Balance Point Read Online Free

faded below Piani’s chitinous beak. Ryn were such sensitive body-language readers that she was probably closing in on what had them worried. “Outsystem?” she asked.
    “Yes,” Jacen said. “Can you raise the relay repeater? We need to get a message to my sister, with Rogue Squadron.”
    Piani eased her sleeping child away from her shoulder, then laid him in a padded cargo crate on the floor.
    “I’ll try,” she promised. “But you know Admiral Dizzlewit. Sit down, have a bedjie.”
    She motioned toward a sideboard, where several small, dark fungi steamed beside a hefty pot of caf. Bedjies were easy to raise—seed a shallow tank with spores, wait a week, and come back with a net. They were becoming standard refugee fare.
    Jacen wasn’t even slightly hungry, but Han grasped one between thumb and forefinger and nibbled. Steamed,unspiced bedjies were unspeakably bland, but the Ryn matriarchs had taken to hoarding their herbs.
    “Solo!” Randa awoke from his nap. He rolled over and ponderously pulled his upper body into the air. “Why are you here?”
    Jacen had tried to get along with Randa. Raised as a spice merchant, sent by the Hutts to run slaves for the Yuuzhan Vong, Randa had defected at Fondor—supposedly.
    “Getting a message out,” Jacen said numbly.
A Jedi knows no fear
, he’d been taught.
Fear is of the dark side
.
    Fear for himself, he could thrust aside. But for Jaina? He couldn’t help being afraid for his sister. They were linked at an uncanny depth.
    Still young, relatively light, and lithe enough to move under his own power, Randa slithered closer.
    “What are
you
doing here?” Han demanded.
    Randa puffed out his sloping chest. “I told you. With my parent Borga defending Nal Hutta with only half the clans’ support—and pregnant with my sibling, at that—where am I? Stranded, as shipless as one of these idiot Vors. I am willing to stand communication watch day and night. That way, I will hear any news from home and free up your workers for—”
    “We’ll talk about it,” Han interrupted. “Piani, what—”
    Scowling, the Ryn whirled her chair away from her set. “I can’t even get through to Dizzlewit. He left orders. ‘No civilian use of relay without authorization,’ ” she mocked. “So I applied for authorization.” She shook her long, sleek mane of hair. “I can notify you as soon as I get it.”
    Han glared. He and the Duros Admiral Darez Wuht had ended up crosswise twice before his first week on Duro ran out. Admiral Wuht hadn’t even tried to pretend he felt hospitable toward refugees.
    It’d been hoped that the Yuuzhan Vong wouldn’t be interested in a planet that was nearly dead. SELCORE, searching the Core region for a place to locate millions of war refugees, had struck a deal with the Duros High House, one of the few remaining local governments that still seemed willing to accept refugees at all. Displaced people could help reclaim its surface, bring abandoned manufacturing plants back on-line, and take over the food-synthesis plants that still fed Duros in their orbital cities. Duros who had worked groundside could go home. Refugees with military experience, it had been argued, might even help defend Duro’s vital trading hubs, including one of the New Republic’s top ten remaining shipyards.
    Except that the refugees weren’t volunteering for military service in anything like the numbers Wuht anticipated.
    Commanding the orbital cities’ overlapping planetary shields, four squadrons of fighters, and the Mon Cal cruiser
Poesy
, Admiral Wuht provided the refugees some cover, even as the orbital cities retooled for military production. With the Fondor shipyards lost and all the other main military shipyards such obvious targets, the New Republic was hastily decentralizing military production.
    Unfortunately, most of the New Republic’s other warships in this area had been redeployed to Bothawui, or out the Corellian Run. Jacen had heard that the