed the safest place for her. Now officers were running from console to console, shouting across the room to one another, looking panicked. Mother herself was on her feet, pounding desperately at a holotransmitter. She looked up when they came in. "Communications are down," she said. "There's no dampening field. They're just gone. We're cut off."

"Everything planetside?" Luke asked, going to her side. The control panel on the transmitter showed red lights across the board.

"Everything everywhere," she said. She took a series of deep, sharp breaths. "We've lost our entire array."

An ensign ran into the control center, bent double, breathing hard. He pulled himself to a stop and bowed to Mother. "Your... Majesty..."

"Get your breath," Mother said kindly.

He nodded. "Yes... " He bent at the waist, put his hands on his knees and took several deep breaths, then straightened. "Your Majesty, I went to the communications control room as you ordered. Two technicians are dead. The third is badly injured. The central communications console has been completely destroyed."

"Is there no backup?"

"No, your Majesty. The backup equipment was scheduled to arrive later this week. It was deemed sufficient to have the primary console in operation." He looked down at his shiny boots. "Your Majesty, one of the dead guards... They appear to have been... cut." He glanced nervously at Luke and pointed at the lightsaber still in his hand. "With one of those."

Luke felt Mother's tension rise, and felt Father's anger well up. For himself, he felt only a dull sense of resignation. Leia. Of course. She had used the other battle as a diversion. Her strategy was to cripple the Guard on Tatooine. Better to abandon the planet to anarchy than let the Empire get a stronghold.

No one in the family spoke. Mother dismissed the ensign with a wave of her hand. As soon as he was gone, she turned on her heel and stalked out of the room, her veils flying behind her in a scarlet slipstream. Luke and Father followed her.

She didn't head for the communications room, as Luke had half-expected - of course not; Leia was long gone from there - but instead punched a sequence of buttons on the turbolift. The doors opened. All three of them went inside, still not speaking. It began to rise.

"Leia," Mother whispered.

"Yes," Father said. "I believe so."

The turbolift reached its destination, and released them onto the observation tower, an open-air rise that gave a wide view around headquarters. From here, Luke could see not only the battle raging in the motor pool, but the battle on the road to Mos Espa, and another, much further away, sending up a cloud of sand on the road to Mos Eisley. A plume of dust marked the passage of a vehicle coming toward headquarters, but Luke paid no attention to it. It wasn't Leia. The cities were also fighting.

How much of the Rebellion had she brought here?

Somewhere, in that chaos, Leia was hiding behind her shields. Was she with the troops at the motor pool? Had she headed back to the cities? Where was Han?

Mother was standing at the edge of the lookout, her hand shading her eyes, squinting down at the battles as though she could will Leia into visibility. "Where is she?"

Father put a hand on her shoulder and pulled her away from her vulnerable position. "She is undoubtedly nearby."

"How could she do this to me? And to the whole planet? She knows better. She is my daughter. And she was raised by Bail Organa, for the Maker's sake. Where would she learn such carelessness?"

Father did not tense, as he usually did when Luke's guardians or Leia's were mentioned. In fact, he didn't seem to hear her. His edgy presence was deepened in a way Luke had come to identify with his use of the Force. He was looking for her. Relentlessly.

Luke himself couldn't sense her anywhere anymore. The chaotic feelings from the battles kept a cloud in the air as surely as the loose sand did. He just let his eyes roam over the desert, hoping to see a flicker of movement that he would recognize clearly as Leia. His gaze fell back on the road to Mos Eisley.

The plume of dust from the single vehicle was much closer, and Luke realized that it was a speeder, traveling at dangerous, breakneck speeds. As he watched, it thundered into camp. The driver was slumped over the steering column, not seeming to pay any attention to the battle he was headed for.

He was unconscious.

And the speeder was headed straight for a concentration of soldiers.

Luke didn't hesitate. He ran to the edge of the lookout and leapt into nothingness. He heard Mother yell after him. There wasn't time to explain it to her.

He used the Force to control his fall as much as he could, but gravity gave him speed as he flew downward. It was going to be a hard landing any way he looked at it.

Then the speeder was below him, and he tucked himself into a midair roll to change direction just slightly. With a bone-jarring crash, he landed in the cargo box at the back of the vehicle. He wasted no time there.

The driver's body was heavy and entangled with the controls, so Luke just pushed him away from the steering column without ceremony and took the handles himself, standing and bending over the seat.

The driver groaned. He was alive.

Luke pulled back on the column, bringing the speeder into a steep climb. It wasn't particularly safe to operate the machines up high, but he'd done so many times in the past. The rocks provided good surfaces for repulsors, as long as you were going fast enough. He guided the speeder up the observation tower using the Force to slow it when he reached the top, and bringing it to a stop in front of his parents.

Mother ran over. "Luke, you frightened me!" She looked down and noticed the driver for the first time. He was covered with blood from a large cut at his hairline. "Who is this?"

"I don't know," Luke said. "The speeder-" He got out, and Father helped him pull the man from the driver's seat. "It was going to crash. I had to do something about it."

"You did well," Father said calmly, not looking at him. "Exceptionally well."

They put the man down gently, laying him carefully on the warm rock of the lookout. Mother knelt beside him and touched his face.

The eyes, surrounded by streaks of blood, fluttered open. At first he looked confused, then he caught sight of Mother. He grabbed her wrist. "Your Majesty," he gasped.

Father was starting to reach for the man's hand, to remove it, but Mother shook her head minutely. "What is it?" she asked. "You've made it to me. What has troubled you?"

"Majesty... Mos Eisley... Rebels."

"We are aware of the situation," Father told him. "We are -"

The man was shaking his head, and a gout of blood seemed to erupt from his nose. It soaked into Mother's dress, where it simply looked like a deep shadow. "Rebels... allied with... " A cough. "Tusken Raiders. Everywhere. Stealing. Looting." Those wide eyes squeezed shut. "Killing and... and worse... my daughter... "

Luke's mind reeled. The Tuskens? Why would Leia ally with them? What did she even know about them? He hadn't ever found a reason to discuss them with her, and Father had told them nothing. He would not speak of Tatooine, even now that they stood here together. Mother had told them only that they feared Father, that he had dealt with them severely for their crimes in the past...

And Leia sees them as his victims only.

"Help us... " the stranger gasped. "Majesty... We need you... help... us... " He drew in a rattling breath and let it out. The next breath never came.

Luke looked up from the man's face. His parents were staring at one another over the body.

"Ani?" Mother said. To Luke's surprise, her voice didn't sound panicked or urgent. She sounded frightened, but it was a different kind of fear than he would expect - it was a deep, ancient fear, tinged with regret and grief. "Ani, are you... ?"

Father stood. "We have no army to send to them," he said.

"Ani... Leia doesn't know."

Father said nothing.

Luke reached forward and closed the stranger's eyes. "I don't think she intended this, Father. She doesn't know anything about the Tuskens."

Father still said nothing. He headed for the turbolift.

"Where are you going?" Mother called after him.

"To meditate," he said. "To go deeply enough into the Force that I can get past Leia's barriers. She has gone too far, Amidala. I'm going to find her."

"Ani... "

"I'm going to find her and bring her back."

The doors of the lift opened, and he disappeared into it. The sound of its passage was grating. Luke and Mother stood up and moved closer to one another instinctively.

Mother looked at Luke, her fear settling deeply into her face. That disturbing, distant look was back on her face, the deep unhappiness that Luke wanted to see banished forever. "Why is this happening?" she whispered. "Why did we ever come back to this awful place? It tears him apart."

Luke put his arms around her and held her. "We came to fix it, Mother. And we will."

"I know... " Her arms wrapped around his waist, and he felt her shoulders hitch once in a quiet sob. "Oh, Luke. What a mess this all is. I want it to be yesterday. Or last week. Or twenty-five years ago. I don't want this. I never wanted this."

"I know that, Mother. You want to do something good. The Rebellion is trying to stop you. I don't know why. But they're not going to do it. We'll stop them."

She nodded and stood back, the light struggling to come back to her features as she spoke. "Yes. We will. We will stop them, and we will establish control of this hellish world once and for all. I will turn Tatooine into a garden and those monsters... " She shuddered. "We'll succeed, Luke. But I want it to be yesterday again. I want none of this to have happened."

"I know, Mother. I know."

Mother crossed her arms over her chest and looked out across the desert again. "She really doesn't know what she's done, does she?"

"No. She knows Father thinks of them as enemies. And she thinks that means they'll be friends of the Rebellion. At least that's as close as I can guess."

"It's probably true." She sighed deeply, and spoke to the sands. "They were his first true hate, just as I was his first love. Oh, Leia... what have you done? What have you let loose?"

"Mother?"

She looked over her shoulder. "He won't hurt her, will he? Not even over this?"

It took a moment for Luke to understand what she was asking of him, then he nodded. He reached into the Force to find Father's presence, to look into it as he lowered himself into meditation. It wasn't always safe, but this time Father seemed to be paying no attention to the intrusion.

There was anger at Leia of course, and anger at the Tuskens. There was a deep wellspring of frustration. But the hate of which Mother spoke was very deeply buried, barely registering under the larger feeling that emanated from it and enveloped everything within itself. And it was the last feeling Luke had ever expected to pick up from his father.

"He's terrified," he said, not able to stop the wonder in his voice. "He's not going to hurt her. He's scared for her."

But Mother didn't even seem surprised. She just nodded, as if nothing could have been more predictable. "I am too," she said.

Leia reached her speederbike, and immediately mounted it and took off. She stayed close to the mesa, hugging it around the bend, and hoping she blended in enough to make her hard to spot. She wondered how long it would take Imperial security - or just an officer that happened to walk by - to see what she had done to that room.

An image of its destruction sprung up in her mind, and Leia quashed it. She needed to focus on Alpha Squadron's battle now.

She brought her speeder up high again - nearly as high as it had been when she was scouting the headquarters - and flew around the base, heading for the side where the Rebels were engaging the Imperial troops. She would need to see if the fight should be continued. She hoped to get there and find that they had already gone through the vehicles and transports and had taken out the weapons caches, and they could simply leave.

Nothing like wishful thinking, Leia supposed. But even if everything had gone well, she still worried that things might become...needlessly complicated when she tried to get her squadron to withdraw. There was always the confusion of battle, which made giving and following orders difficult...

But that wouldn't be the problem, and she knew it.

Alpha Squadron was so close to the Empress they could taste it, they could reach out and grab it. Grab what they thought would be the ultimate victory for the Rebellion. And they were eager - too eager - to give it a try.

Leia shivered against a tendril of fear that snaked its way around her heart. She would just have to trust her people.

Or, she'd have to get back to the battle a little faster.

She was almost there now, and from her vantage point, could see now see the fighting and make out some members of Alpha Squadron. She could clearly see the troops and guards that were defending the headquarters. And they -

"Leia? Leia, this is Han, come in!"

His voice took her completely by surprise, and her speeder wobbled momentarily. She pulled out her comlink and stared at the little red light shining back at her. She had silenced it - she couldn't imagine that she would have been foolish enough to try and infiltrate the base without doing so - but Han had used his codes to override that command. She quickly undid the silencer and answered the hail.

"Han! What are you doing? If you had been yelling into my comm like this a minute ago, every guard in the base would have known I was there. I put it to silent -"

"I'm sorry, Leia, I know it was a risk. Are you safe? Where are you? Did you get the array?"

Leia eased her bike to a stop, hovering above and just behind the fighting below. She could see the smoke of destroyed Imperial vehicles...the battle seemed to be going well, even though they hadn't been able to move on to the arsenal yet. "Yes, all their communications are down, and they won't be getting them back any time soon. I just left the array. Alpha Squadron looks like they're doing all right and I was about to -"

"Look, sweetheart, I'm sorry, but we've got some major problems happening. That's why I overrode your silent command."

"What?" she asked sharply. "Han, what is it? Are you all right? What's happening in Mos Espa?"

"It's not me. We're fine, and we've pretty much got the city under control right now. It's Lando. I checked in with him a minute ago. Leia, things are bad in Mos Eisley. Real bad, and I think they're only going to get worse. The Tuskens showed up, and they are out of control. Lando didn't know what to do - he told me to get you and get your orders. I haven't heard from him since."

The fear that snaked through Leia suddenly grew into a fist and grabbed her heart fiercely. "What...what are they doing? What's happened?"

"He didn't have much time to explain..."

"What did he say? What did you hear?"

She listened to Han sigh. "He said all hell had broken loose after the Tuskens arrived. That they were raiding shops, and killing people...he told me to get you right away. Then he had to go." He stopped, but Leia could tell he wasn't finished. She waited. "I could hear the fighting and everything else going on in the background. It sounded ugly, Leia. And..."

"And what?"

"I don't think I've heard Lando sound like that before. I don't think I can describe it to you. You didn't hear him."

Leia swallowed hard. "I can hear it in your voice now, Han," she said quietly. "Was there...was there anything else? Have you heard anything more?"

"Not much," Han said flatly. "The settlers aren't making things any easier for them, and they still have the Imperials to deal with. I've got people trying to stay in contact with Gamma Squadron, but they're too busy fighting to keep us up to speed."

A pause. "We heard the stories, Leia. We can guess what those Raiders are doing to the settlement."

But Leia didn't need to guess. She was suddenly pulled out of her conversation with Han and into the mists and currents of what was happening in Mos Eisley, and visions came to her forcefully.

The sand was everywhere. Kicked up, blasted up, whipping all around in a storm that threatened to blind her. Yet, Leia could feel what she couldn't make out clearly.

Terror, violence, and death.

She knew there were people in the settlement who were ready to fight and were capable of holding their own against anyone. And they were doing so. It wasn't their fear that Leia was suffering through.

The fear was from the slaves, many of whom had lived their entire lives with no means of self-defense, so they wouldn't be able to challenge their owners. It was from the poor city dwellers, who had only ever known their slums, too busy trying to eke out an existence to have ever spared time worrying about preparing for some outside attack. It was from the shopkeepers, who were trying their best, and who had learned to protect their wares from thieves and smugglers, but were caught unprepared for the viciousness of Raiders who normally didn't venture in far enough to bother the businesses in town.

The fathers and husbands. The women and children.

The destruction.

Leia hoped desperately that not all of these images had occurred - that she still had a chance to stop some of it from happening.

"Leia! Are you there!"

She pulled out of her vision completely - it had only take a couple of seconds - and answered him.

"I'm here. Try to get back through to Lando. I'm sure he's doing what he can to protect the civilians. Tell him to keep doing that until I get there."

"Until you get there?"

"Yes."

"Leia, Alpha Squadron needs you at Headquarters. You can't just leave them in the middle of a battle."

"They're doing fine here, Han -"

"They need your direction. What are they supposed to do if they realize they've been left with no one to command them -"

"They have their orders," she said. "And besides, they're attacking a fully armed and protected military base in open battle. There's no comparison. No matter what happens here, the real trouble is in Mos Eisley. I have to fix this, Han."

"Look, I'm sending people out to help Lando now." Han's voice was sharp. "Mos Espa's under control, we can spare the people. Stay where you are."

"Send your people, I'll need the help. Why are you so against me going?"

"Because you can't fix this on your own, and don't tell me that's not what you're thinking you're going to do. You're out of your mind to even consider it."

"I created this problem on my own," she replied, "and everything we've done on Tatooine is in jeopardy because of it. Besides, having a Jedi there has got to make a difference."

"Leia -"

"Get Lando and tell him I'm coming, Han. Leia out." She switched him off, took a deep breath, and then switched over to Alpha Squadron's channel. Commander Athuli answered.

"Your Highness?"

"Commander, a situation has arisen and I'm needed elsewhere. What is the situation down there?"

"We've hit most of the ships and transports they had stationed here. We're moving on to their ammunitions. We're gaining the upper hand."

"Good. Hit their weapons, and then get out of there as ordered. Check in with Han once you do that."

"But we could -"

"Commander, those are your orders. I trust you as my officer to follow them. Once you've destroyed your intended targets, gather your people and leave. Is that understood?"

"...Yes Ma'am. Athuli out."

With that, Leia immediately pushed her bike to its top speed - pushed it beyond the top speed. She blazed a path directly toward Mos Eisley.

The communications array was not merely disabled; it was utterly destroyed. Its circuits were melted and its console fused. Vader surveyed it by long habit for usable parts. He found none. Leia had aimed the destruction at him personally - it was deliberately damaged in a manner that no amount of mechanical tinkering would repair.

Leia, what have you done?

Thoughts of the past tried to flood his mind. Images. Sounds. Smells.

I will come back and free you, Mom, I promise.

(Don't look back. )

Dreams pass in time.

(Don't look back. )

You had another nightmare last night.

(Don't look back. )

It was just before dawn...

Mom. Her voice, as clear as it had been so long ago: Don't look back.

A woman bound to crossed wooden stakes, blood from some unseen wound making her face a death mask. The pressure of more blood seeping under her flesh, making her feel almost rigid. The smell of the tent. The warm touch of her hand on his face.

And then the fire in his mind, and the screams. The screams never completely left him. Even when his victims were silent - as they usually were now, trying to die with dignity - he heard the echoes of those ancient screams, felt the horrible energy come into him, the desire to punish, to destroy, to hurt. That shame would come later was something he had come to accept as a fact of his life, the natural consequence of exacting... justice? Vengeance? Was there a difference, really?

(Don't look back. )

But he needed to look back. He needed to look back because Leia had brought the nightmare forward, and he had to find her. This time, he would find her before she was tied to the crossed wood rack and beaten until her own blood turned against her. She would answer for this outrage - it was far beyond what he was willing to indulge - but he would find her first, and they would have a long conversation, about a great many things.

The sound of metal crushing metal brought him out of his angry reverie, and he realized that he'd crumpled a small component of the communications array in the palm of his right hand. Obi-Wan would undoubtedly tell him that he was allowing his anger to cloud his judgment, and that clouding his judgment would only impede his progress...

It would be true, Anakin...

Vader looked up sharply, but the voice was just a memory, like the others. Obi-Wan might come to lecture him about Amidala's political affiliations, but he would surely not trouble himself over the minor matter of Leia's safety, certainly not with the sure knowledge that his new pet Jedi would be immediately returned to the Empire and her training with her father.

Still, the memory was right. Anger at Leia and ancient screams would not help meditation, would not help him find her.

He let the smoke from the destruction swirl around him, closing off the vision through the eyeguards in his mask. Behind the eyeguards, he closed his natural eyes as well, though their input in this state was negligible. It took effort to get past the anger and past... past that which lay beyond the anger... but he forced his mind to cool, and finally, beaten into submission, his instinct bowed to his conscious will.

Vader reached for the Force, took hold of it, let it take hold of him.

At first, all he could feel was the pain of the battle at the motor pool - men and women dying as laser burns cut through their hearts, seared their lungs, filled their bodies with fire. There was anger, rage at their loss, at the Empire, at Amidala herself, though their reasons were no more than nebulous clouds of ideology. And terror as they looked up into the alien sky, understanding that this was for real...

He pulled himself away from the energy of the fighting, letting its pain pass through him. He had been in battles, many battles - if you couldn't shut out the pain and terror, you couldn't function. And if you couldn't function, the battle would go on forever.

He went deeper. Leia flickered at the edge of his consciousness, in motion, trying to hide.

Sands shifting, blowing, stinging his face/her face. The suns are too hot. The city is too far.

She became aware of him, and he was pushed back into himself with the strength of a desert whirlwind.

The communications room came back into view for a short moment, then Vader pushed himself back down to a meditative state. She was traveling, rushing to one of the cities. Was it to Mos Eisley itself, into the arms of the Tuskens? Or was it to Mos Espa or Bestine? He couldn't waste time choosing the wrong route.

Sand, again.

Swirling in clouds that reached to the sky, hiding and revealing like a veil blown in the wind.

A figure on a road, her arms wrapped around her waist, watching as he walks away.

No, as he comes to her. He is coming home.

Then she turns away and disappears behind the sand.

Vader follows her.

Shifting sand, shadows. Leia - or is it Mom? - appears in a canyon, on a hilltop, going down into--

"No," Vader whispered, unaware that he was speaking aloud.

The sands part, and the small village of tents comes into view. Vader

(I am Anakin, I am a person and my name is Anakin)

goes down after her, unable to stop his motion. He comes close to her.

She turns.

It is Leia, but it is also Shmi Skywalker. He can tell the difference, but the woman before him is both mother and daughter. Her face changes depending on the angle of the sun.

And she is bleeding. A red mask of blood covers her, and her wrists are raw from binding that has not occurred yet.

"This is my fault," she says as Leia. "And I must go and try to repair the damage. I'll go to them. Surely they will see reason."

Vader tries to speak, but finds himself silenced.

"The people in Mos Eisley," the Woman says as Mom, in her soft, lilting accent. "Ani, no one is helping them. She has to go. You know she won't forsake them."

"Father?"

Vader opened his eyes. The smoke had cleared and his eyeguard vision enhancers were unimpaired. Luke was standing beside him, Amidala at his shoulder.

"She is alone," he said. "Alone and planning to speak to the Tusken chief. I believe they are camped on the rise over Mos Eisley. If I leave immediately, I can arrive before she does. She is on a speederbike."

"I'm going with you," Luke said. "I'll get two of our speeders ready, the modified ones and -"

"No."

"Father, I'm capable of fighting Tuskens. I grew up on a farm on the edge of the Wastes. I -"

"I said no, Luke. I say it as your father, as your Master, and as your superior officer. You will stay here and guard your mother."

"Father -"

"Please, Luke," Amidala said, her hand grasping frantically at the boy's shoulder. "Please do as your father asks. Please. I trust you to allow nothing to happen to me, and I... Oh, Luke, I can't stand the thought of all of you being away from me again. Don't leave me alone."

Luke's jaw tightened. Amidala knew him well, and had chosen the argument he never countered. But he was taking their position as an insult, a lack of faith.

Vader stood. "I trust you, my son," he said. "Do not assume otherwise. But your mother requires protection here. I must retrieve your sister, and... " He stopped, unsure how he'd planned to end the sentence. "You will remain at headquarters," he said. "Do not argue with me."

He suddenly felt Luke's mind on his own, tasting his emotional state, seeing what his motives were. It was a discomforting sensation and Vader usually discouraged it as strongly as he could, but whatever Luke had sensed there - and Vader was never quite sure what Luke believed he was sensing - made him take a step back and bow graciously.

Luke nodded, a puzzled but almost warm look in his eyes. "As you wish, Father."

"My good son," Amidala said, and squeezed his hand.

Vader looked at them together, at their fine-featured faces and broad mouths. They were lovely.

It was not a time to share that sentiment. Instead, he nodded briefly to Luke, ran a finger down Amidala's cheek (she caught it on her lips to press a kiss against it), and ran for the motor pool.

The battle was beginning to wind down, but it was hard to determine who had won at this point. Many vehicles lay in ruins, but the main entrances hadn't been breached. Somehow, a modified speeder had remained, improbably sitting in the midst of a scrap pile that had once been six others. Vader jumped into it, hit the acceleration keys, and steered off toward Mos Eisley.

Luke turned away from the door after Father ran down the hallway and out of sight. He had searched Father's thoughts, and to his surprise - to his pleasure - he had found nothing but trust there. No lingering resentment for the lies or disagreements, no real concerns about leaving him and Mother to fend for themselves. Father had been telling the truth. Luke couldn't help feeling glad of it, even in the midst of these trying circumstances. Because of these trying circumstances, he was glad that something, at least, felt settled.

He planned to move Mother to the main guardpost. It was near the center of the headquarters, which meant that the Rebels would have to make a great deal of inroads to reach them. There would be plenty of officers there to act as a first line of defense, and Luke would be able to get the latest word from the various battlefronts from there. The communications failure meant that the command center was nearly useless in that regard. He'd rather wait for the various guards and officers who might come back from the front lines with reports, than contribute to the hysteria of trying to fix an array that was unsalvageable.

But before leaving, Luke couldn't stop his eyes from wandering over the communications room. Or what was left of it.

The bodies had been cleared out before Father had come here, so Luke had not seen the guards Leia had killed. But the room was still a mess, and his gaze eventually landed on the array itself. He was soon beside it, letting his fingers skate over the misshapen metal and melted wires. His skin was lightly singed and sparks occasionally flew up here and there.

He tried to picture Leia doing this.

Leia, with the lightsaber she had stolen from him, killing Mother's guards, destroying Mother's equipment.

Leia, with the training she had received from him and Father, fighting her own family.

He could almost see it. It shouldn't have been so difficult anyway. Leia had been fighting them in one sense or another since Bespin. And he had seen her, first-hand, when she faced both him and Father to escape from Naboo.

But he still found this hard to grasp for some reason, and thinking about what she had done here and what she was doing elsewhere on Tatooine made him ill.

No, it makes you angry. Genuinely, furiously angry with her.

That wasn't a surprise, or some great revelation, given the circumstances. But being angry at Leia at all - much less this angry - was something that Luke still felt unaccustomed to.

Luke had always denied idolizing Leia, back when she or Han or some other Rebel would tease or joke with him about it. But he knew (and she knew) that he had put her on a pedestal from the first moment he had seen that hologram, begging Ben Kenobi to help her. She had stayed up there during their years together in the Rebellion. Leia had always impressed him as one of the strongest, bravest, smartest people he'd ever met, and it hadn't bothered him to recognize that. So many of the things he'd done during that time were motivated, at least in small part, by a desire to impress her or help her. Maybe he had lost that wide-eyed, farm-boy wonder he used to regard her with, but the way he looked at her had always been colored by his first impressions of her, and by his belief that she was his closest friend.

But now he felt angry. Betrayed. Leia had always railed on and on about how he and their parents had hurt her, betrayed what she believed in...but wasn't she the one who fled Naboo the first chance she got? Hurting Mother and Father so deeply in the process? Wasn't she the one who was destroying his and Father's home as a way of getting back at her family?

Getting back at us for what? For loving her? For taking care of her when she was injured?

Finding out that he and Leia were twins had let everything fall into place for Luke, once the initial shock wore off. The draw and pull between them made perfect sense, and now Leia was family, the sister he hadn't even realized he had been wanting. A missing piece in his life had been found.

And to her, it was nothing more than a reason to ruin the closeness they shared, to rip apart their friendship.

He missed her. He wanted to throttle her.

"Dammit, Leia."

Mother's eyes snapped to him. She was lingering by the door, where she had stood to watch Father leave. Luke wondered if he had ever seen her so tense.

She had heard what he said, and was clearly distressed by whatever she imagined he was thinking. "Don't, Luke. She doesn't realize what she's done."

"Yes, she does. She absolutely does," Luke muttered grimly. He had no desire at all to upset his mother further, but to think that Leia wasn't aware of exactly what she was doing was too much for him to stand.

"Your father never told her what happened with the Tuskens. He's never been able to bring himself to tell that story again. And she's not even from Tatooine, she had no way of knowing the kind of trouble she was asking for." Mother's arms went around her midsection and she held herself tightly. "We should have told her. We should have told you both everything, all of it. Keeping things from one another has only caused this family pain. I guess that's a lesson we still haven't learned yet."

Her eyes were haunted, but not mindlessly so...she appeared thoughtful and reflective, and had an expression on her face that Luke had not seen very often. He gave the console a final touch and then stood before his mother, drawing her away from the door.

"Mother, don't blame yourself -"

"Who else should I blame? Who knows better than I do what lies have done to us?"

"You didn't lie."

"No, I just let Ani keep this secret. And again the secret has come back to us..." She shook her head slowly.

Luke was curious to find out exactly what happened, what it was about the Tuskens that had so frightened and sobered his parents. The Tuskens were certainly feared on the farms when he was growing up, but they were also accepted as a part of the threat of desert life. This kind of reaction confused him. But he could also tell that Mother, despite her protests to the contrary, didn't want to talk about it. He sensed from her the belief that it was Father's story to tell. So he didn't press her. She was agitated enough already.

"Luke, it's almost like it's happening again."

"What is?"

"We're being torn apart again, this family. We're pulling ourselves apart. When I gave you and Leia away -"

"Mother," Luke said seriously, drawing one of her hands into both of his, "this isn't the same. No matter what happens, no matter what Leia thinks, this family has been reunited. We're connected now, and nothing is going to tear us apart again. Leia's stuck with us now. We're all stuck together." He gave the hand a squeeze. "Besides, you did what you felt you had to, you followed the advice of people you trusted. And you did well by Leia and me. Don't feel guilty over the past."

To his surprise, a faint smile touched Mother's lips and she squeezed his hands back. "That, I'm eternally grateful for. Oh Luke, Owen and Beru were so good to your father and me. Whenever we needed them - and it seemed that we never saw them except when we needed them - they were there for us." She sighed. "Sometimes, I have to admit, I was a little jealous of them."

"Jealous?"

"They lived simple lives, on their own terms. And they were raising my son. I used to think of Anakin and I winding up on Tatooine together, raising our children..."

Luke was startled, and found himself trying to picture his parents tending to a farm outside of Anchorhead. He couldn't make it fit. At all. He couldn't understand why they would want it.

But, he supposed that wasn't entirely fair. He might not have had fond memories of the particular lifestyle he had been raised in on Tatooine, but that was mostly because of boredom, and boredom was not such a terrible thing in a dangerous and violent galaxy.

And Owen and Beru were great parents to him, in their own way. They had loved him, and had wanted to protect him at all costs, something that Luke deeply regretted not having realized until they were gone. Maybe they hadn't always understood him - Luke doubted they had always understood his parents either - but family had always won out in their minds, and they had risked and sacrificed much for him.

Beyond the larger issues though, there were the smaller things, the little things that Luke missed about them. The way Aunt Beru would sing to him and sneak him sweets when he had trouble sleeping...how Uncle Owen would get a kind of gruff pleasure out of Luke fixing one of the speeders or vaporators on his own. How they both tried to indulge his love of flying, how they smiled to themselves when Luke would be chattering on about something or another...how they mussed his hair or clapped his shoulder when they were pleased with something he did. Being back on Tatooine had brought back those thoughts and memories and feelings of home. He was surprised by how forcefully he missed it all.

He wondered what Owen and Beru might think, to see him now, to see their farmboy son ruling the galaxy with his parents.

They would be pleased. And proud.

Of course they would be. They'd have to be.

"Luke?"

"I'm sorry, Mother, my mind wandered." Luke slipped an arm around her, and led her out of the door. "We should head to the main guardpost until Father returns."

"Lead the way," she whispered, "my good son."

Together, they made their way through the hectic hallways of the headquarters, to await Father's return.

The Empire was in chaos, though beyond Tatooine it hadn't yet realized it.

The destructive command to the Imperial system was only beginning to work its way outward, causing routine grievances that no Imperial had as yet recognized as a serious threat - garbled images, mangled sounds, messages arriving at unintended destinations or dissipating into the vacuum of space. Within a day, the distortions would be too great to ignore, but by then, it would be too late to make a concerted effort to remove the command.

On Tatooine itself, the comlinks were silenced; the nerves connecting the military body to the Imperial mind were severed and useless. Panic was rising.

In Bestine, the capital of Tatooine, the members of the Guard who had been staffing the base while the majority of the staff marched in what was to have been a triumphant parade were now barricaded behind a rock wall. Not many Rebels had made it to the township proper; the battle had taken place on the road from headquarters, and neither Rebel nor Imperial had arrived to bring news. Commander Arisede Raryth, the temporary commander, had realized immediately when planetside communications went down, because she had been trying desperately to reach her commanding officer, Colonel Nesem, when the empty static she had been able to summon suddenly turned to ominous silence.

Most of the Rebels in Bestine were local recruits, smugglers and gamblers for the most part, to whom the Lady's ascension meant financial ruin at the very least. For some, it would mean execution. They were matched in number by farmers from the outlying provinces, whose vision of life on Tatooine was a clean break from the kind of Core World seediness that they thought the smugglers represented. So the fight was even, and small, and the Guard's only participation so far had been making a few arrests and keeping non-combatants out of the way. The on-duty staff was mostly young and inexperienced - a year in the Rebellion before the Empress had taken control to fix things was Arisede's training, and she was the senior officer - and the near revelry that both sides were taking had swept them into acts of rude defiance. Arisede knew that she should be firing her weapon, but... well, they were...

"We should do something!" Ensign Karso said urgently, looking over the edge of the wall into the fight. She had only recently mastered Basic, and she seemed unable to elaborate on the thought in that language. She slipped back into her native Rodian, her speech patterns becoming higher, more rapid, more panicked as she went. Somewhere in the middle of it, she took off her uniform cap and started pulling nervously at the protrubences on her head. In the end, it degenerated into high-pitched keening.

Arisede grabbed the girl by her shoulders and shook her, hard. There was a great deal more satisfaction in doing so than Arisede wanted to admit to herself. "Shape up, Karso! You're in Her Ladyship's Guard! Act like a sentient!"

Karso fought for self-control, found some, and straightened her shoulders. "We should act," she said. "Her Ladyship wouldn't want us locked away."

"I - " Arisede bit her lower lip, caught herself at it and stopped, then sighed. "I don't know what her Ladyship would want. Should we help the others on the road, or should we try to break up the fighting? They're civilians... "

"But -"

Arisede swallowed. As much as she hated to admit it, Karso was right. "All right. We signed onto the Guard to get Tatooine under control. The rest of the unit can handle the battle. We should... we should try to get Bestine back." She looked around for approval, and was gratified to see some. "Let's go!"

With a determined stride - the best she could muster anyway - she ran at the gate. She'd barely hit the unlock mechanism when she noticed movement on the other side. She never knew whether it was a Rebel, a farmer, or just a kid on a lark. Whoever it was, the timing was better than her own. Something flew into the air in front of her, followed by the blast of a laser, then the air was full of fire and noise and pain. The explosion threw her backward into the broken wall of the Guardpost. There was no more pain when she hit the ground, only an almost pleasant sensation of draining. Darkness came in closing circles around her eyes.

Just before she slipped into unconsciousness, she heard Karso begin to keen again.

"We should do something about the Tuskens in the residential quarter," Lieutenant Birsalit shouted over the blaster fire on the street in Mos Eisley. "This fight isn't going anywhere."

Ter Caldo Maits privately agreed with the assessment. He also selfishly thought it would be nice to move out of the Mos Eisley town square and into the shadowy alleys where the Tuskens were conducting their nasty business. Gungans were not built for Tatooine sun. But their orders were to fight the Rebels, and they were a bigger threat to Her Ladyship than the Tuskens, who were at present more of a threat to their own allies. "Wesa gonna do what wesa ordered to do," he said when a natural pause quieted the battle for a moment.

"But they're monsters!"

Ter Caldo felt the fire flare up in his mind. "Dism what the Naboo be thinking of the Gungans for hundreds of years! Yousa thinkin' these Tatooine people, theysa better than the ones who live away from da spaceports!"

"I think the Tuskens are killing people."

Maybe there's a reason!

Ter Caldo stopped himself from saying that, horrified that he'd even thought it. Her Ladyship didn't believe in that sort of thing. There was no reason why the desert natives couldn't just leave the city and the farmers in peace... which the Gungans had done for the Naboo, no matter what some of the Naboo used to think.

He didn't know what to do.

There was another volley of blaster fire. The Tuskens who were fighting in the street alongside the Rebels punctuated the silence that followed it by striking with their gaffe sticks, but Ter Caldo noticed that they weren't aiming to kill, and their choice of targets wasn't random - they were striking at anyone who was heading for the residential quarter.

Birsalit noticed it, too. She was fuming. "Look at them. They're just keeping us here while the rest of them are looting the place! They're not even really with the Rebels!"

"And dism why wesa fighting here and not there. Wesa got orders to fight the Rebels."

"We also have orders to protect the citizens."

"Desa raiders gonna keep coming, if wesa don't get the Rebels out of here. If wesa beatin' back the Rebels, then mebbe today's gonna be the last time da raids happen. If wesa let the Rebels go, da raids keepin' up forever."

"What do you think the Empress would say?"

"Mesa not knowing," Ter Caldo said, and he realized that his heart was beating too fast and his mouth was even dryer than the desert could account for. The Empress might go either way. It was hard to tell sometimes. And they were cut off from contact. He wanted to run back to headquarters, to set up a chain of command. But there was no time. "Mesa not knowing," he said again. "So wesa stick with what we were being told last."

Another volley of laser fire erupted, and there was no more time to talk.

"What do you mean Tatooine has gone silent?" Piett asked, leaning over the console. "There was some difficulty in the transmissions -"

"Sir, they've gone completely silent. The only way that could happen would be for the central communications console to have been destroyed."

Ice crackled somewhere inside of Piett. The console was far past any reasonable entrance to headquarters, if he recalled the designs properly. To get there... how much had the Rebels needed to go through?

How much... and how many?

"Commander Dihave?" he called.

Dihave, his hair now stringy and hanging in stress-induced clumps, appeared from behind another console. "What is it, sir?"

"We've lost contact with Tatooine."

"I know, sir. I heard."

"Her Majesty is in jeopardy. Perhaps great jeopardy. And we cannot reach her. In your judgment, is this a catastrophic event?"

"My opinion doesn't