by James Luceno
The Alephs didn’t have any defenses that esoteric. Instead, they relied on their thick hulls and on shields powered by those overbuilt generators. Weapons included two turrets, one on either side of the ball-shaped cockpit, each equipped with quad-linked lasers—lasers that could be unlinked, permitting an unpredictable spray fire pattern, an option to confound those coralskipper voids. Forward were the explosives tubes, one for concussion missiles and one for proton torpedoes. All in all, the Alephs packed a heavy punch—heavy being the operative word for much of the vehicle’s performance.
But—and Syal winced—it was a shame the Alephs looked so blasted stupid. With their ball-shaped cockpits, reminiscent of TIE cockpits but larger, and the circular transparisteel viewports before both the pilot’s and gunner’s seats, with the smooth ball cockpit lines graduating to two trailing thruster pods narrowing the farther they were from the cockpit, and with the turrets to either side of the cockpit, the Aleph looked like nothing so much as the head of a gigantic Twi’lek, trailing its head-tails behind and wearing clumsy earmuffs. It was no wonder the Aleph test pilots and just about everyone else who saw them referred to the craft as Twees.
Still, flying them was better than flying garbage scows, rescue shuttles, or tugs.
Test pilot. Syal considered that. Much as she’d come to dislike the Twees in the few days she’d been flying them, she realized that it wouldn’t be fair to this class of starfighters if she didn’t demonstrate every one of their positive traits for their GA evaluators. It also wouldn’t be fair to the Antilles family name. Now that she’d reclaimed her name, she owed it to her family to put a bit more polish on it. She needed to be able to run this craft through maneuvers so exacting that onlooking pilots would have no idea how she did it.
She switched her comm board back on to broadcast. “Gray One, this is Four. Over.”
“Go ahead, Four. Over.”
“Would it be all right if I dropped down into Tralus’s atmosphere before I return to the Diver? I’d like to run this unit through some paces. Atmospheric speed and heat tests, some aerobatics. Over.”
“That’s showing some initiative, Four. You’re authorized. Over.”
“Thanks, and out.” Syal returned the comm board to its previous status.
Zueb gave her a sorrowful look. “Going to fly me dizzy, aren’t you?”
Syal nodded, her expression sympathetic. “Only till you throw up.”
“All right.”
LORRD CITY, LORRD
Ben returned to Dr. Rotham’s offices just as the elderly scholar was commencing her initial evaluation. He walked in, seeing the real tassels set out on the main table and a hologram of them floating above, each tassel labeled.
Rotham was speaking: “—top to bottom, as that seems, from internal evidence, to be the order in which they’re to be read. Hello, Ben.”
“Hello.” Ben moved forward to stand behind Jacen’s chair. He stared up at the hologram.
“So,” Dr. Rotham continued, “number one, at the top, is from Firrere, a dead world, its population scattered; the knotting technique was originally for recording and, in some superstitious cultures, magically influencing names. Its message, ‘He will remake himself’—or perhaps ‘rename himself,’ the two concepts being identical in this context.
“Next is the one I translated for you earlier, from the Bith species, Aalagar race: ‘He will ruin those who deny justice.’
“The scarlet-and-black one was easy, as it was the second of the tactile writing systems I learned—a recording technique used by the prisoners on Kessel. ‘He will choose the fate of the weak.’ ”
Though Jacen didn’t move, Ben felt a jolt of emotion from him. Nelani must have felt it, too; she gave Jacen a curious look, but he did not acknowledge it, keeping his attention on Dr. Rotham. The scholar seemed to be oblivious to the exchange.
“I can’t determine the meaning of the next one in sequence, the poisonous-looking yellow-and-green one. After that comes a very tricky one. The red, yellow, and pale green tassel is actually a representation of a flower arrangement, from the old Alderaanian language of flowers—imagine it as a bouquet in a vase, the red and yellow splotches constituting the petals and the green the stems, and you get a sense of it. Its meaning is ‘He will choose how he will be loved.’ Actually, instead of ‘he’ it should be ‘I,’ but I’m taking the liberty of assuming that the third person is to be used here, as it is everywhere else.”
“Speaking of which,” Nelani interrupted, “is it definitely ‘he,’ or could it also be read as ‘she’ throughout?”
Dr. Rotham shook her head. “It isn’t defined in all the tassels, but everywhere it is, it’s distinctly ‘he.’ Where was I? Oh, yes. After that, a very simple one. The gray-and-brown one is from a still-extant Coruscanti subculture of indigents, transients who pride themselves on being jobless, living by theft and begging. They leave messages for others of their kind, symbols on the walls of shops to say, for instance, that a restaurateur is an easy touch. This three-dimensional representation of their language states, ‘He will win and break his chains.’ ”
She continued. Ben, increasingly bored, began to lose focus, taking only distracted note of her translations: “ ‘He will shed his skin and choose a new skin,’ ‘He will strengthen himself through sacrifice,’ ‘He will crawl through his cloak,’ ‘He will know brotherhood,’ ‘He will make a pet’—by which I don’t mean he will tame some creature, but that he will somehow fabricate a pet …”
Mostly Ben kept his attention on Jacen, for on one or two other occasions the revelation of a tassel’s meaning again caused his emotions to spike to the point where Ben could detect them.
Finally Dr. Rotham’s translations reached the end. “This one you already knew. Ryloth, Tahu’ip culture: ‘He will strengthen himself through pain.’ To be honest, I don’t know whether the order of presentation is significant. It could be random, or it could add up to a specific thought. I just have no way of knowing.”
Jacen nodded. “That’s all very helpful, Doctor. Um, you skipped one.” He stood and reached out to the hologram, his fingertips touching a tan tassel featuring jagged black lines.
“Yes … I could not translate that one. Though I’ve seen the recording method before, the zigzag patterns, the arrays of protruding claws and teeth.” Dr. Rotham looked uncertain. “In statuary and figurines from the world of Ziost.”
This time it was Nelani who looked startled.
Jacen accepted the information with a simple nod. “It means something like ‘He will be drawn from peace into conflict,’ or maybe ‘His life will be balanced between peace and conflict.’ ”
The scholar gave him a curious look. “How do you know?”
“Believe it or not, I just feel it. The tassel’s meaning is imbued within it in a fashion that only a Force-wielder can read.”
“I can’t read it,” Nelani said.
Jacen shrugged. “Maybe when you’ve broadened your range of Force-related learning a bit.”
“What’s Ziost?” Ben asked.
“One of the worlds central to the origins of the Sith,” Nelani said, her tone low, as if she wanted to avoid being overheard.
“There’s actually a substantial Sith influence to this collection of statements.” Jacen gestured at the hologram. “Several of them seem to be paraphrases of portions of the Sith creed. The one about victory and chains, for instance. What we have here is an item fabricated by someone who is at least as familiar with Sith matters as a Jedi historian would be.”
“I hope it is only a historian,” Dr. Rotham said. “One last thing I can tell you is this: I brought in a beadcrafter to look at these items, and he’s certain that they were crafted by different hands. So you’re not dealing with a single individual who is expert in all these recording techniques. You’re dealing with someone who has collected them, arranged for their assembly, rather than someone who has fabricated them all. Which is a considerable relief to me, because the
alternative would be that I have an academic rival I’ve been unaware of all these decades.” She drew a hand over her brow, miming a gesture of relief.
Jacen gave her a smile. “Doctor, your help has been invaluable. And we’ve asked you to do far too much work in far too short an amount of time. I do appreciate it.”
She beamed up at him. “I consider it my chance, so late in life, to offer some thanks to the Jedi for all they’ve done.”
“We’ll leave you now. But if anything does occur to you about any of the tassels, any of the translations, don’t hesitate to get a message to us.” Jacen wrapped the collection of tassels in a cloth and returned it to his belt pouch.
“Good luck with your investigation, Jedi Solo.”
Once the Jedi were in the corridor outside Dr. Rotham’s quarters and headed toward Nelani’s speeder, Jacen asked, “So how was the rest of your day, Ben?”
“Oh, pretty good, I guess.” Ben struggled to look, and feel, nonchalant. “I found the shuttle.”
Jacen smiled. “Well, that couldn’t have been too difficult. You started out at the spaceport.”
“Not your shuttle.”
Jacen frowned. “Whose?”
“The shuttle that escaped Toryaz Station.”
Jacen almost stumbled, and Ben suppressed the urge to laugh. Jacen said, “Wait. Are you sure?”
Ben nodded. “The transponder code is a match, and so is the design. It’s a Sentinel-class lander with the weapon systems stripped out.” Sentinel-class shuttles, slightly scaled-up and more heavily armored cousins of the Lambda-class shuttle that Jacen piloted, were familiar sights along the galactic space routes.
“How did you find it?” Nelani asked. She’d been impressed by Ben’s efforts during and after Huarr’s spectacular suicide, and sounded impressed again. Ben had to work hard not to preen.
Ben grimaced. This was going to be difficult to explain, to put into words. On the other hand, Nelani was a Jedi. “I waited around for a while, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. I guess I wasn’t thinking. More like feeling. And I kept noticing when shuttles landed. They kind of drew my attention, even when transports and cargo ships didn’t. Which seemed weird at the time.”
Nelani nodded. “The Force was guiding you. You were open to it.”
“I guess. And then I remembered something my mother says a lot. She says that any detail, no matter now small, could turn out to be important. And I remembered about the shuttle from Toryaz Station. Mom’s a spy, you know.”
Nelani grinned. “I know.”
“So I went through my datapad, all Jacen’s notes on details we haven’t had time to go through, and I decided to see if the spaceport records showed anything about that shuttle. And there it was, parked half a kilometer from where the Y-wing blew up.”
“Who’s it registered to?” Jacen asked.
Ben pulled out his datapad and opened it. He’d left all that information on the screen. “A human woman named Brisha Syo. She’s from Commenor. She wasn’t at the shuttle; she’d just paid for a week’s worth of hangar space. She left no contact information. The spaceport authority thought she was staying aboard, but the ship’s systems were all shut down. I told Lieutenant Samran. He’s got somebody watching it now.”
“Very good,” Jacen said. “But what if this Brisha Syo sneaks aboard and takes off when Samran’s guard is snoozing?”
“Then the transmitter we stuck on the top of the hull will tell us where she goes.” Ben shrugged as if the matter were of no consequence.
Jacen laughed. “Good work. And what did you do with the rest of your time?”
Ben scowled at him. “Now you’re making fun of me.”
Jacen nodded. “You’re getting so good at what you do, if we don’t make fun of you, you’ll have a colossal, Lando Calrissian–sized ego.”
“That would be fun.” Ben modulated his voice to something like the smooth, insinuating tones of the old Solo family friend. He turned toward Nelani. “Hello. I’m Ben Skywalker.”
“Oh, that’s ghastly,” she said.
“And I’m trying to figure out whether I’m more suave or more debonair. Maybe you can help.”
“Stop it,” she said.
“I’ll pour the wine, and you tell me what you like best about me.”
“Jacen, now he talks too much …”
chapter twenty-seven
CORELLIA
Roaring at tremendous speeds along the avenue, tall buildings flashing by to either side so fast that he couldn’t register details of their color, much less their design, Han kept his attention focused on the vehicle just ahead of his own. It was a black disc with three fiery apertures, thruster tubes, pointed back at him—the tail end of a Corellian YT-5100 Shriek-class bomber just like his own. It galled him that Wedge’s bomber was in the lead—it was an unnatural state of affairs, and he planned to correct it as soon as possible.
Laserfire flashed over his cockpit from ahead, and the monitor screen showing data on his shield status flashed red in his peripheral vision, signs that his Shriek had been hit—but there had been no shudder, so the impact had to have been glancing. He saw Wedge’s Shriek waver and sideslip just a little, a successful bid to reduce the amount of laserfire converging on him from ahead. That, Han realized, was his key to getting in front.
He saw another series of red flashes from ahead, more concentrated laserfire, and gauged that the thickest stream of fire was moving in toward the Shrieks from the port side. He did not swerve, but hit his thrusters.
Wedge did swerve, sideslipping again to avoid the worst of the fire, and Han’s perfectly timed acceleration brought him alongside Wedge’s bomber, then just ahead of it. Han ran into the thickest of the laserfire and his shield monitor flashed alarmingly bright—but he was ahead.
And ahead of him, too close, was the artificial gray mountain of the Terkury Housing Complex, the building he was supposed to fly beneath in less than a second—
He pulled the trigger on his first concussion missile load, knowing that it was too late for the missiles to hit the street and the debris to clear. He thought about breaking off, going skyward—a suicidal tactic, considering all the laser emplacements and pursuing Galactic Alliance vessels that would be able to fire on him, but not as suicidal as plowing into the side of that building—but there was a flash of yellow to his starboard side as Wedge’s missiles, already launched, shot ahead and plowed into the correct spot on the avenue. The street was suddenly replaced by an expanding cloud of debris, dust, and flame.
Han dived toward a spot just beneath the center of the cloud. He’d be flying blind for a second or two, but he knew the distances, the ranges, the depths. He waited a fraction of a second, until his gut told him that he had to be beneath the level of the street; then he leveled off and fired his second brace of missiles.
He cleared the first cloud. All around him were duracrete support pillars and the broad expanses of empty subterranean hangars; unlit, these features were presented in shades of blue by the heads-up display on the viewport before him. Then his missiles hit, and the wall directly ahead detonated into a second cloud. He plunged into it and climbed, trusting his instincts and timing—
And there above him was the sky, tinted by the presence of military shields. “Dropping starting load,” he said, and hit the buttons that would propel the dozens of targeting droids out of his bomb bay.
There was an odd echo to his words, and he realized that the echo was in Wedge’s voice. Wedge had dropped his own ordnance load and announced the fact at the exact moment Han had.
The viewport went black. The Shriek’s vibration and sense of motion ceased. The cockpit was lit for a moment only by the glows from the various displays Han hadn’t looked at once during the mission; then brighter light from behind him illuminated the space as the simulator’s access hatch opened.
Han sighed and used the metal rungs overhead to clamber backward out of the simulator and into a dimly lit corridor. There was anoth
er access hatch, identical to his, a few meters to his right, and two more to his left; Wedge Antilles stood beside one of them, dressed, like Han, in the stylish green-and-black flight suit and helmet of a Shriek pilot, and was already closing his hatch.
Wedge’s features were entirely obscured by the tinting of his helmet’s full-coverage blast visor, but he popped that up to glare at Han. “You don’t have to be in front, you know,” he said. “The mission doesn’t depend on it.”
Han rotated his helmet a quarter turn and pulled it up and off. He offered Wedge his most insufferable grin, the one that, from time to time, came closest to driving Leia to violence. “Sure, I do.”
Wedge’s expression was unrelenting. “Did you notice the part where jockeying for position caused you to miss your missile launch window? Remember that?”
“You covered for me pretty well,” Han said. “You show a lot of promise as a pilot. You ought to consider a career in the military.”
Despite himself, Wedge grinned briefly. “You need to consider working as a team player.” He pulled his own helmet free.
“I’m a team player,” Han protested. “As long as the rest of the team stays behind me.”
“Your flying tactics alarm me—”
“Ooh, General Antilles is alarmed—”
“Because if you end up as a thin red film on the surface of Tralus, Leia will haunt me to the end of my days, which might be only one or two if she’s mad enough.”
Han nodded. “That’s actually a good point. I recommend you keep me alive.”
“Antilles!” That was a new voice, raised in a shout from the far side of the simulator chamber … and the voice was distressingly like Han’s. “Where are you?” The voice was moving closer; the speaker was just around the corner.
