Grimacing at both her mistake and the inconvenience of the interruption, Daala raised her pistol and fired. At forty meters, the bolt took the droid in the crotch. The droid curled into a ball as it fell and lay still.
Daala blinked. It really had been her usual center-of-mass shot, but she’d squeezed the trigger just a trifle prematurely as she raised the pistol, and the results looked much more effective than her shooting skills usually warranted.
“Nice.”
“Thank you. Reset. So, why are there mutterings?” She stepped aside.
Jaxton didn’t immediately move to take her place. “In my opinion, the people in the officer corps don’t think you’re protecting their interests or furthering their ideals. Not the way they, we, expected you would.”
Daala frowned at him. “Across the last couple of years, I’ve restored the strength and responsiveness of the military to a degree that exceeds analyst expectations.”
“Granted.”
“I’ve taken steps to bring the Jedi into line. The Order has been beheaded—Luke Skywalker is chasing the ghost of his dead nephew around the galaxy, and his replacement is familiar with and friendly to our outlook.”
“Yet the Jedi still struggle with you.”
“For now.”
“And one of them, Gilad Pellaeon’s murderer, is still at liberty.”
“That’s a civilian case, and it takes civilian time. Tahiri Veila will be convicted. She’ll be executed. It just takes time.”
“Well, perhaps some other lesson can be taught in the meantime. I’m thinking of a criminal who would be subject to military, not civilian, law.”
“Who?”
“Cha Niathal.”
Daala blinked, honestly surprised. Admiral Niathal, a naval lifer from Mon Calamari, had been in Daala’s own position, sharing Chief of State duties with Colonel Jacen Solo—or, as he later chose to be called, Darth Caedus. As Caedus had become more and more destructive, Niathal had sought to curb his excesses, eventually turning on him. She now lived in retirement on Mon Calamari. “Merratt, you may not have looked at the records of her actions as closely as I have. It’s hard to accuse her of anything but a mistake, the mistake of trusting Jacen Solo.”
“The very same mistake Luke Skywalker made, and was convicted for.”
“But Cha Niathal is one of us.”
“I agree, and I would not want to see her come to harm. Even to interrupt her well-deserved retirement.” Finally he stepped up to the firing lane. “Go.”
The droid lurched into motion. Jaxton let it get three steps into its run before raising his blaster and shooting it in the head. He lowered the weapon. “But the thing is, in reviewing her actions and deciding to head off a legal case against her, you’ve opened yourself up to charges of tampering. Of, in a sense, pardoning someone in your exact position in the hope of setting a precedent—in case you mess up. Thus the loss of faith. The muttering.”
Annoyed, Daala shook her head. “So I should arrange to prosecute Niathal just to shut up whiners?”
“You’d be surprised at how many and how powerful those ‘whiners’ are. And the idea is to prosecute, not persecute. Find three military judges who are impartial, not swayed by public opinion, and well respected by the armed forces. Have them sit on the court-martial. They’ll acquit, Niathal will go home, the masses will stop muttering.”
“I don’t like it.” Daala thought about shooting the droid a few more times to rid herself of her annoyance, then decided against it. “Reset. Exit simulation.”
“Of course you don’t. But like it or not, you’re waging a campaign against the Jedi. Until it’s resolved, any other action you take becomes one front of a two-front war. That’s not good, especially when the second front is your own people.”
DATHOMIRI RAIN FOREST
THE SOLO EXPEDITION SET OUT AGAIN JUST AFTER DAWN. SHA LED THE way on foot, following and interpreting the scant signs of travel left behind by Luke, Ben, and the mystery woman who was pacing them. Han’s and Yliri’s speeders followed sedately, some two hundred meters back, using Sha’s comm signals for navigation.
Only a few minutes into their travel, Leia sat up in her seat. “I feel Luke.”
“All of a sudden?”
“He’s … he’s …” Leia frowned, concentrating. “He’s submerging himself in the Force. Looking for something. I think he’s been concealing himself from the Force. Ben, too.” She closed her eyes and tilted her head. “Now he can feel me. Now he knows I’m here. He’s calm. No danger at the moment.”
“That’s something, then.”
Leia looked off slightly to starboard of their current direction. “Let’s pick up Sha and head toward Luke at speed. I think, if I can maintain contact with him, we can save a lot of time.”
“Whatever you say.”
DATHOMIR SPACEPORT
Morning sun streamed in through the viewports of the Millennium Falcon, but in the engineering compartment, the only available light was from ceiling glow rods.
It was there that Allana found C-3PO sitting behind the curved shell of the hyperspace module. She hopped out from the shadows like a monster from a children’s tale and stood over the golden droid, her hands on her hips. “Where’s Artoo?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, mistress.” His hiding place discovered, C-3PO rose awkwardly to his feet. “Around, I assume.”
“Around where?”
“Around … here. I assume.”
She scowled up at him. “You’re lying again, Threepio. Anji and I have looked all over the Falcon. He’s not here. If he was, Anji would have found him. And you’ve been hiding from me.”
“I would never do that, Mistress Allana.”
“Then what were you doing here?”
“Two years, four months, and three days ago, Master Han dropped a credcoin here in the engine compartment. He was never able to find it. Since then, it has emerged at times of high-stress maneuvers, rolling about and clattering. It’s quite maddening, really. If I could find it—”
“You’re still lying.” Allana’s tone was more disappointed than accusative. “If Artoo was doing something that was all right, you’d tell me. So he’s doing something sneaky and he could get hurt.”
“Droids don’t get hurt, little one. Just damaged.”
“And sometimes kidnapped and tortured and taken apart. That’s not hurt?”
“Well … not technically.”
“Are you going to tell me where he is, or am I going to talk to you all day long?”
C-3PO offered up a simulated sigh. “He went out last night after we tucked you in bed. He hasn’t returned. Though I’m sure there is no cause for worry.”
“Where did he go?”
“I am not sure. But at one point he was raving about seeing a ship in one of the domes hereabout. He probably went to investigate.”
“Well, let’s go find him.”
“No, miss. Either there is no problem, in which case he will return to us, or there is danger, in which case we are under strict orders not to expose you to it. Why, if you were to be harmed, Master Han and Mistress Leia would find themselves a whole new Wookiee to pull my arms and legs off.”
“But you’re not doing anything!”
“I am monitoring Artoo’s preferred comm frequencies. That is all I can do while remaining here.”
Allana stomped in frustration, then turned and ran to the top of the Falcon’s boarding ramp. It was in the up and locked position. She reached high and hit the wall control to lower it.
The control panel clunked to acknowledge that it had been activated, but the ramp did not lower into place.
“Threepio!”
“I’m sorry, mistress. Orders, you know.”
DATHOMIRI RAIN FOREST
Their opponent, Luke knew, had superior knowledge of the Dathomir wilderness, superior tracking skills, and Force powers that, while probably not greater than Luke’s, might be better adapted to this environment.
&nb
sp; So Luke set about to change the rules.
The woman who was pacing them, constantly trying to slow and divert them, had now established a standard operating procedure. She would maneuver herself to one side or another of Luke and Ben’s path and either set up some sort of trap to inflict a minor injury on them or lay down a false trail to lead them astray. Several times, only the Jedi’s Force awareness allowed them to dodge whipping branches, avoid venomous serpent nests, or keep from slipping down an unexpectedly slick slope into a river.
Setting up traps or stomping through the forest like a drunken bantha took time and a greater interaction with her surroundings than she might have experienced while doing simple tracking. So it was then that Luke should be able to find her in the Force.
With Ben on guard for both of them, Luke sat on a flat rock and sank into a Jedi meditative trance. He opened himself to the Force fully for the first time since embarking on this quest. He cast around, trying to become one with the rain forest. If he did this properly, he would be able to feel minute changes, little areas of damage, that would give him some hint of his opponent’s plans and location.
And he felt … Leia.
The unexpected contact nearly jolted him out of his trance, but he calmed himself and sent his sister a touch of reassuring emotion, the Force equivalent of a smile. Then he turned back to his task.
Distantly, he felt animal life across a wide area grow alarmed and alert as they detected a deep rumble in the ground; but it was only a minor tremor, a natural occurrence causing no damage. He gave a little shake of his head and turned his attention elsewhere.
Scars in the forest … a new one-family settlement south-southeast, near the spaceport, a plot of ground laid bare by fire, a prefab permacrete hut now being erected there. He could feel other scars, tiny ones close by caused by the feet of rancors ripping at the forest floor, big ones in the distance caused by migrations of hundreds of beasts or people.
And then there she was. Her booted feet bruised grasses and lichen growing on rock outcroppings as she strung cord, turning a patch of ill-balanced boulders on a hillside into a dangerous deadfall.
She was unhappy about that, Luke could tell, unhappy that this trap was so much more dangerous than the previous ones. She didn’t want to hurt them. She wanted, absolutely needed them to go away.
Luke felt her tense. He backed away on his contact. More dimly, he could sense her looking around in sudden paranoia, but her emotions gradually settled.
She had sensed him but not identified him. Her control of the Force was limited in certain areas, clearly.
Sure now where her rockfall trap lay and where she intended to wait, Luke withdrew and opened his eyes.
He looked up at his son. Ben stared at him, a worried expression on his face.
“What is it?”
“You’re pale, Dad.”
“Am I?” Luke tried to get a sense of his condition.
He was tired, more tired than he should be after such a mundane effort in the Force. Clearly, he was not yet recovered from his exertions in the Maw. He needed days of uninterrupted rest, and he wasn’t getting them.
Well, that was all right. He could go on for some considerable time this way.
He rose, demonstrating, for Ben’s sake, more vigor than he actually felt. “Let’s go.”
“Did you find the crash site?”
“Eh?”
“It occurred to me after you went into the trance. The Sith girl crashed her ship out there somewhere. I assume that would have left the kind of damage you were looking for.”
“It would have, yes.” Luke frowned. “But I found no sign of the crash.”
“Maybe she crashed into a lake. Then there’d be no surface damage.”
“And that would be a good reason why the search party found no sign of the site.” Luke turned toward the northwest. “Let’s find her and ask her.”
Within the hour, they had the Dathomiri woman’s rockfall trap in sight. The ground here rose into mountain foothills, and the eastern slope of a narrow pass, cut in some distant time by a now vanished creek, was dense with irregular white stones.
The woman’s sabotage of that slope was not visible. Whatever arrangement she had made with trip cords was well hidden.
Luke and Ben lay on a jagged slab of rock a few hundred meters from the pass. They had crept up on the area so quietly and carefully that Luke believed the woman lying in wait could not have detected them. Still, the minutes they spent surveying the area offered them no advantage. They’d have to deal with the trap directly and physically.
“I have our tactic.” Ben’s voice was unexpectedly deep and mature.
“Yes?”
“When the rocks fall, we get out of the way.”
“Thank you for reducing our task to its basic components. Come on.” Luke rose and began trotting toward the rockfall.
He could not feel the woman in the Force. She had to be concealing herself. No, more than that. If she was nearby, she could not even be watching the rockfall. To watch it would be to experience increased anticipation as her intended victims approached, which was likely to tip off Force-users … and she had to know that her opponents were well versed in the Force. So she would be nearby, but would pay no attention until she heard the rocks fall.
Luke and Ben crossed the distance from their hiding place to the pass with its snare in moments.
“Not so muggy here.” Ben’s tone was cheerful, and it did not sound forced.
“Eh?”
“Making conversation.” Ben lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Sounding natural.”
“Of course.” With his next step, Luke’s foot landed on a rock that shifted under his weight.
If his senses in the Force had not been tuned to detect any stirring, any remote hint of danger, he would not have felt the tripping of the trap. Far over his head, boulders perched on an overhang leaned out and dropped toward their heads. Luke could feel other, more subtle shiftings take place in the rock wall to his right, but so far the only threat came from that first set of rocks, now gathering speed and building kinetic energy.
Luke leapt up and to the left. His feet came in contact with the rocky slope there, the one on which he had detected no sabotage. He felt rather than heard Ben leap and land beside him.
The slope here was almost vertical, but with a push in the Force Luke sprang up along it, climbing an easy six meters. He dropped back-first onto a ledge. Ben settled in beside him.
They watched several tons of rocks plummet past them, hitting all along the pass and to either side of where they had just been standing. More stones on the facing slope slid free and toppled into the pass, clattering down among the others.
“Three stages of fall,” Ben said, his tone still conversational.
“Very sophisticated. Now let’s find her.”
They opened themselves to the Force, seeking the woman.
Luke made an unhappy face. “Uh-oh.”
“Miscalculated, didn’t you?”
A rancor scrambled into the pass through the entrance Luke and Ben had just used. It carried a gnarled wooden club that must have weighed two hundred kilograms. On its back and neck was a saddle, in which sat a stout blond woman of middle years. She wore glossy black hide garments, and her expression was furious. For the rancor to have appeared there, presumably in response to the triggering of the trap, it must have been concealed very close by. Perhaps it had been cloaked by the Force.
Another rancor appeared down the pass in the opposite direction, thirty meters away. It had no club but carried a metal shield like the first one the Jedi had encountered. Beside it, on the ground, ran the woman Luke had seen the previous day, she of the Lightning Storm, and the rancor’s saddle carried another woman, so like her as to be a sister, though this woman’s garments were tan and her dark hair was streaked with bands of white. The woman on the ground looked dismayed; the rancor rider was smiling as though she relished the scrap to come.
Three more women, dressed in a fashion compatible with the others, appeared at each end of the pass, arriving at a dead run, surefooted. Luke felt a tickle in the Force and looked up. A third rancor was now reaching the summit of the hill where the Jedi sat. This beast was riderless and unarmed, but bigger than the other two.
Luke turned to his son. “When I spotted the woman, she didn’t have these reinforcements.”
“Embarrassing, isn’t it?”
“A bit.”
“What would one of your old Masters tell you at a time like this?”
“Never mind that now.” Luke turned toward the woman they had been following. He called out to her, “A pleasure to meet you at last.”
Looking grave, she opened her mouth to reply. But the woman in the rancor saddle above her gestured, and a sudden wind howled along the pass, plucking Ben from his perch and sending him tumbling down the slope.
With a sigh, Luke released the Force technique that was holding him in place and followed his son.
“Hurry, hurry.” Leia’s tone was urgent.
Han, grim-faced, could not manage any more speed; the airspeeder was at its flat-out maximum. But he could shave off microseconds by taking chances. Veering right and left to avoid the thinning trees, he now came within centimeters of scraping off hull paint against tree bark.
In the seat behind them, Dyon made a strangled noise audible over the engine shriek. Han paid him no mind. The boy clearly needed some excitement in his life. This was it.
They shot past the last of the trees onto rising, rocky ground and topped a low slope. Han’s eye was drawn first to the huge rancor standing atop a nearby hill, roaring down into the gap below. “Oh, stang.”
Leia shook her head. “The rancors aren’t the problem.”
“Rancors? Plural?”
“There are Witches here.”
Their angle of approach brought them in line with the opening into a rocky pass, and Han could suddenly see what Leia was talking about. Farther down the pass, Luke and Ben, the former in white garments, the latter in black, were leaping side-to-side at the bottom of the pass, dodging head-sized rocks swirling around them. The stones were a cyclone of blunt weapons that could easily crush their skulls. A rancor with a rider stood at either end of the engagement zone, accompanied by three or four Witches of Dathomir. The women gestured, clearly keeping the potentially lethal stones moving with their Force spells.
Fate of the Jedi: Backlash Page 6
