Star Wars - Darth Plagueis

concussion missile, but it, and the Headhunter, zipped right underneath the elevated Jade Sabre .
    Before the three women could even begin to catch their breath, another ship streaked in, an X-wing, the new XJ version of the starfighter, its own laser cannons blasting away from its wingtips. Not at the Jade Sabre , though, but at the Headhunter that had just gone past.
    “Who is that?” Leia asked, and Jaina, equally curious, brought the Jade Sabre about hard.
    The Headhunter snap-rolled left and dived, but the far superior X-wing stayed on her, lasers scoring hit after hit, depleting her shields and then blasting her apart into a million pieces.
    “A Jedi,” Mara and Jaina said together, and Leia, when she paused to collect the Force sensations about her, concurred.
    “Fast to the Mediator ,” Leia instructed her daughter, and Jaina swung the Jade Sabre about yet again.
    “I didn’t know there were any Jedi in the sector,” Leia said to Mara, who could only shrug, equally at a loss.
    “Another one’s out,” Jaina informed them, watching the blips on her sensor screen. “And two others are vectoring away.”
    “They want no part of a Jedi showing a willingness to shoot back,” Mara remarked.
    “Maybe Rodians are smarter than I thought,” Leia said dryly. “Smooth it out,” she instructed her daughter, unbuckling and climbing unsteadily to her feet.
    Jaina reluctantly dialed the inertial compensator back to full.
    “Only one pursuing,” Jaina informed them as Leia made her way to the door.
    “The X-wing,” Mara added, and Leia nodded.
    In the hallway outside the bridge, Leia found C-3PO inverted and against the wall, his feet sticking up in the air, his head crunched forward so that his chin was tight against his chest.
    “You have to learn to hold on,” Leia said to him, helping him upright. She glanced across the way to Bolpuhr as she spoke, to find the Noghri still standing calmly in the exact spot she had assigned him.
    Somehow, she wasn’t amazed.
    Jaina took the Jade Sabre at a swift but steady pace toward the distant Mediator . She checked often for pursuit, but it quickly became obvious that the Rodians in their outdated Headhunters wanted no part of this fight.
    Leia rejoined them a short while later, to find Jaina in complete control and Mara resting back in her seat, eyes closed. Even when Jaina asked her aunt a question about docking procedures, the woman didn’t respond, didn’t even open her eyes.
    “They’ll guide you in,” Leia interjected, and sure enough, a voice from the Mediator crackled over the opened comm, giving explicit directions for entry vector.
    Jaina took her in, and Jaina took her down, easily—and after the display of flying she had just given them out with the Headhunters, Leia wasn’t the least bit surprised by her ability to so smoothly tight-dock a ship as large as the Jade Sabre .
    That final shudder as Jaina eased off the 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