Outcast

by Aaron Allston

  “I know, Master.”

  “The less calm you are, the less alert you are.”

  Seha gestured at the small tracker box that rested on the permacrete before her. “I just have to watch this. It glows the same whether I’m calm or not.”

  “Spoken like a true, proper, lazy apprentice. Why, again, did I let you choose where we would have our stakeout?”

  “Because I’ve been on a mission with Valin. I mean, Jedi Horn.”

  “And you brought us here because?”

  Seha frowned, out of confusion rather than irritation. She had already explained her logic once. “Because if he’s thinking strangely, maybe he’s thinking like an animal. Find a nest, lick his wounds, recover. I led him to the undercity here a couple of years ago. There’s more security now, but he can find plenty of places to hide. And if he pops up here, he can use his Jedi powers to steal very good vehicles or maybe kidnap prominent politicians.”

  “Very good. It’s as good a reason for choosing a stakeout as any. You used your mind and your logic to lead us here. And now you’re willing to simply abandon them and watch a box because that’s just as good as thinking?”

  Seha sighed. As usual, there was little reward in arguing with her teacher. “No, Master.” She tried to quiet her thoughts.

  “Do you have a crush on him?”

  Seha gave Octa a pained look. It was going to be one of those conversations, no secrets safe. “Yes, Master. Well, I did once.”

  “Are you embarrassed by it?”

  “No. I’m embarrassed that I had a crush on Jacen Solo.”

  “Don’t be. He was a good, thoughtful Jedi for many years. And a nice-looking one. Took after his father. I had a crush on his father once upon a time.”

  Seha smiled. “You didn’t.”

  “Yes. And just think of the chores you’ll find yourself doing if you mention that to anyone.”

  “I shouldn’t allow myself to have crushes, at least on Jedi. I have a crush on Jacen Solo, he goes dark and dies. I have a crush on Valin Horn, he goes crazy.”

  Octa’s smile faded but did not go away entirely. “Once upon a time, I had more than a crush on a Jedi. He was tortured by the Yuuzhan Vong, then drowned in freezing water fighting them. Should I have stopped loving? Caring? Being attracted?”

  “No …”

  “Then you shouldn’t, either.”

  The device at Seha’s feet lit up, the bulb atop it glowing with a faint pulse of amber light. The pulse intensified, faded, and then became steady.

  Octa must have felt Seha’s excitement. She sat up, eyes opening, and looked at the tracker. “Well done, Seha.”

  “Thank you, Master.”

  “Call it in. Then we go looking.”

  Enneth Holkin, protocol aide to the honorable Denjax Teppler, co–Chief of State of Corellia, dismissed his driver well beyond the vehicle checkpoint that marked the closest approach civilian speeders were allowed to make to the Senate Building. He had a lot to do this morning; a longer walk would settle his mind. For security’s sake, he kept his thumb through the panic ring on his topcoat. It wouldn’t do for a Corellian functionary to be caught with a weapon at the summit, but the panic ring was perfectly legal and just as likely to save his life in case of kidnapping or a protracted encounter with a criminal.

  When he was not far past the checkpoint and beginning to cross the plaza, he heard a faint noise from immediately behind, a scrape of leather on permacrete. He turned and saw the sole of a boot just before it cracked against his jaw.

  Valin, rested and calm, looked dispassionately down at the being he’d just assaulted. The man was his own approximate height and coloration, which would prove useful.

  He set about relieving the unconscious man of clothes and document bag. He did not bother to take the curious metal ring, with a few centimeters of thin black cord dangling from it, that encircled the man’s left thumb.

  More than two hundred meters away, in a claustrophobic security office deep within the Senate Building, a security station picked up an automated emergency transmission on the visiting dignitary comm band. The automated programming selected one security officer from the several on duty and threw graphics up on his monitor. Relevant data on Enneth Holkin, including his name, political affiliations, homeworld, and known associates flickered to life on the screen. Next came a holorecording of his face and a copy of his criminal record, which consisted of stealing a dilapidated speeder bike for a joyride when he was a teenager on Corellia. Then came a coordinate listing of his current location, which was, curiously, not far away.

  The security agent, a lean, balding man who, after twenty years of street work, was more than happy to earn his living behind a computer terminal, yawned and typed a tracking instruction into his keyboard.

  Out on the plaza and on the exterior wall of the Senate Building, holocams traversed from their usual monitoring patterns and aimed themselves toward the tracking coordinate. As the balding agent flipped from view to view, the ultraviolet-enabled holocams all showed the same scene: a pale-skinned human male, lying faceup in one of the darkest portions of the plaza, eyes closed, wearing nothing but underthings. The readings from infrared holocams indicated that his body temperature was more or less stable, suggesting he was still alive.

  The agent upped the computer system’s threat code from green to yellow, standard to alert. The security system responded by taking control of the external and internal holocam systems, noting the locations of every individual they detected, submitting faces to data banks whose usefulness had been vastly improved during the recent Galactic Alliance Guard years. Every Senator, aide, functionary, visiting politician, hired companion, janitor, driver, bodyguard, and celebrity within the scanning area was suddenly queued for high-priority identification.

  Seconds later, cautionary flags began to pop up on the agent’s screen. Avedon Tiggs, actor, musician, and frequently arrested libertine, was exiting with the Senator from Commenor. Gerhold Razzik, a member of the Imperial Remnant delegation who had no business being in the Rotunda, was there, gaping like a tourist, probably recording everything he saw with a disguised holocam. Valin Horn, Jedi Knight, was on level 2, moving confidently and steadily through what should have been a secure corridor. Octa Ramis, Jedi Master, in the company of a younger woman also dressed as a Jedi, was approaching the east main entrance.

  The security agent had no special instructions concerning wayward musicians or Imperial spies, but he had very new, very specific orders about Jedi.

  He activated his comlink and requested the Special Operations office of the Chief of State.

  “You have to let us in,” Octa said.

  The uniformed and helmeted security woman standing in front of the closed east entrance doors shrugged. “Actually, I don’t.”

  “No, really, you do.” Octa made a subtle gesture with one hand and poured soothing feelings of peace and compliance into the security agent. “It’s Jedi business, very important.”

  The woman gave the Jedi Master a smile. Perhaps it would have been a scowl of irritation had Octa not been smothering her with dreamy goodness through the Force. “First, the doors just sealed. It’s called a lockdown. Happens all the time, nothing to worry about, nothing to see here. I’m sure the office will tell us in a minute why. Second, no, not only can I not let you in until the lockdown ends, really I don’t have to.”

  Exasperated, Octa turned away and returned to the side of her apprentice a few paces back. “We need another entrance. One with an appropriately weak-willed guard.”

  Seha’s eyes were unfocused as she stared at a blank wall of the building. “He’s moving. Looking for something. Ascending, I think.”

  “A vehicle. He has to be looking for an escape vehicle.” Octa turned back toward the guard and raised her voice. “You, where are the hangar exits from this building?”

  “That’s classified.”

  “Some of them are public!”

  “Everything’s classi
fied during a lockdown.”

  Octa made a strangled noise and turned back to Seha. “I hate good guards. They’re the most inconvenient things in the universe.”

  “Happiness. He’s elated.”

  “Can’t he feel you?”

  “Maybe. Maybe he doesn’t care. He’s about to get away.”

  “Meld with me. Give me a sense of him so I can pick him out.”

  Seha extended herself through the Force, a tentative expression of power—she was years behind other Jedi students her age, many of whom were already Jedi Knights. But she performed the technique correctly, and Octa could feel her emotions, feel the distinctive characteristics of the living being Seha was trying to track.

  It was easier for the Master. “Up about ten meters, this way.” She set off at a trot northward, along the wall that would gradually curve around toward the north entrance. Seha followed.

  Octa could feel decisions being made—“He’s considering two vehicles. No, he’s taking two vehicles. How can he take two vehicles?”

  “One inside the other?”

  They found out seconds later. A hundred meters farther, they heard a tremendous shriek of metal from ahead and above. A shuttle with Kuati markings emerged from the building—through a closed portal, the impact hurling slabs of artificial stone and durasteel supports scores of meters. Passing through the non-exit, which was too small for the shuttle’s generous girth, caused the vehicle’s upraised wings to rip clean off; they fell to either side. The shuttle, angling downward, headed toward the permacrete of the plaza. Octa could neither see nor detect a pilot in the shuttle’s cockpit.

  The shuttle’s repulsors were not the only ones to be heard. Before the building alarms cut in, their howl drowning out all other noises, Octa heard another, more familiar set of repulsors increasing in volume from within the hangar.

  She put on a Force-aided burst of speed, then leapt, trying to achieve as much altitude and distance as she could. As she leapt, she shouted, “Push!”

  Her apprentice, though underconfident and undertrained, was smart, and telekinesis was something she was good at. Octa felt Seha’s effort not as a blow to her back but almost as a short blast of wind, a stream of power that lofted her, propelled her.

  As the gray X-wing emerged from the hangar through the ruined door, Octa slammed into the starboard side of the fuselage, her right arm scrabbling at the nose just in front of the canopy. The impact hammered her ribs.

  Valin Horn, in the pilot’s seat, inappropriately dressed in businessman’s garments, looked surprised. He stared at Octa, mouth open.

  Unseen, behind Octa in the distance, the ruined shuttle came down on the plaza with a noise like tons of metal and ceramic refuse being dropped by a negligent giant. The noise became a screech and scrape as the shuttle skidded forward, still propelled by its thrusters.

  Octa knew Valin’s preferred tactics as well as he did. He needed to bank and roll, cause her to drop off. But, halfway emerged through an irregular aperture, he couldn’t, not yet—to do so would mangle or even tear free the starfighter’s strike foils, turning the X-wing into an expensive, uncomfortable, ugly airspeeder.

  Instead, Valin grimaced and eased the yoke forward, emerging two more meters into the predawn air.

  Octa got her offhand onto her lightsaber and managed to unclip it. She ignited it and thrust with the weapon at the canopy—not at Valin, but at the point closest to her right arm, where the canopy dogged into place against the fuselage.

  The point of her weapon, driven at an awkward angle by her less practiced hand, skidded off the transparisteel and up, inflicting nothing but a scar on the canopy.

  She tried again. Valin, timing his action by her attack, punched the thrusters just a little, throwing her off balance. She did not fall off, but the energy blade punched through the canopy centimeters behind the latch. The blade, just above Valin’s hands on the yoke, hit the far side of the canopy and burned through there, too.

  Now the X-wing was fully extracted from the hangar door. Valin gave Octa a mocking smile, elevated the starfighter’s nose, and opened the thrusters full force. The X-wing shot upward at a steep takeoff angle.

  Octa felt her right hand slipping across the fuselage. She slid farther down the side of the cockpit, wildly waving her left arm and the lightsaber in it for balance, and then tried another blow. Her attack had no accuracy or leverage; it hit the canopy over Valin’s face, well away from her intended point of impact, and again left nothing but a scar.

  Valin should have been rolling the X-wing by now, but he did not, and Octa lost a precious second or two trying to figure out why.

  Then she understood. He’s taking me as high as he can … so I’ll die when I hit ground. She took a moment to look around, but of course there were no speeders below or close by—unauthorized traffic was forbidden this close to the Senate Building, and authorized traffic was rare at this hour.

  Valin gave her a last look of triumph. He twitched the yoke and the X-wing shuddered. Octa’s hand slipped free and she fell.

  She felt a touch of regret. Force techniques to slow falling were of little use in open air at altitudes like this. She was going to be a mess, a dead mess, when she hit.

  She deactivated her lightsaber and clipped it to her belt. It wouldn’t do to have it shear through some innocent pedestrian running in the wake of the shuttle, which, now burning, had come to a rest against the government building on the far side of the plaza.

  Octa prepared herself for impact.

  When Octa woke up, she knew only moments had passed. The Senate Building alarms were still howling. Sirens announced the imminent arrival of other official vehicles. There was also a persistent ringing in her head.

  She didn’t hurt that badly. Quickly, carefully, she flexed limbs, shifted her body, explored herself in the Force.

  Not even a broken bone.

  She opened her eyes and Seha, framed by stars, was kneeling over her, looking worried, crestfallen. “Master?”

  “I’m all right.” Octa struggled to sit up. Well, she wasn’t entirely all right. Every muscle hurt and she was certain she had a concussion. “You caught me? With telekinesis?”

  “Partly. You still hit hard.”

  “Not that hard.” Octa managed a shaky laugh. “You did very, very well.”

  “But we lost. He got away.”

  “We won. He’s in street clothes and his canopy isn’t airtight. So he can’t make space. And he’s airborne, so his tracking device will give away his location continuously. We flushed him.” Standing, she stretched her back, trying to afford it a little relief. “Others will have to run him to ground.”

  “Come to course two-six-nine.”

  Han, following his wife’s directions, banked the Falcon around and headed toward the government district. Leia, in the copilot’s seat, had her personal comlink to her ear.

  The Falcon’s comm board was alive with Coruscant Security and traffic monitors warning Han to return to designated ship traffic lanes or be subject to arrest. He growled and switched the thing to silent mode. “They found him?”

  “They found him. He’s in an X-wing with a hole in the cockpit.”

  “Armed?”

  “Fifty–fifty chance. It was in the Senate Building, so it’s either a fully functional security vehicle or some Senator’s unarmed memories-of-youth vehicle. I’m hoping for the second option.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Come to two-five-nine.”

  “Nah.” Han put the Falcon into a dive. His stomach fluttered, and the sensor screen filled up with tiny objects getting larger—small-vehicle traffic at and below building-top level. Flashing down at terrifying and illegal speed, he twitched the controls right and left, nimbly dodging the much smaller civilian vehicles.

  “Han, what do you think—”

  Then he was fully among them, streams of traffic above as well as below. He pulled out of his dive two hundred meters below the average height of the buildings.


  “—you’re doing?”

  “This way, we’re off the major sensor boards. Only vehicles with line of sight on us will complain.”

  “I understand that. I mean, why not turn to two-five-nine?”

  “His course changes are just to jerk us around, to confuse us. I know where he’s going.”

  “Where?”

  “The spaceport, right at the edge of the government district. He stole a starfighter; that means he wants to make space. It’s damaged, so he can’t. He needs another one. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “When it comes to piloting and pilots, I’m all-knowing.”

  Leia put an artificial sweetness into her voice. “I’ll never argue with you again.”

  Han snorted and increased velocity. A Coruscant Security speeder following in his wake dropped back, left behind as though it were suddenly standing still.

  Luke and Ben, in Ben’s nimble red airspeeder, received the transmission with Han’s guess about the spaceport.

  Luke, at the controls, shook his head, not pleased. The spaceport, comparatively flat and built at a much lower altitude than the surrounding residential, business, and government zones, was not, as most supposed, actually situated at bedrock level. Below it were many levels of machinery, repair hangars, Empire-era emergency bunkers, spaceport employee facilities, and repair accesses.

  If Han was right and Valin was headed that way, even if he was unsuccessful at stealing another spaceworthy vehicle he might escape into those subterranean regions, making it hard or impossible to find him before he detected his tracking device and destroyed it.

  Their speeder emerged from the skytowers and was abruptly out over the flatter region surrounding the spaceport. It was mostly given over to speeder parking, though it had decorative elements, including tree-spotted grassy regions and a small artificial lake.