Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Conviction

by Allston, Aaron

  Then the image jolted, blurred. Suddenly it was outside, under the stars, with dawn gleaming violet in the east. And the child’s scream continued as the little Thei ran …

  “Come back to us. Come back to the present, where you’re safe. Don’t think about the cave. Think about your husband. Think about your baby to come.” Rubbing his chin, Taru sat back on his stool, leaning away from Thei and the geode.

  The image in the geode faded, though the golden outline around its circumference lingered.

  Ben whistled. He had paled.

  Luke knew what he was thinking, what he was feeling. He’d lost his own mother only a few years before. It had been very hard to deal with. What it must be like to be five and go through that … Luke reached out, gave Ben a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder.

  Then he turned to Taru. “What next?”

  “First, I need to confirm something.” From a side table, Taru retrieved a datapad, an older model with a scratched, scuffed case. He brought up a viewer and began scrolling through a set of holocam images. He angled the device so Luke could see its screen, but it showed only ordinary domestic scenes: Thei and the happy dark-skinned man who was clearly her new husband, the husband laboring away beneath an airspeeder, a living room, a kitchen—

  “There.” Taru froze the sequence on one of the kitchen images. It showed the husband standing beside a stove, saying something back over his shoulder to whomever it was taking the picture, presumably Thei. “See anything?”

  Luke glanced at the image, shook his head, then frowned and narrowed his eyes. He tapped the stovetop. “That saucepan. It’s identical to the one in her memories.”

  Taru snapped the datapad shut. “Not of local manufacture. And a distinctive design, unusual scrollwork on the handle. So this girl leaves her home, moves into her new husband’s dwelling, he has a saucepan identical to one she last saw in association with her mother’s death …”

  “And memories start surfacing.” Luke considered. “What do you do now?”

  “Just the revelation of the source of her terrors would probably suffice if she wanted to confront them. She could take that knowledge to a Newcomer mind doctor and spend the years, credits, and effort necessary to diminish those terrors. But we spoke of this earlier. She knows something awful had to have befallen her mother and doesn’t want to live with that. So we will be doing the vein routing.” Taru leaned toward Thei again. “Normally it takes months or years to learn the beginnings of this technique. But I suspect you constitute a very advanced student. Still, you’ll need to join with me to the extent you can, a melding through the Force …”

  “One of my specialties.” Luke closed his eyes and extended his awareness through the living energy that surrounded them.

  Once again, he was rocked by the sense that he stood in a crowd of giant, impassive observers. But he ignored them, shoved aside the self-consciousness that this world’s Force presence invariably produced, and sought Taru.

  He found the man’s presence in the Force almost instantly—his, Ben’s, Vestara’s, and that of the girl Thei. Thei’s presence was shining, as if illuminated by a bank of industrial-strength glow rods.

  Within the Force, Luke reached out for Taru and Thei, his energy connecting with, interacting with, theirs. He opened his eyes.

  Taru shook his head, clearly impressed with Luke’s speed and skill. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Now you see the portions of her memory that I have outlined and surrounded. Join me, find the same borders.”

  Luke tried. It was diabolically complicated. He could see Taru’s energy, see its parameters, but not the memories themselves—as if, told to look at a river, he could only estimate its course by looking at dry riverbanks. Working with memories was not like working with Force energy …

  Wait, it was. For all these memories had a distinctive characteristic, the primal terror experienced by a little girl. Emotion could flavor the Force, and he sought out that emotion, tasting its flavors, sensing where it turned more benign at the boundary of other experiences.

  There was a recollection of the twelve-year-old Thei catching sight of herself in a mirror, gauging the changes time was making, reflecting that ever more she was coming to resemble her mother—and then, a blast of terror inexplicable to the adolescent Thei. But it was explicable to Luke, to Taru, for her eyes in the mirror had the same pleading quality as Thei’s mother in that final moment and were suddenly bound up forevermore with fear. They surrounded that memory.

  Another memory, this one by the then-teenage Thei, seeing a fallen cu-pa wailing in a corral, victim of a broken leg. Again, there was terror the girl did not understand. Again, Luke and Taru did, seeing in the scene a reflection of Sparkle’s final moments. Again, they encapsulated the recollection.

  Luke and Taru flowed along the contours of Thei’s terror until they could find no more matching the flavor of fear they sought. There were other terrors in the girl’s life, other tragedies, but none connected even peripherally with her mother’s death.

  “Very good, Master Skywalker. Now, ever so gently, we pull.”

  They did, together.

  Luke had trained in many combat styles, against masters of many arts, and one thing he had learned early on was that the holodramas vastly exaggerated the ease with which a simple blade could be drawn from a body into which it had been thrust. Organic tissues tended to close over simple metal surfaces, preventing easy withdrawal. This was why primitive blades were often engineered with fullers, inaccurately referred to as blood grooves—they made that withdrawal a bit easier. This was why lightsabers and vibroblades were far superior to simple blades. Their very nature made them easy to withdraw instantaneously.

  Pulling the toxic memories from Thei was like drawing out a simple blade. Despite her conscious wishes, her unconscious mind resisted their extraction. The very nature of memory resisted. The effort took a consistent application of Force by Luke and Taru, a slow, measured, implacable pull. Thought by thought, memory by memory, Luke and Taru persisted, and the set of horrifying images slowly released its hold on the young woman.

  Luke could sense that it would be possible to apply more strength, less control, and wrench those memories free. He could not imagine the damage such an act would cause to Thei’s psyche.

  Within minutes, though he could not see them as images, Luke could sense the presence of the extracted memories as a hovering matrix of thoughts, bound to the Force but not to a body, floating before him and Taru, each of them touching it.

  Taru turned to him. “Do you want them?”

  Appalled, Luke stared at him. “What?”

  “Thei loses them. She does not want them. But they are important, human experiences. We cannot dishonor memory by letting it fade to nothingness. Masters of this technique take those memories into themselves so that they will not evaporate.”

  Luke seldom found himself shocked, but the notion of internalizing the horror of a five-year-old girl watching her mother die floored him. At the same time, he understood what Taru was saying. “How many—how much of other people’s grief do you carry in you, Taru?”

  Taru gave him a bitter little smile. “How much do you carry, Master Skywalker?”

  “No, I don’t … I don’t want these memories.”

  “Then you must release them.”

  Luke did, and felt a sudden easing of tension he hadn’t realized he was experiencing.

  Taru raised his hands. His eyes closed.

  There was no visible change, but Luke could feel the alien Force element flow into Taru, become part of him. Taru shuddered once. Then his eyes opened. He looked tired. “Done.”

  “That was …” Something occurred to Luke. “I’ve done that before.”

  “I thought perhaps you had. You took to it very quickly.”

  “Not memories, not as such. But I’ve rooted out Force energies that didn’t belong …” Luke felt tired himself.

  “You know you are hurt.” Taru glanced down at Luke’
s knee.

  “My leg?” Luke flexed his injured knee experimentally. “It’s healing quickly.”

  “If you want me to look at that—you know bacta isn’t allowed on Nam Chorios, since it exacerbates the effects of the Death Seed plague …”

  The scuffed datapad rose from the table where Taru had replaced it. Suspended by no hand and no wire, it floated in midair, then opened of its own accord.

  Luke glanced around at the others. “Who’s doing that?” He couldn’t detect any of them acting through the Force; the routine interference of omnipresent, dispassionate eyes prevented him from determining the effect’s source. “Stop it at once.”

  Ben shrugged. “Not me.”

  The others began to shake their heads.

  The datapad flew a meter to crack into the side of Taru’s head. The blow toppled the Listener from his stool. He fell, landing on his buttocks and lower back, and an expression of pain shot across his face.

  Luke was on his feet in an instant but did not stoop to help Taru. He knew what was coming, knew he could not take his attention off his surroundings. “Force storm! Prepare yourselves.”

  Ben, Vestara, and Sel rose, unconsciously took back-to-back positions. Taru rose, moved beside Thei, and angled his body over hers protectively. A thin line of blood crawled down his cheek from the cut inflicted by the datapad.

  Vestara’s lightsaber rose, tugging at the clip that held it to her belt. She grabbed it. Its activation button depressed of its own accord. She twisted the hilt, and the red blade sprang into life, pointing away from her. She held on to the hilt in a death grip, her expression surprised.

  There was a crash from above, then a muffled explosion and a cry of pain. Sel ran for the archway to the stairs. Luke joined her, passed her by a few steps up, and left her behind, emerging into the main room above well before she did.

  A few medical instruments, the most advanced ones, floated around the room, swirling in the air in the middle of the chamber like a miniature whirlwind outlined by the contents of a physician’s office. The elderly man who had been reading was now hunkered down behind a stout wooden table. Atop another table were the ruins of a blaster pistol. Its battery pack appeared to have exploded, separating the weapon into several pieces, of which the handle and barrel recognizably remained on the tabletop. The old man’s cheek was split as if by shrapnel.

  There were howls and cries of alarm from outside. Luke charged in that direction, throwing the blanket curtain aside and hurling the door open.

  Outside was a vision of chaos.

  The instant Luke emerged, a late-model landspeeder rolled past, mere meters from him, end over end as if kicked by the galaxy’s largest rancor. Three computer monitors, moving in formation like starfighters, flew by overhead, banked, then smashed straight into the wall of an Oldtimer house. Luke heard cries of alarm from within.

  A block to the left, a whirlwind composed of glittering dust, chunks of speeder bike, glow rods stripped from building stilts, bales of wire, girders, and droid parts grew to an undulating shape ten meters tall and began moving away. A block straight ahead, a dome, a Newcomer building, jerked and rattled as if straining to break free of the ground.

  Ben and Vestara appeared to either side of Luke. Ben’s eyes were wide. “Stang.”

  Luke’s reply was curt. “Dome.” He sprinted ahead, angling left to follow a side street toward the twitching, heaving Newcomer dwelling.

  As he skidded around the corner and the dome came fully within sight, it was clear the building and its inhabitants were in serious trouble. Two of the stilts had snapped, lengths of durasteel rebar showing in the broken permacrete posts. The dome on that side rose two meters into the air, then came crashing down on the broken piling stumps. The white dome cracked but did not collapse, leaving a jagged break across the front facing of viewports and the main entrance. There were cries of dismay and pain from within.

  Luke charged forward and leapt up into the dome’s recessed entryway. It was a difficult leap—he did not draw on the Force and had to perform most of the maneuver with his uninjured leg—but he landed where he intended. The light above the door sputtered.

  The door itself did not open for him. Luke braced himself against the side of the entrance and kicked, but the dome rose and fell again as he did so. He was hurled up to crack headfirst into the entryway’s ceiling. Despite the shooting pain to his skull, he managed to come down on both feet and not lose his balance.

  To his right, Vestara leapt, a beautiful ballistic arc that brought her slamming against the dome exterior. In the doorway recess, Luke could not see where she hit, but the sound of impact was the dull clang of meat hitting thin metal instead of permacrete, so she must have been aiming for one of the viewports. There was a muffled clang that had to be the viewport giving way under her impact.

  To Luke’s left, Ben tried the same stunt. He hit harder, and had greater mass than Vestara to begin with. The sound of his viewport being punched free from its frame was distinct and gratifying.

  Luke kicked again, this time completing the maneuver. The door, though a sliding barrier, catapulted free of its frame, giving Luke access to the interior, a living chamber the same size as Sel’s.

  Then the dome rose again on one side. Luke braced himself on either side of the entryway.

  Instead of coming down, the dome twisted laterally. Luke heard another permacrete post crack. He looked over his shoulder to watch the world veer as the dome pivoted on its one remaining post. Centrifugal effect nearly threw Luke clear of the entryway—he certainly felt as though his stomach contents were about to be thrown free. He gripped harder, determined not to use the Force to anchor him in place, and heaved, propelling himself into the living chamber.

  This room had started out more crowded with furniture than Sel’s, and now those furnishings were scattered, strewn as if by the breath of some giant being. Electronics—datapads, entertainment monitors, art holoprojectors—rose to smash into the ceiling, crashed to the floor again, rose once more, hurling sparks in all directions as they performed their aerial dance of self-destruction. Luke saw a stuffed chair beginning to ignite.

  Luke also saw a human arm flailing from beneath an upside-down sofa. He ran to it, uphill part of the way, downhill the second half of the distance as the dome’s floor tilted crazily, and stooped to heave the furniture away from the victim it trapped.

  Beneath was a white-haired man, lean almost to the point of emaciation, with a look of pain on his face. As soon as he was free of the sofa, he rolled onto his back and clutched at his left arm. From his expression, Luke suspected there was a break there, at the elbow or just above.

  Luke knelt, bracing himself against a dome exterior wall to help maintain his balance. He had to shout to make himself heard over the din of breakage, of sizzling electronics, of screams from elsewhere nearby. “How many more here? In this house?”

  “Two.” The old man struggled to sit up. “My daughter, her son …”

  Luke picked him up and turned to gauge the return path to the outer doorway. A bookcase of simulated wood scraped and slid past between him and his goal, then fetched up against an exterior wall and was momentarily still.

  Luke ran. The floor seemed to heave and drop, causing him to stumble forward off balance, and he did not draw on the Force to stabilize his run. He twisted sideways so that he slammed shoulder-first into the entryway rather than hammer the old man’s head into the surface there. Then, staggering sideways, he made his way onto the recess just outside the door and leapt free.

  He leapt farther than he expected to, actually, for the dome began another pivot as he jumped. He flew ten meters, took the brunt of the landing on his uninjured leg. His momentum was not checked, so he went forward into a somersault, wrapping his body around the old man’s, and came down on his feet again and ran another five paces, slowing.

  Then he could stop and turn.

  Vestara was already out of the dome. In her arms was a little boy of m
aybe three. Vestara, too, was turning to look back at the dome. Then she glanced down at the boy. She wrinkled her nose as though discovering she had just come in contact with a smelly substance. She unceremoniously set the little boy down on the dusty street.

  Luke realized that the dome had twisted to face opposite its original direction; he and Vestara now stood on the street that had been behind it. It still twisted like a living thing, like an animal intent on ripping its neck free of a restraining collar.

  There was a series of thumps from the second-story viewport and that piece of scarred transparisteel came free, rolling down the dome’s curved surface to crash into the dust below. Then Ben emerged, a young woman in his arms. He hopped onto the curved exterior surface and, quick and nimble as a monkey-lizard, ran down that curve, leaping free when he was three meters above the ground. He hit the dusty Hweg Shul street on his feet, rolled forward across his shoulders, came up on his feet again.

  The dome pivoted around and its free end rose directly over Ben’s head. It came down—

  Luke began to shout a warning. But Ben reversed direction, jumping and then rolling toward the one surviving permacrete stilt. The dome came down with a crash, obscuring him, a portion of it breaking free, and then rose again, and Luke could see his son and the woman Ben had rescued lying unharmed at the base of that surviving post.

  The remains of the dome flapped up again and finally broke completely free. It rose into the air, spinning with a sort of strange majesty like a tiny space station come nearly to ground, then floated away, flying over the city.

  Luke set the old man down and ran to Ben’s side. “You all right?”

  Ben stood. He had a cut on his cheek, and his cloak was gone. His breath, like his father’s, emerged as a cone of frozen vapor. “Just fine. Dad, Zara. Zara, meet Luke Skywalker.”

  The woman, dark-haired and big-eyed, no more than glanced at Luke before running to Vestara and her son. The little boy wailed—not in pain; he was watching his home sail away, borne by phantom winds.