“You’re to be taken to see the prisoner,” he replied. “As requested.”
There was derision in his tone, but it was all bluster and show. He knew that Jaina had the upper hand in this situation.
Her smile widened. It never hurt to boost respect for Jedi on outlying worlds, and respect wasn’t always earned at the end of a lightsaber.
She offered a polite bow of her head in the direction of the droids, knowing that whoever had authorized her would no doubt be watching. There would be no further need for any aggressive posturing this evening—not unless she was provoked, of course. “I apologize for this inconvenience. The sooner I can see Malinza Thanas, the sooner I can be out of your hair.”
Her senses finely attuned for any sign of deception, she let herself be shepherded by the four guards deep into the heart of the penitentiary. The high-security wing was identical to the regular wings except for G-2RD droids stationed at every junction. They hummed menacingly when she passed, as though warning her not to try the same tricks she had employed on their fellow sentries. She tried to memorize every turn and corridor as she went, but it wasn’t easy. They all looked the same to her, and the cell numbers didn’t seem to follow any particular pattern.
Finally they arrived at Cell 12-17. The door looked like all the others they’d passed along the way: sterile white with no window or openings. One of the lead guards keyed a short code into a keypad, then stepped back as the cell door slid open with a dull grinding sound.
Inside, on a narrow cot, sat a thin, dark-haired girl of about fifteen years. Despite the gray prison uniform and the bruises to her face and arms, she still had a defiant look about her—but there was also exhaustion behind that defiance.
“What now?” the girl asked.
“A visitor,” the first guard said, motioning Jaina to enter. He indicated a green touchpad by the door. “When you’re done, just hit the CALL button.”
“Kinda late for visitors, isn’t it?” Malinza said, looking Jaina over suspiciously.
Jaina stepped into the brightly lit cell. “My name is Jaina Solo,” she said as the door closed behind her. She examined the girl quickly, wondering what sort of treatment she’d been subjected to.
Malinza’s sharply defined face tilted upward. She studied Jaina for a moment before nodding. “Uncle Luke has spoken about you. He once showed me a holo of you and Jacen when you were little.”
Jaina felt an unaccountable stab of jealousy at the girl’s words. Uncle Luke? Who was this girl she’d never met, claiming Jaina’s uncle as her own?
Indignation quickly gave way to understanding, however, when she remembered that Malinza was Luke’s sponsor daughter. With both her parents dead—Gaeriel Captison, former Prime Minister of Bakura, had sacrificed her life to destroy a large chunk of the troublesome Sacorrian Triad, while Pter Thanas died of Knowt’s disease some years earlier—Luke Skywalker was probably the closest thing she had to family. What right did Jaina have to deny the girl that?
“I wish we could have met under better circumstances,” she said, moving deeper into the small room, close to the girl. She gestured to the bunk. “May I?”
“You sure picked a bad time to visit,” Malinza said as she moved to make room for Jaina to sit down.
“Want to tell me about it?”
Malinza studied Jaina with a maturity that was at odds with her age. Her gaze was piercing, made even more disconcerting by the fact that her eyes were different colors. Her left iris was green, her right gray.
Just as her mother’s had been, Jaina thought.
For a long moment it seemed as though Malinza wasn’t ever going to reply to Jaina’s question.
“You know why I’m in here,” she said after a while.
“You’ve been charged with kidnapping the Prime Minister.”
“Actually, the official charge is disturbing the peace and conspiracy.”
“Doesn’t it amount to the same thing?”
Malinza shook her head. “The difference is an important one, actually.”
“Why? Now that Cundertol has returned—”
“I had nothing to do with him,” Malinza interrupted. “But the rest is true enough.”
“Sorry, but I find it hard to picture you as a disturber of the peace.”
Malinza smiled faintly at Jaina’s comment as she held out her arms to display the bruises. “Look at me,” she said. “If they wanted to beat me, there are ways they could have done it without leaving any marks. I earned these while resisting arrest. It took three of them, as well as two droids, to bring me down.”
Her expression held a burning pride, but it failed to hide the terrible weariness that Jaina recognized all too clearly. She remembered that feeling from when Anakin had died: of there being nothing left to lose; of desperation; of despair. It was so easy to mistake the signs of self-destruction for battle scars.
“What are you fighting for?” Jaina asked.
“That’s the strange thing. A week ago, I wasn’t fighting at all.” Malinza’s defiance dissolved altogether then, and became a look of genuine bemusement. “You’ve no idea what you’ve just stepped into. I tell you, it’s crazy around here.”
“In what way, Malinza?” Jaina leaned in closer to encourage a feeling of trust.
The girl chuckled. “That I’d even think about telling you is probably the craziest thing of all,” she said, slumping back against the wall. “If anyone here is the enemy, it’s you.”
Jaina frowned but said nothing, sensing that there was no point pushing. It would come or it wouldn’t.
After more than a dozen heartbeats, Malinza sighed. “Whatever. It’s not as if I haven’t tried to tell everyone here already.”
“They don’t believe you?”
“Why else do you think I’m in here?” The girl pointed at where a security cam watched them. “I guess it couldn’t hurt for them to hear it one more time. And who knows: they might even listen this time.”
“And even if they don’t,” Jaina said, “you can be assured that I will.”
Malinza smiled and nodded. “Okay,” she said, leaning forward again to begin her story. “About a month ago I was in charge of a cell of activists, capitalizing on my parents’ reputations to get our message heard. There were sixteen of us in all. At first we just organized protests, spread the word—but it’s grown much more over time. We called ourselves Freedom.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s lame, I know, but it gets the point across.”
“And what point is that?”
“That we’re tired of kowtowing to Imperial doctrines, of course. It’s time for us to throw off our shackles and govern ourselves.”
“Imperial?” Jaina echoed, confused. It had been almost thirty years since the Imperial presence had been repelled from Bakura.
“Not the Empire,” Malinza explained. “The thing that took its place: the New Republic. Don’t you know that nature abhors a vacuum? Especially a power vacuum. No sooner had we won our freedom than we held out our wrists to be shackled again. We offered ourselves up to the New Republic like pets begging for a scrap of affection. And that’s all we got, too: scraps.”
Jaina winced at the description of the government her parents had helped create.
“Of course, you don’t call it the New Republic anymore, do you? It’s been given a new name ever since it lost its war against the Yuuzhan Vong.” Malinza snorted derisively. “No one wants to be associated with losers, do they? Therefore, your only hope of fighting back was to pretend to be something else. But cratsch droppings by any other name still stink, don’t you think?” She shook her head and looked away. “If you do beat the Yuuzhan Vong, you’ll just chain everyone up like before. And if you lose, you’ll drag everyone else down with you.”
“It’s not like that.”
“No? You’ll probably tell me that we’ll all die unless we band together to defeat the common enemy. But there’s always a common enemy, Jaina. Oppressive regimes don’t function without them.
The Empire had its Rebel Alliance; once, we had the Ssi-ruuk; and right now, you have the Yuuzhan Vong. Who will it be next time you feel the cracks spreading?”
“I’ll be happy just to reach the next time,” Jaina said. “But tell me, Malinza, what would happen if we did lose this war? What would you do if the Yuuzhan Vong turned up on your doorstep and we weren’t there to help you, like we did with the Ssi-ruuk?”
“We’d fight them, of course,” the girl said simply. “And yes, we would probably all die in the process. But it would be our decision, not one made by some faceless bureaucrat on the other side of the galaxy.”
“Is that really the issue, Malinza? Does it really boil down to who controls you? Or who makes the decisions for you?”
“Of course it does!”
“I don’t recall the New Republic ever demanding anything of Bakura. You were always asked.”
“And we always said yes. I know that. That galls me more than you could possibly understand. While we abased ourselves before the New Republic, it was happy in return to steal our defense fleet, our families—”
Malinza stopped there, leaning back heavily against the wall with a troubled, weary sigh. Jaina was relieved to see tears in the girl’s eyes. She had already guessed what lay at the heart of Malinza’s dislike of the New Republic, no matter how she dressed it up in rhetoric. Behind her stoic defiance, she was still just a fifteen-year-old girl. One pushed into defying a government she regarded as being oppressive, forced to learn skills no teenager should have had to know—but still only fifteen. That she had risen above that disadvantage spoke volumes about her ability and her determination. She had taken the example of her adopted uncle to heart, it seemed.
Jaina herself hadn’t been much older when the war with the Yuuzhan Vong had broken out. People were capable of extraordinary things when circumstances demanded it, she reflected.
“I’m sorry about your mother, Malinza,” Jaina said, putting a hand on the girl’s shoulder. It wasn’t pushed away. “I met her briefly at Centerpoint before she died, but I was just a kid then. I know Uncle Luke held her in very high regard.”
“I barely remember her,” Malinza said, trying to be casual as she knuckled away the tears she was fighting. “I recall her leaving, and my aunt trying to explain what had happened when she didn’t come back, but I was only four years old, and I never really understood. I just knew who had taken her from us. The New Republic dragged her into a war she wasn’t part of, and she gave her life to save others. She did a very good thing, and I suffered because of it.” She shrugged helplessly. “I guess the universe found its balance, as it always does. It’s just that in this instance I was on the receiving end, that’s all.”
“Balance?” asked Jaina. “What do you mean?”
“Cosmic Balance. The wheel of fate, you know?” She shifted her position on the bunk so she was facing Jaina fully. “Every action causes a reaction. A great force for good can’t exist without there also being a counterbalancing force for evil, somewhere. In the same way, good works lead to evil results for someone else, quite unintentionally. It’s just how the universe works, and the Force, too. Save someone on Bakura today and you might kill another later. That’s why I don’t want this Alliance of yours here. It’s too dangerous. I have no desire to see my home get caught in friendly fire.”
“So you want no part in the Galactic Alliance and the war against the Yuuzhan Vong. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Don’t get me wrong, Jaina. I have nothing against Uncle Luke. Apart from Aunt Laera, who raised me after Mom died, he’s the only family I have left. Dad died not long after I was born, so I never got to know him. If I should side with anyone, it would be you. It’s only my fear of the backlash from the Balance that stops me.”
“So how does kidnapping Cundertol help you, then? He’s all for an alliance with the P’w’eck. They’d make viable alternatives to the Galactic Alliance and give you a fighting chance of defending Bakura against a Yuuzhan Vong attack.”
“Exactly!” she said. “That’s why it makes no sense for me to have kidnapped Cundertol in the first place.”
“But you could have ordered it—”
“No,” Malinza cut in firmly. “I didn’t. Just because I’m young doesn’t make me automatically stupid!”
“I’m not saying—”
“Maybe not, but you’re still listening to what they’re telling you—and they’re telling you that I’m stupid.” A humorless laugh broke her somber mood. “Then again, to have attempted a stunt like that, perhaps they’re right.”
“You’re not stupid, Malinza,” Jaina tried to reassure her, but the girl didn’t seem to hear.
“I keep trying to explain that the goal of Freedom is simply to kick the New Republic off Bakura. We don’t use violence, and we certainly don’t kidnap people. Call us idealistic if you want, but we do have principles. The last thing we want to see is the old regime replaced with one equally as bad.”
Jaina’s mind boggled at the thought of sixteen people attempting to take on a galactic civilization. It smacked of either madness or incredible bravery.
“How did you ever hope to succeed?”
“Ah, well, there’s the thing,” Malinza answered with a half smile. “You see, we had some funding from private sources, and with that money we were able to dig deep into the infrastructure, looking for things that might assist us: evidence of corruption, brutality, nepotism, and so on. You’d be surprised what we turned up.”
Jaina seriously doubted that; she’d heard plenty about dodgy politicians over the years from her mother. “Who funded you?”
“They would consider that private, I’m sure,” Malinza said firmly. “Especially where you are concerned.”
Jaina respected Malinza’s reticence on the matter, but quietly suspected that the Peace Brigade might have been involved at some point in the past. Such an underground organization would be just the thing for stirring up dissent. “You say you’re not into violence, Malinza, but what about the others?”
“None of the sixteen core members of Freedom was into violence. It wasn’t our style. But …”
“But?”
“Well, there were others who joined us,” she said.
“And it’s possible that they might have had violent intentions. In fact, with some of them I’d have to say that violence was high on their agenda. But we didn’t encourage them to stay.”
“So who else would join?”
“All sorts, really. Not all of Freedom’s actions were covert; we had a recruiting front and our policies were well known. This is a democracy, right? Or it’s supposed to be. Some of our members were bored with their everyday lives and were looking for excitement. Sometimes we’d get people coming over from similar underground movements.” She shrugged. “Ever since the P’w’eck arrived, we’ve attracted all sorts of malcontents.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, for one thing, my involvement in Freedom was never a secret, and I have some sort of profile with the media because my mother was once prime minister. We’ve had cranks trying to come along for the ride since we started, but they’ve always been easy to weed out. Until recently, anyway.” She looked down at her lap. “It was getting hard to control, to be honest. The anti-P’w’eck movement made it clear that if we weren’t with them, then we were against them. As I said, I’m not a xenophobe; I think the P’w’eck could be a good thing for Bakura. I don’t want to be against anyone, really, because that makes them against me. The Balance kicks back just as hard as we lash out. And trust me, I have no desire to get kicked again.”
“I think I’m starting to understand that,” Jaina said. And she was. She didn’t necessarily believe everything Malinza had said, but she also didn’t believe that the girl was the sort to order kidnappings and murders to further her cause. “So why do you really think you’re in here, then?” she added.
“We were too good at what we did,” Malinza said. “We were making too
many inroads. We’d uncovered some dirt on a few Senators and threatened to go public with the information.”
“Blackmail?”
“Is it blackmail if you’re acting in the public’s best interests?” Malinza shrugged. “Whatever. They were getting nervous, but they couldn’t put us away without whipping up an even bigger storm. We hadn’t done anything really wrong, you see. It would have been difficult for them to incarcerate us for very long, because once we made their secrets known then public sympathy would have been on our side. So we reached a kind of impasse, I guess. It was only a matter of waiting to see who snapped first.”
“During which time you kept digging for more dirt, I presume,” Jaina said. “Which means that if they don’t genuinely think you kidnapped Cundertol, then you must have uncovered something new that they very much wanted kept quiet.”
“If we did, then I honestly have no idea what it could’ve been.” Malinza shook her head again. “We were tracing some financial deal that went through just after the P’w’eck arrived. An awful lot of money went offworld, but we couldn’t work out who was behind it or where it was going. It looked like some sort of commercial transaction, and may well have been just that. The fact that the endpoints had been obscured made us wonder.” She looked at Jaina, eyes narrowed slightly. “Your Galactic Alliance isn’t looking for money now, is it?”
“No. Not from Bakura, anyway.” Taking money from Bakura would have been like taking small change from a child in order to finance a starship purchase. “It could have been legit, as you say.”
Malinza nodded, taking in the confines of the cell with one sweeping gesture. “Nevertheless, here I am.” She paused, fixing Jaina with a sober stare. “I’m not responsible for Cundertol’s kidnapping, I swear. But that’s not going to stop the people behind this. They never let the truth get in the way of what they want.”
“If you didn’t do it, they won’t be able to make the charges stick.”
Malinza laughed. “You’re assuming I’m going to get a fair trial.” She shook her head. “There’s bound to be circumstantial evidence.”
Refugee: Force Heretic II Page 13
