Vortex: Star Wars (Fate of the Jedi) (Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi)

by Troy Denning

  “… when the Mandalorians opened fire in the streets of Arari,” Madhi continued. Between the voice issuing instructions in her ear, the violence outside, and her own shock, her thoughts were racing and whirling through her mind like a beldon flying through a hurricane. But there was strange calm inside her, a recognition that this was what she had spent her life training to do … and that she was more than up to the task. “We are told that the Octusi use similar songs to communicate over great distances as they race over their native plains on Blaudu Octus.”

  Madhi fell silent as Rhal’s speaker-enhanced voice cracked across the circle, splitting the Song of Sorrow like a thunderclap. “I won’t ask you again, slave.”

  Rhal pointed his blaster at the injured Octusi.

  The Elder folded his knees beneath him and dropped to the ground, then looked Rhal straight in the eye. “No.”

  “The courage of the Octusi is legendary in the Albanin sector,” Madhi continued. “And yet, they are described as the gentlest of species. In their own culture, they engage in nothing more violent than the aptly named Shove-Dances, which young males perform during mating season.”

  Her last two words were drowned out by the shriek of a blaster bolt. A smoking hole appeared in the center of the second victim’s chest, and the Elder collapsed forward onto the ground, his great, dark eyes still staring up at Rhal.

  “We have just witnessed a second cold-blooded murder by the Mandalorian commander in charge of this company,” Madhi reported. “It is difficult to understand the reasoning behind this excessive use of force. However, lawless actions are common out here on the galactic edge. Pirates plague the region, as do crime rings and bounty hunters. Perhaps Sextuna Mining Corporation feels justified in employing beings such as Belok Rhal to protect their fleets.”

  As Madhi spoke, a tremendous thrumming filled the circle, overwhelming the parabolic mike she was holding and filling her head with a painful boom that left her ears ringing. In the next instant the Octusi sprang into flight, rushing for the alleys and streets that the Mandalorians had blocked with their assault sleds. Rhal reached up to activate his throat mike, and Madhi barely managed to swing the dish back in time to capture what he was saying.

  “Commence Operation—”

  The last part of the command was lost to the ear-piercing wail of a blaster cannon barrage. The circle below erupted into a blinding mesh-work of colored bolts and flashes, and the outer ring of Octusi fell almost as one.

  “The Mandalorians have opened fire!” Madhi yelled, unconcerned about being heard above the roar and screech of so much blasterfire. “A massacre of unbelievable magnitude has begun before our very eyes here on Blaudu Sextus. And this reporter, on assignment for the Perre Needmo Newshour, must conclude that it was the Mandalorian commander’s intention all along to provoke a stampede as justification for the cold-blooded atrocities that you are now witnessing. Hundreds of Octusi lie dead or dying already, and still the Mandalorians continue to fire …”

  As Madhi spoke, the gunner’s hatch on Rhal’s QuickStryke flew open, and out popped the head of a female Mandalorian with short-cropped brown hair and a small, button-ended nose. She said something about being borked, then pointed up toward the window where Tyl’s right-angle lens lay recording the massacre in the circle.

  Rhal glanced up, and Madhi’s parabolic mike captured his static-filled voice asking, “Live?”

  The female nodded and said something that Madhi’s parabolic mike did pick up: “You stupid idiot.”

  Rhal ignored her and grabbed the swivel-mounted heavy blaster in front of his hatch, then swung the barrel toward the droid-repair shop where Madhi and her crew were hiding.

  Madhi dropped to take cover, but continued to report. “It appears the Mandalorians have discovered our presence. They are not pleased to have their actions—”

  A flurry of blaster bolts came shrieking through the window, filling the stockroom with the stone shards, smoke, and flying droid parts.

  “—brought to light for you to see.” The quaver that had come to Madhi’s voice was unprofessional, she knew, but there was nothing she could do to disguise it. “We are under direct fire here, so please be patient while—”

  The deafening crack of a cannon bolt shook the repair shop, spraying hand-sized stones across the room and filling the air with so much smoke that Madhi could no longer see Shohta waiting by the door. She glanced across at Tyl and found him holding a hand to his forehead. There was blood pouring down over his eye, and it was dripping onto the vidcam’s display. But he was still squinting at the screen with his good eye, struggling to keep Rhal in the frame.

  “—change locations,” Madhi finished. She deactivated her collar mike, then tossed the parabolic mike out the window and scrambled across the floor to Tyl. “Will you forget about the shot for a minute? We’ve got to move! Now!”

  Without waiting for a reply, she grabbed his arm and started to race toward the back of the room. Another cannon bolt struck the front of the storeroom, pelting them with fist-sized stones and dropping both of them to their knees. Tyl went limp. For a moment, Madhi thought he had been seriously injured.

  Then she saw him toss the right-angle lens aside and reach for the wide-angle, and she knew he was fine.

  Taking her lead from his example, Madhi activated her collar mike and began to narrate again. “My cam operator has quite a gash over one eye, so please forgive us if our images grow unclear. We remain under fire, and we are fleeing our observation post. Again, this is Madhi Vaandt, bringing you events live from Blaudu Sextus for the Perre Needmo Newshour.”

  They reached the back of the room and found Shohta crouched over the uplink antenna and power generator.

  “I don’t know if you can see this, but my Chev assistant, the former slave Shohta, is attempting to shield our equipment with his own body.” Madhi grabbed him by the arm and dragged him toward the door. “We’ll keep transmitting until it’s no longer possible, but I’m afraid we will be going off ’Net sometime soon.”

  The female voice began to sound in Madhi’s earbud again. “This is great stuff—a Peamoney Award for sure,” she said. “Keep it going as long as you can, and don’t worry about medical expenses. The network has you covered.”

  “That’s because there aren’t going to be any medical expenses,” Tyl grumbled. He braced the vidcam on one shoulder and grabbed the uplink antenna with his free hand, then nodded Shohta toward the generator unit and turned to Madhi. “Go!”

  Madhi cracked the door open and peered into the hall, then sighed in relief. “No Mandos,” she reported. “Let’s go.”

  They stepped through the door and, still trailing a power feed and datalink to the abandoned equipment, scurried down the hallway to the stairwell.

  “As you can see, we’re attempting to relocate to a more secure position,” Madhi reported. “We may have to abandon our generator and uplink antenna at any moment, so …”

  Madhi reached the top of the stairwell and found herself staring down at Belok Rhal and a handful of armored Mandalorians. She stopped short.

  “Tyl, you getting this?” she whispered.

  “Wrong lens.” He activated the vidcam floodlights, filling the stairwell with illumination. “But we’re sending pictures.”

  That was all Madhi needed to hear. She started down the stairwell toward the Mandalorians.

  “Commander Rhal,” she began, “the entire galaxy has just witnessed your company initiate an assault of incredible violence in the Big Circle of Fun. Would you care to explain these atrocities for the record?”

  “No.” Rhal pointed his blaster over Madhi’s shoulder, no doubt in the direction of the vidcam. “Turn the cam off.”

  Madhi’s knees began to shake, and she grew very afraid that she was going to lose control of her bladder on the intergalactic news.

  “That’s not going to happen, Commander Rhal,” she said.

  “No?” Rhal shifted the blaster barrel toward her chest,
and Madhi knew she was about to die. “I beg to differ.”

  As Rhal spoke, two tiny circles of brightness appeared in the stone wall behind him. Madhi could not imagine what they were—but she felt sure it was nothing she wanted to point out to the Mandalorians. She began to descend the stairs, one hand turning the button mike on her lapel toward Rhal.

  “The galaxy is watching, Commander. Would you care to comment on what you’ve done here today?” she asked. Behind Rhal, the bright circles turned into lightsaber tips, one green and one blue, and Madhi began to think she and her crew just might survive this assignment. “Are you truly in the employ of Sextuna Mining Corporation? Or do your orders come from somewhere else—somewhere closer to the Core?”

  This last question, she knew, was pushing the boundaries of journalistic ethics. But considering that the man was pointing a blaster at her chest, she was going to allow herself some leeway.

  “Is it possible, Commander Rhal, that your true employer is Chief of State Daala?”

  Madhi saw Rhal’s eyes narrow, and she knew that she had pushed things farther than was safe. The lightsaber tips at the bottom of the stairwell became lightsaber blades and began to cut through the thick stone as though it were flimsiplast, and Rhal’s companions spun around, preparing to open fire on the two Jedi that the Freedom Flight agent had promised were on the way.

  Rhal merely pulled the trigger of his blaster pistol … twice.

  The bolts caught Madhi in the torso, knocking her back onto the stairs with a chestful of fire. She heard someone screaming and saw Shohta flying down the stairs toward her, his brutish Chev features twisted into a mask of grief, his big fists flailing in anger.

  Meanwhile, Rhal’s escorts began to pour fire toward the bottom of the stairs. Their efforts were, of course, useless. No sooner had they opened fire than the Jedi used the Force to send the lightsaber-weakened wall flying inward, knocking the Mandalorians over backward. In the next instant, a pair of young Jedi Knights, one a furious-looking Chev and the other a handsome young human, were standing at the bottom of the stairs, using the Force to slam the armored Mandalorians first against one wall, then against the another, denying them any chance to bring their weapons to bear … and making them suffer terribly for the attempt.

  In the same instant, Shohta reached Madhi’s side. Her vision was already starting to narrow and darken, but she saw her assistant tearing at her tunic, first exposing her wounds, then covering them with hands that her flesh was already too cold to feel.

  Then Madhi saw Tyl descending the stairs, the vidcam still on his shoulder and focused on the bottom of the stairwell. He stopped beside her and turned the lens on her face, tears pouring out down his cheeks. He knelt beside her but made no move to lower the vidcam and help her—and there wouldn’t have been any sense in it. Madhi could feel what had happened to her, how much of her had been burned away by the Mandalorian’s bolts, and she had been a journalist too long to deny the truth of her situation.

  She looked up at Tyl and smiled. “Did you get the shot?” she asked. “Just tell me you got the shot.”

  With a line of Coruscanti skytowers gleaming on the horizon and the lush gardens of Fellowship Plaza spread out a thousand meters below, the view from Pinnacle Platform was breathtaking—even to a Barabel. The platform was the Jedi Temple’s highest landing pad, an elegant blonstone deck large enough to receive diplomatic shuttles. On a clear day, a being with a predator’s keen eyes could stand at its sanke-wood balustrade and watch bureaucrats taking lunch in Peace Park, or gaze down the Grand Promenade and ponder the security sleds swarming the silver cylinder of the Galactic Justice Center.

  But the beings gathered on the platform that morning had no more interest in the spectacular view than the sleek Incom CrewComet descending to land. The shuttle was carrying Zekk, Tekli, and a handful of recovered Jedi Knights returning from temporary exile on Shedu Maad. Hoping to make the group feel comfortable and welcome after their recent bout of psychotic illness, the Masters had arranged an enthusiastic reception at the Temple’s most prestigious entrance.

  Unfortunately, a crisis on a faraway world had erupted just as the shuttle entered the atmosphere, and now all eyes were locked on the nearest datapad. It seemed to Saba that events on Blaudu Sextus were already shaping the future of the Jedi in ways she did not comprehend.

  “Stun bolts, yes?” asked the Council’s newest member, Barratk’l. “No officer would kill a reporter on live HoloNet.”

  “Belok Rhal would,” Leia said. “Those were no stun bolts.”

  “This one agrees,” Saba said, peering over the heads of both Solos at the datapad in Han’s hands. He was holding it out for others to view, but being careful to keep the screen high enough to prevent Allana from seeing the violence. “If Rhal will kill on the stepz of the Jedi Temple, he will kill anywhere.”

  The grainy image zoomed in on a Devaronian journalist lying motionless in a narrow stone stairwell, then focused on a pair of smoking scorch holes that left no doubt about the nature of the bolts that had struck her chest. Saba noted the corpse’s absolute stillness and the awkward angle of its limbs, and she knew that Madhi Vaandt had been dead before the holosignal reached Coruscant.

  A tinny clatter sounded from the datapad’s speaker—a section of stone wall collapsing off camera—and it was followed an instant later by the screech and drone of a blaster-on-lightsaber battle. The cam operator lingered on the smoke rising from Vaandt’s body long enough to establish firmly that she had been killed, then zoomed out to show two Jedi Knights—a powerful-looking Chev named Sothais Saar and a slender, dark-haired human named Avinoam Arelis—fighting their way into the bottom of the stairwell.

  For a moment the pair stood shoulder-to-shoulder, their bright blades weaving a basket of color as they batted blaster bolts back at their Mandalorian attackers. Then, moving so smoothly and swiftly that Saba almost missed it on the grainy transmission, they executed a perfect shield manuever, with Sothais stepping forward to protect both of them while Avinoam remained motionless, a little behind him and to one side. Dropping his lightsaber to his side, Avinoam raised his free hand and started to wag it gently. Armored Mandalorians suddenly began to fly back and forth, crashing into the stone walls and dropping to the stairs in flailing heaps of beskar’gam armor, spraying stray blasterfire everywhere.

  The blurry image of Belok Rhal appeared at one edge of the tiny screen, pointing a blaster toward the cam and shouting orders that were not quite audible over the din of the battle behind him.

  “Stang!” There was more alarm in Han’s voice than anger, and Saba understood him well enough to realize that he was worried about the cam operator’s safety. “I think we’re about to lose our feed.”

  But even as Han spoke, another figure was moving into the frame, blocking Rhal’s firing angle.

  “This is Madhi Vaandt’s production assistant, Shohta, reporting live from a droid-repair shop in Arari on the planet Blaudu Sextus.” As Shohta spoke, he turned to present his profile to the cam, revealing the heavy-boned face of a middle-aged Chev. “As you know if you have been watching our live report …”

  A flurry of wildly inaccurate blaster bolts came flying over Shohta and bounced out of sight. He cringed and ducked, but continued to speak.

  “As you know,” he repeated, “the mercenary commander Belok Rhal has killed Madhi in an attempt to prevent us from reporting the Mandalorian massacre of Octusi slaves taking place right now a few dozen meters beyond that wall. But Madhi Vaandt would not be silenced, and neither will we.”

  Shohta frowned in the direction of his cam operator, then nodded. He stepped out of the image to reveal Rhal, retreating up the stairs toward the cam and pouring fire down toward Sothais Saar. Saar was advancing calmly, his lightsaber blade barely moving as he deflected bolt after bolt into the stairwell walls. Behind the Chev Jedi Knight, Avinoam Arelis was disarming the half a dozen Mandalorian survivors he had already beaten into submission by Force-slamming the
m into the walls and one another.

  “During our short time together,” Shohta said from off cam, “one of the things that Madhi repeated to me many times is that it is a journalist’s duty to report the story, not to interfere with it. I hope that, just this once, you will forgive me for disobeying her.”

  As Shohta spoke, a huge boot appeared in the image, then planted itself square in Rhal’s back and sent him tumbling back down the stairs toward Sothais Saar. The Jedi used the Force to redirect the Mandalorian’s fall, slamming him into the wall several times before bringing him to a stop within easy reach. It was impossible to hear what the young Jedi Knight said as he brought his lightsaber around toward Rhal, but the Mandalorian’s face went pale, and he let the blaster tumble from his hand without attempting to fire.

  Shohta’s heavy-browed face appeared again, this time with tears streaming down his lumpy cheeks. “Madhi Vaandt died today so that the galaxy would know the truth about slavery: that it still flourishes on the edges of the Galactic Alliance, and that there are many powerful beings and corporations in the so-called civilized galaxy actively helping to preserve this immoral and illegal practice.”

  Shohta paused to look down and gather his thoughts, then addressed the cam again. “Fortunately, her death was not in vain.” He stepped aside and waved his hand down the stairs, to where Sothais and Avinoam were securing their prisoners. “Thanks to Madhi Vaandt, the Jedi have heard the cries of the oppressed … and they have answered.”

  Atop Pinnacle Platform, the Force grew heavy and still, for most of those present knew the truth—that the Jedi had not heard the call of the oppressed. The Jedi Council had sent Sothais and Avinoam to Blaudu Sextus not to free the Octusi, but to discover who was inciting the rebellion and put an end to it before it resulted in just this kind of massacre. But the mission had gone terribly awry. The two Jedi Knights had found themselves caught in circumstances that dictated they follow their hearts rather than their orders, and because of their decision, they had found themselves on live holo doing exactly what Jedi were supposed to do.