Outcast

by Aaron Allston

  Mistress Tila Mong approached the pyre. From the distance of a meter, she extended her hand. A crackle of lightning leapt from the end of her fingers to strike the base of the pyre. Instantly the combustible material caught fire, an odd, purplish flame that rapidly spread across all the surfaces of pyre and casket.

  The flame became very fierce, very fast. Soon the Kel Dors and the two humans had to stand farther back so as not to be burned themselves. Purple flames leapt into the sky, rising nearly to the height of the temple roof. The onlookers spoke little, but soberly watched the fire consume the body of their friend.

  Not long after, the pyre collapsed. Remains of the casket fell into the center of the burning mass. The flames were still fierce, but dying. One by one, the Kel Dors began turning away, taking their leave.

  At an appropriate time, before the last of the Baran Do had left, Luke thanked Tila Mong and led Ben around the building toward the front gates.

  “Kind of sad,” Ben said. “He was pretty nice. A good fighter, though he didn’t have a lot of weapons experience. Staff, mostly.”

  Luke’s tone was equally soft. “It always annoys me to be lied to.”

  “I wasn’t lying to you, Dad.”

  “What?” Luke looked startled. “No, not you. Them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  They passed through the gates. Instead of turning south, toward the spaceport, Luke led them north, toward the mercantile district. “They lied. About Charsae Saal. He didn’t die, and they didn’t cremate him.”

  “Are you kidding? I felt him die.”

  “You felt him vanish in the Force, as I did. A graduated diminishment that was not much different, in the way it felt to Force-sensitive onlookers, from death. Ben, have you ever met anyone who could conceal himself in the Force?”

  Ben grinned. “Other than myself? And Jacen? And you? And—”

  “They put an empty casket on that pyre and burned it. And ordinarily I don’t need to pry into other people’s secrets. But this one may have something to do with what Jacen learned here, so we have to root out the truth. We’re going to find a restaurant for oxygen breathers, have a good meal with our masks off, and then we’re going to come back here. And find the truth.”

  Two hours later they returned, but not as official visitors this time. Instead of walking up the street, they moved as Jedi knew how to, darting from dark place to dark place, sending tiny distractions into the minds of pedestrians so that they might pass unnoticed. Their dark garments helped, as did the lateness of the hour and the still-ominous cloud cover, which blocked out starlight and moonlight.

  Soon enough they found themselves at the base of the durasteel-and-transparisteel walls of the temple. Luke gauged the height and sprang upward. He came to rest atop, one haunch on the transparisteel lip, balancing there. He extended his hand down for his son.

  Ben leapt up, letting the Force enhance his jump. He landed beside Luke in a crouch, both boot heels on the transparisteel lip, and grinned at his father. Together they leapt down into the grounds of the temple.

  Moments later, they stood by the hearth where Charsae Saal had theoretically burned. The remains of the fire had been mopped up; no ashes remained.

  Luke turned his attention to the platform where the Kel Dor had stood for his speech, had lain down to die. “If we assume that this was the means by which he disappeared, there’s probably a mechanism here.”

  “Or a sensor,” Ben said. “From which they’re watching us right now, and plotting our demise.”

  “You watch too many holodramas.” Luke stroked the platform along its top.

  “No, it doesn’t take that many before you learn all the rules.”

  Luke paused over one spot. “If he triggered the mechanism himself, it was with use of the Force.”

  “We would have felt that.”

  “Good point. So it was done by a confederate.” Luke snapped his fingers, and a portion of the top of the platform swung downward, leaving a gap easily large enough for a good-sized human or a Kel Dor to fit through. “Shall we?”

  “Masters first.”

  They used Luke’s hook and grapnel, no longer worn on his primary belt but still in his customary gear, to descend. Ten meters down, their boots touched a stone floor. Luke pointed a finger up and the hook dislodged, dropping into his other hand; he gestured again, and the rectangular opening above their heads closed.

  They were in a storage chamber of some sort. There were many metal shelves here, loaded with crates marked in the Kel Dor language. There were also several large containers that themselves looked like coffins—but silvery, lozenge-shaped, high-tech coffins. It was all dimly lit by low-intensity glow rods.

  They stood on some sort of hydraulic platform that, retracted as it was now, was almost at floor level, but when raised should take it up to the ceiling and the hidden entrance above.

  “Pretty simple,” Ben whispered.

  Luke tucked his grapnel and line away, nodding. He gestured toward the one door out of the chamber.

  They waited by the door, extending their perceptions through it. In the Force, Ben could feel living beings beyond, but not close by.

  Luke activated the door. It slid open quietly, but the hiss was loud enough to make Ben cringe. Sneaking around was so much more difficult when you had to rely on other people’s machinery, he decided.

  He followed his father into a plain, permacrete-lined corridor. There was a large rolling cart against the hallway wall opposite; other doors lined the hall. The Force presences Ben had detected were beyond the one at the end of the hall to the left.

  Luke had come to the same conclusion. Together they approached the door. It was sturdy durasteel, too thick for sound to carry through.

  Luke looked at Ben and shrugged. “Might as well barge in,” he whispered.

  “They’re Baran Do Sages. They’re not going to try to kill people for prowling through their basement, I hope.”

  Luke smiled. He activated the door, and it slid up.

  The chamber beyond was not large. Two shining metal rails at waist height led into a round hole, a meter in diameter, in the wall; one of the lozenge-coffin containers rested on those rails. Beside the container stood Mistress Tila Mong, Master Charsae Saal, and two other Masters whose names Ben had not learned. All four turned in surprise at their entry.

  “I apologize for the intrusion,” Luke said. “Master Charsae Saal, you look very good for one who is recently deceased.”

  Tila Mong looked decidedly unhappy. “This is unforgivably rude of you.”

  “Unfortunately, my need—which I expressed to you, a need involving all possible knowledge about Jacen Solo—forces me to do some uncomfortable things. Such as intrude on your rituals. The problem is, when I realized that Charsae Saal was not dead, it occurred to me that your predecessor, Koro Ziil, might not be dead, either. True?”

  Tila Mong, tight-lipped, did not immediately answer.

  Charsae Saal spoke up. “In a moment, I will climb into that transport.” He indicated the silver lozenge. “I will be swept away, never again to see sunlight, the temple, or my family. Then Charsae Saal will truly be dead.”

  “Charsae Saal will,” Luke said. “But you won’t.”

  Charsae Saal hesitated, then nodded. “I will take a new name. Charsae Saal will be dead.”

  “So Koro Ziil also took a new name?”

  Tila Mong interrupted: “We cannot answer that. It is forbidden.”

  “And yet I need to speak to Koro Ziil, or whoever he is now.”

  Tila Mong looked at them, considering. “This could be arranged. If you are willing to do what Charsae Saal is about to do.”

  That alarmed Ben. “Fake our deaths?”

  “No. Climb into a transport and ride to where Charsae Saal is going.”

  “I will go,” Luke said. “Ben can stay here.”

  “It is both or neither,” Tila Mong said. “Answers for both or answers for none.”

 
Luke frowned, but Ben nodded. “I’m in.”

  His father turned to him. “Ben—”

  “Dad. Jacen. Coruscant. Answers.”

  Luke scowled. “I don’t like it that you can win an argument without using verbs.”

  Ben just smiled at him.

  Charsae Saal climbed into his transport. The lid was lowered over him. Tila Mong shoved the transport along the rails until it fully entered the hole in the wall. Then gravity, magnetic propulsion, or some other motivator Ben couldn’t detect took over. The transport disappeared, clattering its way down into the depths of the planet.

  The other two Baran Do Masters returned with transports on rolling carts. They lifted one onto the rails. Luke climbed in and gave Ben one final, encouraging look. Then the Masters lowered the lid on him, too, and shoved him into the railed tunnel.

  As they positioned his transport on the rails, Ben wondered what he was getting into this time—and whether he would soon consider his time on the surface of Dorin to have been a vacation spot in comparison.

  CALRISSIAN-NUNB MINES, KESSEL

  They had breakfast in the conference room where Lando, Tendra, and Nien Nunb had first talked to Han and Leia, but none of the adults were there now. Nanna served, C-3PO chattered, Chance treated his food as though it were as much a toy as a meal, and Allana moped, scarcely tasting her food.

  Lando’s wild yell of victory jolted her. She stared wide-eyed as he burst into the conference room, his hip cloak askew, his face all smiles.

  “Get your breath mask,” he told her. “We’re going on the Lady Luck, my yacht. To pick up your parents.”

  Ten minutes later, Lando, Tendra, Allana, and Nien Nunb, all crowded into the cockpit of the Lady Luck, came in for a landing on a salt plain many kilometers from the mine. Han and Leia stood there in the middle of nowhere, breath masks not concealing the smiles on their faces. They looked dirty, scuffed, tired, and cold, but they had never looked better to Allana.

  “That’s the way it is with your folks,” Lando told Allana. “Everything’s fine now.”

  CALRISSIAN-NUNB MINES, KESSEL

  Things happened fast after the Solos’ return.

  Mere minutes after Lando, Tendra, and Nien Nunb heard the Solos’ story, they placed a rush order to Trang Robotics for dozens of small flying sensor drones, a type used in military operations for reconnaissance over a large area. Two days later, a first shipment of ten drones arrived. Tendra already had their programming worked up and ready to be installed; then Han and Lando used the Falcon to take the drones to the sensor access tunnel by which Han and Leia had escaped the underworld. They released the drones into the shaft, planted a data relay unit there, and returned to the mineworks.

  Hours later, the drones had transmitted enough visual and sensor recordings that the data could begin to be integrated. In the conference room now being used as the Calrissian-Nunb-Solo base of operations, Tendra brought up a schematic of the planet, a green wire frame of the entire world.

  “All right, start your Podracers.” Tendra pressed a button on her console, and an elaborate webwork of yellow lines appeared on the diagram; the yellow web spread hundreds of kilometers from the site of the mineworks, straight lines intersecting at larger bulbous spots.

  Leia leaned in close, peering at the design. “Where were we?”

  Tendra tapped a spot on the diagram, a yellow line between two closely situated yellow blotches. “This is where you escaped the complex.” She tapped one of the two yellow zones, which was dotted with blackness. “This is the cavern that blew up.”

  Han whistled. “Every one of those yellow things is a cavern?”

  Tendra nodded. “Every one. All part of the same ecosphere, with pretty much the same sorts of life-forms. A lot of the caverns were destroyed already, though, apparently due to magnetics-and-explosives devices like the one you saw at the center of yours. Sometimes they caused complete cavern collapses, sometimes not.”

  “And if Leia’s interpretation of her contact with the bogeys is correct”—Lando raised a hand to forestall an objection from Leia—“and I’m certain it is, then we have a limited amount of time to figure out how to disarm the rest of those devices before they all blow up and crack Kessel into pieces.” He nodded to his wife. “Show them the rest.”

  “Oh, good,” Han muttered. “There’s more.”

  Tendra keyed in another command, and more wire-frame data superimposed itself on the schematic of Kessel. Red tracings, complicated but small, appeared in several spots on the planet’s surface, and a series of thick orange lines, jagged and wandering, seemed to meander their way through the center of the planet from pole to pole.

  “Red is mineworks,” Lando explained, and he tapped the one closest to where Tendra had indicated a moment earlier. “You are here. The orange thing is an enormous fault system. The seismologists made us aware of it as they’ve been investigating the groundquake phenomena. We had them run some numbers, and it’s pretty clear that if enough of these caverns blow up at the same time, it’ll cause the fault to crack, basically shaking Kessel to pieces.”

  Nien Nunb offered a comment in his own language, and Lando translated: “He says for Han not even to talk about just evacuating. We want to save this planet.”

  Han grimaced. “I hate it when I’m the only sensible one—it’s a bad precedent for me—but it’s even worse when no one gets to be the only sensible one.”

  Leia waved away his objection and turned back to Lando and Tendra. “So how do we visit, investigate, analyze, and then defuse all those detonation devices in the time we have available?”

  Lando looked unhappy. “That’s where I’m stumped. We’re already losing drones to the bogeys. They get too close, the bogeys come out to investigate, there’s contact, and the bogeys go down the way your speeder did that first time. We’ve had six of the ten drones go down like that already, and only two have recovered sufficiently to continue their missions. I’m not sure how to get a crew of demolition experts and scientists down there, keep them safe, give them enough time to figure out how to defuse the explosives … It sounds pretty close to impossible.”

  Han opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again.

  Leia glanced his way. “I felt that.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “You had an idea.”

  “I was just yawning.”

  She grinned at him. “I know you think the galaxy would be a better place without Kessel in it. But not everyone agrees.”

  “Come on, old buddy.” There was a genuine plea in Lando’s tone. “If you’ve got an idea, let’s hear it.”

  Han sighed. “All right. My idea is this. You don’t even try to defuse those things. Instead, you set them off.”

  Lando’s brows rose. “We’re not even waiting for them to blow up my world? We’re doing it ourselves?”

  “No.” Han pointed at the yellow patches on the monitor screen. “It’s not just that they’re blowing up. It’s that they’re blowing up all at once. Right? But if you set them off in some sort of random order, some sequence that will keep the strain from cracking that big fault …”

  Lando’s face cleared. “Han, you just earned yourself some shares in Calrissian-Nunb.”

  “Thanks, but I’d rather have shares in a firm that makes space-station trash compactors.”

  “I can arrange that.” Lando turned back to the map. “We get one of the big tunnel grinders, one that’s not cracking minerals anymore, and dig a shaft straight down to the tunnel nearest the surface. That’ll give us a straight in-and-out big enough for small transports. We’ll need teams of demolition experts who can figure out how to set off those explosives mounds reliably.”

  “The Jedi can help,” Leia said. “I’ll—”

  “Noooo,” Han said, and the others echoed his sentiment.

  “Why not?”

  “The Jedi have government watchers now, remember?” Han said. “This world represents big, scary technology like Centerpoi
nt Station did. Things the government could study. As soon as the government hears about what’s here—”

  Leia nodded ruefully. “That’s true. They’ll put a halt on all proceedings until they’ve sorted out what they think should be done, and that decision will be slowed to a standstill by the promise of new technology. Then it’ll stay deadlocked until everything blows up and Kessel becomes a cloud of asteroids.”

  “So no Jedi,” Lando said. “Other than you, of course.”

  Leia sighed. “Agreed.”

  Tendra looked thoughtful. “So Step One, I guess, is to figure out what we can do to set off those explosives mounds at the times of our choosing.”

  DEEP BENEATH THE SURFACE OF DORIN

  Though he had expected the trip to take only seconds or, at most, minutes, Ben rode in his unlit coffin for what seemed like forever. He checked his chrono from time to time—fortunately, its tiny screen was lit—and watched ten minutes trickle by, then twenty, then an hour …

  The only thing he heard was occasional clattering as the container’s grippers traveled over debris or a coupler-joined sections of rail. He shouted on two occasions for his father, but Luke was clearly too far away to hear. Ben could feel Luke out there, though, calm and unalarmed, so Ben himself had no reason to fret.

  He was just bored.

  Two hours and five minutes into his trip, the container slowed. Ben breathed a sigh of relief. The container continued to decelerate, and within a minute it came to a complete stop. Ben could see light glimmering along the edges of the lid. Then he heard voices speaking in the Kel Dor tongue and the lid opened. The sudden light blinded him.

  Blind or not, he was ready for trouble, using senses beyond sight, but he detected no hostile intent in the three nearest beings, even as they reached for him. He let one take his hand and guide him up and out of the container. Warm, humid air washed across him—all but his face, still enclosed in the breath mask—and he dropped to his feet on a rocky surface.