Tahiri frowned. “What sort of under-the-table pressure?”
“Suggestions reach the concerned parties’ ears through diverse means they cannot follow back to their sources. For instance, I’ve made it clear to the warden that he is under intense scrutiny now. Every decision involving you is being analyzed. Every credit he drops on a luxury. Every charge on his expense account. Every purchase or service made on behalf of any member of his family. Known associates. It has been hinted to him that someone, he doesn’t know who, recently sentenced to his prison is actually a Galactic Alliance Security agent investigating corruption in the Department of Corrections. Would that it were true … but any efforts on his part to root out the investigator will prove futile, so perhaps he will believe the investigator to be of extraordinary ability. If the warden has any sense, he will at least not resort to a tactic as simple as delivering you into the wrong exercise yard. I hope this will keep you safe. I expect it will, at least for a while.”
“Good. That’s something, anyway.”
“And if I may be frank, the … effectiveness … of your spirited defense against your attackers has indeed convinced many people that you are not to be trifled with. But be wary of such things as sudden malfunctions on the part of your guard droid. It would not be a bad idea to occasionally switch places with other inmates when in line at the mess. All ordinary precautions. And I’ll continue to work via the other means.”
“Thank you, Eramuth.” His words hadn’t offered a lot of comfort, but they’d given her more than she’d had upon entering this conference room.
A tiny chime sounded from within one of Bwua’tu’s many pockets. He drew forth a chrono and glanced at it. “Time to march into the Hall of Justice. Ready?”
“Ready.” She rose.
He stood and smiled again. This time it was not reassuring. It was feral. “Let’s destroy some prosecution witnesses, shall we?”
WILDERNESS NORTHWEST OF HWEG SHUL,
NAM CHORIOS
LATE THAT FIRST NIGHT, ONLY AFTER THEY’D CONCEALED THE SHUTTLE beneath a rocky overhang and further disguised it with large quantities of crystal-and-gray sand poured liberally onto the vehicle from above, they saw Ship.
The Sith meditation sphere cruised high overhead on a straight line toward the rock ivory processing plant. Through his macrobinoculars, Luke studied the ancient craft’s alien lines, the menacing pulsating redness of it, as it flew.
It circled over the distant plant for several orbits. Then its circle broadened; it spiraled out, an ever-growing pattern, as it searched for evidence of the Skywalkers and Vestara.
Luke smiled. He was sure they had left no sign they’d ever visited the plant. Dr. Wei’s body was untouched. Any footsteps they might have left had been obscured by Luke, and any eddies of wind would have caused them to vanish completely.
Luke ducked under the overhang well before the sphere’s orbit brought it on its closest approach to the shuttle. A few minutes later, he ventured out again. There was no sign of the craft. “All clear, you two.”
Ben’s head and shoulders popped up from the passenger-side hatch. He squinted toward the east, where a trace of violet light limned the peaks of the mountains, signaling the arrival of dawn. “Time to get some rest, too.”
“You’re right.” Luke hopped up onto the port-side wing and climbed atop that pod. Moments later he squeezed into the passenger seat behind his son and closed the hatch. He didn’t dog it down; in this sheltered ravine, the wind wouldn’t be able to blow it open. In fact, he propped it open just a crack with some loose rocks, making sure that air could circulate.
They hadn’t completed the repairs or the rigging of the sail. A few more hours would do the trick, but they wouldn’t be able to do their work during the windstorm-battered daylight hours, so this was a time for rest.
Rest on restricted rations, already nearly half gone, on a hostile world. Things could be better. But Luke was a veteran of countless events that could have been described as Things could be better.
He listened as Ben made one last intercom check to make sure that Vestara, alone in the pilot’s cockpit, was comfortable. Then, untroubled, Luke fell asleep.
Sleep was fitful during those hours. Luke would manage to sleep for an hour, for half an hour, and then a sudden rocking of the shuttle in the wind would rouse him, or a restless movement on Ben’s part would do so. At times during the day, each of them had to exit the craft to relieve him- or herself and then would return, cold and dusty, to the comparative warmth of the shuttle interior.
Late in the day, each had managed all the sleep he or she would be able to get. They ate, a fraction of the calories they should be receiving, cold-stored rations several years old, and then contented themselves with time-killing tasks on their datapads.
Dear Papa:
The sleeping arrangements here are funny. Back at the hostel in Hweg Shul, Master Luke and Ben crowded into one room, while I had all the space I needed in the other. Here in the field, they crowd into the passenger pod and its two uncomfortable seats while I have the cockpit.
Master Luke is protecting Ben, of course, because I’m—
Because she was a Sith, of course, and not entirely to be trusted. But it was more than that. He was protecting Ben from possible mistakes of judgment, from any act that might bind Ben to her before her own loyalties and needs were clearly determined.
And that stung. It didn’t bother her that she wasn’t fully trusted. It was that Luke would protect Ben, while her own father, Gavar Khai, would offer her no such consideration, had not for years. He would simply assume that if Ben undertook any action Vestara did not care for, she would kill him herself. That was the Sith way. Like a reptile, walking away from the nest long before the eggs hatched, not overly concerned with the fate of its progeny.
She backed up a little in her letter.
Master Luke is protecting Ben, of course, just as you would protect me.
The letter stalled there. The lie, for the moment, was insurmountable. In her mind, the real Gavar Khai laughed at her for her softhearted delusions.
Suddenly she wanted to go home.
She wanted there to be a home to go to.
There wasn’t one.
* * *
After dark, they resumed work on the shuttle. They activated the repulsors; vibration through the craft caused much of the piled-on sand to fall away, and Ben climbed atop the craft to sweep off as much of the rest as possible. They shoved the shuttle farther into the open and began the work of mounting the sail-rudder.
This entailed using the arc welder included among the craft’s emergency tools, running off the shuttle’s power, to burn two holes in the span connecting the port and starboard personnel pods, then fitting the rudder’s main post down through the holes. After that, they attached wires and cables to the trailing edges of the solar panels and rigged the hatch-closing wheels as pulleys.
From a few meters away, they admired their handiwork.
Ben used his datapad to take some holocam stills. “Looks like bantha poodoo.”
Luke nodded. “You’re being generous.”
Vestara took holocam shots of her own. “So what’s our plan?”
Luke hopped up on the port strut and then moved to sit on the pod. “We have to assume that Abeloth-Nenn has seized control of some portion of the Theran Listeners. Which means that, for all practical purposes, all the Oldtimers could be against us. Which means we avoid human contact on the way back to Hweg Shul. We have the planetary map on our datapads, so we need to plot a course to Hweg Shul—flatlands only, since we can’t steer this contraption well enough to navigate hills or mountains.”
Ben frowned, clearly doing some mental calculations. “I’m pretty sure we can’t get there by night’s end.”
“So we get there tomorrow night. Unless we stumble across some speeder bikes or landspeeders en route. We can’t change what we can’t change, Ben.”
“I don’t know about that. Obviou
sly, we can build a landspeeder out of bantha poodoo.”
Luke grinned. “Get in.”
Steering was about as hard as they had anticipated.
Once the port ion engine fired, they could get up to speeds of nearly fifty kilometers per hour. That would have put them back in Hweg Shul after a hard ten-hour run, but only if they could have flown a straight line. The total trip, including zigzags to avoid mountains and hill ranges, was more like eight hundred kilometers.
They would run straight for an hour or two, then have to vector to navigate around a series of hills. That entailed Luke in the port pod and Ben, not strapped in, behind Vestara in the starboard pod, shouting at each other across the intercom—“Port! Port!” “I’m going!” “Keep going! Port! Stop stop stop!”—while manically spinning the improvised pulley wheels. Once the shuttle had finished its laborious, lumbering turn, they’d have to return the rudder to point straight back—“Starboard, starboard! Stop stop stop!” Within a couple of hours, both were hoarse.
But the kilometers flew past, and Luke’s attempts to navigate by the stars, comparing the starfield above with data on his datapad, indicated that they were on a preposterous, overcorrection-driven, but roughly accurate route back to Hweg Shul.
At the end of that night, they cut the ion engine a hundred meters or so from a hilly ridge. Luke and Ben pushed the shuttle, still on repulsors, up against the ridge. Vestara killed the repulsors, and all three piled sand atop the vehicle.
Though the shuttle’s comm system had been blown by the sabotage, they still had their personal comlinks, and these devices, in the last hour before dawn and the first hour after, picked up faint, distant comm signals.
“… storm activity resulted in three deaths and hundreds of thousands of credits’ damage to Hweg Shul. Authorities have offered no explanation for the freak events, which are similar to storms attested to thirty years ago and in the distant past …”
“… launce still recovering from the savage beating he sus …”
“… thority investigators are now on the ground, but restrictions on traffic to and from orbit are still in place, pending further …”
With the first winds of the day’s dust storm, those tenuous transmissions faded away, replaced by static.
“Not good, Dad.”
“Not good, Ben.”
“Plus, I’m hungry and I smell bad.”
Luke opened his mouth to answer, but Ben interrupted, an impersonation of his father’s tone. “ ‘Oh, but this is nothing like Dagobah, where mold rotted everything, duraplast included, and did it stink. Even my lightsaber blade stank. Food stank. Yoda stank. Distilled water stank, I’m not sure how.’ ”
Luke ruffled his son’s hair. “If you’re going to be my biographer, you’re going to have to learn not to editorialize.”
SECURITY CENTER, SENATE BUILDING, CORUSCANT
Shackled hand and foot, clad in prisoner’s grays, her red hair a disarrayed mess, Seha moved as fast as her leg restraints would let her between two GA Security guards who insisted on walking just a bit faster than she could manage. Once inside the interrogation chamber, they pushed her down, not gently, into one of the two chairs at the table, then left.
Seha blew out a sigh and turned after them. “I miss you already.” Then she turned to look up at the individual who stood, his back to her, on the other side of the table. He wore a crisply pressed Galactic Security officer’s uniform.
She realized who he was a split second before he turned around. Her heart sank. “Oh, stang.”
It was Lieutenant Javon Thewles. His face impassive, he seated himself opposite her. “Seha … Dorvald.”
“My real name, you know that now. You shouldn’t be here.”
“I can’t do my career any more harm. My career ended the instant you obliged me to take you out.”
She offered him an expression of apology and sympathy. There was no deceit in it. “I didn’t mean for that to happen. I’m so sorry.”
“Why’d you do it?”
“Well, I was playing a role, and it seemed consistent with the behavior of the person I was supposed to be, and the old saying about men in uniform being especially handsome is true—”
He closed his eyes in a pained expression. “No. Why did you poison the Moff and the general? And try to poison all those others?” He opened his eyes again. His look suggested he really was trying to understand.
“Don’t be silly. Of course I didn’t do that.”
“You were the only one with access to the poisoned men and to the Senate Building.”
Seha’s jaw dropped for a moment. “Are you crazy? Of course I wasn’t. On the same shuttle were Wynn Dorvan and all their aides.”
“None of whom had a motive to do it.”
“Neither did I.”
“Yet they were poisoned.”
“When?”
Now it was his turn to look confused. “What?”
“When were they poisoned? Not on my shuttle. Maybe aboard Errant Venture, by political enemies. Except that wouldn’t account for the same poison showing up in this building. So it had to be after they got here. Look, I have nothing to give you that you haven’t already gotten from my earlier non-confessions.”
“I haven’t seen those recordings.”
“Sure you have. Your superiors would have shown you at least a condensed version before sending you in here so you could guilt a confession from me.”
He shook his head. “I’m not here on anyone’s behalf but my own. I cashed in some favors to get a few minutes with you. I’ve already tendered my resignation from the GAS. As soon as it’s processed, I’ll be thrown out of the building, never to return.”
“Oh.” She slumped back in her chair. “I’m sorry.”
“So what were you doing, masquerading as a shuttle pilot?”
“Can’t say. I’m sure it will all come out at my trial.”
He drummed his fingers on the tabletop and stared off into space as if Seha were all but forgotten. “So if you didn’t poison those two, who did? And why? Step one is always to evaluate the consequences of the crime and see if one of them, plausibly, was the motive.”
A trickle of alarm went through Seha. “Hey, wait a minute.”
“What were the consequences? First, I was discredited, but I have no enemies. Only rivals I might be up against for rank advancement, and poisoning two Very Important People calls for resources way beyond those of another struggling lieutenant. Second, all of security was discredited.” His eyes suddenly connected with hers again. “Was that it?”
“No.”
“You become aware of some sort of conspiracy against Galactic Alliance Security. You bring Lecersen, Jaxton, and Dorvan here in such a way that this conspiracy can spot and exploit a security weakness. You do this to draw out the enemy.”
A feeling of helplessness washed over Seha. This eager young officer clearly intended to jump aboard a white airspeeder and rush off to save the galaxy, and his suppositions were mostly wrong. She mouthed the words, You’re going to get yourself killed.
“No need to whisper.” He gestured around the chamber. “I made sure that the advocate–client confidentiality screens were functioning correctly, and I swept for listening devices.”
“You’re going to get yourself killed. You need to go home and start looking for a job.”
“I have a job. An unfinished job.”
“Look, um, I tried to kill Lecersen and Jaxton and all those Senators because I know the real ones have been kidnapped and these evil duplicates substituted for them, and I’m just trying to get rid of the duplicates.”
“Too late, Seha.” He moved to the door and keyed a code into its numeric pad, then stared into its retinal scanner. “I’m not angry anymore. It’s obvious you were just doing your duty.” The door slid up.
“Idiot.”
“I know you don’t mean that. Good luck.” Then he was gone.
Despairing, she put her forehead down on the ta
bletop.
That was how they found her, a couple of minutes later, the two security troopers. They hauled her to her feet. One, a dark-skinned human, gave her a close look. “Do you need medical attention?”
“I just need to learn how to keep my mouth shut. Forever.”
HIGH CORUSCANT ORBIT
PERHAPS IT WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER IF THE GALACTIC ALLIANCE government could have kept the tragedy a secret.
But it wasn’t possible. Thousands witnessed it with their own eyes, as the GA naval frigate Fireborn passed between an orbital Golan gun platform and a hotel space station shaped like a child’s top.
The event was promising to become a media circus. The government had already announced that Fireborn had been diverted from its normal picket routes so it could personally deliver its most famous prisoner, Klatooinian terrorist/freedom fighter Grunel Ovin, to justice. The stargazing decks and lounges of the hotel were packed with the curious—some of them, to the delight of news directors, wearing or waving banners with slogans such as FREE GRUNEL or GA OUT OF HUTT AFFAIRS—as the frigate cruised past.
Then Fireborn exploded.
It was so sudden that for several long moments the witnesses had no idea what had happened. The arrowhead-shaped frigate, headed for a low Coruscant parking orbit, was abruptly replaced with something resembling a tiny white dwarf star. The fireball swelled out as the crowds staggered back from it, many hundreds of people shielding their eyes. Then, as vision cleared, they stared at the spot where Fireborn had been—the spot where nothing now remained.
Moments later the first pieces of heat-warped debris slammed into the transparisteel viewing walls of the hotel. The huge viewports shuddered, some of them dimpling or actually buckling from the impacts. Atmosphere spilled out into space, not enough immediately to endanger the hotel guests, but decompression alarms shrilled their message of impending disaster, adding to the chaos and confusion of the moment.
Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Conviction Page 17
