“I didn’t think the food was that bad.” Han Solo set a cup of water down on the stone beside me. “Wash your mouth out.”
I sloshed half the water from the container as I raised it to my lips, then rinsed my mouth and spat the foul water over the edge of the pyramid. “Thanks,” I said. At least I think I said it.
Han half dragged me away from the remains of my dinner. “Leia said it was something horrible. Sun Crusher killed a system?”
I wiped my mouth on the sleeve of my tunic. “Unless you know of another superweapon sitting around that could explode a star.”
A smile started to grow on his face and his dark eyes sparked for a second as a wiseass remark formed itself in his head, but he never let it out. Instead his grin melted into a more serious expression. “It has to be the Sun Crusher—that or there is another superweapon out there.”
The fleeting image of someone who looked like Kyp surfaced in my brain. Through his eyes I saw the slender craft, I felt his joy at seeing his brother again, pain from betrayal that stretched into untold agony as his body melted. “Kyp had a brother?”
Han’s eyes focused distantly. “Imps took him to the Academy at Carida.”
“He’s gone. So’s Carida.”
“I guess they won’t be inviting me back for a class reunion, then.” Han glanced down at me. “New Republic Intelligence will confirm that, but now I know where to start looking.”
I looked hard at him. “You’re going after Kyp?”
“Have to. He’ll listen to me.”
“You hope.”
“Hmmm, your lips move but I hear my wife’s voice.” Han sighed. “I have a history with the kid. He’s angry and he needs someone to trust. I’m it.”
I nodded, then lifted my head. “Take me with you.”
“Look, kid, I work best alone.”
“So I’ve heard.” I projected an image of my old self into his brain. “We’ve met before, Captain Solo. Wedge Antilles introduced us. I’m here incognito at Master Skywalker’s suggestion.”
“Horn, right.” Han blinked his eyes. “You’re a hot hand in an X-wing, but a Death Star couldn’t take out the Sun Crusher. If I needed anyone with me, you’d be the first I’d tap.”
“You’re going after someone with incredible power, and I’m not just talking about that ship. I can’t allow you to go alone.”
Han’s face clouded over. “ ‘Can’t allow?’ My ship, my rules, and don’t try to pull any rank on me. I was a general with the Rebellion before you ever left Corellia. I can handle Kyp just fine. And I’m not so sure it’s Kyp you’re afraid of.”
My eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“You were CorSec. You just don’t like the idea of someone like me with his hands on the Sun Crusher.”
That brought me up short. I looked at him, then away at the dark jungle. Was I allowing old prejudices to rear up and influence me? For years I’d looked forward to getting a shot at Han Solo if he ever ventured back into the Corellian system. Even after joining the Rebellion I had severe reservations about him. In meeting him the first time I thought I had laid all that to rest.
I looked back at him. “Time once was when you’d have been right. Not now. If I actually thought that, I’d be down there stealing the Falcon and going after Kyp myself.”
Han slowly nodded. “Look, kid, Corran; going after Kyp is the only thing I can do. You’re a Jedi. You can be here and help Luke in ways I can’t. I’ve got to do what I can do, and so do you. I’m going to leave you here so you can take care of Luke; so you can help my wife and watch my kids.”
“You’d allow someone from CorSec to watch over your kids?”
“Getting soft in my old age, I know, but I understand it’s possible to let old opinions die.”
“Thanks.” I narrowed my eyes. “What’s going to happen if …”
“Kyp turns on me?” Han slowly shook his head. “I think I told you, your father hunted me once. I had to run to Carida to escape having a Horn on my tail. Doing what he’s done, Kyp’s destroyed even that haven. If it comes to that, good hunting.”
TWENTY-THREE
That night, as I fell into bed and waited for sleep, I refused to review the dinner conversation, even though I had a nagging sense something of importance had been said during it. I didn’t want to get anywhere close to going over again what I’d felt during Carida’s death. I had once thought myself so hardened that a distant tragedy like this would tote itself up as just a statistic.
My training in the Force had changed all that. It hadn’t made me any softer or weaker, but just more aware. I became cognizant of more of the connections between things and people. The pain of those who had died at Carida had echoes in the pain of relatives who would never see kin again, expatriates who could never go home again, people like Han Solo, whose memories of Carida would forever be tarnished because of what Kyp had done. While all of this would have been obvious to someone who sat down to think about it, it had come to me full blown through the Force. It amazed me, and also reinforced how vast my sphere of responsibility had become.
Sleep, when it finally came, was mercifully dreamless. I awoke a bit late and skipped my run, instead helping Han pre-flight the Falcon. He loaned me a couple of hydrospanners so I could work on Mara’s Headhunter. He then said his farewells to his family and raced off, leaving his children flanking their mother, waving fervently until the Falcon vanished from sight.
I spent much of the rest of the day working on the Headhunter. When Artoo was not busy with babysitting duties, he helped me out. He saved me from a mistake where I crosswired two boards in the navicomp that would have transposed coordinates, sending me off in directions I didn’t want to go. By early evening I’d fixed most of the things Kyp had broken and figured I would resume where I left off the next morning. I finished the day with an evening run and a long soak in a cool stream, then dropped into bed.
I felt more than heard the children scream. I bolted from bed and ran to the turbolift, but the car was already moving upward and away from my level. I ran to the internal stairwell and started sprinting upward as fast as I could. Above me, in the Grand Audience Chamber, I could feel forces gathering, and was surprised that the person sitting with Luke had not raised an alarm. Streen is smart enough to summon help.
The second the old man’s image popped into my mind, a piece of the dinner conversation echoed through my head. “I can’t get away from him,” he’d said desperately. “The dark man. A dark man, a shadow. He talked to Gantoris. He talked to Kyp. You shine the light, but the shadow always stays, whispering, talking.” My chest tightened. By all of Alderaan’s ghosts, we’ve doomed Master Skywalker!
A raging windstorm howled through the Grand Audience Chamber and battered me as I burst through the stairwell doorway. As I entered the room, I saw Leia leap for her brother’s legs and get carried upward toward the ceiling by the cyclone. At the heart of the storm, Streen danced around in a circle, his arms spread wide, his eyes open but unseeing. He clearly meant for the storm to blow Luke and Leia out through the skylights and hurl them into the jungle, where the fall would kill them.
And without any telekinesis, I was powerless to halt the storm. Something urged me to despair over the fact, but I brushed it aside. I’ll just have to make Streen stop it himself.
As the turbolift door opened and Kirana Ti boiled into the storm armoring Streen, I set myself and concentrated. Summoning the Force, I projected into Streen’s brain a vision of the room that did not include me or Kirana or the other apprentices coming out of the lift. I also showed him that the room was empty save for himself. Those he wished to blow out of here were gone, sent off on the fate he had intended for them. I shoved into him a sense of his mission having been accomplished fully and totally and I felt an alien wave of satisfaction roll back out from him.
Then Kirana Ti battered her way past his defenses and tackled him. The wind died, allowing Luke and Leia to plunge toward the ground. Kam Solu
sar and Tionne rushed forward and used their telekinetic abilities to catch the siblings and lower them to the ground slowly.
Master Skywalker appeared to be unhurt. Streen slowly recovered himself and explained that in his nightmare, he thought he was fighting the dark man. He had tried to destroy him, thought he had, and then awoke to find he had actually been trying to kill Master Skywalker.
Standing up, Streen put an edge into his voice. “We must destroy the dark man before he kills all of us!”
I retreated back down the stairs, mulling over Streen’s words. I’d always known it would come down to that. While I used sociopathic murderers as mental models for Exar Kun, I hadn’t located the logical flaw in my thinking. When hunting a sociopathic killer on Corellia, we could still have our blasters set on stun. We could capture him, have him treated for mental illness, have him incarcerated so he would do no more harm or even exile him to Kessel or some other hideous penal colony. We could also kill him, but only after court proceedings and judicial reviews. If we had to, if we were given no choice, we could employ deadly force against him, but few serial murderers fought to the bitter end.
Capture and rehabilitation were not options with Exar Kun. Master Skywalker might have been able to redeem his father, but I held out no such hope for the dark man. Luke had a stake in redeeming his father, and his father had a connection to him that invited redemption. Exar Kun had just spent four millennia trapped on this rock—virtually forever to think on what he had done—and if he hadn’t decided to mend his ways in that time, it wasn’t going to happen when one of us asked nicely.
But how does one kill a creature of the dark side? I had no clue as to the answer to that question. We would just have to find a way and then do it.
It really came as no surprise when, as I lay down in my bunk, an oily, glistening black stain seeped into the ceiling above me. It resolved itself into the shadowy image of a tall, slender, sharp-featured man. He wore archaic clothes and long hair. He knitted his long fingers together at his waist.
“Your mind-trick was quite good, Keiran Halcyon.”
“High praise from a Dark Lord of the Sith.” I watched him through half-lidded eyes. “Did it really fool you, Exar Kun, or were you just too trusting in using Streen’s senses?”
The Dark Lord threw his head back in a silent laugh. “Fire and spirit, good. I had misjudged you because Gantoris and Kyp held you in such contempt.”
“And here I thought a man should be known by his enemies.”
“A truism I once lived by.” The shade descended from the ceiling and stood at the foot of my bed. “I was once like you, a mere man filled with ambitions.”
I sat up and snorted. “If you’re the ‘after’ holograph, I’m not interested.”
“Quite droll, Keiran, not as full of anger or fear as the others.” Exar Kun’s obsidian gaze bored into me. I tried to armor my mind against him the way I had with Mara Jade, but he was in and out too quickly for me to stop him. “You have more experience and more maturity. You are a riper fruit.”
“But not to be plucked by you.” I drew my knees up and hugged them to my chest. “You continue to misjudge me if you think there is anything I want from you.”
“Oh, there is, you just don’t realize it,” A confident grin twisted his ebon features. He gestured casually with his right hand and a window opened in the air, hanging there in the center of my room. Within its confines I saw an Imperial Star Destroyer and I knew I was looking at the Invidious. It looked more worn than it had in the image General Cracken had showed me, but battle damage had far from crippled it. Swarms of Tri-fighters cruised around it on picket duty.
The image zoomed in, closing on the bridge, and exploded in through the forward view port. There stood Leonia Tavira, a bit older than Cracken’s image of her, but all the more beautiful for it. She wore her black hair longer, so it fell to the swell of her breasts. Her figure had become less gangling and more rounded—while still petite, she had developed symmetrically so without other things or people around to judge scale, she appeared perfectly normal. Her violet eyes gleamed with a feral cunning that sizzled electrically through the image I was being shown.
The long-dead Sith Lord laughed lightly. “I can give you the power to destroy the Invids. Wipe them out. Or …” The image of Leonia brightened slightly. “I can give you the power to possess her and rule beside her. I will use the two of you as the focal point for a new Empire that I will spread throughout the galaxy.”
I felt a stirring in my loins, then forced myself to laugh and shake my head. “It’s been a while for me, and she’s pretty, but I’m not interested.”
“No, of course, you are not. You are a man of duty. Still here, on the Invidious, there are things you want.”
The image pulled back a bit and slid over to center itself on an armored figure standing well back of Tavira. Two meters tall and apparently male, he wore a grey cloak over steel-grey armor. The armor looked as if it were made of the same plasteel used in stormtrooper armor, but had been shaped differently and layered with another material that provided texture and the grey color. The styling appeared more natural and primitive, as if designed to mimic the armored hide of some animal. This remained true of the facemask the figure wore. Serpentine styling and diagonal eye slits gave it a very viperish cast.
As soon as I saw him I knew he was the reason the Invidious could remain hidden. As I watched, his head came up and he stared straight out at me. His head then dipped and the image faded for a moment. Then I saw him striding forward toward Tavira. He gestured and she began shouting orders that started a flurry of activity.
Exar Kun yawned. “He is the true foe you seek. He is responsible for her successes. With my power you can defeat him, supplant him, do with her what you wish.”
“I’ll get there without your help at all, Exar Kun.”
The shade’s voice sharpened. “Perhaps, but you will not get here without it.”
The image he presented me shifted and my stomach imploded. I saw Mirax lying on a bier, very much like Master Skywalker above us. A soft silver light bathed her. Her arms rested at her sides and she looked as if she were just napping. The only anomalous feature in the image was a small grey band resting on her forehead, pulsing with red and green lights. She looked very peaceful, and try as I might, I could sense no distress from her.
And nothing else.
“I can give her to you. I can tell you exactly where she is.” Exar Kun shaped his face into what he thought was a compassionate expression. “You know the Force allows me to show you the past, the present, the future. This is where she is, your wife, right now. Hidden away, where you will never find her without my help.”
“And what would you have me do for your help?”
“Kill Skywalker.”
I smiled. “Mirax’s life for his? No deal.”
“You want more?” The Dark Lord laughed defiantly. “I can give you more, I will give you more. I will give you your wife and Tavira. You can have her ship and destroy her fleet. You can destroy your father-in-law’s ship. You can return to Corellia and destroy those who hate you there!”
I shook my head. “No.”
“No?”
“No.” I sighed. “You don’t get it, do you? You’ve already lost and you’re continuing down that losing path. Haven’t the last four thousand years taught you anything?”
“I know more than you could ever hope to learn in four thousand years or forty thousand years.”
“That may be, but I know the one thing you don’t.” I rose from my bed and pointed a finger at him. “You’re never going to win. You destroy those who oppose you, and what does that leave you?”
“The faithful.”
“From among whom arises a rival. You have a schism.”
“And I destroy the heretics.”
“Yes, you do.” I nodded carefully. “And again and again that cycle repeats itself and you let it go on because you’ve forgotten the most fundamental
truth of reality: Life creates the Force. When Kyp destroyed Carida, he diminished your power. When you destroyed Gantoris, you diminished your power. You’re a predator over-grazing your prey, but you can’t stop because the dark side fills you with this aching hunger that will never be satisfied.”
“Ha!” Exar Kun’s laughter slashed at me, but sounded just a bit too shrill. “You cannot speak of the dark side until you have experienced it. Join me and learn that you are wrong.”
“I don’t think so. A Two-Onebee droid doesn’t need to contract a disease to diagnose and treat it.” I folded my arms across my chest and laughed at him. “I’m not fodder for your fantasies, go away.”
Exar Kun lifted his head. “I came to you, now, inviting you to join me. I would have given you much. When next you come to me, and you will, I shall not be so generous.”
As he spoke the image of Mirax began to fade, but it did so in a most horrible way. I watched her lying there, aging years for every passing second. Her dark hair became grey and brittle, then fell out in clumps. Her flesh became ashen, her eyes sunken. Her body puddled out through the seams of her clothing, then they split, letting me see bare bones. A gust of wind came up, scattering them, spinning her skull around like a child’s toy. Finally it came to rest, gap-toothed, staring at me with empty sockets.
I blinked the image away and found myself alone again. I sat back down on my bed and discovered I was trembling. It surprised me, so I made myself laugh. I had to push at first, but it came more easily. The warm sound filled my small room and I swore I could hear the echoes of laughter that Biggs, Wedge and Porkins had shared in here. They had laughed because they knew they had the secret of destroying the Death Star.
I laughed along with them. Exar Kun had come to me to entice me to join him. What he didn’t know, what fueled my laughter even more, was that in doing so, he gave me the secret of destroying him.
Star Wars: I, Jedi: Star Wars Page 22
