Free Hero's Trial: Agents of Chaos I by James Luceno

supplied. “I wish I knew where her people went.”
    Mara snorted. “Even if you found them, I don’t think the Yuuzhan Vong are going to be as susceptible to Fallanassi-created illusions as the Yevetha were.”
    “Not judging by what we’ve seen.”
    An ironic laugh escaped Mara. “Akanah. Akanah, Gaeriel Captison, Callista … Luke Skywalker’s lost loves. Not to mention that one on Folor …”
    “Fondor,” Luke corrected. “And I was never in love with Tanith Shire.”
    “Just the same, you met each of them during a time of crisis.”
    “When haven’t we been in crisis?”
    “That’s what I’m getting at. Should I be worried that someone new will cross your path this time?”
    Luke went to her. “Our crisis is the one that concerns me most,” he said earnestly. “We need a victory.”
    “You want to talk about irony? My father told me a story that happened right here in the Meridian sector, maybe twelve standard years ago.”
    Captain Skent Graff—human and proud of it, with broad shoulders and a face that turned heads—was half perched on the com-scan integrator console of the
Soothfast
’s cramped bridge, one high-booted leg extended to the floor. His captive audience, slouched at sundry duty stations, were the half dozen who made up the light cruiser’s bridge crew. The stations chirped and chimed intermittently, and the ship’s Damorian power plant thrummed. The sloping viewports of the ingot-shaped vessel looked out on cloud-blanketed Exodo II and its poor excuse for a moon, and some light-years distant, the luminous dust clouds of the Spangled Veil Nebula.
    “He’s stationed aboard the
Corbantis
, out of Durren Orbital, when the ship’s tasked to investigate reports of a pirate attack on Ampliquen. Actually, nobody knew for sure whether it was pirates or forces from Budpock violating a truce accord, but in fact the whole thing turned out to be a ruse engineered by Loronar Corp, a contingentof Imperials, and a guy named Ashgad, who was trying to spread a plague through this entire sector.”
    “The Death Seed plague,” the young female Sullustan at the navicomputer said.
    “Give the lady a glitterstim spliff,” Graff said good-naturedly. “She knows her history. Anyway, the
Corbantis
never makes it to Ampliquen. It’s quilled by a flock of Loronar’s smart missiles and left for dead in an ice chasm on Damonite Yors-B—not too far from here as the mynock flies. But then along comes Han Solo and his Wookiee pal—”
    “Who just happened to be in the neighborhood?” the communications officer asked.
    “Actually they were searching for Chief of State Leia Organa Solo, who’d gone missing, but that’s beside the point.” Graff rested his elbow on a deactivated R series droid fastened to the bulkhead. “Solo and the Wookiee investigate the
Corbantis
and find seventeen severely rad-burned survivors—one of which was my father—and they take them to the sector medical facility at Bagsho on Nim Drovis. At the time the place was being run by some well-known Ho’Din physician—I can’t remember his name, Oolups or Ooploss, something like that—and Ooploss does everything he can for his patients. The problem was that the med facility was so overcrowded that some of the survivors had to be relocated to bacta wards in the annex. And what do you think happens?”
    “They come down with the Death Seed plague,” the navigator ventured.
    Graff nodded. “They come down with the Death Seed plague. Which just goes to show you that even when youfigure you’ve cheated the odds, you’re still a statistic waiting to happen.”
    “And now here you are, all these years later,” the navigator said, “right back where your father was, making local space safe for Drovis’s zwil packers.”
    “Zwil?” the Twi’lek enlisted-rating at the threat-assessment station said.
    “Some sort of narcotic,” Graff said.
    The navigator’s recurved mouth quirked a smile. “For those with