Star Wars - Black Fleet Crisis - Shield Of Lies

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  himself retired. He says he's very selective about who he'll do this

  kind of work for."

  "Well--I guess the fact he's on Golkus and not in Tatos backs that up,"

  Luke said, shaking his head. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I did," she said. "Just now."

  "That's a cheat," Luke said.

  "Yes," she said. "The truth is I wasn't ready to trust you with that

  information. I didn't really know whether I might need to hide myself

  from you at some point. I have a lot to protect."

  "But you're ready to trust me now."

  "If I don't trust you, I'm completely alone," she said, a hint of an

  old sorrow in her eyes. "And I can't do that anymore. I never wanted

  to, and now I just can't. I can't hold you out when what I need is to

  be close to someone again."

  "Akanah--" "Secrets are like walls, aren't they? They separate

  people.

  And I've been alone behind these walls for as long as I can bear," she

  said. "I'll teach you to read scribing, Luke. And if you want it, and

  you allow me enough time, I'll teach you the rest. You will become one

  of us in full measure--an adept of the White Current.

  You will finally wa lk your mother's path."

  Luke understood the significance of what he was being offered. "Thank

  you," he said in a voice drawn tight by emotion. "Even the chance that

  I might find her--I want to bring as much of her into my life as I

  can--I want that balance--" "But you still have questions," she

  supplied.

  "Yes."

  "Please don't hold them back because you don't want to seem

  ungrateful.

  Ask them."

  Her words captured the flavor of his reluctance exactly.

  "Is telepathy one of the adept's skills?"

  She laughed lightly. "Are people now so afraid to 'look closely at

  Luke Skywalker that ordinary attentive-ness seems remarkable?"

  Luke's smile was rueful and faintly embarrassed.

  "Perhaps."

  "They should not be," she said. "Now ask me the real question.

  Something else in those reports, I think."

  "Something that wasn't there," he said. "You were right. There wasn't

  a word about the Fallanassi-not on Lucazec, or Teyr, or Coruscant, or

  Atzerri. Not that word."

  "You must wonder whether there really is a circle," she said, "or if

  this is just a fable spun by a lonely mad-woman to lure you away with

  her." She showed a small smile, inviting him to demur.

  "I just expected there to be something. Rumors, myths, legends,

  superstitions---it's hard to understand how a people as powerful as the

  Fallanassi, with as long a history as you've suggested, could leave no

  trace of yourselves!"

  "Because we have made it so," she said quietly.

  "--Or are the traces there, and I don't know the right names to ask

  after-- What did you say?"

  "Because we have made it so," she repeated. "When such traces appear,

  we remove them. But there are not many to remove, because we have not

  made it our purpose to leave a mark."

  Luke nodded slowly. "Not to conquer--not to con-vert--but to find the

  place where one belongs--" "Yes. If you understand that, you

  understand the most important truth of the Current," she said. "If you

  let it, it will carry you to where you need to be, for the lessons you

  need to learn, the work you need to do, and the people who need you in

  their lives."

  Nodding, Luke slid across to the pilot's seat.

  "Speaking of which--we've been sitting here a long time.

  We should get going," he said. "But I need to know where."

  "J't'p'tan," she said. "The world is called J't'p'tan."

  Luke turned away toward the controls. "Well--you've stumped me

  again.

  I'll have to look that one up in the navigation atlas."

  "Luke--" "What?"

  "Isn't there a question you haven't asked?"

  Luke thought for a moment. There were many he still could ask, but the

  urgency had left them. He believed she would answer them all, in their

  turn. "Yes, one," he said finally. "Did you love Andras?"

  "That isn't the question I expected," Akanah said, and bit her lower

  lip. "Yes. I loved him. He held me lightly. He found something in

  me that he thought was beautiful, and he never tried to change me. And

  he was never cruel. It was like being a child--like being a child

  should be. I wish that it could have lasted."

  Curiously, J't'p'tan wasn't in the skiff's navigational database.

  Since the spelling was so odd, he pressed Akanah about it.

  "It isn't a Basic word," she said, calling forward to him from the

  refresher. "It's the Basic transliteration of four mystical glyphs in

  H'kig--'jeh,' the immanent; 'teh,' the transcendent; 'peh,' the

  eternal; and 'tan,' the conscious essence. Only 'tan' may be written

  out in full. The H'kig consider the others too sacred. The spelling I

  gave you is the convention that respects that belief."

  "You could have just said 'I'm sure,'" he said with mock grumpiness.

  "Next time, I will."

  The failure of the skiff to identify their destination forced Luke to

  make a query to Coruscant, and Mud Sloth to linger a while longer near

  the Oort Cloud. When the Astrographical Survey Institute returned the

  requested coordinates, they caused Luke's eyes to widen.

  "A long way," he said, zooming and scrolling the nav chart across the

  primary display. "And we can't go there directly, because that'd put

  us on the wrong side of the Borderlands for the whole middle third of

  the trip."

  "Which would be unsafe, I take it."

  "There are Interdictor patrols all in through there," Luke said. "But

  that's okay, because it's too far to go in one jump anyway. We'd be

  twenty hours over the skiff's endurance. I'm going to have to pick a

  stopping place somewhere along the way." He waggled a finger over one

  section of the map. "Somewhere in here--that'll keep us on the right

  side of the line."

  "I'll leave that decision up to you."

  Luke drew a small square around their destination and zoomed the map in

  to a more familiar scale. Legend marks and other identifiers popped

  into view. "Farlax Sector," he said under his breath.

  "What?"

  "Talking to myself," Luke said. "I'm tired. My mind's already lying

  down in the bunk."

  He zoomed the map another order of magnitude. Not just

  Farlax--Koornacht Cluster, he realized with a troubled frown. Pulling

  the datapad from the tie-down keeper, he brought up the news abstract

  and searched it for J't'p'tan. It was a relief not to find it listed

  among the worlds involved in the fighting.

  Still frowning, Luke next turned to the PIO reports still waiting in

  the message queue. Skimming, he found confirmation for the key element

  in the news reports--some colony worlds within Koornacht had been

  attacked, and their populations exterminated, by the Yevetha. Some

  colonies were given by name, some only by the origin of the

  colonists.

  But J't'p'tan was not mentioned.

  Nor were the H'kig.

  He zoomed the navigation map once more and studied the ge
ography of

  Koornacht Cluster. J't'p'tan lay in the interior, out of scanning

  range for a ship on the edge of the Cluster. If something had happened

  there, Corus-cant might not have any way to know.

  Do I tell her? Do we wait here until we know more, or do we go?

  As he plotted an alternate course--one that would take them as close to

  the border as possible without crossing the line--he allowed himself to

  consider the horrendous possibility that the Yevetha had fallen on

  J't'p'tan and exterminated the Fallanassi. It was possible that he and

  Akanah had set out on their journey too late--by no more than a few

  tens of days. It was possible that Nashira had been alive that short a

  time ago--and was now dead.

  Akanah emerged from the refresher, and Luke pushed the datapad back in

  the keeper as she came forward. I can carry this. I can tolerate this

  uncertainty--she can't, he told himself as he blanked the secondary

  display.

  "We have a good line to Utharis," he said to her. "A Tarrack world,

  just inside the border. We should be able to take care of the skiff

  there with no problems."

  "Have you ever been there?"

  "No," Luke said, sending the coordinates to the autopilot. "You?"

  "No."

  "Can't get a better recommendation than that," Luke said, suddenly

  feeling as tired as he had pretended to a short time before. "When we

  get there, I'll buy you a souvenir hat."

  He did not wait for Akanah to settle in her couch.

  Thumbing the hyperdrive safety and throwing the actuators forward, Luke

  bent time, stretched the stars, and hurled the ship toward Utharis.

  Lying on his back in the bunk, Luke stared up into the mesmerizer that

  covered the bulkhead above the bunk.

  The thin panel offered several holographic depth illusions intended to

  combat shipbound claustrophobia, an array of hypnotic sleep-inducing

  light and color patterns, and several other displays of a purely

  recreational nature. Playing before Luke's eyes was the slowly

  spinning disk of a great spiral-armed galaxy as viewed from outside, a

  thousand light-years above the galactic plane.

  Luke had seen such a sight once before--from the Alliance's medical

  frigate, at the deep rendezvous point they had code-named Haven. The

  sight took him back.

  That had been after the debacle at Hoth, after the escape from

  Bespin.

  He held his right hand, the bionic hand, up before his face and flexed

  the fingers, remembering--trying to remember.

  Even more than leaving Tatooine in the Falcon with Han and Obi-Wan, it

  was his encounter with Vader, there in Cloud City, that divided his

  life into two halves.

  Before that, Luke had been little different from any of the Empire's

  many casual victims--uprooted from his home by Imperial brutality,

  recruited-into the Rebellion more by rage and tragedy than ideology.

  The blaster boltg that killed Owen and Beru had destroyed one future

  and sent him tumbling into another. But it had seemed a matter of

  chance, not destiny.

  His meeting with his father, though, had laid a greater weight on his

  shoulders. Not until he was hanging from the power gantry, hearing the

  voice from behind the black mask speaking unthinkable words, had he

  understood what was being asked of him. Not until then had he known

  that he and no one else could carry that weight. Looking back to that

  moment was looking back to the moment he became himself. Looking back

  beyond that moment was almost impossible.

  You can hardly see twenty-one from thirty-four, he thought.

  The soft click of the curtain release interrupted his introspection. A

  moment later, Akanah slid the sections apart.

  "Somehow I knew you were still awake," she said, showing that now

  familiar quick smile. "What did I leave you wondering about?"

  He shook his head. "I was just thinking about when I stopped being a

  kid. And how long ago it seems."

  "What if you live to be as old as Yoda?"

  He smiled ruefully. "Then I'll probably laugh at myself for feeling

  the way I feel right now."

  "It's not the time. It's the responsibility," she said, and the smile

  left her eyes. "Luke--I'm sorry to intrude on you this way. But there

  was something I didn't tell you, and should have. And I didn't feel

  right letting it wait."

  Luke sat up far enough to prop himself up on his elbows. "Okay."

  She sat down on the wide sill at the edge of the bunk where the curtain

  track ran. "Even though I held back some things you might wish I'd

  told you, I've tried to always tell you the truth," she said. "But I

  did lie to you about Atzerri."

  Luke sat up a little farther. "Oh?"

  "I took you to Atzerri under false pretenses," Akanah said. "The

  circle was never there. You were right about Star Morning. The

  writing at Teyr said to go to J't'p'tan."

  "Then why?"

  "I had to," she said. "I had to try to find my father."

  Luke looked hard at her for long seconds, but his words were

  surprisingly soft. "Did you think I wouldn't understand?"

  "I was afraid of what I might find," she said, dropping her eyes. "I

  was afraid of what you might think of me if my father turned out to be

  someone even I can't respect."

  "Well--I understand that, too," Luke said. "I think Leia's been afraid

  to look for our mother. Maybe if I were Leia, I would be, too."

  "Why?"

  Luke considered for a moment before answering "Her. memories of our

  mother--few as they are, and little as they've told us--are very

  precious to her. They're a child's memories, innocent, idyllic. And

  she's protecting them."

  "Protecting them? From what?"

  "Reality," Luke said. "There's nothing Leia could possibly learn about

  Mother that could improve on those memories--and a lot she could learn

  that could damage them. Leia's never had to consider our mother in her

  full complexity. What kind of relationship did she have with Vader?

  Why did she have his children? Why did she give us up? When you start

  letting yourself ask questions like those, you risk getting an answer

  you don't like."

  "But it's different for you?"

  "I don't have any memories to protect," he said, with a hint of wistful

  regret in his voice. "I just want to know who I come from what else I

  carry inside me. I'm not as worried about being disappointed." He

  smiled wryly. "Though if I discovered that Mother had something to do

  with turning Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader--" "Oh, no," Akanah

  said, looking up and touching his hand reassuringly. "I promise

  you--Nashira is nothing like that. Please believe me."

  He nodded. "I do."

  "That's so important to me--and I'm afraid I've destroyed it," she

  said, her voice quivering with anguish. "I didn't want you to have any

  reason to doubt me, any reason to question coming with me." She smiled

  sadly.

  "So, of course, I lied to you. I'm so sorry, Luke. I knew better. I

  knew I would never be able to deceive you."

  Luke folded his fingers around hers and
squeezed.

  "Did you find him?"

  "Yes," she said, and her eyes began to glisten. "In a way, I did. I

  found him in Trasli District. He's the very minor chief of a shabby

  little tribe, puffed up with flattery and brain-burned on Rokna blue.

  He didn't remember my mother. He didn't know he had a daughter." She

  bravely tried a smile. "These little pieces of us that others hold

  inside them--some know their value, and others are careless with

  them.

  When you find Nashira, I know that she will have more to give you than

  Joreb Goss did me."

  "You didn't have much time," Luke said. "You can go back." one else

  lives in his body. I will never speak to that person again."

  Luke could tell that her composure at that moment was simply an

  exercise of will. There was a tremble in her hand, her eyes were

  tear-bright with loss, and her skin was hot with her misery. But she

  would not let herself ask him for anything but forgiveness.

  "I understand that, too," he said gently. "I know how that feels, to