Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Conviction

by Allston, Aaron

  Dorvan nodded. “Glad to meet you.”

  “You seem to have a small animal in your pocket.”

  Wynn glanced down at his suit’s breast pocket. Nestled there, his pet, all orange stripes and sleepy eyes, peered out at the general, then settled down for another nap. Wynn grinned. “Pocket’s a lot of fun. I sometimes try to convince people that they have animals in their pockets, too.”

  “Ah.” Davip didn’t rise to the bait. “Will you come this way?”

  “Thank you.”

  They walked clear of the party atmosphere and the worst of the noise, to the general’s personal landspeeder. They boarded, but the general did not signal his pilot to move out. “It’s calmer here.”

  “I could use some calm.”

  “I’ve been in direct contact with the Chief of State and have given her the preliminary report that you’re fine. She wants you to get on the holocomm and report as soon as possible. But the security and survival of this outpost is my first concern, so I need you to tell me what I can expect from that.” He jabbed a finger upward, pointing at the Errant Venture, a tiny triangle orbiting far above, so high that it was in sunlight, a red arrowhead.

  Wynn shrugged. “I don’t think you can expect any action, actually. As far as I can tell, Booster Terrik and the Jedi have just one agenda here—staying clear of the Alliance military—and no plans to do Borleias or anyone else any harm. From what I could overhear as we were being lined up for the shuttles, they plan to leave the Pyria system as soon as the last shuttle returns. I think they want to stay clear of any capital ships coming out of Coruscant or other Alliance naval bases.”

  The general offered an irritated grunt. “I don’t think there will be any capital ships.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “I’ve been informed of no relief coming our way.”

  Wynn blinked. That made no sense—

  Oh, yes it did. Slave revolts were now popping off all along the galactic rim like celebratory fireworks, and the Jedi departure from Coruscant had to have suggested to Admiral Daala that she had enemies capable of doing tremendous harm to her military close to home. She doubtless did not want to pull any forces from the fleet guarding Coruscant. To do so would weaken the planetary defenses, weaken herself.

  He sighed. “Any idea how we’re getting home?”

  “I’ve been given broad discretionary powers to deal with that. There’s a transport here—it was grounded by the Errant Venture’s arrival while delivering consumables. I intend to press it into service to deliver all of you back to Coruscant. It’ll be a little cramped, I suspect, but it’s only a short run.”

  “I look forward to getting home.”

  “By the way, who won the tournament?”

  Wynn felt a little flush of emotion, but wasn’t sure whether it was more pride or embarrassment. “I did.”

  The general looked at him as if he’d just magically transformed himself into a Twi’lek dancer. “Are you joking?”

  “No.”

  “Well … when I retire from the military, I’m coming straight to you for a job.”

  “Make sure I get a private cabin back to Coruscant, and I’ll certainly consider it.”

  “Pilot, back to Ops.”

  The pilot put the landspeeder in motion.

  On the bridge of the Dust Dancer, the young redheaded woman who had received Dolo’s signature sat in the copilot’s chair and watched the final shuttle arrive. It would be carrying Lando Calrissian and his retinue. They’d be traveling back to Coruscant to present a credible case of being innocent of any complicity with the plans of Booster Terrik or the Jedi.

  The young woman knew this, of course. Her name was Seha, and she had recently been elevated to the rank of Jedi Knight. Even more recently, she had flown shuttle missions—recovery of EV pilots—above the world of Almania.

  After the Almanian engagement, events had developed with startling speed. The Masters along with the StealthX mission had emerged from a private meeting, including a holocomm exchange with the Masters back at the Jedi Temple, with a new set of objectives. Until the Sith were found, they had plenty to do involving Coruscant.

  Booster Terrik, once a smuggler and presumably long retired from that profession, but with connections to that trade that never seemed to become fewer in number, had arranged for the Dust Dancer to be loaned to them. A legitimate cargo transport owned by a legitimate company, it had an unsullied record. That would probably change soon.

  Booster had also arranged for many of the untouched stores brought aboard his ship for the sabacc tournament to end up in Dust Dancer’s cargo modules. The two shuttles connected to the freighter’s main spar, repainted and with new false IDs, had shielded smuggling compartments.

  By choosing a planet not too far from Coruscant but with limited transportation facilities, by positioning Dust Dancer there first, and then by commandeering all the celebrity players’ own shuttles and transports before dropping the celebrities themselves off on the planet’s surface, the Jedi had all but guaranteed that the Dust Dancer itself would be commandeered to transport the players back to Coruscant.

  Which meant that, in a few hours, their shuttles would quite probably be able to transport armed Jedi right into the Senate Building.

  Seha’s comm board blipped. She looked down to see a text message pop up. She read it over, then turned to the woman in the pilot’s seat—her Master, Octa Ramis. The woman was nearly unrecognizable, her skin temporarily dyed dark, her hair bleached nearly white. “We have a message from Borleias Operations. They’re requesting that Wynn Dorvan receive a private cabin for the trip back to Coruscant.”

  Master Ramis snorted, amused. “Our first special request. I wonder how many of the celebrities will be requesting—demanding—private cabins. Of which we have one, mine.”

  “You going to give it to him?”

  “Sure. I’ll make certain we have a listening device in place before he boards.” She rose to accomplish that errand. “There’s no hurry, I suspect. We’re going to be herding unhappy, uncooperative drunks for the next couple of hours.”

  Seha gave her a wise-beyond-her-years smile. “Ah, the glamorous life of a Jedi.”

  NAM CHORIOS, MERIDIAN SECTOR

  IT WAS A WHITISH PEBBLE DRIFTING IN SPACE, SURROUNDED BY A FEW gleaming specks of sand, all under the mild violet glow of the system’s sun.

  Luke gestured toward Ben, a circular motion ending on an upward stroke, and Ben obligingly dialed the visual magnification upward. The pebble grew larger, and the specks of dust around it resolved themselves into space stations—mostly Golan III Space Defense NovaGun stations, the same platforms, thick with domed turbolaser batteries, that protected far more populous, industrialized, and wealthy worlds of the Galactic Alliance.

  One station was not a weapons platform. The largest, it dwarfed the others in size. A thick-bodied ring in silvery gray, its surface was mottled with docking ports and magnetic atmosphere barriers.

  Vestara, in the navigator’s seat, gave the shimmering sensor image a close look. “They’ve devoted a lot of firepower to keeping that backworld safe from intruders.”

  Luke shook his head. “Those stations are to keep ships from escaping, not arriving.”

  That earned him an arched brow. “Escaping?” she repeated.

  “You’re right that it’s a backworld. But one of the naturalized life-forms, an insect species called drochs, carries a disease called the Death Seed. Heard of it?”

  She shook her head. “But no one names a disease Death Seed if all it does is give you an upset stomach.”

  “You’re depressingly logical … Drochs are tiny. They start out that way, anyway. They breed at ferocious rates in dark, damp places. When they encounter living tissue, of most species, they burrow in. Their gift is that they sample the host’s body chemistry and electromagnetic characteristics, even tissue density, and mimic them, becoming all but invisible to scanners. They grow in the host’s body, living
off the host’s life energy, and when they are numerous enough, when collectively they begin drawing enough life energy from the host, the Death Seed plague manifests itself.”

  Ben scrunched up his face, an expression of mild disgust suggesting he’d heard all this before and didn’t enjoy hearing it again. Luke gave him an understanding smile.

  “The skin begins to die. The drochs inside the body continue breeding, releasing more drochs to infect others. The victim experiences bodywide aches and listlessness, impaired thinking, impaired breathing … and then dies. The drochs that do not flee the body are seldom detected, so there are no bacterial, viral, or fungal infections to detect, no poison traces … just death. And under certain circumstances—such as control from a very old, very powerful, very large droch—the illness can be accelerated, claiming its victim when only a few drochs are in the body, killing so swiftly that the necrosis of the skin isn’t even under way.”

  Vestara looked at the image of the planet with more distaste—or perhaps respect; Luke couldn’t tell. “I’m surprised you haven’t destroyed the world altogether.”

  Ben leaned back as if to put a few extra decimeters between himself and the planet’s image. “There are other life-forms on the planet—human settlers, and an indigenous crystalline life-form, the tsils.”

  “How can they survive there with these … drochs?”

  “The violet light from the sun, processed through the tsils and other crystals, kills the drochs, and they just get absorbed harmlessly into the body. But you have to stay within reach of the tsils and the sun. Otherwise—well, make sure your last will and testament is up-to-date. Dad, are we going in as Skywalkers or what?”

  Luke shook his head. “We don’t want to invite scrutiny at this point. Send our Black Diadem ID again. Captain, Vestara Khai. Crew, Owen Lars, Ben Lars. Cargo, none. Purpose of visit, searching for relatives and genealogical information among the Newcomers.”

  Ben nodded and turned to his task. A few minutes later, he received transmitted text. “We’re cleared to dock at Koval Station. The port authority sent a list of decontamination options. We can take Jade Shadow down to the surface, but on liftoff we have to return to the station and put the yacht through quarantine and decontamination—minimum of a full day and lots of credits. If we shuttle down as three passengers, the cost for getting offplanet is lots less and with much faster decontamination.”

  “We’ll go the cheap, fast route. The other option is mostly for vessels delivering cargo.”

  Ben nodded and began inputting a course to Koval Station.

  With the young, appealing Vestara up for the task of taking point, interacting with port authorities, and paying for everything with a credcard not traceable to the Skywalker name, it was simple for Luke and Ben to stay wrapped in their traveler’s cloaks and remain anonymous.

  The port authority representative, a youthful redheaded human wearing a gold jumpsuit with piping in burgundy, offered advice—rote advice that he’d obviously memorized years earlier. “Nam Chorios is at its farthest point from its sun, and that, plus axial tilt, means it’s winter. Harsh winter. If you’re away from shelter at night, you freeze and die. If you don’t have heavy clothes, you can pick them up in Hweg Shul, the shuttle’s destination.” He set three small spray canisters on the desktop between himself and Vestara. “Droch repellent. Courtesy of the port authority, which means it’s paid for by your decontam prepay. You can buy more planetside.” He set three small glow rods with oversized battery packs beside them. “Very bright—don’t look right into them or you’ll damage your retinas, but they send drochs scurrying away. Or paralyze ’em so you can step on ’em. These you return when you lift, or incur an additional charge to your decontam account. Good luck finding your cousins.” He sounded as though he had not the least interest in learning how the quest for fictitious cousins came out, but his tone was polite enough.

  A few minutes later, loaded with their new anti-droch gear and duffels from Jade Shadow packed with winter garments, the three boarded an aged but meticulously maintained Lambda-class shuttle. A few minutes later, the passenger compartment also occupied by a Duros female in medical whites and a middle-aged human male in the shiny business wear affected by Meridian sector middle managers, they launched from Koval Station and began atmospheric entry.

  Staring out the port-side viewport beside his seat, Luke reflected on the changes brought by the thirty years since his first visit to this world.

  As they descended into the atmosphere, the colors, the textures of the world below were just as he remembered. There were vast plains of slate-gray stone and dust. There were patches of terrain that glittered, reflecting and refracting the sunlight in all the colors of the rainbow and more besides—plains of crystalline gravel, ravines filled with towering columns of crystal, some of them the sapient tsils, or spook-crystals, native to this world. There were dark ridges of basaltic mountain, many of them decorated with crystalline patches. And here and there, more numerous than on his first visit, there were small patches of green—communities clinging precariously to the small areas of arable land above subterranean water seams.

  Not that farming sustained the planet’s economy these days. Most of the remaining farmers were Oldtimers, descendants of the first wave of colonists, tough, hardy men and women content with the hard-scrabble existence of agricultural production on an unforgiving world.

  But for the Newcomers, the second wave of settlers, the aftermath of the events that had brought Luke Skywalker here three standard decades before had changed everything. Release of the Death Seed, discovery of the intelligent tsils, had forced the hand of the New Republic, which previously had had no interest in the self-governing world. Suddenly there were space platforms taking away from the Oldtimers and their ground-based weapons stations the responsibility of making sure no drochs ever made it offworld … and that no tsils were removed from the planet against their will. Suddenly medical facilities, both government and private, were establishing a new economy based on medical research and the production of medicines unique to this world because of the violet sunlight, the manipulation of that light by the tsils, and the healing techniques of the Theran Listeners, the Oldtimers who communed with the tsils through the Force.

  Everybody had gotten what they wanted. The Oldtimers, though their secrets were revealed, had help in keeping the menace of the drochs in check. The Newcomers had a booming economy. The tsils no longer had to fear being ripped from their world by technology-producing corporations that did not understand, and in many cases would not have cared, what they were.

  Everyone got what they wanted … everyone but Callista Ming, who had come here to learn to reconnect with the Force, and had failed. Callista, now part of the being called Abeloth. Callista, whose memories of the resources this world had to offer had doubtless led to Abeloth’s choice to come here.

  Luke caught Vestara’s eye. “By the way … no using the Force.”

  Her eyebrows shot up. “What?”

  “You don’t draw on the Force here, period. Passive uses, perhaps. Nothing as active as giving yourself a boost of running speed or a few extra meters of jump distance. If you do, disaster results. People die.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a unique property of the Nam Chorios environment. The crystals that lace the planet’s crust magnify Force usage … and redirect it in random and destructive ways. You augment one of your leaps here, and somewhere else, a storm rises that causes catastrophe in a farmstead or a town.”

  “I wish you’d mentioned that before.”

  He managed a smile. “Consider it a test of discipline.”

  * * *

  Luke couldn’t tell how much Hweg Shul, the planetary capital, had changed in all these years. As the shuttle descended into the lower atmosphere, winds battered it, sending it slewing, and the winter storm they entered, scores or hundreds of kilometers in length and breadth, stirred up the planetary surface into a dust storm
that obscured the town.

  The thrusters and repulsorlifts of the Lambda whined as its pilot battled the winds, fought to keep control. Luke saw Ben and Vestara grimace. He felt the same way they did. From what he could tell of the winds they were experiencing and the pilot’s control, the shuttle passengers were in good hands … but no pilot ever, ever wanted to be a passenger, especially in difficult circumstances. Every pilot wanted to be in control.

  The businessman in the shiny suit, sitting one row up from Luke and on the other side of the aisle, began to change color. From the pocket under his armrest, he extracted an opaque flimsiplast bag designed to capture the contents of his stomach should they decide to escape. He did not use it immediately, just held it before him and contemplated it sorrowfully. He occasionally looked at the other passengers and seemed to grow even more unhappy as he realized that they were not as miserable as he was.

  Then the thrusters cut out. Through the Force, Luke felt alarm from the businessman, none from the cockpit or the woman from Duro.

  The shuttle turned slowly. Luke’s view of driving wind and abrasive crystalline dust in a single, nearly opaque sheet was blocked as the Lambda’s wings lifted into landing position. Then the shuttle thumped to a comparatively gentle landing. It began to rock at intervals under the pressure exerted by particularly hard gusts of wind.

  The pilot’s voice, that of a female, probably human, rich with humor, came over the intercom. “Koval Transport would like to welcome you to Nam Chorios, vacation capital of the Meridian sector, and Hweg Shul Spaceport. Please prepare to debark via the main boarding ramp. The temperature outside is negative ten degrees, but windchill brings it down to a far more comfortable negative forty-two, so please watch that exposed flesh.”

  Moments later, hoods up and eyes protected by goggles, the three of them marched down the boarding ramp. The bitingly cold wind tried to topple them as soon as it began to flow past their ankles. Outside, it plastered their insufficiently insulated clothes and cloaks against their bodies. All three instinctively turned their backs to it. In the near distance, they could see lights limning what had to be the main terminal dome, but the skin of the dome itself was invisible, obscured by the driving dust.