“Let me help,” she said, taking his hand. “Do you perceive the wall?”
“Yes—”
“Take it away. Stop perceiving the substance. Make it disappear from your thoughts, and look inside it. Stay open—let me guide your eyes.”
Then he saw it—not written on the wall, but written within it, the pale white shapes of symbols drawn not with matter, but with some elemental essence swirling within it.
“Is that it?” he asked, as though she could not only guide his eyes but see through them.
She smiled and tightened her grip on his hand. “The way home is always marked. That is the promise made to us.”
“Can you read it? What does it say?”
“I know where we have to go,” Akanah said, and released his hand. “Can you still see it now, without my help?”
The symbols had been brightening, but they vanished abruptly when the contact was broken. “No—it’s completely gone. I can remember the shapes, but I can’t see them now.”
Nodding, she said, “It doesn’t matter. If you can see Current scribing with guidance, I can teach you to see it on your own. It’s how children learn.”
“Is there more—in the other cottages, or outside, on the other buildings?”
“No. Just here. This was meant for me.”
“The attack—it came after you’d been in the house,” Luke said with sudden understanding. “They knew there was something there. That’s why the Empire still had agents here. They were just waiting for someone who could read it to show up.”
“But would the Empire risk sending a ship this deep into New Republic territory?”
“That depends on how badly someone still wants the Fallanassi,” Luke said. “I don’t think we should wait around to see.”
Akanah frowned. “No.”
“And we can’t be followed.”
“No,” she agreed. “Can you cloak us?”
“I can disguise our appearance. But we have to do more than that,” Luke said. “You need to erase the message.”
Even without looking at her, he felt her reluctance and resistance. “It’s the only way to be sure this trap has been disarmed,” he added. “Can you erase it? Can it be done at all?”
“Scribing opens a tiny breach between the real and the unreal,” Akanah said with a slow nod. “It’s easier to collapse it than create it.” She hesitated, then sighed. “Wait for me outside.”
She did not keep him waiting long.
“It’s done,” she said, taking his arm as she joined him. “But, just to be certain no one can undo it, please knock it down.”
“Are you sure?”
“Please,” she said. “I’m never coming back here. Bring all of it down.”
Without moving from where they stood, Luke complied. A twist of a corner, a push in the middle of a long wall, opened a spiderweb of cracks. The cracks widened in turn, until the stonework fell in and the roof collapsed atop it, kicking up a billow of yellow dust.
“We’d better hurry now,” Luke said.
“There’s one more thing,” she said. “You need to go inside your mother’s cottage.”
He shook his head sadly. “There isn’t time.”
“Take the time,” she said. “I’ll hide us, so you can stay open while you’re there.”
“Akanah—”
“A few minutes won’t matter to the outcome,” she said. “The nearest friend of the men you killed is either very close already, or a very long way away. But those few minutes may matter a great deal to you. Go.”
Luke sat in the middle of what had been the floor of the ruined cottage and whispered his mother’s name, as if to ask the broken stones whether they remembered it.
“Nashira,” he said, but the sound fled into the dark corners and vanished.
“Nashira,” he called, but the echoes escaped out through the cracks and fissures in the walls.
He brushed the litter aside and pressed the palms of his hands to the floor, drew the dusty air deep into his nostrils and tasted it on his tongue, slowly scanned all around him for anything that might have belonged to the last person to make a home of that space.
“Mother,” he said, and the reality of the moment welled up inside him. It was a point of contact, after so many years without one. She had been where he was now.
It did not matter that he could not find her touch lingering on the rude substance surrounding him. The knowledge alone was enough. Where before he could only pretend, now he could imagine, and imagination overleaped the time that separated them.
She had slept here, laughed here, retreated here for sanctuary, cried and sought peace here, perhaps loved and grieved here, moving through this space as real as life and as human as the rush of longing Luke felt in that moment.
He could not see her face or hear her voice, but, even so, she was more real to him in that moment than she had ever been before.
It was not enough, not by half, but it was a beginning.
The village was in shadow by the time Luke emerged from Nashira’s cottage and rejoined Akanah. The sun had dropped below the hills, and the breeze had a softer edge.
“How long was I in there?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Are you ready?”
Luke nodded. “You were right,” he said. “Thank you.”
“I knew it was important. But we’d better hurry now. It’ll be dark before we reach the airfield.”
Neither had anything more to say as they returned to the cart and climbed atop it for the return trip. Luke checked it closely for any sign of a tracker or tampering, then raised the vehicle a meter off the ground. “No bumps this trip,” he said with a small smile. “But I’d still hold on. What do they call those carrion birds here?”
“Nackhawns.”
“That’s what we are, then. A big, ugly nackhawn.” Luke swung the cart in a wide circle over the hills enclosing Ialtra, scanning for any other vehicles. He found none, and wondered how the Imperial agents had followed them there.
But Luke shook off the thought, and sent the cart arrowing toward the southeast and the airfield. Their passage was silent but for the air tearing past the contours of a vehicle that was never meant to fly.
Not long after, back in the ruins of the village of Ialtra, the bodies of two dead Imperial agents merged with the shadows that had enveloped them, and vanished as though they had never been.
Chapter Thirteen
Near a brown dwarf star on the edge of the Koornacht Cluster, the New Republic astrographic probe Astrolabe dropped out of hyperspace.
The broad flat underside of the small unarmed ship was heavily studded with scanners. Four scan platforms carried everything from stereo imagers and neutron dippers to quark detectors and wide-band photometricons. Many of the instruments were duplicated as a hedge against malfunctions. The combination of the thin, wide profile and the scanner configuration had given the Astrogator-class probes the nickname “flatfish,” which in turn had given rise to an unofficial logo popular with the crews.
“Your tour operators, the Astrographic Survey Institute, welcome you to Doornik-1142,” the pilot called back to his survey team. “Be sure to take in all the recreational opportunities of this undiscovered gem of Farlax Sector—look out the viewports! Then later, you can look out the viewports! And whatever else you do during your nineteen-hour stay, make sure you take the time to look out the viewports!”
It was an old, familiar joke, and drew no more than ritual chuckles from the survey team. ASI vessels were the restless, peripatetic travelers of the stars—professional tourists on breathless sightseeing expeditions through the galaxy. Capable of exceptionally high speeds in realspace, a flatfish rarely took more than a day to complete a mapping and survey pass across the top of an entire star system.
Most planets were overflown at close to maximum speed. Only if the approach data showed signs of life would a probe slow to quarter-speed. Only the markers of technological habitation could mak
e them linger as long as a single orbit. Only the most extraordinary anomalies in the scans could make a flatfish pilot turn back and make a second pass. And landings were so rare as to be nearly unheard of.
Astrolabe had been diverted from work in Torranix Sector to fill a gap in the standard star charts—a gap left by the fallen Empire’s obsessive secrecy, which treated ordinary astrographic data about the territory it controlled as classified military data.
The pilot, an eighteen-year veteran known to his crew as Gabby, had overflown more than a thousand planets in his career—but had set foot on only three. His senior surveyor, Tanea, had nearly three thousand overflights on her jacket, yet had ground-level memories of only half a dozen. The junior surveyor, Rulffe, expected to pass the five hundred mark on this tour, but had never drawn a breath on any world but his homeworld.
This mission began like all the others. The first hour was the busiest—while Tanea and Rulffe checked out the scanners, Gabby calibrated the probe’s autonav for the shortest-path mapping pass over the system’s quartet of cold, gaseous planets. They had every reason to think that their visit to Doornik-1142 would be short and uneventful, ending with a compressed data dump to Coruscant and the jump to the next gravitational well.
But it would end early, and hard.
Gabby and Tanea were playing a word game over the ship’s comm system as Astrolabe approached the second planet.
“Hemostat,” said Gabby.
“Oh, easy. Statistics.”
“Eh—experience.”
Tanea laughed. “That’s not legal, but I’m going to give it to you anyway, because I’m such a kind and loving soul. Encephalitis.”
“Tissue.”
Tanea frowned. “I take it back. I think you’ve got me now—”
Without warning the ship began to shake violently. The cabin was filled with a roaring sound like an animal wind, a deep growly rumble, and crackling like fire.
“What the hell!” Rulffe exclaimed.
“Something’s wrong with the engines!” Gabby cried as the roar became a screaming whistle.
In the next moment, the air was ripped from his lungs in a frosty plume, and silence reigned.
Moments later, with the temperature plunging, the cabin lights failed. The trouble board, now a mass of blinking red and yellow squares, provided the only illumination.
In the last excruciating seconds of consciousness, with the gases boiling in his blood vessels, the pilot tried to reach the switches to manually fire the emergency buoy and transmit the log. But his limbs, bound up by agony, would not obey him. He was already dead, and consciousness soon gratefully followed volition into the abyss.
Vol Noorr, primate of the battle cruiser Purity, watched approvingly as a fierce salvo of high-energy laser pulses blindsided the intruding vessel.
The accuracy and discipline of his gun crews pleased him, and he made a note to commend the weapons master. The firing ceased with the vessel holed and ravaged but not destroyed. A cloud of white fire and metal dust would have had little to tell them. But there would be wreckage enough to examine, and Vol Noorr’s follow-up report could be as complete and useful as possible.
“Send out the salvors,” he ordered. “Make certain they maintain hygienic protocols on all material recovered.”
Then Vol Noorr locked himself in the secure communications booth. A few minutes later he transmitted what would be the only alert concerning the destruction of the Astrolabe to be sent from Doornik-1142—a short burst of code aimed not at the Astrographic Survey Institute on Coruscant but at the viceroy’s flagship Aramadia, ground-moored at Imperial City’s Eastport.
“Three days in a row now,” Princess Leia said to those gathered in the staff conference room. “Does anyone have any hint why Nil Spaar has been canceling our sessions? Is he ill? Do we know anything about what he’s been doing?”
“He’s only left the ship once,” said General Carlist Rieekan. “He went to the diplomatic hostel and stayed two hours and thirteen minutes—”
“Never mind that. Who did he go there to see?” asked Ackbar.
“We weren’t able to develop that information,” Rieekan admitted. “You know what the hostel is like—hot and cold running privacy. The diplomatic missions expect that. I can tell you that the hostel host has been keeping a chalet reserved for the Yevetha since before they arrived, and this is the first time any of them have turned up there.”
“So he could have met with any or all of the legates staying at the hostel,” said Leia.
“That’s correct.”
“I want to see a list,” Ackbar demanded.
“We’ve prepared one, and transmitted it to everyone on the clearance sheet for this meeting,” said Rieekan. “I do have some additional information, which was given to me just before I left the office to come over here. The viceroy received visitors today on board the Aramadia—”
“What?” exclaimed Nanaod Engh. “They haven’t allowed anyone but their own past the portal since that ship arrived. Who was it?”
“Senator Peramis, Senator Hodidiji, and Senator Marook,” said Rieekan. “They arrived together, and all stayed more than two hours. Senator Marook left before the others.”
“Do we know if they were invited or they invited themselves?” asked Leia.
“I made a discreet inquiry to Senator Marook’s staff. It seems they were invited.”
“Have they been in contact with the Yevetha all along?”
“Princess Organa, I can’t answer that.”
“Let’s get them all in here, and we’ll get some answers,” Admiral Ackbar said testily. “Let Senator Peramis answer.”
“Easy, my friend. Let’s try to keep this in perspective,” said Leia. “The viceroy has every right to meet with whomever he chooses. He doesn’t need our permission to hold a tea party.”
“Princess, forgive me—if you were not ready to hear the answers, why did you ask the question?”
Leia turned to Rieekan and frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“You asked if anyone had any notion why the viceroy was canceling his sessions with you. Now you learn that he’s met privately with some of the candidate legations, and publicly with some of the Senate’s most iconoclastic members. He’s not only broken all precedent, but pointedly extended courtesies to others that he’s never extended to you—and you refuse to draw the obvious conclusion.”
“Which is—”
“That something fundamental has changed. That your negotiations with Nil Spaar are over.”
“But what could have caused the change?” Leia protested. “There were no problems at our last meeting. I can’t believe that he would throw all our work away without so much as a word—”
Admiral Ackbar, who was standing, was the first to notice the viewpanes of the conference room beginning to hum. The broad expanses of transparisteel had been darkened against the morning sun and prying eyes, so he could not immediately see the cause of the tremor when he turned.
“Princess—a moment—”
“What is it?”
“I know that sound—” Engh was saying.
“Something big over at Eastport,” Rieekan said. “Can’t you hear it?”
By that time, Ackbar had strode to the controls for the viewpanes, and the room was abruptly flooded with light. As one, they turned their faces toward it and squinted into the glare.
They saw the bright spherical shape of Aramadia slowly ascending from the spaceport, with its three tiny escorts circling it like planets around a star. Ripples of atmospheric distortion rolled out of scalloped depressions in its hull.
“I guess we’ll have to believe it now,” said Engh.
“I have the port commander online,” Rieekan said.
“Let all of us hear it,” said Leia.
“Yes, sir. Go ahead, Commander—what’s happening out there?”
The roar of the Yevethan vessel’s pulse-lifters was louder over the comm line than it was in the conf
erence room. “We’re still sorting things out. I can tell you Aramadia did not request a launch window from the tower. Our first warning she was gonna lift was when she started to launch escorts. That wasn’t enough warning to get everyone clear of the downblast. There are six port sentries and at least three ground personnel injured, and the ship in the nearest bay, Mother’s Valkyrie, looks like it took some substantial damage. Those pulse-lifters are nasty—we’ve got reports of ships being bounced as far away as the commuter docks.”
“Thank you, Commander. Stand by,” Rieekan said, and closed the link. “Princess, I recommend we immediately place the Home Fleet on high alert.”
“We must do more than that,” said Ackbar. “I have ordered the Brilliant to move into position to fire on the Aramadia if necessary.”
“What? Why would that be necessary?”
“Princess, Aramadia is inside our planetary shield,” said Rieekan. “A ship that size could carry enough munitions to make quite a mess down here—at least the equivalent of a couple of Imperial assault frigates. We can’t wait until we know what she means to do to respond.”
“This is insane,” Leia protested. “It’s a diplomatic vessel. We have no evidence that it’s even armed. Why would Nil Spaar do such a thing?” She looked back over her shoulder at Alole. “Any response?”
Her aide shook her head. “No, sir. No answer at all to your earlier messages, or to my red-line page.”
“Princess,” Ackbar said, “with respect, the question we need to be asking right now is not why he might do it, but what we can do to prevent it. We can’t afford the luxury of thinking we have friends on that ship.”
“I agree,” said Rieekan. “The casualties at Eastport testify to Nil Spaar’s priorities. They had to know what the consequences of a full-power lift with no advance warning would be. They’ve demonstrated that their convenience was more important to them than the lives of our people on the ground.”
“Not convenience,” Ackbar said. “This was no coincidence. This was calculated. He must have known that we were meeting. This was meant to embarrass you, just like the invitation to the senators.”
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