The plan was extremely detailed, and the bad thing was that every step was necessary. They knew things would go wrong, but they had to stick to the script as closely as possible. Lando and his wife Tendra would in fact be the ones delivering them to the Vong, so they'd both been brought in to hash out the plan, go over it till the Jedi Knights knew it all, and then tomorrow they'd practice it all again.

It all made Jaina deeply nervous, but in her mind, that just meant they had to get it right.

Currently, she was pacing the floor of her quarters, turning in time as she ran over each step in her head. This was how Jacen found her when he appeared at the doorway, asking, "Am I interrupting?"

"Point thirty: The crew departs," Jaina recited, stopping in place.

Not even questioning it, Jacen relied, "Point thirty-one: Offer the enemy a gift. We just went through this."

"I know," she said. "I don't have as much time to practice as you do. I think I'm afraid I'll forget steps when I get back to Fandom."

He stepped inside the room and asked, "This might be an obvious question then, but... Why go back?"

It was a complicated answer for her, one that stemmed from one simple reason. "I just have to," she said after a moment.

"If it's John, he hasn't exactly been out of place here," Jacen pointed out. "I'm surprised he's not here now."

"If he knew everything we're doing, there's no way I'd end up coming back here. I'd be locked in a closet somewhere," Jaina told him. "Or worse, he'd insist on going along. It's just another mission. We go in, we kill the queen, we go on with life as bizarrely normal with one less problem on our hands."

"That's oversimplifying it, isn't it?"

She shook her head. "No." Then again, she hadn't realized as much as others had how much she tended to distance herself from this sort of thing. She shrugged it off and took a seat on her bunk. "Since it didn't come up, I'm assuming we still haven't figured out how to get past the breaking."

The voxyn were worrisome, yes, but the breaking was going to really be the hard part. It was exactly what it sounded like. The Yuuzhan Vong, who revered pain and mutilated themselves for status, took a perverse pleasure in torturing their prisoners, and they'd have even more fun with Jedi. If they got through that, they'd probably be fine, but they had no idea how to get through that.

"Not yet," Jacen said, sitting beside her. "Still working on it."

"We'll come up with something. We always do," Jaina said, maybe a little less confident than she actually sounded.

He gave her a little smile. "I actually came to get you for dinner. Did you want to head down there?"

"Run through the rest with me," she said.

"We just did this," Jacen said again.

Jaina wasn't budging. "Point thirty-two."

He sighed. "Point thirty-two: The enemy acknowledges the offer."

They'd get to dinner late, but Jaina would feel better.


[NFI, NFB, woo hoo.]