Ben managed a wintry smile. He had to raise his voice to a shout to be heard over the wind. “This planet is a hellhole.” His breath emerged as a foggy plume that was ripped away from him.
Luke shouldered his carry bag and turned toward the terminal. “You’re spoiled. I grew up on a planet like this.”
“Not including Death Seed, Dad.”
“Well, true.” Not including Death Seed, ancient and insane Dark Jedi, synthdroids … Memories of Nam Chorios flooded him, and he could not afford to push them away.
CORUSCANT
“SOMETIMES I THINK THIS PLANET IS NOTHING BUT A HELLHOLE.” Chief of State Natasi Daala’s voice was unusually soft, subdued.
But that was appropriate in this place. It was late at night in the medcenter. The brilliant, horizontal streaming lights of Coruscant’s endless airspeeder traffic, outside the high-altitude chamber’s viewport, were not accompanied by traffic roar; the room’s sound insulation kept that noise at bay. Yet the streaks’ steadiness and beauty were actually soothing. Faint light from dimmed overhead glow rods suffused the chamber, turning stark medical whites into calming grays, turning machinery-packed walls and corners into shadows illuminated by unblinking star-like glows.
And turning the bed’s badly wounded occupant into what plausibly looked like someone who was merely asleep.
Admiral Nek Bwua’tu, head of the Galactic Alliance Navy, lay as he had for so long, unmoving, faceup. A sheet covered and concealed his still-healing injuries. One arm lay exposed across his chest. Not long before, it had ended a bit below the elbow. Now it was complete again, the prosthetic hand and forearm indistinguishable from a naturally furry organic limb, except for the band of very short fur where the prosthetic had been joined to flesh—his fur had yet to grow in, completing the illusion that his arm was undamaged.
An aging Bothan, he was strong and resolute, one of Daala’s few confidants.
And she could confide in him even now. But he could not hear, could not answer, while he remained in his coma.
She continued, though, as if he were an active part of the conversation. “What amazes me is the struggle for power. I don’t mean the jockeying to discredit a rival for a Senate seat or the rank of general. They constitute real power, worth real effort and risk. I’m talking about the way people will resort to the same viciousness for nothing. The office martinet who’s willing to make lifelong enemies just so he can win the right to apportion the monthly allotment of datachips. The personal assistant who doles out the right to appointments with her obscure, irrelevant, powerless boss just so she can curry favor with people equally meaningless.” She shook her head, a slow motion at odds with her usually brisk personality. “You’d think that they’d proportion their efforts to the value of the reward, but no. Treachery can be just as great when it’s for control of a caf cart as when it’s for control of an empire.”
Nek didn’t answer. He lay, eyes closed, this being in the midst of the hours when his eyes were scheduled for rest rather than data stimulation. His thoughts remained locked away in the damaged compartments of his mind.
Knowing that she was not under observation, for there was no one else in the chamber and her own security team swept the location prior to every one of her frequent visits, she reached out and put a hand on his chest, on the fur above the blanket’s hem. She felt the slow, shallow rise and fall of his breath. “I’m going to stay the course, Nek. I’m going to crush the ones who pursue power. Leaders of the slave rebellions, who simply want to rule where others ruled before. Politicians who look on good men and women as nothing but meat standing in their way … or as disposable assets. Jedi, with their lawless arrogance. I’ll crush them, and you’ll come back to me, and together we’ll figure out how to crush them for good. How to make them pay for their self-interest. Self-indulgence.”
There was a single rap at the chamber door, the signal from one of her security detail that someone was coming, someone they weren’t supposed to intercept. Daala jerked her hand back.
She was standing, posture-perfect, demeanor icy, when the door lifted and Desha Lor entered.
A female Twi’lek, green-skinned with darker stripes on her head-tails, she wore a blue gown that set off her skin color attractively. One of her brain-tails, or lekku, was wrapped around her neck; the other hung free down her back.
She bowed to Daala. “My apologies, Admiral.”
“What is it?” Daala didn’t try to keep the curtness out of her tone.
“Dust Dancer has entered the system. Wynn will be here within half an hour by shuttle.”
Daala moved to and then past the Twi’lek, allowing her speed and decisiveness to suggest that she had already put Nek Bwua’tu from her mind. The door reopened for her and she swept out. She did not need to look—she could hear Desha’s rapid steps as the Twi’lek tried to catch up to her, to keep up with Daala’s longer stride.
Once Desha had drawn up alongside, Daala spared her a glance.
“Bring his shuttle to the Senate Building. I’ll debrief him personally.”
“Yes, Admiral.”
JEDI TEMPLE
A crisis, Leia noted, far from the first time, cut through barriers of rank and social status like nothing else could.
The conference chamber, deep within the Jedi Temple, was packed with Jedi who seldom interacted in these numbers on the basis of equals. But here, anyone might throw out an idea that could save lives. Thousands of lives. Millions of lives.
She sat in a high-backed gliding chair next to her daughter, Jaina, who brushed a lock of chestnut hair back behind her ear and spared her mother a smile. Leia patted her hand and turned to listen, to ease into the flow of conversation and information.
Master Corran Horn, standing in front of his own chair, his green Jedi robes somewhat rumpled from his having occupied them for too many hours, was talking. “… telemetry indicates that it entered planetary atmosphere five minutes ago and is on an approach path toward the government district, perhaps the Senate Building.” He glanced at a junior Jedi Knight, a dark-skinned human male, who appeared to be monitoring matters on a datapad. The Jedi Knight returned his look and nodded confirmation of what Corran had just said.
Saba Sebatyne, the Barabel Jedi Master and temporary leader of the Jedi Order, sat to his immediate right. She glanced at the Jedi Knight and then back to Corran. “What are the chances Master Ramis and Jedi Dorvald will be detected?”
Corran shook his head. “Minimal. Seha is the sole pilot, and she is not well known. Facial recognition scanners are going to be thwarted by plastinserts in her cheeks, which change the outlines of her face, and by her optical goggles. Octa Ramis and Kyp Durron are inside the shielded smuggling compartment.”
Master Cilghal, to his left, turned her large, bulbous eyes onto him. “Two Masters. If they are detected entering the Senate Building under these circumstances, it will force Chief of State Daala’s hand. She will—correctly—assume that she’s under assault. It will be all-out war.”
Jaina spoke up. “You don’t win by playing a defensive game.”
“Jedi Solo is correct.” Saba shifted in her seat, an unconscious indication of discomfort. Though it had been a few days since her tragic duel to the death with Master Kenth Hamner, the injuries to her side were not fully healed. Cilghal and Tekli exchanged a glance, outwardly emotionless, but it was clear to Leia that both wished Saba would do what she had to do to rest and recuperate.
But Saba could not afford the time that a protracted stay in a bacta tank would entail. Her position slightly more comfortable, she continued. “Now we must figure out how to capitalize on this opportunity. How to manage the timing. How to keep it as bloodless as possible.”
His formal report done, Corran resumed his seat. “We already have provisions in place to ground the shuttle in the Senate Building. But if Kyp and Octa are going to be able to move around in the building, we need to get them resources. Identification, for those times a Jedi hand wave won’t get
them through a security station. Makeup. Yes, Leia?”
Leia lowered her half-raised hand. She thought for another split second about saying, Forget it, bad idea. But it wasn’t a bad idea, just a betrayal of trust. Daala perhaps did not deserve to be able to trust … but Leia’s instincts ran contrary to what she was going to suggest. “After the, um, less-than-entirely-friendly exchange Master Sebatyne had with the Chief of State the other day, we could propose a series of meetings. Han and I and the Chief of State. This would require regular, even daily, visits to the Senate Building. Opportunities to smuggle in necessary materials, a process my husband knows something about.”
Corran nodded, his expression speculative. “But she’s going to want to talk to Kenth Hamner instead. They speak—spoke—the same language. And until the news of Hamner’s death breaks, he’ll still be assumed to be in charge.”
Leia sighed. “Here’s our story. Kenth Hamner has withdrawn to a concealed location because his military mind tells him that Daala’s best tactic would be a surgical strike against the acting Grand Master of the Jedi Order, himself. He has taken this drastic action to forestall such a preemptive strike, and appointed Master Sebatyne as his spokesbeing in his absence. He’ll come out of hiding when relations between the Alliance government and the Order have normalized.”
It was a big lie, a painful lie. Kenth Hamner never would have avoided the risks brought on by his office.
But Daala seemed to be increasingly paranoid, and this tactic was one a paranoid would understand and appreciate.
Jaina looked thoughtful. “That … might work.”
“We will do it.” Saba’s voice was decisive. “Now we must plan contingencies for the removal of Admiral Daala. In the absence of knowledge of her schedule, her current resources, and her exact state of mind.”
Corran managed a wan smile. “If it were easy, it wouldn’t call for a Jedi.”
* * *
Several floors up, the name finally came to Valin Horn: Nam Chorios.
It had been growing within his mind for days, a conviction that he needed to go somewhere—somewhere distant, a place where he could be himself, could achieve his destiny. With each hour that passed, his sense of it became stronger, sharper, more defined.
And now, sitting in the main Temple chow hall, a forkful of nerf steak raised nearly to his lips, the exact place flashed into his mind.
He knew about Nam Chorios, of course. Everyone knew about the Death Seed plague that had decimated Meridian sector thirty standard years earlier. Everyone knew about the extraordinary efforts by the New Republic, later the Galactic Alliance, Department of Health to keep the cause of the plague buttoned down on that dimly lit little world.
And now he knew that this was where he needed to go.
He glanced at his sister, sitting opposite him.
She flashed him a smile and gave him a small nod. She knew.
They couldn’t talk, of course. Spies were everywhere. These false Jedi clearly remained suspicious, despite pretending to accept the two of them as their own, as trusted members of their subverted Order. So Valin and Jysella had said not one single word that could have let their captors and observers know that the two of them understood what was really happening.
But what to do? The best way to escape Coruscant would be in StealthXs, but almost every Jedi StealthX was now in space, hunting the Sith.
Master Kam Solusar, lean and weathered, a Jedi since the earliest days of Luke Skywalker’s school on Yavin 4, moved up to stand at the head of their table. “May I join you?”
Jysella offered the older man a smile Valin knew she did not feel, and Valin gestured for him to sit. “Of course.”
Kam did, his body language suggesting ease and confidence. “I hear from Tekli that your last sets of test results are in. No lingering effects from your lengthy carbonite imprisonment.”
Jysella gave Valin an encouraging look, and Valin answered Kam. “Good to know. Except, of course, it means that our vacation is over. Back to work, I assume?”
Kam nodded. “I’m afraid so. I’ve scheduled the two of you for a light courier run to Corellia. You’ll take a long-range shuttle to transport some lightsaber crystals and some medicines, a small payload, to our enclave there.”
Valin felt his stomach tighten. Trap, it was a trap.
It had to be. A mission like this didn’t require two experienced Jedi Knights.
The most likely scenario flashed through his mind. The shuttle would have a tracking device on it. Valin and Jysella were expected to take it up out of Coruscant orbit, put in a course to some distant point that was probably not Corellia, and make an escape attempt. A signal to that tracking device, which would be tied into the shuttle’s computer, would shut down all but the shuttle’s life-maintenance systems. The false Jedi would come, and, knowing at last that Valin and Jysella had not been subverted, would capture them again. Or kill them.
This was all so obvious that only a crazy person would step blithely into the trap. Did these impostors think Valin and Jysella were crazy? Or of diminished mental capacity? It was insulting.
Or maybe he and his sister were expected to refuse the bait because it was so obvious—but if so, what then? Valin’s thoughts began to circle ever more tightly as he sought to anticipate his enemies’ anticipation of his anticipation.
Kam gave Valin a close look. “Are you all right? I felt a flash of … something.”
“Disgust.” Valin positioned his fork underneath Kam’s nose. “Here, smell this.”
“That’s all right.”
“No, really. I think it’s canned and about a million years old.” He moved the fork under Jysella’s nose. “Smell.”
She grimaced at him. “Don’t do this to me. He’s always doing this to me.”
Valin returned the fork to his plate. “A mission like that doesn’t call for two Jedi Knights. One Jedi Knight and a Kowakian monkey-lizard, maybe.”
“That’s the point.” Jysella kept her face straight. “I’m the Jedi Knight. You’re the monkey-lizard.”
Valin made a shooing gesture at her. “Send her to Corellia. Put me in charge of security at some bathing-suit charity function.”
Jysella grinned at him. “Sure. A Gamorrean charity bathing-suit function.”
Valin shuddered.
“Good point.” Kam rose. “Jysella, two hours. Valin, I’ll find something else for you to do.” He wandered to the next table, doubtless to impose a series of tasks on the Jedi Knights and apprentices there.
Valin relaxed, just a little.
He and his sister had passed another test. Jysella would go on her undemanding Corellian run and come back. The two of them would be that much more trusted, that much closer to finding their escape vector off this planet … and on to Nam Chorios.
HWEG SHUL, NAM CHORIOS
BEN DECIDED THAT HE’D NEVER SEEN A TOWN QUITE LIKE HWEG SHUL.
Not that he’d seen much more than a few meters of it at a time. The driving wind and the dust storm that blanketed the town made any comprehensive overview impossible, and the intense cold, threatening to strip heat right out of his body despite his winter cloak and insulated clothes, made him happy to scurry with Luke and Vestara from sheltered spot to sheltered spot without much time for sightseeing.
But Ben did have time to see the disparity of architecture in the town.
The majority of dwellings and businesses were built on stilts or pilings—some wood, mostly permacrete, a few of durasteel coated in corrosion-resistant ceramics. These stilts tended to be a meter and a half to two meters high, the buildings themselves permacrete or duraplast domes of various colors, their foundations, resting atop the stilts, of sand-scoured permacrete. A meter up on the stilts, on most buildings, he could see bright glow rod modules, shining even at high noon—a measure against drochs, he assumed.
The dome shapes were highly wind-resistant, but their undersides, the flat permacrete foundations, were not. An occasional wind at the correct
angle and speed would sweep under these elevated buildings, making lifting surfaces of the foundations. They did not actually lift off their stilts; they were too firmly attached for that. But the contact caused a succession of shuddering booms as the wind hit underside after underside in turn. It sounded like a city being strafed.
These, his father had told him, were the Newcomers’ buildings.
Less numerous and far older were the dwellings and businesses of the Oldtimers. Often built with angled walls or even with trapezoidal shapes to keep the winds from hammering them constantly at right angles, they were made of stone covered with stucco, or, in the case of more shanty-like dwellings, cast-off duraplast covered in stucco. The stucco itself, like the materials the Newcomers’ buildings were made of, was wind-scoured.
Viewports on both types of buildings were small patches of transparisteel, usually scratched by sand until they better served as diffusers rather than admitters of light. Ben quickly realized that the homes of the wealthier residents of town were characterized by transparisteel panels that were regularly replaced or polished, and thus more transparent than those in the less wealthy homes.
And everything, at least indoors, had a faint, not-too-offensive chemical smell. It was sweetish, a little cloying. Ben didn’t recognize it or know what it was until he unpacked his duffel and, at his father’s suggestion, sprayed down his clothes and the bag interior with the droch repellent he’d been provided at Koval Station. That was the smell—every plastoid surface, whether it be chamber walls, carpet, or furnishings, was coated or imbued with something to keep the drochs at bay.
His father led the three of them out of the Admirable Admiral, the hostel where they’d taken two adjoining rooms, and through the streets of this wind tunnel masquerading as a town.
Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Conviction Page 6
