Exile

by Aaron Allston

  “No, Daddy.” Kiara hurled herself onto her father’s chest. “He hurt you.”

  “He just knocked me down. I was already hurt. The starfighter hurt me.”

  Uncomfortable with the exchange, with what was coming, Ben interrupted. “Why did you steal the Amulet of Kalara?”

  Faskus looked at him, confused. “I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did. From an office building on Drewwa.”

  “Drewwa is where they gave it to me, yes. That’s where I live and work.”

  “I thought you were from Ziost.”

  Faskus shook his head, not an energetic move. “I’m from Almania. I’m a courier.”

  “Who gave the amulet to you?”

  “A Bothan. Named Dyur. He told me to bring it here. To land at specific coordinates and carry the amulet to a nearby cave. To come alone.” He laughed, one short bark that ended in a gasp of pain. “I’m sorry, Kiara. I wish I had. I’m so sorry.”

  “And you were strafed?” Ben asked.

  Faskus nodded. “I was partway to the cave when I heard the engine roar. I ran back to the Blacktooth. They were firing on it, a TIE fighter. Kiara was still inside. I had to reach her …”

  Ben didn’t need to ask anything more. The rest of the story was clear to him. Faskus has gotten his daughter clear of the transport, but some calamity, an explosion perhaps, had sent a shard of durasteel into his guts.

  And killed him. Slowly.

  “Please.” His voice was weak, wavering. “Untie my hands. So I can hold her.”

  Ben thought it over, then nodded. Using Faskus’s own vibroblade, he cut the bonds on the man’s hands.

  Then, while Kiara sobbed and Faskus spoke soothingly to her, in ever-quieter tones, Ben began to break down the man’s camp and inventory his goods.

  And to think.

  I have the amulet and it can’t be used against me. This stage of his mission was accomplished; Ben could check it off his list. Now he needed to find a way to get offplanet, or at least to send a signal to Jacen.

  If Faskus, or whatever his real name might be, didn’t steal the amulet, who did? Dyur, whoever he was. And Dyur had framed Faskus by leaving the note behind. But why would Dyur give Faskus the real amulet to bury in a cave? This had to be the real thing; up close, it reeked of dark side energy and the creepy happiness that had allowed Ben to follow it. Something did not add up.

  Ben counted six oversized blankets, one of them slightly damaged by his lightsaber; several wooden poles being used as tent poles; four durasteel spikes anchoring the tent to the ground; three blasters and a vibroblade, each one with extra power packs; food rations, possibly as much as a week’s worth; a quantity of cord; the backpack; the contents of Faskus’s pouch, including a datapad, numerous credcoins, credcards, data cards, and identicards; and the man’s clothes, if he wanted them. But he didn’t. He carefully broke down the tent, exposing the girl and her father to the first snowfall of the day, and folded all the blankets except the ones constituting the floor, on which Faskus and Kiara still lay. Faskus’s eyes were still open, but he no longer spoke, and Ben could not feel him through the Force.

  The astromech came waddling down from its position of concealment as Ben began dividing all his new goods between his own pack and the larger backpack Faskus had made. “Good news, Shaker,” Ben said. “Several power packs. If you have adapters, we can keep you going for a long time.”

  But Shaker’s response didn’t sound happy. The droid kept its optics trained on Kiara and Faskus, trilling a discordant note.

  “Yeah,” Ben said. “It’s said.”

  Even sadder was what he’d have to do in a minute. But his duty was clear. He had to get the amulet to Jacen. And that meant not taking chances with his resources.

  He thought about asking Kiara to move so he could claim the final two blankets, but decided that such a request was unnecessary. Four blankets would be enough for just him.

  He spent a few minutes using more cord to tie the big backpack to Shaker’s dome, and then he began walking.

  He didn’t hear Shaker following. He turned to see the R2 still in place. Its optic sensor glided back and forth, staring first at him, then at Kiara. “C’mon, Shaker.”

  The astromech began waddling in his direction. Ben imagined that he could sense reluctance in its pace, but he pushed the thought away. Shaker had never met these people before, and therefore it could not care about them.

  “Hey!” Kiara sat up. Snow was accumulating in her hair, and tears were freezing to her cheeks. “You can’t go. Daddy said you were going to take care of us.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ben said. “But I didn’t say I would.”

  “You can’t leave him! The animals will eat him!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Turning his back on the girl a second time took an act of will, but recognition of his duty gave him the strength to do it. He began walking again, slowly, and Shaker followed.

  The droid trilled, a long and complicated communication. Ben opened his datapad, and it had received Shaker’s message:

  WHAT IS OUR DESTINATION?

  “I had a look at Faskus’s datapad.” Ben tapped his pouch to reassure himself that the ’pad was still there. “There’s information on Ziost that I don’t have. Like the coordinates where he was supposed to set down, the cave where he was supposed to leave the amulet—I guess he abandoned that part of the plan after he got hurt—and a lot of locations marked RUINS. I bet that wherever there are ruins, there’s stuff to find. Maybe even people. Maybe even the base that TIE fighter is from. We’re headed for the nearest ruins site. I bet Faskus was, too.”

  WHY ARE YOU LEAVING THE GIRL BEHIND?

  That caused Ben’s stomach to knot up again. “Because if she’s with us, we’ll go through our resources faster, like our food. And we might not get to where we need to go. Our mission is more important than her life.”

  IS THE MISSION MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOUR LIFE, TOO?

  Ben thought about it for fifty meters of travel. “Yes.”

  THEN TELL ME YOUR MISSION SO THAT IF YOU FALTER I CAN ABANDON YOU AND COMPLETE IT.

  Ben turned and round-kicked the astromech in its dome. Shaker squawked and fell over. But the bindings Ben had used to lash the big backpack in place did not loosen. “Shut up, you, you walking hot plate. If you didn’t have a few useful systems to go along with that malfunctioning droid brain of yours, I’d leave you, too.”

  Shaker didn’t offer a response. It didn’t try to right itself.

  Ben forced himself to calm down. He’d wait until he was sure he didn’t need the astromech anymore, then he’d crush it in a vise or throw it out an upper-story viewport.

  No, that made no sense. It was valuable property. He could sell it for passage to another planet, if he could find someone willing to take him.

  With a sigh, he righted the astromech, then continued walking.

  * * *

  An hour later, as they crossed a lightly forested ridgeline, Ben’s datapad beeped. But Shaker hadn’t made any noise indicating he was trying to communicate. Ben stopped and opened his datapad.

  Images of his parents swam into focus on its diminutive screen. They were both smiling.

  “Ben,” Mara said. “In case you hadn’t noticed—you’re fourteen!”

  “Congratulations on another birthday,” Luke said. “So whatever torture your teachers, including me, had in store for you today—forget it. Report to me for some birthday credits, and the rest of the day is yours to enjoy.”

  Their images faded to blackness.

  Shaker came up behind Ben and waited with a droid’s patience.

  Oddly, Ben felt as though there were nothing inside him, as if he had suddenly become a Ben-shaped balloon filled with gas. Gas could not think, and neither could he, for a long moment.

  They had to have recorded this shortly before he started this mission.

  “Hi, Mom,” he said. “Hi, Dad. For my fourteenth birthday, I killed a little
girl.”

  He sat down, his lower back resting against the astro-mech. He leaned forward, wrapping his arms around his knees.

  And he began to cry.

  Kiara stabbed at the ground with the knife. It was an eating utensil, not a vibroblade, and when it hit the ground, it made a ringing noise. Sometimes it scraped away a little of the ice-hard soil. Sometimes it didn’t. After more than an hour of digging, punctuated by fits of sobbing, she had dug a hole a little larger than her hand.

  But she’d keep digging. Her father was dead, and she had to put him in the ground so the animals wouldn’t come and eat him.

  Through the snowfall, she could see that there were booted feet in front of her. She looked up into the face of Ben Skywalker. The waddling astromech was entering the clearing from the far edge.

  Ben didn’t say anything for a few moments. Then he took a look around. “I think,” he said, “we need to wrap him in one of the blankets, then pile rocks on top of him. That will keep the animals away.”

  “They won’t eat him?”

  “They won’t eat him. I’ll wrap him up and find the rocks. You put the other blanket around you and go sit with Shaker.”

  Kiara did as she was told. Her tears didn’t stop flowing, but now she knew her father would be safe under the rocks.

  chapter sixteen

  CORUSCANT

  The weeks after the military disaster at Corellia did not argue for a quick resolution to the conflict.

  Fondor, a world well known for its orbital shipyards—a world whose economy had been chafing under Galactic Alliance military production restrictions—announced its resignation from the Alliance and signed articles of friendship with Corellia and her allies. It was just one more world, increasing the size of the Confederation—no longer being referred to as the Corellian Confederation, at the indignant insistence of Bothawui and Commenor—from three systems to four. But of those four systems, two, Corellia and Fondor, possessed ship construction yards that were critical to Alliance military development. Fondor’s loss lit up the holonews services. Soon after, Bespin, with its crucial production facilities for Tibanna gas, and Adumar, with its munitions industry, also joined the Confederation.

  And other worlds were wavering. The worlds of Hutt space made no secret of their preference for the Confederation—or of their willingness to remain staunch, warm friends of the Alliance, so long as they received special trade and aid privileges that would pour wealth into their accounts. Several planets of the Imperial Remnant, long uncomfortable with being part of the Alliance, suggested that they favored the Confederation, but the Moff Council continued to abide by its treaties with the Alliance. Grand Admiral Pellaeon, recently retired and returned to the world of Bastion, participating in the ongoing process of rebuilding and repopulating the Imperial throneworld, spoke openly and often of the Empire’s need to remain associated with the Alliance.

  During these weeks there were only sporadic clashes between the Alliance and the Confederation. Admiral Limpan’s task force at Corellia made frequent raids against the Corellian shipyards, the still-intact Centerpoint Station, and industrial facilities on the other worlds allied with Corellia, though these were largely inconclusive. The Confederation forces in the Bothawui system succeeded, with minimal effort, in driving Alliance observation vehicles into retreat.

  Neither side pressed an assault. The Confederation worlds sat back, tightened their defenses, sent diplomats with offers of friendship to scores of systems, and cranked up their ship production to epic levels. The Alliance brought military forces back from distant stations and patrols, gathered information, and enhanced security. Mostly the war was fought in the news feeds, with analysts predicting where the next major action would be fought, who would start it, and how it would end.

  Admiral Matric Klauskin, recently vanished from a hospital on Coruscant, turned up on his homeworld of Commenor. His handlers transmitted to Coruscant the resignation of his commission with the Galactic Alliance military. At a dinner on Commenor, he was recognized as a hero of his planet and was ceremoniously retired. He was not observed to speak much during the celebration, and close observers described him as unresponsive and glassyeyed.

  GALACTIC ALLIANCE MILITARY HEADQUARTERS SENIOR OFFICERS’ BRIEFING ROOM

  “The so-called Chasin Document,” said General Tycho Celchu, “is authentic.” A tall, elegantly handsome man with blond hair frosting to white, he radiated confidence and competence.

  Admiral Niathal was not concerned with what the human military analyst radiated. Her eyes vibrated with her agitation. “It can’t be, General. We had no plans to invade Commenor.”

  “Yes, we did,” Tycho assured her. “Thirty years ago.”

  That settled Niathal a bit, piquing her curiosity. The statement obviously had the same effect on the other senior officers present; Niathal heard muttering from up and down the long table. “Please continue,” she said, cutting off the side conversations.

  “Back when the Rebel Alliance was mounting its campaign for the liberation of crucial planetary systems of the Empire,” Tycho said, “General Garm Bel Iblis drew up a number of plans for individual systems. The Chasin Document, recently obtained for us by Intelligence, is a revision of Bel Iblis’s Operation Blue Plug. Blue Plug was never launched, because Commenor voluntarily ousted its Imperial governor a few months after Coruscant fell to us.”

  “Were the details of Operation Blue Plug ever made public?” Niathal asked.

  Tycho shook his head. “No, they’ve been classified top secret for decades. Classified, and forgotten, owing to their irrelevance. I wasn’t aware of them. But when I began doing my analysis of the Chasin Document, I was struck by how thoroughly it resembled General Bel Iblis’s preferred logistical patterns. At first I thought it must have been drawn up by a student of the general’s … but then it occurred to me that the plan made no provisions for the use of the most modern classes of ships, and that made me suspicious. So I went looking through the records.”

  “I see. And do we have any indication of how the original plan fell into the hands of someone who might revise it and pass it off to the Commenorians?”

  “Yes.” A touch of dismay was visible through Tycho’s controlled manner. “Our security has been compromised. An analysis of the data banks where that file was stored indicated that the only times it had been accessed in recent years was when automated backup programming refreshed it and compared it with static stored copies. Military programmers could find no other signs of intrusion, so I requested assistance from Intelligence, which revealed the method used—”

  Murmurs from other active-duty officers cut him off. Tycho glanced impassively around the table. Niathal knew the general was in disfavor with his colleagues for bringing in an outsider. She, too, regretted that General Celchu had exposed a security flaw to outsiders, but she also applauded the fact that he’d solved the problem. “By Intelligence in this case,” Niathal said, “you mean your wife.”

  “Yes.” Tycho’s wife, Winter, was a longtime operative. She’d been a field agent back when the New Republic had been an ideal rather than a reality. She had helped rear the Alliance’s most popular son, Jacen Solo. Solo was one of the officers at the table, and he listened dispassionately, not reacting when Winter was mentioned.

  Tycho continued, “Winter discovered that the backup code had been replaced. It was still doing its job, but it was additionally sending those files to an off-site location. Once we knew what to look for, we found similar programs backing up other banks of data. This programming was self-replicating and could have spread itself through our entire military network, but we caught it in time. It had accessed only older files and some ordnance inventories.”

  “And your actions?”

  “We scrubbed the malignant code and turned over pertinent details to Military Intelligence, Galactic Alliance Intelligence, and the Galactic Alliance Guard. We could have used their intrusion for disinformation purposes, but this would hav
e been a massive undertaking—the enemy would presumably have noticed if their code had stopped spreading through our network, so maintaining the secret would have called for building an entire second network, full of a combination of false data and noncritical genuine data, and updating it at the same rate the real network is updated.”

  Niathal nodded. Such an operation was possible to execute, but it would have been a tremendous drain on resources. “Do we know how our systems were violated?”

  “In part,” Tycho said. “Verifiable records suggest that the initial code slicing took place during a routine data inquiry using a GAG passcode.”

  That did get Jacen’s attention. “Ridiculous,” he said.

  Tycho regarded him steadily. “But verifiable.”

  “No one with access at a high enough level to make significant requests of the military network is a security risk.” Jacen kept his voice hard. “In addition to all the security measures we employ, I’m a Jedi. It would be next to impossible for one of my senior officers to deceive me that way.”

  “Next to impossible,” Tycho said, “isn’t impossible.”

  “Give me the passcode,” Jacen snapped.

  Reciting from memory, Tycho said, “Three seven nine aitch oh ell forty-four underscore bee nine two one.”

  Jacen whipped out his datapad and accessed a file. He scrolled through it for a few moments. Then his expression went from merely angry to angry and confused. “Unassigned,” he said. “Toward the bottom of the unassigned list.”

  “I suggest,” Niathal said, “that you run checks on the other unassigned codes to be sure they haven’t been used, as well.”

  Jacen snapped the datapad shut. “I’ll do that.”

  “And report your findings.”

  “Yes, Admiral.” Clearly furious, Jacen turned away and avoided eye contact.

  “Is there anything else?” Niathal asked.

  “Yes.” The speaker was a dark-skinned, dark-haired woman dressed in somber civilian dress rather than in uniform. She was Belindi Kalenda, the Galactic Alliance’s director of intelligence since the end of the Yuuzhan Vong war. “I have one item pertaining to the military. Information has reached me suggesting that the Confederation is experiencing growing pains—an increased difficulty, as more planets join, with coordinating their respective military forces.”