Deceived

by Paul S. Kemp

  In the sky above the port, the running lights of three Imperial shuttles came into view as they descended into the port. The mouth of the doors swallowed them, closed, and killed the light once more.

  At least he knew there were ships there.

  Zeerid stayed where he was and for a time watched to see if there was more traffic. He saw none. In normal times, even a small spaceport like the Liston would have been buzzing with activity.

  He fired the speeder back up and drove on, wanting to get a closer look. The area around the port to a distance of several kilometers had been hit hard by Imperial bombs. Burned-out buildings tilted like drunks on their foundations. Jagged, charred holes pockmarked the ground. Autowalks hung askew, forming a mad web of walking paths that led nowhere. Live wires spat angry sparks. Chunks of duracrete lay here and there, haphazardly strewn about by the force of the bombs.

  He drove slowly, without lights, avoiding the hazards. He saw no one in the area, no movement at all. It felt like a ghost town. The stink of char hung in the air. So, too, the faint, sickly-sweet stink of organic decay. The ruins were the tombs of thousands. He tried to put it out of his mind, hoping that many had been able to flee into the lower levels before the bombing began in earnest.

  He saw an unattended multistory parking structure. Half of it lay in ruins. The other half looked stable enough, and it was only a few blocks from the port. He drove the speeder into the lower level and parked it there. He’d cover the rest of the way on foot. He wanted to eyeball the port unseen and could do that best without a vehicle.

  Republic flight school had taught him ground evasion—to prepare him should his ship ever go down in enemy-held territory—and he put his skills to use. As unobtrusively as a shadow, he moved among the stone rubble and steel beams and abandoned vehicles, keeping undercover as much as possible to avoid being seen from the air. He knew the Empire sometimes used airborne surveillance droids.

  Ahead, a ten-story hotel, The Nebula, stuck out of the smoking, rubbled urbanscape. Unlike almost everything else around it, it looked mostly intact except for a few shattered windows on the lower floors. Zeerid saw no lights in any of the rooms so he assumed it had no power and was unoccupied. He dashed across the street to the hotel, pried open the doors, and entered the lobby. No welcoming droids, no one at the concierge desk, deep darkness.

  “Hello!” he shouted. “Anyone here?”

  No response.

  With the power out, he ignored the lifts and headed for the stairs. He was mildly winded by the time he reached the roof access door. He kicked it open, blaster in hand. Nothing. He ducked low and headed for the edge of the roof. From there, he had a good view of the spaceport. He pulled out the macrobinoculars he had taken from the Armin speeder and glassed the port.

  The control spire was a dark spike of transparisteel, obviously unoccupied. All the entrances appeared locked down except one, and a dozen Imperial soldiers in full gray battle armor guarded it. Zeerid imagined there were more Imperial troops within the complex itself. It seemed the Empire had shut down all of the port save for a few of the small-craft landing pads, probably to give the already stretched troops less ground to secure.

  Large transparisteel windows in the wall opened up on the near pads. Through them, he saw the three Imperial shuttles that had just landed. All of them had a numerical designation written above the word VALOR, the name of Darth Malgus’s cruiser.

  “Looks like you’ll get your wish, Aryn,” he muttered.

  He saw another ship there, too, a modified Imperial drop ship, Dragonfly-class. He rolled a dial on the macrobinoculars to magnify the image.

  No Imperial markings, and the landing ramp was up as if it were ready to launch.

  A couple of dozen workers in dungarees went about the business of operating the port, as did half a dozen or so droids wheeling among the ships, fuel lines, loading cranes, and comp terminals.

  A flash of lavender filled the binoculars’ field of vision and he backed out of the high modification.

  A Twi’lek female had walked in front of the window and temporarily filled the lenses with her lavender skin.

  Lavender skin.

  He watched as the Twi’lek and a squad of uniformed Imperial soldiers in half armor put six hooded and manacled sentients into one of the shuttles. Zeerid tried to keep the binoculars on the Twi’lek, who appeared to be giving orders to the troops, but it necessitated hopping the binoculars from window to window as she moved, and he sometimes lost her.

  Like the Twi’lek in the vid at the Jedi Temple, she wore twin blasters on her hips. She also wore the tight-fitting trousers and high boots.

  “Has to be her,” he said. But he wanted to confirm, so he waited, and watched, and at last she turned her face to the window and he saw it, the jagged scar on her throat.

  “Gotcha,” he said.

  The Twi’lek spoke into her comlink, and the shuttle with the civvies started to wind up. As it rose on its thrusters, the roof doors of the pad slid open, once more spilling light into the night sky. When the shuttle broke the roofline, it engaged its engines and took off, presumably heading back to Valor. The doors closed behind it.

  The Twi’lek and about a dozen troops remained on the pad. Workers, too, and droids. Zeerid watched a team of workers and the treaded box of a maintenance droid start refueling one of the shuttles from a thick hose connected to an underground tank.

  Seeing that, Zeerid struck on a plan. He pocketed the binoculars and hurried back out of the hotel, to the speeder, and back to Aryn.

  THE SHUTTLE FLEW a silent vigil over the ruins of the Jedi Temple. Malgus’s pilot’s voice carried over the intership comm. Boredom tinged his tone.

  “Shall I remain here, my lord?”

  “You will remain until I say otherwise,” Malgus answered. “Internal and external lights are to remain off.”

  “As you wish, my lord.”

  Malgus’s shuttle hovered over the ruins of the Jedi Temple at about three hundred meters. From that height, the Temple was little more than a tumble of stones in the starlight. He had lingered over the ruins for hours, as day had faded to night, and still Aryn Leneer had not shown.

  But she would come. He knew she would.

  ARYN UNWRAPPED and ate the protein bar Zeerid had given her. She and T7 had sheltered in one of the apartments. She sat on a dusty couch, the stink of a burning planet in her nostrils. She replayed in her mind Master Zallow’s death, the look on his face. She saw once more the ruins of the Temple and she knew that his body lay beneath the mountain of rubble.

  Fighting the rising tide of grief, she adopted a meditative posture, closed her eyes, and tried to drift into the Force.

  “Still heart, still mind,” she intoned, but both proved impossible.

  Eventually, she sat back on the couch and stared up at the sky. The omnipresent smoke looked like black clouds against the stars. Now and again she saw a ship’s lights in the distance and presumed them to belong to an Imperial patrol craft.

  In time, her emotional and physical exhaustion chased her down and she drifted off to sleep.

  She dreamed of Master Zallow. He stood before her on the ruins of the Jedi Temple, his robes billowing in the breeze. The cracked stone face of Odan-Urr watched them. Master Zallow’s mouth moved but no sound emerged. He seemed to be trying to tell her something.

  “I cannot hear you, Master,” she said. “What are you saying?”

  She tried to get closer to him, picking her way through the debris, but the closer she tried to get, the farther he moved away. Finally her frustration got the better of her and she screamed, “I don’t know what you want me to do!”

  She woke, heart pounding, and found T7 standing before her. He whistled a question.

  “No, I’m fine,” she said, but she wasn’t.

  She stood and pulled her cloak tight about her.

  She checked her chrono. Zeerid had been gone for over an hour. He would probably be gone another hour, at least.
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  Her dream had left her shaken. She took the hilt of Master Zallow’s lightsaber in her hands, turned it over, studied its craftsmanship. Its design mirrored his personality: solid, without flourish, but wonderful in its plainness.

  She wanted to return to the Temple, to the scene where murder had occurred. She should have made Zeerid set down the speeder when they’d been over it earlier. She wanted to walk among the ruins and commune with the dead. She hooked Master Zallow’s weapon to her belt.

  “I have to go somewhere, Tee-seven. I’ll be back soon.”

  He whistled another question, alarm in the beeps.

  “Tell him I’ll be back. There is nothing to worry about.”

  She left the ruined apartment building and headed back toward the Jedi Temple.

  There was something there for her. There had to be.

  WHEN ZEERID RETURNED to their safehouse in the ruined apartment building, he found Aryn gone. Her absence put a lump in his throat. T7 whistled to him from one of the apartments.

  “Where is she, Tee-seven?” he asked.

  The small droid chattered, whistled, and beeped so fast that Zeerid could scarcely follow. In the end, he gathered that Aryn had left the apartment after a short rest, and that she did not tell T7 where she was going.

  But Zeerid knew where she would go. She’d go to where Master Zallow died.

  “Let’s go, Tee-seven,” he said, and loaded the droid up onto the speeder.

  ARYN’S EMOTIONS ROILED, her mood as dark as the night. Ordinarily, the artificial lights of hundreds of thousands of businesses and advertisements lit Coruscant’s night sky. But the attack had knocked the power out over huge swaths of the planet, and the dark silence made the city feel like a mausoleum.

  Aryn picked her way through the black darkness and approached the Temple along the wide, stone-paved processional that once had led to the Temple’s grand main entrance. Malgus must have used the same approach, she realized, and it appalled her that the last person to walk the processional before the Temple’s fall had been a Sith. She found it obscene.

  She fancied she was retracing his footsteps, her boots effacing the wrongness of his passage.

  She slowed, steeling herself, as the rubbled structure materialized out of the darkness before her. The attack had turned the Temple’s once curved lines and elegant spires into a shapeless mound of ruin, a burial cairn for the Jedi Order.

  The sight of it scratched the scab from the wound of her grief. As she approached, the ghosts of her past rose out of the ruin—her time in the Temple as a youngling, as a Padawan, the ceremony when she’d been promoted to Jedi Knight. The Temple had been her home for decades, and her father had been murdered in it.

  In her mind’s eye she saw the final blow that had slain her master, as clear as if she were once more watching the vid in the Temple’s surveillance room. She saw Malgus spin, reverse his grip, and drive his lightsaber through Master Zallow. And once more she saw the look in Master Zallow’s face as the light went out of his eyes, the despair there. He had failed and he had known it. Maybe he had also known, as Aryn now did, that the Jedi Order had failed, too.

  The thought of her master dying with despair in his heart drove a hot spike of rage through the sore of her loss.

  And yet … she could not shake the look she had seen in his eyes in her dream. It had looked like concern, a warning maybe. He had wanted to tell her something …

  She shook her head. It had been but a dream, not a vision, just a projection of her own subconscious. She dismissed it.

  She would find Malgus and she would kill him.

  She reached the edge of the ruins, climbed the jagged chunks of stone. They still felt warm, still radiated the heat of their own destruction. She walked among them, the graves of dozens of Jedi, and wept through her anger.

  A feeling seized her as the strings of her Force sensitivity vibrated with a discordant note. The feeling took her by the shoulders, shook her, and emptied her of grief, leaving only anger.

  She knew the feeling’s origin.

  She activated her lightsaber and tried to pinpoint Malgus’s location.

  MALGUS FELT THE SIGNATURE of another Force-user, the uncomfortable pressure of the light side, and it pulled him to his feet. The pressure reminded him of how he’d felt in the presence of Master Zallow, and he knew that Aryn Leneer had come at last.

  “Take the shuttle down to fifty meters,” he said, adrenaline already coursing through his body. “And when I exit, you may leave.”

  “When you exit, my lord?”

  Malgus did not respond. Instead, he overrode the in-flight safeties and pushed the button to open the side hatch. As the door slid open, as the night air poured in, redolent with the stink of a ruined Temple and a burned planet, he let anger fill him.

  The ship descended to fifty meters. Below, the ruined Temple was dark, covered in the velvet of night. But he perceived the presence of Aryn Leneer as clearly as he would have under a noon sun.

  He stepped to the doorway, drew on the Force, activated his lightsaber, and leapt out into the dark.

  A ROAR, heavy with hate and rage, pulled Aryn’s eyes skyward. Malgus descended like a meteor. His cape flew out behind and over him, a comma of darkness, and he held his lightsaber in a two-handed grip. Power went before him in a wave of visible distortion. The shuttle out of which he had leapt flew off into the night sky.

  Aryn fell fully into the Force, raised her defenses, took a fighting stance, and parried Malgus’s two-handed overhand slash. Still, he landed in a cocoon of power, hitting the ground in an explosion of might that shattered the stones around them and turned them into a hail of shrapnel. Unflinching, Aryn deflected them with the Force as she parried another slash from Malgus. The force of the Sith’s blow made her arms quiver, but she gave no ground.

  Blades locked, sparking, their eyes met.

  Malgus’s dark eyes burned with a rage that knifed through her. The anger he radiated was tangible to Aryn, made the air feel greasy, polluted. But she felt something else in it, something unexpected, an odd ambivalence.

  “I know why you’ve come,” he said, his voice a hiss from behind his respirator.

  She forced words between gritted teeth. “You killed Master Zallow.”

  “And now I will kill you, too,” he said. “In the same place I killed him.” He leaned into his blade, pushed her back a step, and unleashed a Force-augmented kick at her ribs.

  But she was the quicker, and a flip sent her over his head and fifty meters away, deeper into the mountain of ruins where her Master had died. She landed in a crouch atop one of the broken columns sticking out of the rubble.

  “You will find that difficult,” she called, and answered his anger with a wave of her own. “I assure you of that.”

  Malgus gestured with his left hand, and the column she stood on began to shake. She leapt off it to another nearby, then another, then another, leapfrogging her way across the ruins, back toward Malgus.

  When she landed atop a large chunk of stone ten meters from the Sith, he made a cutting gesture with his free hand and two pieces of statuary rose from the rubble and rushed toward her from either side. She leapt into the air and they smashed into each other beneath her, spraying shards of rock. She landed atop the remains, lightsaber ready.

  Malgus growled, leapt through the air from his perch toward hers. She slid to the side of his downward slash and his blade split the stone at their feet. She unleashed a crosscut that would have decapitated him had he not ducked under it.

  She flipped up and over him onto another piece of rubble, fifteen meters away. Taking telekinetic hold of a large stone near Malgus, she flung it at him. He never moved, simply held his ground and split the incoming rock in two with his lightsaber. Red sparks and bits of stone rained down

  Aryn could not find her calm. She was fighting angry, but did not care. Snarling, thinking of her Master, she bounded across the hill of rubble, leaping from one chunk of rock to another, cl
osing the distance with Malgus. He answered her charge with one of his own, the two of them jumping across the gravestones of the Jedi Order until they closed to within striking distance.

  Aryn stabbed low and Malgus slapped her blade out wide, reversed his motion, and unleashed a backhand swing at her abdomen. She leapt over it, pulling her legs in tight, and loosed a two-handed overhead strike as she came back down. Malgus parried crosswise with his blade and stepped into a Force-augmented side kick aimed at her ribs. She caught the kick with her free hand, closed her arm over his leg, spun, and flung Malgus twenty meters from her. He flipped in midair and landed atop the cracked face of the Odan-Urr statue that had once lined the processional approach into the Temple.

  She took the hilt of Master Zallow’s lightsaber in her off hand, crouched, and bounded into a leap toward him. He watched her come and at the apex of the leap’s arc, he thrust his left hand at her, roaring, and veins of Force lightning squirmed toward her.

  Ready for it, she activated Master Zallow’s lightsaber, used it to form an X with her own, and intercepted the lightning on the two blades.

  His power met her will. The lightning twisted around the glowing blades. The force of it stopped her downward descent and held her aloft in the air for a moment, suspended on a column built of the dark side.

  And then she overcame it. The lightning dissipated to nothingness and she, unharmed by it, fell straight down, landing on her feet atop a shifting pile of rubble and deactivating Master Zallow’s blade.

  The moment she landed, Malgus was upon her, his blade slashing, stabbing, spinning. He tried to use his superior strength to force her off the stone, off balance, but she answered his strength with speed, sidestepping his blows, leaping over them, parrying, unleashing her own flurries. The hum of their weapons through the air, the sizzle of crossed blades, merged into a single song of speed and power.

  ZEERID FLEW THE SPEEDER full-throttle at over a hundred meters in altitude. He watched an Imperial shuttle accelerate into the sky from the vicinity of the Jedi Temple. Thinking of Aryn, he felt his stomach flutter. He flew still higher, hoping to catch a glimpse of her near the Temple.