Outcast

by Aaron Allston

  Kyp’s expression darkened. “You’d better—”

  “Their job is to prevent unauthorized entry, just as it is the job of guards outside your blockhouse to do the same,” Cilghal interrupted, as smoothly as she could.

  “I am authorized to enter.” The man held up a datacard. “This is a warrant. My authorization.”

  “Which the guards, being very young, would not know what to do with.” Cilghal reached out to pluck the card from the captain’s grasp, moving so swiftly that he stared at his palm for a second as if wondering how it had become suddenly empty.

  Cilghal slid the card into her datapad. On the screen appeared the opening lines of a legal document—a warrant for the arrest of Jedi Valin Horn. “Ah. Of course. I must point out that the government and the Order have not yet come to terms on the question of who is to evaluate Jedi Horn’s mental state.”

  “We’ll decide that. The Jedi no longer have a say in the matter.”

  Cilghal felt very un-Jedi-like irritation bubbling up within her. “By the way, where is Captain Savar? The intelligent one who stands a chance of promotion sometime in his career?”

  “Out cuddling Ewoks, I expect. Now, it’s time for you to hand over Valin.”

  “Not quite.”

  The captain took another step forward, putting him face-to-face with Cilghal. She could feel tension rising in the captain’s companions. Several of them made sure their weapons were at hand. The two bounty hunters surreptitiously stepped away from each other as if to define separate but overlapping fields of fire. “What,” the captain asked, “did you say?”

  “You have left out a necessary step. You have failed to identify yourself.” Cilghal’s palm itched as her sense of the moment told her it would be a very good idea to have her lightsaber in hand. But she couldn’t reach for it, not in this situation. She would have to rely on her unarmed skills, and on the actions of Kyp Durron, if things went sour.

  The captain hesitated, then drew an identicard from one of his pockets. He held it up directly in front of one of her bulbous eyes. “Captain Oric Harfard, Galactic Alliance Security.” The holo on the card matched his face, except that it was not as red. “Now get out of my way, fish-head.”

  “Two things. First, my name is not Fish-Head. It is Master Cilghal.” If Cilghal’s tone had been an actual temperature, her words would have given the captain a bad case of facial frostbite. “Second, I am not in your way. That is a logistical impossibility. I am less than a meter wide. The entryway where we stand and the doorway behind me are several meters wide. I now leave it as an exercise of your alleged intelligence to find a way into the Temple. If you do a very good job, perhaps we will name the test after you.” She poured her disdain for the man through the Force.

  Stupid or not, the captain was not weak-willed enough to be overtly affected. He pocketed his identicard, then waved his troops forward. Slowly they filed past him and entered the Temple. As Zilaash Kuh and Vrannin Vaxx passed, Cilghal felt Kyp leave her side, following them.

  The captain remained where he was. “If you’re Cilghal, then the perpetrator is your patient. I’m surprised that you don’t want to be there when we take your patient into custody.”

  Cilghal did want that, but she could not bear for this sorry excuse of a human to win any victories she could prevent. “No, I’m going to stand here, enjoy the morning air, and transmit this document to Master Kenth Hamner, leader of the Order, a man who actually had a distinguished military career. Jedi Tekli can prepare Jedi Horn for transportation.”

  Well, if the captain could not be compelled to leave, perhaps he could be made to suffer for his impudence. As she transmitted the warrant file and added a brief message to Master Hamner, Cilghal altered the nature of the impulses she was issuing into the Force. Instead of encouraging an emotional urge, she began promoting a biological one—the notion that the captain needed to visit the refresher. To her compulsion she added visual aids, including images of flowing streams, beautiful waterfalls, and steady, drenching rainfalls.

  The red suffusing the captain’s face drained away, to be replaced by something like pallor. “Done with my warrant card yet?”

  “No, no. I’m having some trouble with the message I’m adding. Typing on these things is difficult for a fish-head, you know. By the way, do you call Dhidal Nyz a fish-head? Is it a sign of affection, a nickname? What is your nickname? Is it Orry—may I call you Orry? Can I get you something to drink, Orry? A tall, cool glass of water, perhaps?”

  Even as she parked her airspeeder in a low-level hangar at the Jedi Temple, Jaina could feel agitation from above, a sort of atmosphere of un-Jedi-like worry and anger that filtered down through permacrete and durasteel like water filtering through coarse cloth. With her observer Dab beside her, obliviously talking about the High Court decision, she rode the turbolift up. The agitation did not feel like a call to arms, did not seem like a physical emergency unfolding, so she forced herself not to reach for her lightsaber. It bothered her that her first impulse was to ready herself for combat. Despite their role in popular entertainment, that was not the way of the Jedi, even for their Sword.

  She and Dab emerged into a darkened corner of the Great Hall, finding it full of Jedi who stood in small groups, talking in quiet tones.

  Jaina strode up to a nearby group of three Jedi, including Master Katarn. “Master, what’s happened?”

  Kyle’s expression was unperturbed, though he radiated a little anger. “They’ve come for Valin.”

  Jaina frowned. “I hadn’t heard that we’d come to terms with the government about his evaluation—”

  “We haven’t. This is unilateral on the government’s part. It’s in retaliation for this morning’s High Court decision.”

  “But we didn’t have anything to do with that!”

  “Of course we did. If we had put pressure on Tahiri Veila to withdraw her appeal, all the pressure the Order could bring to bear, would she have continued?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Well, now we know what the government considers cooperation on our part. Unthinking acceptance of their decisions, silent obedience, preemptive groveling.”

  From behind them came the sound of a turbolift arriving. Jaina turned as everyone else did. From one of the lifts emerged Master Kenth Hamner at the head of a short processional. He marched before a floating medical bed, its repulsorlifts quiet and unobtrusive compared with those of airspeeders. Valin lay on the bed, conscious, covered to his neck by a sheet, and strapped in place. Flanking the bed were Jedi Tekli, Master Durron, and the bounty hunters Kuh and Vaxx. A Jedi apprentice guided the floating bed from the rear.

  Valin was not a silent, immobile patient. He twisted and strained against his bonds, loudly talking all the while: “Look at you, all of you. You think you have everyone fooled. But you’ll make a mistake. They’ll see through your deception as I have. What have you done with the real Jedi? What have you done with the real Horns? Did you kill them? Bring them back alive and unhurt or I’ll make you suffer. You’ll suffer like you were swallowed by a sarlacc, forever and ever, once I get my hands on you …”

  Another lift opened, disgorging a squadron of GA Security troopers, who swarmed forward and rapidly formed up around the procession.

  Dab recorded the progress of the bed and its guard. “They made a very public event of this,” he said, so quietly that Jaina barely heard him. “Not nice.”

  “You have no room to talk.” Jaina’s tone was angry. “You’re part of the problem.”

  Unperturbed, he continued recording. “I’m qualified and even sympathetic. If I quit, who replaces me? Maybe a one-armed convict with a grudge against the Jedi, released from prison just for this job? Would you prefer that?”

  She didn’t answer. Instead, like many of the Jedi present, she followed the procession.

  It reached the end of the hall and exited, passing Master Cilghal and a human security captain who looked as though this assignment was making him misera
ble. Valin, still haranguing the onlookers, was loaded into the ambulance. The security operatives, medical personnel, and bounty hunters took their places in their vehicles.

  The captain, pallid and sweating, raised a hand to prevent Master Cilghal and Jedi Tekli from boarding the ambulance. Then the caravan of official vehicles got into motion and was gone.

  As Master Hamner reentered the hall and passed her, Jaina caught his eye. She whispered, “This is going to get worse and worse as long as we let it.”

  He nodded, somber. “And yet I have to stay on this course. I need to be able to look Chief of State Daala in the eye and say, There is no resistance in the Order to your measures. Just ask me. Ask any Master.” He continued on his way.

  Jaina felt a rush of elation. As stuffy as Master Hamner was, as creased and starched in his personality as any of his old dress uniforms, he did know what was needed. He wasn’t just a stooge for the government.

  “You look suddenly happy,” Dab told her.

  “Ever been given permission to do what you planned to do anyway?”

  “Sure. What were you given permission to do?”

  “Have lunch,” she lied.

  CALRISSIAN-NUNB MINES, KESSEL

  Half an hour later—a time that was mercifully uninterrupted by energy spiders—the bogey’s residual energies that had crippled their electronics began to dissipate. The monitors in the speeder came up with patches of static; Leia tested her lightsaber and it came on, fitfully in the first few seconds and then reassuringly steady. Han got behind the speeder’s controls and tried to coax the vehicle into life; a few minutes later, its repulsors kicked in and lifted the vehicle off the floor.

  As Leia climbed in, Han mopped imaginary sweat from his brow. “Ready to go back up?”

  “No, we haven’t really found anything.”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  “While we were waiting, I felt more of them in the Force.”

  “Bogeys?”

  She nodded. “Deep, deep down. Maybe they’re somehow related to the groundquake phenomenon. I’ve also traced paths of lower life-forms that I think correspond to tunnels.”

  “Going down, I assume.”

  “That’s the direction I was looking.”

  He sighed and put the speeder into motion. “Point the way.”

  Kilometers up and to the southeast, in the surface buildings of the Calrissian-Nunb Mines, Allana sat in a secondary conference room that had been pressed into service as a playroom. Chance was gone, having been bundled off by Nanna for a nap. Allana was alone with C-3PO and R2-D2.

  She wanted to glare at them, but that would be showing her true feelings, and her mother—her real mother—had always said that only loved ones deserved or needed to see your true emotions. And not even them, if you needed to convince them of something.

  “I’m tired of waiting,” she told the droids. “I want to do something.”

  C-3PO looked down at her where she sat on the carpeted floor. “Why, you are doing something. You’re reading on your datapad.”

  She closed the electronic device with a definitive snap. “No, I want to do something good. Something nobody’s ever done before.”

  “I have done things that no one has ever done before, and I can assure you, it is usually a dangerous and alarming sort of activity. Not suited to little girls.”

  “What have you done?”

  “Well, I have been mistaken for a golden god, and in so doing helped strike down the Galactic Empire. Let me tell you that story—”

  “No.” She grapped her backpack, tossed in her datapad, and dragged out her breath mask. “Let’s go outside.”

  “Not advisable, young miss. Every new world is a place of new, uncataloged dangers—”

  R2-D2 interrupted him with a series of notes.

  “What did he say?” Allana asked.

  “He asserted that we could protect you in the unlikely event of danger. In short, he undermined my already precarious authority. Oh, very well. The outside offers no comfort, you know.”

  “Maybe, but I like to bounce.” Kessel’s gravity, lower than that of most worlds where humans settled, had given her the opportunity to make some extraordinarily high leaps on the short walk from the Falcon to this building.

  Not that bounding had anything to do with her desire to go outside.

  Quietly, so as not to alert the Calrissians, Nien Nunb, or any of the occasionally glimpsed members of the skeleton crew Lando had on duty in the building, Allana led the droids down corridors that were so echoingly empty and dimly lit that they all but had signs pointing out that they were off-limits to little girls. Eventually, she found a hatch exit to the exterior, and moments later she stepped out into the bracing chill of Kessel’s atmosphere. “Time to bounce,” she announced.

  “As we are rather ill suited to bouncing, and even more poorly engineered to land in a nondamaging fashion, I believe that Artoo and I will simply watch from a safe distance.”

  Allana shrugged. She began moving in a straight line away from the main building, sometimes running with long steps, sometimes jumping for the fun of it, always heading away from the perceptions of adults. Soon her shoes and the lower parts of her pant legs were covered in the white powder that seemed to be everywhere.

  Now it was time to do as Leia had begun to teach her, to open her mind and feelings. It was hard for her, because she had always had reason and usually encouragement to stay bottled up. Sometimes her life had depended on it. Scary people were less likely to sense weakness or fear if you remained bottled up.

  The ground ahead and to the left was darker. She changed direction to head that way, and soon found herself at the edge of what looked like a series of stone outcroppings, jagged brown rocks protruding from the white dust. The ground was jumbled, rising and falling.

  This area wasn’t pretty, but it was better than more white sand. Cautiously, she moved out among the broken stones.

  “Miss Ameeeeeelia …” she heard C-3PO cry plaintively. She turned and saw the golden droid, R2-D2 beside him, a couple of hundred meters back. She waved to them, as though she welcomed their presence and had absolutely no intention of keeping clear of them, then headed farther into the outcroppings, picking up her pace.

  Deeper in, the rocks were taller, some as tall as she was. She gracefully moved among them and soon was completely out of sight of the droids. Occasionally she would hear C-3PO calling or R2-D2 tweet-ling, and she would extend a hand above the level of the rocks, wave, and shout—then immediately head off to some other spot.

  After a few minutes, she became aware of something not too far away. It felt different from people and animals; it was a stillness, unlike anything she had felt before. Cautious, she headed toward it, moving as quietly as she could.

  A few dozen meters later, the ground became white and flat again. She moved out into an oval clearing surrounding a building. It was not tall, barely twice her height, and since the clearing was in a depression in the ground, she doubted that its slightly peaked roof would poke up above the surrounding rocks.

  It was made of gray-white stone. It had four walls and was not large enough to be a house—perhaps more the size of a storage shed. She circled it and found that there were no viewports, just beveled depressions in the stone suggesting where viewports might someday be cut out, and no door, though on the west face the outlines of a door had been incised in the solid stone. The edges of the bevels and incisions, the corners of the walls and roof were worn and rounded, giving the building the impression of tremendous age.

  Allana took a deep breath. This was a storage shed of a sort—a storage shed for dead people. A tomb. It did not need a working door or viewports, but whoever had constructed it had given it the semblance of such things, as if the dead needed them.

  Dead things did not worry her, but she had seen, when she was not supposed to be awake, parts of many holodramas in which dead things in tombs turned out not to be dead after all, and
it took brave, roguish heroes with big blasters to save the day. She shrugged. Grandpa Han was a brave, roguish hero with a big blaster, but he wasn’t here, so she had to make sure she didn’t cause any trouble she couldn’t handle herself.

  Why had she felt this place? Grandma Leia said the Force was an energy of living things, and there would be nothing living in the tomb. She reached out toward it with her senses, again feeling that oppressive stillness.

  And then the stillness was no longer still. She felt something stirring within. Not life, just motion—energy. She froze in place, willing herself to become as small and as still as possible.

  It waited, whatever it was, on the other side of that wall, waited with a stillness that matched hers. In the distance, Allana could hear C-3PO calling for her, and she desperately wished that she was with the droids.

  She took a slow step backward. The thing in the tomb did not react. She took another, and another, and bumped into the rough surface of a rock outcropping, and still nothing came bursting out of the tomb. Barely breathing, she moved into the outcroppings, not even beginning to relax until the tomb was out of sight.

  I can feel you.

  The words crept quietly into her mind. Allana almost shrieked.

  They were not from the tomb. She stared up into the pinkish sky, seeing only the distant sun and a sliver of the former garrison moon. The thought came from there.

  Who is there? I felt you. Please … please … There was such a yearning desperation to the words, such a hunger, that Allana wanted to reply, wanted to reassure whoever was there. But caution and fear and a hundred lessons she had learned at her mother’s knee kept her from doing so.

  What is your name? The question sent a tingle of dread down Allana’s spine. She had the eerie sensation that if she responded, if she offered her name, it would be snatched away and never returned, leaving her to wander forever not knowing who she was. She hugged herself for warmth and, keeping her head low, reined her senses in.

  The voice did not return, and a couple of minutes later Allana no longer felt any hint of it. She breathed a sigh of relief.