Octa settled into the seat opposite. “The building’s chemical sniffers will detect it once the container is open.”
“Right. Um, makeup supplies, spray-on skin tone, and hair color.”
Octa inserted one of the identicards into a datapad. She looked at the screen as data began to scroll by. “This one’s yours, Kyp. You’re Izzen Fray, a financial analyst with the tertiary support detail of Senator Treen of Kuat.”
Seha offered a dismayed expression. “Tertiary?”
Kyp nodded. “Yes, she’s known for maintaining lots of resources here. A good choice. She’s also known for discouraging anyone prying into her affairs, meaning that many of her people don’t know one another by sight.”
Octa offered him a little grin. “Of course, as a Kuati male, you’re a second-class citizen. Time to practice your bowing and scraping.”
“Yes, madam. Hey, it’s still a step up from a slave miner, which I’ve been for real.” He inserted the other identicard in the other datapad. “You’re Olya Merker. Same delegation. A comfort specialist.”
Octa snorted, amused. “Ah, good, I’ll need to sharpen my pillow-fluffing skills.” Then something occurred to her. “Seha—how did the date go?”
Seha shrugged. “It was nice. Dinner, dancing. He was just aggressive enough to show he was interested, but not so much so that I’d need to throw him out a viewport.”
Octa gave her a cautionary look. “Remember, as nice as he may be, he’s security. Naturally suspicious and probably inclined to poke around for information he shouldn’t have. Plus, if he ever finds out you’re a Jedi using him for access to the Senate Building …”
“Yes, yes.” Seha rolled her eyes. “I can pretend to be living a normal life occasionally, can’t I? For an hour?”
Octa and Kyp looked at each other.
He shook his head. “Nah.”
She shook her head. “You’re fooling yourself.”
Seha sighed. “Anyway, one of these chips will have information on Senate Building offices not currently assigned to a delegation. If you can forge an assignment showing that another one has been approved for Senator Treen’s use—”
“Then we’ll have a semi-comfortable place to stay.” Kyp grinned at Octa. “I get the couch.”
“You get the floor. Or maybe the top of the desk.”
Seha turned back toward the cockpit. “At least you’ll already have your lightsabers past all the new security measures, and a constant flow of information and goods from the Solos. This should be an easy assignment. Right?”
“Nah.”
“You’re fooling yourself.”
Half an hour later, Seha signaled Bandy via a single comlink beep.
Bandy, wiping his hands on an oily rag, walked stiff-legged up to stand before the cockpit viewscreens. Seha activated an exterior mike and speakers. “Yes?”
“All done.”
“You’re sure this time?”
He grinned. “You’re going to get some smoke on activation. There’s coolant pooled behind the exhaust vent, but it’s ready to go. Guaranteed.”
“Want a ride back to your shop?”
“Please. I’ll get my tools.”
Seha went aft and glanced at Kyp and Octa, who waited, with implacable Jedi Master calm, in their seats. “One minute.” She activated the boarding ramp and trotted down.
At its bottom, she waved to get the attention of the door guards. “Can you switch off the fire system during our takeoff? We’re going to have smoke here for just a minute, then we’ll be gone. I’m sick of foam.”
The Devaronian nodded. “Fine.”
“It cakes in your hair. Takes several sanisteams to get out.”
“I wouldn’t know.” He gestured at the top of his own head, gleaming, bald, and horned.
Bandy, tools in hand, trotted up into the passenger cabin. Seha followed and reentered the cockpit.
She powered the engines up, but did not raise the boarding ramp just yet.
As soon as the main thrusters showed all green for readiness, there was a mechanical coughing noise from the stern. Smoke billowed out the thruster.
Seha felt just a touch in the Force, sign that the two Masters had run down into the smoke and then used their powers to boost their speed to get clear of the cloud before it dissipated.
She smiled, raised the boarding ramp, waved at the Devaronian, and lifted. She backed a few meters, turned the shuttle in a smooth pivot, and glided for the blast doors opening before her.
A moment later she was out in the sunlight again, breathing a sigh of relief.
Bandy moved up and settled into the copilot’s seat. He pointed out the starboard viewport. “Hey, look.”
In the distance, just leaving another Level Two hangar, was the Millennium Falcon. Seha gave the aging transport a little salute. “I suspect we had an easier time of it today than they did.”
“Yeah, I guess stress comes with being old and famous.”
Seha shook her head and began punching in a course for a climb to orbit.
For the Jedi, this was two missions accomplished—delivery of Jedi Masters, delivery of support resources to them—and nothing, absolutely nothing, had gone wrong.
So she hoped.
WILDERNESS, NAM CHORIOS
AS BEN, BOYISH AND UNCONCERNED, PILOTED THE LANDSPEEDER, VESTARA used the best security available to encrypt the letter she was composing.
She had to. The letter was one she would never dare send, one she could never allow anyone to see. It would remain in the hidden reaches of her datapad’s memory, something she would allow only herself to experience. She might have to purge it from her own memory if it threatened to expose what she was feeling.
Father—
No, that was how she normally would begin such a communication in truth, in the real world.
Dear Dad:
She rejected that as well. Dad was not right. The term was so very, very …
So very Ben.
The surroundings changed from bleak gray plains littered with crystalline gravel to hilly terrain, then dipped into a series of canyons. Rising from their depths were the chimney-like spars of crystal, blue and green and white, that constituted the largest and most impressive gatherings of tsils and inert stone found on this planet. Vestara barely registered their presence.
Papa.
That was it.
Dear Papa:
I hope you are feeling better, and that the hurts you have recently suffered have been well tended.
It was such a stupid way to begin, so strange to express such a thought. Of course his injuries would have been well tended. But to begin a communication with such a sentiment was itself a tremendous indicator of the difference between the Lost Tribe and the cultures of the Galactic Alliance. The words tasted strange in her mind, but she thought that she did not dislike the taste.
Nor did she necessarily dislike recasting her father, Gavar Khai, in a different light, softening his ruthless drive for perfection and accomplishment to something else. Something like Luke Skywalker.
The other night, seeing Ben blindsided by reminders of his mother, seeing how her loss still affected him, and seeing how his father instinctively reached out for him, to comfort him, I was of course reminded of you. And I wonder sometimes what I would be like if I had grown up with a sire—
She knew that was the wrong word. She backed up and corrected her words.
—grown up with a father who was cold and indifferent, or determined to drive me toward a hard destiny in a more cold and ruthless world. I’m not sure I would like myself, and I’m so—
The next word was almost impossible to add, so foreign was it to her nature. She forced herself to continue down that alien path.
—happy that you have always been kind and supportive.
Finally the lie was too big for her. She set the datapad down and turned away from it for a moment. She needed to regain her sense of self.
The very language she was employi
ng was foreign, phrases and sentiments she’d heard when studying the holodramas of these people. They celebrated gooey, impractical emotions. They saw weakness as a virtue.
Except, perhaps, it was not precisely weakness. Ben was not weak. His sentimentality made him vulnerable, but she could no longer apply the word weak to him. What, then, was the right word?
Perhaps supple. She, Vestara, was like a hardwood tree, one that stood tall and proud no matter what was thrown at her.
Ben, instead, was a flexible tree, perhaps not capable of holding up so much weight, but also capable of leaning and bending to remain unharmed when the greatest winds came at him. Those winds might uproot Vestara, might topple her … kill her. And in the short time since she was separated from her fellow Sith—separated by more than distance, separated by her involvement with the death of their leader Taalon, which would earn her a death warrant from her own kind—she felt increasingly as if those winds were hammering at her.
She picked up her datapad again.
Luke told us a story the other night, a story of his first visit to this world. A woman brought him a tsil crystal, back before anyone knew they were living, intelligent things, and demonstrated how they could be reprogrammed through application of electrical current. She attached leads from a recharger to it, and the lines of its natural internal circuitry changed.
It also, it turns out, experienced the destruction of its mind, an event similar to a near-instantaneous, agonizing death. The experience was broadcast through the Force, hurting Luke badly, if temporarily. And shortly afterward, the crystal was dropped and shattered. Luke felt the tragedy of it all without understanding it. I have to wonder at the minds of the Newcomers here who still resist thinking of the tsils as sapient, who experience no sorrow at the thought of a needless, accidental death like that, an event that had to have been replicated by the dozens or the hundreds in those years …
Once again, the sticky sentimentality of her thoughts got the better of her. She saved her text and shoved the datapad back into her belt pouch.
One must do this sort of thing to understand the minds of potential enemies, she told herself. One must understand their weaknesses if one is to exploit them.
“Are you all right?”
Sel’s question brought Vestara out of her reverie. She offered the old woman, who shared the speeder’s backseat with her, a smile she hoped looked authentic. Then she remembered that it would go unseen under her goggles and cold-weather veil. “Just thinking.”
Sel nodded, then turned forward again.
Taru’s speeder bike was fifty meters ahead, making a left turn down a side canyon. Sel took a look around, orienting herself. “We’re almost there.”
“Good.”
Moments later both vehicles came to a stop before a cave mouth. This was a large aperture in the canyon wall, tall enough for a Wookiee riding his brother’s shoulders to stay upright as they walked in. Two more speeder bikes, another landspeeder, and three cu-pas were situated outside. Taru and Ben parked among them.
The five of them entered the cave. Its entrance, just inside, was flanked by two Oldtimers carrying modern, well-kept blaster rifles. These two men gave Taru a quick glance and then ignored him and the others.
The first cave was a bare and colorless thing, illuminated by a single high-powered glow rod. Toward the rear, its uneven floor sloped down at a steep angle. Steps had been cut into the floor there in some ancient time; they were now well worn with the passage of booted feet across the centuries. Taru led them down.
Deep within the canyon wall and well below the level of the canyon floor outside, the cave more or less leveled off. The half-natural stairwell opened out into a much grander cavern. Here, crystals were embedded in the walls; illuminated by more glow rods, they gleamed as if lit from within.
There were more men and women here, Oldtimers, most of them arrayed around an ancient black cooking pot from which smokeless heat emanated. Drawing close, Vestara could see that cans of heating fuel had been placed within it and ignited.
Taru brought Luke up before a man, as elderly in appearance as Sel. Tall for an Oldtimer, he was bald and white-bearded with intense eyes, black in these lighting conditions, that seemed fierce enough to stare clean through a person or a wall of stone. Vestara had seen eyes like his many times in her life, the eyes of Force-users with goals to pursue.
Taru made introductions. “Master Nenn, this is Master Luke Skywalker. Nenn is the senior Master of the Theran Listeners—as close as we have to a leader. Master Luke, of course, is head of the Jedi Order.”
“Former head.” Luke offered his hand.
Nenn stared at it before appearing to remember the Newcomers’ way of doing things; he shook Luke’s hand. “We of course know your name. I think I met you long ago, when you first began coordinating the effort to bring the lost tsils home.”
“I believe so.”
“Taru tells me you have disquieting news about Nam Chorios. I might have some disquieting news for you in return. Here …” He gestured to a rocky ledge, one nearly absent of crystals, and sat. “Please begin. Taru has told me what he understood, but I prefer to have such information firsthand.”
Vestara settled in on the far end of the ridge to half listen. These were details she already knew.
If she switched herself over to the mind-set of the Vestara who had been composing the letter, Ben and Luke became different people. That was interesting. Yes, Ben was still infuriatingly boyish, in a way few Sith of Kesh ever were. Even Luke was sometimes boyish. But from that emotional perspective, this boyishness was not so ridiculous. Perhaps it was even attractive, in moderation.
Luke spoke of Abeloth, her ability to absorb others whole and take on their knowledge and identities, her desire to extend her very nature throughout the galaxy, her bleakness. Luke concluded with the warning he’d already offered to Sel. “Because the Listener techniques are so heavily involved in opening themselves to the Force, in listening to and interpreting the will of a difficult-to-understand species, I worry that they are vulnerable to Abeloth. If she—when she understands the tsils, she might be able to simulate their voices and thoughts very effectively, and persuade the Listeners to follow her. You and your followers may be more vulnerable to her influence than any other Force-using group I’ve encountered.”
Nenn, eyes downcast for the last part of Luke’s recitation, sighed. “You may be right. Perhaps we need to understand more of closing ourselves off from the Force. This is something we normally never need to learn.”
“I can teach you. As can my son.”
“And I.” Sel offered a faint smile. “One of the few things I remember.”
“So can I.” Vestara surprised herself by saying those words. She was no stranger to working toward common goals, team goals—personal advancement sometimes called for that tactic. But she had as yet found no common ground with these Oldtimers and their insular, self-limiting ways.
“Now my news.” Nenn raised his eyes to meet Luke’s. “There was a Listener adept named Cura. Her body was found this morning.”
Others of the Listeners murmured in surprise. Evidently that news had not previously spread to this entire gathering.
Nenn continued. “She bore terrible injuries on her body. They appeared to be the sort that would cause great pain rather than death under normal circumstances. We think she was tortured.”
Ben frowned. “Why would Abeloth torture her when she could just incorporate her instead, and have all her knowledge?”
Nenn shrugged. “I don’t know … perhaps Cura was too strong in the Force to be incorporated against her will. But she was not strong in body; her heart was weak. Perhaps Abeloth was wearing her down and her heart failed.”
“Perhaps.” Luke sounded thoughtful. “Could the killer have been someone else? A case of more ordinary murder?”
“Possibly. The other news is even less informative and even more potentially distressing. In Hweg Shul there is a doctor,
a Latecomer scientist named Cagaran Wei.”
Vestara had now heard the term Latecomer a couple of times, mostly at the Admirable Admiral. Oldtimers were descendants of the original settlers, Newcomers descendants of settlers who had arrived within the last century or so … Latecomers were those who had arrived in the wake of the New Republic’s assumption of control of this world.
Luke frowned. “I know that name. He’s been here for a while. I talked to him many years ago.”
“Yes. He makes medicines for the offworld companies. He is also interested in the effects being a Force-user has on the body, and in all chemical and energy interactions of species from differing worlds. Drochs fascinate him.”
“What about him?”
“He is gone. Disappeared. As of three days ago, when the Bleak Point station saw the arrival of what might have been your enemy. But he was not in Hweg Shul at the time, so it may be that he has a homestead out in the wilderness, a private one. A secret one.”
Luke winced. “I hope you’re wrong. It’s not usually a good sign when a brilliant researcher chooses to maintain a secret facility.”
“Yes, Master Skywalker. Especially on the world where the Death Seed plague survives.”
“Especially here.”
Nenn gestured at the Listeners in the cave. “I will begin a notification of all of our order to be aware, alert for possible signs of this Abeloth. I will supply you with Listener teachers who will learn your techniques of closing one’s self off from the Force. My people will look for Dr. Wei.”
Luke nodded. “As far as Wei is concerned, do you have anything to go on?”
“Yes … Perhaps his home in Hweg Shul will offer some clue as to the location of his other home. And his landspeeder is serviced in Hweg Shul. Its memory may have been backed up at the repair facility.”
Luke opened his mouth as if to reply, shut it again.
Vestara thought she knew what he had intended to say. Couldn’t we have had this meeting in Hweg Shul? It’s two hours’ speeder time back to town. Four hours of search and investigation time lost. But the Jedi Master withheld this implied criticism. He merely nodded. “Thank you for your help.”
Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Conviction Page 12
