The dome disappeared over the horizon of Hweg Shul’s low skyline. Then they heard it come to ground, a terrible crunching and crashing in the distance.
That seemed to be a signal for the powers that tormented the town. All around, the dancing, whirling, zooming devices and building components that had made the neighborhood a nightmare of danger and mayhem crashed down to city streets and building roofs.
They fell, and then silence fell—silence broken only by the gasps of the injured, distant cries of pain, proximity alarms being triggered.
Vestara rejoined them.
Luke looked at the youngsters. Vestara, too, was little damaged; her robe was ripped at the shoulder, and its lower hem was splashed by liquid that smelled as if it came from an aquarium.
Luke nodded at the destruction around them. “Let’s get to work.”
* * *
An hour later, they had done all they could—helping Oldtimers and Newcomers alike dig victims out of collapsed houses, helping find children separated from parents, helping round up cu-pas freed when a corral fence collapsed.
The flying dome had, fortunately, come down in a field rather than atop another dwelling. It had claimed no victims.
Reports were sketchy. It appeared that there had been deaths, one of a man electrocuted in his sanisteam cabinet, one of a teenage boy crushed by a tumbling airspeeder. There might have been more; some dwellings had caught fire, and their charred ruins had not yet been fully explored. There were indications, too, that other Nam Chorios towns and settlements had been hit by the Force storm.
But for now the chaos had subsided, and Sel led the three of them back to their hostel.
Ben shook his head, wondering. Or perhaps Luke mistook his constant shivering for a shake of the head; Ben had not found his cloak. But Ben’s voice certainly sounded impressed. “So that was a Force storm.”
“That was worse than any I’ve ever seen.” Luke tried to recall the descriptions Leia had provided him of the ones she’d weathered. “Worse than any I’ve heard about, actually.”
Vestara frowned, the expression barely visible under her goggles. “Why was it mostly electronics affected?”
“No one is sure.” Sel’s voice was heavy with regret. “And we haven’t had any Force storms in thirty years to evaluate. But there’s a theory that, since Force activity is magnified and scattered by the presence of the tsils, and since the tsils themselves are a crystal life-form resembling programmable computer chips, the Force energy is reshaped and resonates with computer circuitry. Everything manufactured these days has circuitry in it—even durasteel girders, for self-diagnostic purposes. A dome like that would have hundreds in it …”
Vestara sounded impressed. “Did we cause that?”
“No.” Sel’s voice was decisive. “No. Listener techniques don’t do that. I’d have seen it happen before. This was … something different.”
“Abeloth.” Luke repressed a sigh. “She’s here. Somewhere. Experimenting. Using the Force with greater strength than I ever did, certainly. And not caring what happens when she does so.”
Sel caught Luke’s eye and deliberately lagged a little behind. Luke matched his pace to hers. The two teenagers drew ahead.
Luke heard Vestara’s voice rise, her tone one of accusation. “That’s just a ploy, Ben.”
“No, it’s not. I’m freezing. Look at me.”
She sighed and opened her cloak, wrapping it around him as well. He tucked in close to her, and they shared its warmth.
Sel kept her voice low so Ben and Vestara would not hear. “I need to give you my key.”
“The key to your dome?”
“No, to my mnemotherapy.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Think of the mind as a computer system. The patient must trust the Listener, and they must work together to create a key, one that will give the Listener a back door by which he can invoke the mesmeric trance used in the technique. This was already accomplished on Thei before we arrived tonight. You understand?”
“I think so.”
Sel passed him a folded sheet of flimsiplast. It was thin enough that Luke could see some of the notation through the material. It seemed to be a musical score. The lyrics belonged to an ancient lullaby of Alderaan; Luke had heard Leia sing it to Jacen and Jaina when they were little.
Sel returned her hand to the warmth of her jacket pocket. “That is mine. Taru and the other Listeners used it when curing me. You may have need of it, if you feel that I may have been … compromised … by this Abeloth. It might allow you to be sure.”
“You’re playing a dangerous game, Sel. You’d still be better off just leaving for a while.”
“So would you.”
“Point taken.”
SENATE BUILDING, CORUSCANT
“YOU SEEM DETERMINED TO OFFER ME OFFENSE AT EVERY STAGE OF this discussion.” Daala’s voice was as frosty as Hoth in midwinter. Perhaps the spotless whiteness of her uniform and many of the furnishings in her Chief of State office contributed to that impression. “You refuse to allow me to speak to Kenth Hamner, and give me reasons for his absence that are patently insulting. You refuse to hand over information on the mad Jedi who assaulted Admiral Bwua’tu. You say you want to normalize relations between the Jedi Order and the government, but do nothing to support your claim.”
Leia and Han exchanged a glance. It frustrated Daala that she could not read its meaning. Long-married couples possessed a language, one of glances and cryptic terms and throat clearings, that no outsider could interpret.
Han replied first. “We haven’t seen any sign that the attackers were Jedi.”
Wynn Dorvan, the fourth person participating in this private negotiation, gave Han a look that was all mockery. “No sign? Lightsabers? Forensic evidence that they knew how to use these weapons—not just to kill, but also to deflect blaster bolts? That’s not something you learn from watching holodramas.”
“Not everyone who knows how to use a lightsaber is a Jedi.” Leia’s voice was measured and polite but implacable. “There are ex-Jedi, of course.”
Daala nodded. “Such as Tahiri Veila, the murderess.”
“There are also, as you now know, more Sith in the galaxy.”
“So good of you to have informed me of their existence before my intelligence forces discovered them. And I’m still waiting for a clarification on the difference between Jedi and Sith—a difference Jedi Veila and your son Darth Caedus could not seem to distinguish.”
Leia was silent for a moment, and Daala wondered if she had finally pushed the doomsday button that would cause Leia to come over the desktop at her. But after the pause Leia continued speaking, with no change in her tone. “You yourself employed a lightsaber user, Zilaash Kuh, a bounty hunter, who was no Jedi. Where did you find her? Perhaps she can explain where Admiral Bwua’tu’s attackers came from.”
That rankled Daala … because Kuh had, shortly after her last mission with the bounty hunters employed by Daala, disappeared. Her ID documents proved to be masterful forgeries. Her true identity and current whereabouts were a mystery.
Daala did not allow this fact to intrude upon her point. “If you’re hoping to recruit her, I regret that I do not feel obliged to help you. Back to the subject. The subject that has plagued me for many months. There can be no normalization of relations between the Jedi and the government until the Jedi Order acknowledges itself as, and behaves as, a government resource.”
Han offered up a lopsided smile, a smuggler mocking authority. “Even if that’s not what the public wants?”
Daala transfixed him with a hostile stare. “You think the public has any affection for the Jedi right now?”
Leia waved away the Chief of State’s objection. “Now may not be relevant. The Order waxes and wanes in public opinion … and is usually viewed in a heroic light, recent events notwithstanding.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Daala offered a tiny, dismissive shrug. “The public doesn’t want to
be taxed, either. And without those taxes, the infrastructure of the Alliance evaporates, the armed forces cease to exist, some entire worlds become uninhabitable—Kessel, for example. The public, collectively, is not smart enough to make a decision like that.”
Now it was Leia’s turn to sound icy. “So the public has no right to demand that it be listened to, represented. Only ruled. Palpatine certainly thought that way.”
“There’s a difference between direction and distance, Princess. Palpatine went too far—vastly exceeded the distance he should have traveled. But his direction had merit.”
Leia’s expression froze as if carved in stone, and Daala knew they would find no common ground today.
Hundreds of meters away, in a secure hangar bay within the building, a Galactic Alliance Security two-person team carrying scanning apparatus descended the boarding ramp of the Millennium Falcon. The two women moved away from the saucer-shaped light freighter, casting not a backward look despite the vehicle’s antiquity and fame.
In the cockpit, seated in the copilot’s chair, C-3PO watched them through the starboard viewport. “Oh, dear. I wish they hadn’t left so soon.”
Behind him, standing in the cockpit doorway, R2-D2 tweetled musically.
C-3PO turned to glare at the dome-topped astromech. He knew he had no facial expressions with which to indicate his irritation, so he relied on posture and vocal tone. “Because, you assemblage of malfunctioning processors, now we have to do what Master Han and Mistress Leia asked of us. And I, for one, am not looking forward to it.” He held up his arms so his photoreceptors could scan them. “Look at us, we’re not even ourselves.”
It was true. Where the protocol droid was normally shiny, if sometimes scuffed, gold and occasionally silver, he was now a matte metal-orange from head to foot, consequence of a session with a spray can. The orange color would peel away with a little work, and C-3PO wished that the work would begin immediately. The novelty of being in disguise did not endear the condition to him.
R2-D2 was similarly changed. All his blue coloring had temporarily been changed to black. He was disturbingly not himself.
Both droids also wore restraining bolts; C-3PO’s was plugged into his chest. The bolts were false, inactive, but they looked identical to those with which droids temporarily visiting the Senate Building were routinely equipped.
R2-D2 tweetled with the old, let’s-get-it-done manner that C-3PO found so irritating.
“Very well.” Awkward, the protocol droid stood. From the pilot’s seat beside him, he picked up a toolbox—innocuous looking, scarred from years of use, brushed durasteel with a black handle.
Together the two droids moved down the boarding ramp and headed for the interior exit, the one leading to the curved corridor accessing all the Level Two hangar bays. Two troopers in the uniforms of Galactic Alliance Security stood at that exit, talking, keeping an eye on the bay interior. One was a large Twi’lek male, blue-skinned, his brain-tails decorated with alternating yellow and red stripes like some sign from nature that he was a venomous reptile, while the other, a Bothan female, had fur that, had it been metallic, would have been an exact match for C-3PO’s current color.
“Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I hate this part.” Clutching the toolbox in both orange hands, C-3PO, affecting as nonchalant a walk as a protocol droid could manage, maneuvered to pass by the security operatives without engaging their interest.
“Halt,” the Twi’lek barked.
C-3PO, programmed to obey the orders of living beings when they did not countermand more significant orders, jumped, then froze in place. “Sir?”
“You have no business here.”
“Oh, please, sir, but I do. The mechanic who did the initial security evaluation of the Corellian freighter there is now in Bay 2315. He has left his auxiliary toolbox. I need to return it to him.”
The Twi’lek exchanged a look with the Bothan and seized the toolbox. He opened it. The Bothan held up a hand scanner; the Twi’lek grabbed each of the box’s contents in turn and held them under the scanner.
Hydrospanner. Data cards. Spray cans labeled as lubricant, preservative, and paint applicators. Meters. Datapads.
The scanner offered no blips of alarm, which seemed increasingly to annoy the Twi’lek. Finally he snapped the toolbox shut, shoved it back into C-3PO’s hands, and glared at the droids. “All right.”
“Thank you, sir—”
“It takes four standard minutes for a protocol droid to reach that hangar. I’ve timed it. If you’re not back in ten minutes, if you leave the main corridor for any destination other than that hangar, I’ll send lifter droids after you and have them crush you to a pile of flakes.”
“Understood, sir. Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.” His speed boosted by fear, C-3PO hurried out through the exit.
The hall beyond was broad, its floor surfaced in permacrete rather than stone or some other pleasing material, and it was busy, trafficked by traveling parties headed to or returning from their shuttles, by miniature speeders hauling vehicle repair parts and battery packs, by beings from scores of worlds, many of them nonhuman. Despite his apprehension, C-3PO was cheered to hear so many different languages represented. They gave him a rare opportunity to exercise his multiple instantaneous translation faculties.
But then R2-D2, rolling along in tripod mode behind him, had to ruin it by communicating, a series of cheerful-sounding notes and blerts.
“Yes, Artoo, he was big, and I suspect he meant what he said.”
Tweet, whistle, beep.
“Well, if we are delayed by circumstances beyond our control, we could very well end up in the crusher. Let’s hurry a bit, shall we?”
Blert, tweedle, whistle.
“Yes, a Wookiee could decide to play with us, pinning us in place until the Twi’lek came for us. It’s unlikely, it’s a ghastly thought, but it’s conceivable.”
Tweet, toot-toot, blort.
“Artoo, I think you’re having me on, and I don’t appreciate it.” But if he’d had the throat structure to do so, C-3PO would have gulped. All the many ways they could be delayed beyond their two-minute operating aperture … R2-D2’s suggestions set C-3PO’s mind racing, thinking of even more. A bolt failure causing his right leg to fall off … an impromptu parade cutting across their path … a malfunctioning set of blast doors … The possibilities were endless and horrible.
The two droids reached Bay 2315, which was similarly guarded by two security beings, a horned, red-skinned Devaronian male and a gray-skinned man from Duro. They, too, performed a scan on the toolbox contents, this time with slowness that agonized C-3PO, and then admitted the droids.
To C-3PO’s relief, the shuttle from Dust Dancer was nearby, only one berth over from the doors. A male human mechanic was at work on the main thrusters at the stern, performing some sort of welding action that threw a glowing trail of sparks out to a distance of four meters. And—glory be—Seha was already at the foot of the boarding ramp, waiting. C-3PO came as close to running as he could in approaching her. “Mistress—”
“Sela, remember.” Seha glanced over the protocol droid’s shoulder, at the guards in the doorway.
“Yes, Mistress Sela.”
“Stand still.” Seha maneuvered herself so C-3PO was directly between her and the guards. She affected to open the toolbox and examine its contents. “Artoo?”
“Mistress, we’re under considerable time pressure here—”
“Hush.”
R2-D2 crowded in close. A small port on his dome slid open, and his spindly manipulator arm emerged. In its grasper claw was a silvery tube the approximate length of a lightsaber handle, but thicker along its length. Words were stenciled on it in black. He placed it in the toolbox and retracted his arm.
“Everything seems to be here.” Seha’s voice turned stern. “Don’t let this happen again.”
“Don’t let what happen again? Oh. Yes. Forgetting. Although technically it was not we who forgot, but your mechanic.” Wh
ich itself was a fabrication, since the mechanic had in fact not visited the Millennium Falcon at any point, but the lie was a plausible one.
Tweetle-tweetle-blort.
“Oh, goodness, time is running out.” C-3PO spun in place. “Come, Artoo. If we’re to avoid a fate even worse than being shredded …”
Seha watched the two droids flee. She glanced at her mechanic—the Jedi apprentice Bandy Geffer, who was black-haired, earnest, and good with mechanical tasks—and gave him a thumbs-up. Then she trotted up the boarding ramp.
In moments she had hit the button to raise the ramp to its up and locked position and had shut the light partition door between the cockpit and the passenger cabin. She moved to the back of the cabin, shutting the sliding covers over the side viewports as she went. Then she opened small hatches, ones that should have provided access to luggage storage, above the rear seats port and starboard. But these hatches showed emergency system backup controls—fire extinguishers, atmosphere, backup holocomm.
On the small keyboard of each panel, she typed in a short encrypted command. The panels slid forward, revealing that there were horizontal coffin-sized enclosures beyond, enclosures extending aft even farther than the passenger compartment did.
Enclosures containing Jedi.
Master Kyp Durron blinked at her, shading his eyes from the sudden light of the main cabin. “Delivery?”
“Finally.”
Opposite, Master Octa Ramis pulled herself halfway out of her smuggling compartment, then levered her legs free and dropped nimbly to the floor. Dark-haired and appealing, she wore a white hooded rain cloak of thin material over the sort of dark, innocuous business dress that was ubiquitous in the Senate Building.
Kyp also pulled himself free, struggling a bit to fit his broader shoulders through the aperture. He chose to fall face-first and roll to his feet. “Let’s see it.”
Seha handed him the toolbox. While Kyp laid out the contents on a shuttle seat, Seha brushed dust from the cabin floor off his back.
“Thanks. What do we have here … Identities. Credcards.” Kyp held up the cylinder R2-D2 had given Seha and read its lettering. “TWO KILOS MALLEABLE EXPLOSIVE. DO NOT OPEN PRIOR TO USE.”
Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Conviction Page 11
