Outcast

by Aaron Allston

  “They tricked us, Master Skywalker, and I’m feeling rather foolish at being tricked. We didn’t look beyond the rumors that this was all about you leading the Jedi out of the Alliance camp and waging a private war on Colonel Solo two years ago.”

  “It’s not about that?”

  Nawara shook his head. “The government is actually asserting that, in not recognizing Jacen Solo’s degenerative moral and ethical changes—the only way they can say ‘descent to the dark side’ in legalese—you were derelict in your duty as the Jedi Grand Master and were partly responsible for every consequence of his subsequent abuse of power. In other words, a share of every death, every act of torture, every butchered legal right, every military excess performed by the Galactic Alliance in the last war is being laid at your feet.”

  Luke felt the air go out of his lungs. He sat down. “You’re not serious.”

  “As serious as death.” Nawara frowned, deepening the shadow cast by his brow. “I’m certain they’re holding back a related charge of treason as a negotiating point. The maximum possible sentence for that is, of course, death.”

  Luke drew in and then let out a deep breath of hurt. He had to acknowledge that some part of the accusation was valid—he should have consciously recognized Jacen’s excesses long before he had. That he had not, that almost no one in his immediate circle had done so, was a tribute to the power of self-deception and denial.

  Of course, others had recognized Jacen’s fall earlier. Ben, whom Luke had not listened to. Luke’s wife, Mara, who had kept her own counsel … and had died in doing so. If there was any death Luke bore partial blame for due to his refusal to accept reality, it was hers. While his grief had receded from everyday life, the pain still arose at unexpected moments to stab him in the heart. It was almost a physical pain, like a punch to the gut. He took another deep breath.

  Nawara dragged the other piece of furniture, a skeletal metal chair, forward and sat backward on it, resting his arms atop the back. “We can beat this charge, too. It will be harder than the fight we were anticipating. It will require a considerable amount of mud slinging. Everyone associated with Jacen bears the same responsibility, meaning a lot of people in the wartime government, yet they’re not being charged. We can demonstrate that you’re being singled out because you’re a Jedi. Because you’re the face of the Jedi Order.”

  “Is that the truth? Is that why I’m being charged?”

  “As far as I can tell from the hints I’ve picked up since your arrest, from the favors I called in while waiting to see you, it is.”

  “Explain that.”

  Nawara considered his words. “You must understand, I appreciate the Jedi. What you do, what you risk, what you accomplish. But not everybody does. You’re unpredictable. From a military point of view, which I also understand, you’re conceivably the most irritating force in the galaxy.”

  That brought a brief smile to Luke’s face. “True.” He nodded, unrepentant. “We have a sort of loose alliance with chains of command and legal precedent. Following orders is not as important as achieving goals.”

  “The Alliance’s military and ex-military leaders intensely dislike a resource they know they can’t control completely.”

  “So is the military behind this, or Daala?”

  “The Chief of State, but many in the military support her.” Nawara paused as if reluctant to continue. “They can actually win this legal war even if we stomp them to pieces in some of the battles. If we mount a successful legal defense, so much dirt gets spread around that the Jedi lose a lot of public and government support—compared with what you get if the Jedi and the government suddenly decide to work hand in hand again. Or perhaps they have a case that’s too strong for us. On the one hand, they might offer you a bargain: go free and manage the Jedi under their terms. On the other hand, they might just convict. Then you go to prison … or do what they’d prefer you to, run off into hiding and prove your unreliability and criminal nature.”

  Luke leaned back against the bars behind his cot and whistled. “Today just keeps getting better and better.”

  “They’ve been putting this together for a while. Some of my sources suggest that the order to make this case came down possibly as long ago as a year, maybe longer.”

  Luke thought about that. “Then why issue the warrant now? Did it take them all this time to assemble the case?”

  “No. The timing, your arrest taking place in a public venue on the first day of the Unification Summit, is obviously no coincidence. It constitutes sending a message.”

  “To the parties considering rejoining the Alliance.”

  “Yes.”

  Luke scratched his jaw and thought about it. “They’re saying to the Imperial Remnant, We’re putting a leash on the people who gave you so much trouble over the years. It’s safe to come back.”

  “I believe so.”

  “And they’re telling the Confederation, You and the Jedi had a mutual enemy during the war, but now we control them, which is another good reason to rejoin.”

  “My thinking matches yours.”

  “Also another good reason to exclude the Hapans this time around. Queen Mother Tenel Ka would not react favorably to the action against me. If she doesn’t participate until the next summit, this situation could be resolved by then and she’d have time to cool down.” Luke stood and began pacing. His stomach fluttered, either from tension or from the fact that he’d had no meal since his arrest, and he drew on inner reserves of calm to settle it. “Nawara, I’m not sure we can change the way we operate within the Alliance, or should. We serve a higher cause. Life, calm, progress toward a fair and serene future. Self-interest and the kind of pragmatism that sacrifices innocent lives don’t motivate us the way they can the civilian and military authorities.”

  Nawara offered him an unhappy smile. “History, as interpreted by non-Jedi, demonstrates that you’re wrong. In the records, Jedi often demonstrate these self-serving and destructive impulses. They just stop calling themselves Jedi. Like Jacen Solo did.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Your arraignment’s in two hours. I can have a different set of clothes delivered if you’d prefer to appear before the judge in something fresher or more cheerful.”

  Luke glanced down at his black Grand Master robes. He winced, considering how they might remind a judge of the garments preferred by Jacen Solo. “Send for my white and tan robes, would you?”

  “Done.”

  COURT CHAMBERS, CORUSCANT

  At the arraignment, Leia, Han, and Ben waited in the audience, which otherwise seemed to be made up entirely of the press, all with holocams running.

  A gray-skinned Duros judge, chosen out of the standard rotation of Alliance judges, turned out to be sympathetic to the Jedi. He listened to the charges, ignored the prosecutor’s assertion that Luke was a flight risk, ordered Luke to appear at hearings that would proceed from this event, and released him on his own recognizance. Minutes later, Luke, his family, and Nawara Ven exited the building through a portal Nawara knew but the press did not. They emerged at the fortieth-story walkway level into fresh air and nighttime darkness alleviated by pedestrian lights and traffic streams.

  Luke opened the bag Captain Savar had given him at arraignment’s end and began pocketing his personal effects. “That was a bad day. I look forward to some meditation.”

  Grim-faced, Leia handed him his lightsaber. “I don’t think you’ll get that chance. Things just keep getting better and better.”

  JEDI TEMPLE, CORUSCANT

  The Jedi Temple’s medical center was a complete, if compact, hospital facility—operating theater, private recovery rooms, common ward, bacta chambers, therapy chambers, sealed atmosphere rooms to simulate various planetary environments, laboratories—and Valin Horn was now the centerpiece of the neurology lab. Strapped to a deactivated repulsor gurney that was resting on a platform built to accommodate it, he strained against his restraints, not speaking. There was no one present fo
r him to speak to.

  They watched him from an adjacent chamber through a sheet of transparisteel that was reflective on the lab side, transparent on the observer side. Luke stood with Master Cilghal, the Mon Calamari Jedi Master who was the Temple’s foremost medical expert. Also on hand were the three other members of the Horn family, Leia, and Ben. Jysella Horn, Valin’s sister, a lean woman in her midtwenties, wore a look of resolute calmness appropriate to a Jedi, but redness around her large, expressive eyes suggested that she had been crying. Her mother, Mirax, looked grimly determined and seemed unable to turn away from watching Valin.

  Cilghal, her voice as gravelly as that of most Mon Cals, spoke clinically. “The patient is not rational and not cooperative. He continues to insist that everyone he knows, whom he sees now, has been replaced by an imposter. He is paranoid and delusional.”

  Leia became tight-faced. “Like Seff, only in a different way. Seff was on about Mandos.” Not long before, while traveling aboard the Millennium Falcon, Leia and Han had encountered the Jedi Knight Seff Hellin, who had exhibited a mania as pervasive as that which Valin seemed to be experiencing. Seff had left their company before he could be evaluated.

  The similarity of their behavior sounded ominously to Luke like something one may have contracted from the other, or something they could have developed from exposure to a common source.

  “His blood pressure is high, at a level consistent with his state of anxiety,” Cilghal went on, “and there are greater-than-normal levels of stress hormones in his blood. Toxicology, virology, and bacteriology reports are in their preliminary stages but have suggested no answer. Basic neurological tests suggest no damage, but we have not been able to employ more advanced scans.”

  Luke glanced at her. “Why not?”

  “I’ll show you.” Cilghal moved to a monitor affixed at head height on the wall beside the viewport. Delicately, because her larger-than-human hands were ill suited to the task, she depressed a number of keys beneath the monitor.

  The monitor screen snapped into life, showing a series of five jagged lines, like simple graphical representations of extremely precipitous mountain ranges, one above the other. “This,” Cilghal explained, “is a brain scan, set to display brain wave forms. It can be set to show many different types of data in different types of graphical representation. This is the scan of a normal being—myself, as a matter of fact.

  “Now I will show you Valin’s first scan.” She clicked another series of buttons.

  The image on the screen was wiped away, replaced by bars of jagged peak-and-trough lines so tightly packed, so extreme and savage that Jysella took an involuntary step back from the display. Cilghal continued, “No living member of any species we know could display waveforms like this and survive for very long. A few minutes after we took this, we took another reading. It, and subsequent ones, looked like this.”

  The monitor image wiped again. Luke thought for a moment that it had not been replaced, for the screen was almost blank. But there were still measuring bars to the right and left of the display. There were simply no lines between—not one.

  Cilghal blinked at the image. “This is the brain scan reading of a dead person. Valin Horn is demonstrably not dead. There is no way a reading of Valin could yield a result like this. But it did.”

  “I’ve seen this before.” Luke stared curiously at the screen, then glanced over at Valin, who was glaring at the viewport. Though unable to see through it, he seemed to be staring at Luke; perhaps he could feel the distinctive presence of the Grand Master. “Years ago.”

  Cilghal switched the monitor off. “That’s true.” Her voice sounded reflective. “Perhaps you should explain for the others.”

  “Jacen could do that. Deliberately, as a Force technique. He did it once during the Killik crisis.”

  “Is it a technique you know, Master Skywalker?”

  Luke shook his head. “I assume it was something he picked up during his wanderings among all the Force groups he visited.” He turned his attention to the Horns. “But where did Valin learn it?”

  Corran shook his head. “He’s never mentioned it. And I’d expect him to, just for fun. ‘Look what I can do that my old man can’t,’ that sort of thing.” He glanced at his daughter. “Jysella is more of a confidante. She may know.”

  Jysella looked from her father to Luke. “Valin and I knew Jacen, of course. But he was a few years older than Valin, and that makes a big difference when you’re an adolescent. Jacen was out fighting the war against the Yuuzhan Vong while Valin and I were stuck in the Maw, at Shelter, for the last half of the war. We didn’t see him at all during the years he spent wandering, and not much after that.”

  Luke frowned. It didn’t sound like the sort of relationship in which Jacen would teach Valin an obscure Force technique. “And how about Valin and Seff?”

  Jysella shook her head, causing her brown hair to sway. “They weren’t close. We all studied together at Shelter and afterward, but once we were apprenticed, following our respective Masters around, hardly ever. Occasionally one or the other of us would encounter him on missions. We were acquaintances, colleagues, but we weren’t social buddies.”

  Luke heaved a sigh. “But the similarities are too striking to be a coincidence. Seff also knew an obscure Force technique we can’t account for. Another one that Jacen exhibited, a Force-based paralysis. There’s just too much missing in what we know about Jacen’s travels, even his thought processes. Whether or not it has any bearing on Valin, at some point we need to fill in as many details as we can about what he was up to in the years prior to the Killik crisis.”

  Corran caught Cilghal’s eye. “Is there anything you can do for him? To snap him out of it?”

  “Nothing at the moment. We need psychological experts to evaluate the recordings we have made of him. We need complete toxicological lab work to come back. We need to find a way to complete a brain scan … As far as we can tell, whatever he’s doing to thwart the scanner works even when he sleeps. I wish he hadn’t awakened from Mirax’s stun bolt before we tried the scanner the first time.”

  She pressed another couple of switches on the control board. An opaque panel slid down in front of the window, cutting off their view of the malevolently staring Valin. Mirax started, then reluctantly turned back toward the others.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” Luke said. “Sit down, get some caf, and figure out what to do about this. And other problems. Ben, I want you to exercise your investigative skills and see what information you can get me on the bounty hunters we encountered today.”

  “Will do.”

  “Will he be all right, left alone?” Mirax’s tone was soft, full of pain.

  “He is being watched constantly on monitors by my staff.” Cilghal sounded confident, reassuring. “They will also look on him personally every half hour to an hour. He is not strong enough to break through his straps, and, as you know, like his father he lacks telekinetic strength—he cannot free himself that way.” She led them from the chamber.

  Luke patted Corran’s back as they departed. “Did you have any trouble with the authorities?”

  “We didn’t wait for them. Just threw the boy in Mirax’s speeder and came straight here …”

  Valin could sense their departure. Bright lights in the Force, somehow approximating those of his family and respected teachers, grew more distant.

  He smiled to himself. They were nowhere near as smart as they thought they were, no matter how much research they may have done. They did not know all his secrets, including the one that was going to free him.

  He closed his eyes and looked for other lights in the Force—tiny ones in nearby pockets and streams. Individually they did not hold much life, but their collective biomass exceeded that of all the sapient beings on Coruscant.

  They were the insects, and though he had not done so in years, he remembered how to be their friend. Now he needed them to come here. He needed certain species that he could convince to craw
l out of gaps in the Temple walls, march up his gurney, and consume just a small portion of one strap holding him down.

  One strap, and then when his nurse came on an in-person visit, one lunge. Valin would escape and find his way to where the real people were.

  A two-tone musical alarm awakened Luke. He sat up, glancing around his darkened Temple quarters, and saw his monitor lit, Cilghal’s face displayed on it. “Master Cilghal. What time is it?”

  “Middle of the night. Valin Horn has escaped.”

  Luke sighed at the inevitability of those words. “This day … How long ago?”

  “Twenty minutes or so. His night nurse, Apprentice Romor, is not badly hurt but has a concussion.”

  “Do we have any leads on where Valin went?”

  “Better than that. We have the tracking device I planted below his skin in the event of such an occurrence. He will begin to feel it when the local anesthetic I injected there begins to wear off, but that gives us a few hours still. Unfortunately, he seems to be spending a certain amount of time traveling through the undercity, so our signal is intermittent.”

  Luke rose and began putting on his white tunic. “Alert the other Masters. Assemble all the Jedi Knights present that the Temple can spare. Let Han and Leia know. I’ll be in the Great Hall in three minutes.”

  “And the Horns?”

  “They don’t need to know.”

  SENATE BUILDING PLAZA, CORUSCANT

  Seha sat cross-legged on hard, cold permacrete in the darkness at the center of the plaza, glaring at the Senate Building before her. A lean girl in her early twenties, she was dressed as a Jedi, her long red hair held back in a tail by elastic bands.

  She glared because nothing was happening. Senatorial aides and office workers were arriving on foot in this predawn hour, a steady trickle, and that added up to nothing. None cast a look out into the darkness where Seha waited. None looked like Valin Horn.

  Beside her, stretched out full length on the permacrete, wrapped up against the chill in a full-length hooded robe, lay Master Octa Ramis. A stoutly built, muscular human woman, she lay with her eyes closed as if asleep. The pale skin of her face, surrounded as it was by dark hair and dark cloak, was all that could be seen of her from more than a couple of meters. Now she smiled, not opening her eyes. “You’re not calm, Seha.”