by James Luceno
“Haxan hadn’t decided to die.”
“True. But he was going to, no matter what we did.”
“No—”
“What was the blaster pistol for, Nelani?”
That brought her up short. “What?”
“The blaster pistol he held. What was it for?”
“To compel obedience?”
Jacen shook his head. “He had his bomb for that. The bomb was all he needed, and he knew it. So what was the blaster for?”
“What do you think it was for?”
“To shoot hostages, one by one, as the afternoon wore on. To shoot them, and to mock us for our helplessness.”
She considered that. “Maybe.”
“Definitely. And with the first one he shot, our loss, our failure, would have been already equal to the one we eventually did face—one innocent life. With two shot, we’d have been worse off than we are now. And so on.”
She stared at him for a long moment, and Ben could see in her expression a tragic mask of disappointment, disillusionment. “Jacen, you have a good argument for everything you do. But my gut tells me that you’re doing wrong.”
“Your gut, or the Force?”
“My gut.”
“What does the Force tell you?”
“Nothing. The Force tells me nothing about what just happened.”
“Then it wasn’t the wrong choice.” Jacen turned away to head back to the Jedi speeder.
chapter twenty-eight
With the meaning of the tassels offering the Jedi clues but no clear path to follow, and with the Toryaz Station shuttle and the mystery of the Jedi-related terrorist encounters lingering in Lorrd City, Jacen put off his departure from Lorrd.
And it was only a day later that the mystery encounters continued.
First, in the morning, the Lorrd Security Forces received an anonymous communication that the kidnapped daughter of a prominent businesswoman was being held in steam tunnels beneath the School of Conceptual Design. The security operatives, after scanning plans of the tunnels, found no access that would give them an approach to the child’s prison chamber without getting the girl killed. So the Jedi were called.
Examining the same plans, Jacen noted that the diameter of one of the steam pipes, while insufficient for a fullgrown man or woman to slither through, would provide a tight access for an average-sized adolescent. So the security forces had the steam cut off to that pipe, and after it cooled, Ben crawled through, cutting his way out of the pipe at an appropriate point, dropping into the kidnapped girl’s chamber, and defending it against all comers for the three minutes it then took for Jacen, Nelani, and the security forces to storm and secure the hideout.
The kidnapping’s mastermind, a frustrated radical who wanted to replace the Lorrd planetary government with something ruled by logical, pitiless legal-analyst droids, died during the attack, but his surviving allies said that the girl had appeared to him in his dreams and recommended the kidnapping in the first place.
Later that day, a man dressed in Jedi-style robes and carrying a nonfunctional, pre-Clone-Wars-era lightsaber he’d stolen from a museum, climbed to the summit of the main university’s administration building and perched there, threatening to leap to his death unless he was admitted to the Jedi order. Jacen, Nelani, and Ben went to deal with the situation. Jacen climbed to the summit to talk to the man while the other two remained at ground level.
As it turned out, the desperate Jedi applicant had no Force sensitivity whatsoever, and could not bring himself to believe that Force sensitivity could not be taught. Mindful of Nelani’s desire that he talk things out more with the desperate people who provoked such encounters, Jacen argued politely but fruitlessly with the man for over an hour.
“Tell me,” the man finally said, “how to do your Jedi tricks—one Jedi trick—or I’ll step off this roof.”
“I’m tired of talking, and I don’t have the energy to lie convincingly right now,” Jacen said. “Go ahead and jump.”
The man did.
Nelani, assisted by Ben, caught him, slowing his descent with the Force, and the worst he sustained from his twenty-story plummet was a broken ankle. Security agents bundled him off for medical evaluation, and still he shouted that the Jedi had betrayed him.
But Nelani hugged Jacen, when he reached ground level again, for doing his best to argue the man out of a bad decision.
As they stood there, security agents keeping the crowd and the press at bay, a comlink beeped. Jacen and Nelani sighed and reached for their respective communications devices … but it was Ben’s that had sounded. He pulled it out of his pouch. “Ben Skywalker here … Really? Did she put up a fight? All right, we’ll be there in half an hour or so.” He sought Jacen’s face for confirmation, got a nod, and concluded, “Out.”
“You know,” Jacen said, “the more like a Jedi Knight you act, the more likely your father is to send you off to put down a planetary insurrection or delve into the mystery of a Sith Holocron.”
Ben flushed. “This was stuff I’d been communicating with him about.”
“Him?”
“Lieutenant Samran. That woman showed up. Brisha Syo.”
“The shuttle pilot?”
“Yeah. She’s in custody.”
“Let’s go.” Jacen led the dash for the speeder.
The human woman sitting alone in the security interrogation room did not look like a criminal, at least on the surface. Clad in a purple jumpsuit that suggested both money and a preference for simplicity, she was about the same age as Ben’s parents, at the height of vigorous middle age. She was lean, with well-defined muscles suggesting an active life, and had dark hair, slightly curled, cut short in an easy-to-maintain hairdo.
Her features were fine, and she was attractive. Her beauty was very approachable; she looked like the sort of woman who had been a greeter in a shop or hotel in her youth, and still carried the mannerisms of that profession. Alone in the interrogation room, she did not look bored, but seemed to be impatiently awaiting the moment she could begin interacting with others again.
The chamber she waited in featured a one-way reflective panel that showed her a mirrored surface, while the Jedi, on the other side, could look through it like a viewport. Ben had the unsettling feeling that she was restraining herself from looking at the Jedi—that any moment she would look up and lock eyes with one of them, despite the physical impossibility of her seeing them. Ben knew better than to assume that her good looks and apparent friendliness meant she was a good person. His upbringing had grounded him in principles of both logic and the Force, and both disciplines knew that an attractive appearance could conceal malevolence. Still, he detected none in her.
“Perhaps she just isn’t feeling wicked right now,” Jacen said.
Ben looked up at him. “Huh?”
“Your thoughts are very much at the surface. Still, they’re good thoughts. You’re keeping sharp.” He shrugged. “Let’s go in.”
A Lorrd Security guard led them into the interrogation chamber. Jacen waited until the guard had exited, then sat and gestured for Nelani and Ben to do likewise. They took the chairs on the opposite side of the table from the woman.
“Hello,” she said, her voice warm. “Jedi Solo, Jedi Dinn, young Skywalker.”
“You know us,” Jacen said.
“Of course. I’ve been meddling in your business for some time.”
“You admit it.”
“I admit to that, yes.”
“You admit to inciting people to acts of violence and terrorism.”
“Certainly not.”
“Then you’re denying that you had anything to do with the actions of Ordith Huarr, Movac Arisster, the Lorrd Logistician Liberation League, and …” Jacen frowned, trying to remember.
“Borth Pazz, Jedi candidate,” Ben said.
“No, I admit that. Certainly.”
Jacen gave her an exasperated look. “Your confession and your denial are mutually exclusive.”
>
The woman’s mood began to alter from cheerful to irritated. “Of course they aren’t. Involvement is not the same as guilt. Who taught you to think, boy? Certainly not your mother. She’s brighter than that.”
“Leave my mother out of this.” Then he gave in to curiosity. “You know her?”
“We’ve met.”
“So what’s your story? A story that magically involves you in all the tragedies I’ve mentioned, yet leaves you blameless.”
“I’m a Force-sensitive.”
“I’m shocked.”
Finally the woman’s demeanor became chilly, hostile. “Sarcasm is inappropriate. That’s bad manners. If you’d like me to continue, you will apologize for your rudeness.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Then you can go to hell.” She fell silent.
Jacen let the silence grow between them. Finally he said, “I’ll refrain from interrupting for purposes of scoring conversational points.”
“Good for you.” She fell silent again and waited.
Jacen sighed. “I apologize for my manner. Please continue.”
“I’m a Force-sensitive, and in my dreams I hear people planning evil deeds. ‘I will kill that woman.’ ‘I will make them understand, and if they don’t, I’ll wipe them all out.’ But they’re dreams. I know they’re grounded in reality, but when I awaken, not all the details are available to me. So in my dreams, I’ve been telling them, ‘Bring in the Jedi. Your victory will be greater if you defeat the Jedi. You’ll never be famous if you can’t outwit the Jedi.’ That sort of thing.”
Ben watched as Jacen fell silent, considering the woman’s words for a long moment. Ben knew that each Jedi experienced the Force, including the possible future events the Force had to show them, in different ways; he supposed that someone could experience them as dreams.
“What was your involvement with the events at Toryaz Station?” Jacen asked.
“I was there to observe you. I used my arts to stay out of the sight of the Jedi and the station’s security forces, and I spied on you. Then, when everything went wrong, I decided that I needed to get out of the way until that mess was settled for the time being. I left something to lead you to me—”
“The tassels.”
“Yes, of course.”
“You were pretty confident that they would lead me to you.”
She nodded. “I knew one would speak to you and you alone. And from my own researches I already knew that this collection of tassels would inevitably point to Dr. Rotham on Lorrd for decipherment; any other so-called experts in the field would eventually refer you to her. So you’d be here, sooner or later.”
“You killed the security captain, Tawaler.”
She shook her head. “I saw him killed, from a distance. A hooded figure spaced him through an air lock. Knowing that the Jedi investigations would lead to that air lock, I chose to leave the tassels there. Then I walked out of the Narsacc Habitat before security measures closed off the corridor to the main station.”
“And you coincidentally ended up in the same shuttle by which the soldiers arrived at the station.”
“No coincidence. I used my own resources to track it down. Not tricky at all, since I assumed it would go to the Corellia system; and there it was, hangared at the main Coronet City spaceport. I confronted its pilot, but he attacked me rather than answer questions, and I was forced to kill him. Which left me in possession of the shuttle. When I ran its identification numbers, I found that it had been stolen on Commenor a few months ago, and the title had been vested in its insurers after they’d paid off its value to the company it had been stolen from. I bought it from them, clean and legal.”
“How did you kill the pilot?” Jacen asked.
“Bare hands. And I buried him. No sense in involving the authorities on Corellia … when the authorities on Corellia were the ones who sent those killers to wreck the Toryaz Station meeting in the first place.”
“You’re assuming.”
“I’m concluding, based on evidence.”
“And then you came here, because you knew that the tassels would lead the Jedi who found them here to Lorrd.”
She shook her head. “Not the Jedi who found them. You.”
“You almost ended up with my sister running down their origin.”
“I don’t think so. In all the galaxy, only you, Jacen Solo, would be sufficiently intrigued to follow them all the way here and beyond.”
“Why me?”
“Because only you could read and understand one of the tassels. Only you could detect its significance. And so you’d demand to be the one who investigated it.”
Ben studied Jacen’s face. His mentor gave nothing away with his expression. But Ben remembered that there was one tassel Jacen had been able to translate when even Dr. Rotham hadn’t—the one from the Sith world. He felt a little chill of unease.
“All right,” Jacen said, “let’s put all this into some sort of context. Let’s have your story from the start.”
“From the start? From when I was a little girl?”
“Sure.”
“No, not here. I’ll tell you at my home.”
“On Commenor?”
“No; my true home, on a planetoid in a star system close to Bimmiel. Not far from here, as galactic distances go. We could take your shuttle or mine.”
“No, thanks.”
“Then you’re not getting any more answers.”
“And you’ll rot in custody here for quite a while.”
Brisha Syo offered him a cool smile. “I don’t think so. What charge would I be held on? The best you could do would be suspicion of complicity in the Toryaz Station incident. There’s enough evidence there to begin assembling a case … but not enough to deny me my freedom while the machinery of the justice system grinds along. I’ll spend a day in jail, then be freed, ordered to stay on Lorrd while things are investigated. Having the run of this lovely educational planet is not exactly what I call rotting. And in the meantime, you get no more information.”
“I could just decide that you’re guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, and then kill you.”
The woman’s smile did not falter. “No, you couldn’t.”
“What makes you think that?”
“First, the Force is not telling you that I’m guilty. I know this because I’m not. I doubt you’d murder when not even the Force is defining me as evil, or a threat. Second, to kill me you’d first have to kill Nelani here. Wouldn’t you?”
Jacen and Nelani exchanged a look. Jacen’s face was as free of emotion as it had been for most of the interview. Nelani’s expression, hard to read, had elements of determination and sadness to it. Ben could feel her emotions, though, naked and unconcealed—a hope that Jacen would make “the right choice,” a grim determination to face him if he did not, an underlying attraction to Jacen that was increasingly sad.
Ben backed away from that surge of feelings. They were too complicated, too intermixed. They unsettled him.
Jacen stood. “Let’s talk outside,” he told Nelani and Ben, and left. They followed.
Once in the corridor, he said, “I’m going to visit her home.”
Nelani shook her head, not taking her eyes from Jacen’s. “Why?”
“I have to know how she spoke to me through the tassel,” he said. “Does she know something about me I don’t myself know? Or is it a method she could use on other Jedi, perhaps to lure them into traps? I can’t just ignore this, or assume that imprisoning her would eliminate the risk she may represent.”
“But it’s a trap,” Ben protested.
Jacen gave him a dismissive look. “A trap to do what?”
“Well … kill you, I guess.”
“Ben, she was able to lure me to several different scenes of violence over the last few days, and she knows a lot about Jedi and the Force. If she were going to kill me, wouldn’t one of those situations have been enough? Pack enough explosives into the aquarium and we’d
all be dead. Find a sniper combat droid to shoot me from half a kilometer—I wouldn’t feel any emotional intent; there’s a good chance such a plan would succeed. Why lure me out to some planetoid?”
“I don’t know.” Something about Jacen’s assuredness suddenly annoyed Ben. “And neither do you. Just because you can’t figure out what she’s up to, doesn’t mean it isn’t bad.”
“Ben’s right,” Nelani said. “The woman’s story is too weird and complicated, so there have to be important lies, or at least omissions, in it. Going to where she’s the master of the environment is just a bad idea.”
“Nevertheless, I’m doing just that.”
Nelani looked even unhappier. “Then I’m going with you.”
Jacen shook his head. “That’s outside your jurisdiction.”
“I don’t have a jurisdiction. I’m just assigned to live on Lorrd. It’s fine for me to investigate something as near as Bimmiel. Especially when it involves the safety of another Jedi, and a mystery that involves the Sith world of Ziost. Do you think Master Skywalker would object to my going? I suspect he’d insist on it.”
“All right.” Jacen shrugged. “I just think it’s a bad idea for you to go.”
“Is that the Force talking to you, or your gut?”
Finally, he smiled. “My gut.”
CORELLIAN SYSTEM, ABOVE TRALUS
Leia, led to the bridge of Dodonna, marveled as she always did at the extravagant open spaces of a Star Destroyerstyle command area. Though the Galactic-class battle carriers had been designed after the decline of the Empire—after the fall of the New Republic, in fact—they preserved the basic design of the Imperial-era Star Destroyer bridges, with the main walkway stretching from the main entrance to the gigantic forward viewports, with the officer and data stations on a lower level to the right and left of the elevated walkway.
Admiral Tarla Limpan, flanked by the ubiquitous aides and advisers any top-ranking naval officer warranted, stepped forward energetically as Leia moved onto the bridge walkway. A female of the Duros species, she had pale gray-green skin and facial features that looked like a cartoonish simplification of a human’s—large red eyes without visible iris or pupil, an almost featureless mouth, and a broad empty space where a nose should have been between them. She smiled and extended her long arms to seize Leia’s hand between her own, shaking it enthusiastically.
