Balance Point Read Online Free PDF Page A

Jacen exhaled in relief.
    “Her pressure suit held, but she was close to an attack cruiser, one of ours, when the drive blew. She got a massive mag-field exposure.”
    Jacen’s blood turned icy. “Will she recover?”
    Han echoed his question into the pickup.
    The voice hesitated. “Tentatively, yes. We’ll update you as soon as we know. We’re also trying to raise her mother. Is Leia with you?”
    “Isn’t she back on Coruscant?”
    “No, Captain. SELCORE administration seems to have lost her.”
    “Lost
her?” Han echoed sarcastically. “Sorry. I can’t help with that.”
    Jacen flicked the console’s edge. “I could stay out here,” he offered. “I’ll try to find her.”
    Han’s eyes focused on something in the distance. “Sure,” he said. The pain in his voice reminded Jacenthat things were not well between his parents. “You do that.”
    Leia Organa Solo glanced into a dark corner, where her young bodyguard Basbakhan stood like a darker shadow. She hadn’t taken on a planetwide project since … was it Basbakhan’s homeworld, Honoghr?
    She sat at the head of a long synthwood table. Surrounded by bickering scientists, she would’ve liked to cradle her head in both hands, plug her ears, and demand that they stop acting like children.
    Duro did that to people.
    Conditions here were appalling. Still, with Borsk Fey’lya clinging to power on Coruscant, this was one way she could shore up the New Republic, protect the Jedis’ reputation, and wear herself out so thoroughly that every night she dropped onto her cot too exhausted to worry about her own scattered family. Over the past year, she’d been bounced from system to system, caught up in on-again, off-again administrative and diplomatic work, wherever the New Republic’s Advisory Council pretended not to send her.
    Even if she was starting to feel like a nonperson, this Duro project might be the most significant job she ever took on. To remake a world in these terrible times would be an enormous victory.
    Her reconstructive meteorologist clenched a fist on the tabletop. “Look,” the scientist growled, glaring at the huge, furry Talz sitting opposite her. “There were excellent reasons for setting our domes on the dry side of these ranges. The worst toxins fall with the rains. Any settlement placed on a wet side, like our partner Thirty-two, will be utterly unsuitable for spiro-grass rangeland, but ideal for water reclamation. If we try to alter our wind patterns, we’ll set up an environmental catastrophe.”
    “Would anyone even notice a catastrophe?” The Talz sat with his large, lower pair of eyes shut, his small upper pair blinking slowly. “Rangeland needs more water than you seem to think. With all due respect …” He nodded up the table to Leia. “Not only here, but in other areas, we cannot depend on mined groundwater. It’s saturated with soluble toxins and costly to pump.”
    “While we’re here—” A Ho’Din plant-development specialist rested his off-green forearms on the tabletop. His long legs almost didn’t fit under the conference table. “I would like to petition for Sector Four of the reclaimed marshlands. I have several promising vegetative species under development—”
    “I apologize for interrupting my esteemed colleague,” the cereals specialist put in. “But Sector Four was promised to the grains project—”
    “And where’s Cree’Ar?” The meteorologist, Sidris Kolb, spoke Leia’s mind. So far, Dr. Dassid Cree’Ar had missed every one of these weekly meetings.
    Not that I blame him
, Leia thought wryly, watching the Ho’Din pass her datapad back to her personal aide, Abbela Oldsong. At each meeting, they downloaded their current research into Leia’s administrative files. Cree’Ar, a plant geneticist, sent his reports via his own datapad.
    Leia had known many truly eccentric people, whose brilliance showed not only in their results, but in odd personal habits—Zakarisz Ghent, the