Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime Read Free Page A

repulsorlifts and settled the shuttle onto the docking bay floor stirred Mara from her rest. She opened her eyes and, seeing where they were, rose quickly.
    And then she swayed and seemed as if she would fall.
    Leia and Jaina were there in an instant, catching and steadying her.
    She regained her balance and took a deep breath. “Maybe next time you can dial down the inertial compensator toninety-seven instead of ninety-five,” she said jokingly, straining a smile.
    Jaina laughed, but Leia’s face showed her deep concern. “Are you all right?” she asked.
    Mara eyed her directly.
    “Perhaps we should find a place where you can rest,” Leia said.
    “Where we all can rest,” Mara corrected, and her tone told Leia to back off, a reminder that Leia was intruding on a private place for Mara, a place she had explicitly instructed all of her friends, even her husband, not to go. This disease was Mara’s fight alone, to Mara’s thinking, a battle that had forced her to reconsider everything she thought about her life, past, present, and future, and everything she thought about death.
    Leia held her stare for a moment longer, but replaced her own concerned expression with one of acceptance. Mara did not want to be coddled or cuddled. She was determined to live on in an existence that did not name her disease as the most pressing and important facet of her entire life, to live on as she had before, with the illness being relegated to the position of nuisance, and nothing more.
    Of course, Leia understood it to be much more than that, an internal churning that required Mara to spend hours and tremendous Force energy merely holding it in check. But that was Mara’s business.
    “I hope to meet with Nom Anor tomorrow,” Leia explained, as the three, with C-3PO and Bolpuhr in tow, headed for the lower hatch, then moved down to the landing bay. A contingent of New Republic Honor Guard stood waiting there, along with Commander Ackdool, a Mon Calamarian with large, probing eyes, a fishlike face, and salmon-colored skin. “By all reports, we should all be rested before dealing with him.”
    “Believe those reports,” Mara said.
    “And first, it seems I get to meet with our savior Jedi,” Leiaadded dryly, looking back behind the
Jade Sabre
to see the X-wing gliding in to rest.
    “Wurth Skidder,” Jaina remarked, recognizing the markings under the canopy on the starfighter.
    “Why am I not surprised?” Leia asked, and she blew a sigh.
    Ackdool came over to them, then, and extended his formal greetings to the distinguished guests, but Leia’s reaction set him back on his heels—indeed, it raised more than a few eyebrows among the members of
the Mediator’
s Honor Guard.
    “Why did you send him out?” Leia snapped, motioning toward the docking X-wing.
    Commander Ackdool started to answer, but Leia continued. “If we had needed assistance, we would have called for it.”
    “Of course, Princess Leia,” Commander Ackdool said with a polite bow.
    “They why send him out?”
    “Why do you assume that Wurth Skidder flew out at my command?” the cool Commander Ackdool dared to respond. “Why would you assume that Wurth Skidder heeds any order I might give?”
    “Couple o’ ridge-head parachutes floating over Osarian, if those Rodians had any luck,” came the singsong voice of Wurth Skidder. The cocky young man was fast approaching, pulling off his helmet and giving his shock of blond hair a tousle as he walked.
    Leia stepped out to intercept him and took another quick step for no better reason than to make the Jedi stop short. “Wurth Skidder,” she said.
    “Princess,” the man replied with a bow.
    “Did you have a little fun out there?”
    “More than a little,” the Jedi said with a wide grin and a sniffle—and he always seemed to be sniffling, and his hair always looked as if he had just walked in from a Tatooine sandstorm. “Fun for me, I mean, and not for the Rodians.”
    “And the cost of your fun?”