Outcast

by Aaron Allston

  “Obviously,” Luke said, “you’ve known about this place for some time before coming here.”

  “I have.” Chara nodded. “It was nearly twenty years ago when Master Koro Ziil, sensing that I might someday be suited to this existence, came to me. He swore me to secrecy and told me of the Hidden One, who then was the former Tokra Hazz.”

  Ben snorted. It caused a touch of condensation to form on the inside of his breath mask, but the film quickly evaporated. “And the idea of living in a hole in the ground and pretending to be dead was just irresistible to you.”

  Luke gave Ben a now’s not the time to mock look.

  Chara did not seem offended. “It’s not an issue of pleasing ourselves. It’s an issue of service. Service to the Baran Do, and to the cause of knowledge.” Having completed the tour of this chamber, he led them back through the blast door and out into the hallway beyond. “And in a sense, you Jedi are responsible for it.”

  Luke smiled. “I don’t recall sending out a communication asking for arrangements like this.”

  “Not you personally. Before your time. I was just a child when it happened. The day the Jedi disappeared from the galaxy.”

  “Oh.” Luke sobered. “The purge.”

  “Yes.” The next chamber was not behind a blast door; the entryway was merely curtained. Chara brushed the black cloth aside and entered. He fumbled against the wall on one side and then the other before he found the glow rod activator switch. Light sprang up along the ceiling, revealing racks of depressingly identical black robes. “Ah. You’ll want some of these, though they’ll have to be adjusted for your diminutive height.”

  Ben grimaced. “Diminutive.”

  Chara switched the light off and led them back into the access tunnel. “Anyway, Master Tokra Hazz was horrified by this. All the Baran Do were, so the story goes, but Tokra Hazz was profoundly affected. Perhaps he felt the deaths of the Jedi through the Force. Tokra Hazz was not so much distraught at the loss of individual life as at the loss of knowledge. Remember, at the time it was believed that all Jedi everywhere had died—that the Jedi Order had completely winked out. Fearing that the new Emperor would extend the same genocidal impulse to other Force-sensitive orders, Tokra Hazz sent many of the Baran Do Masters into hiding and thought about what to do next.”

  Ben looked around dubiously. “And what to do was to dig a hole in the ground.”

  “Yes.” The next chamber, also behind curtains, proved to be a storehouse of preserved foods, all in bottles or cans. Ben recognized brand names from Dorin manufacturers. Chara continued, “As a repository of knowledge. If the Empire were to come and destroy the sages, a cell would survive, deep in the ground, and would be able to … communicate its learning to others on the surface.”

  Luke frowned. “Communicate how?”

  “The rails that brought us here are also direct comlink connections with the surface. Not just with the temple, but other places. And should the rails be destroyed, the Hidden One knows a Force technique of mind-to-mind communication.”

  “Telepathy.” Luke sounded dubious.

  “Yes.”

  “Interesting. I’ve experienced communications through the Force from loved ones light-years away, but they tend to be emotional surges, perhaps a few words, perhaps a vision … Exchanges of anything but emotions and general impressions are impossible to maintain for any useful length of time. That’s not the sort of communication through which you can teach all your techniques.”

  Chara shrugged. “This technique is known only to the High Masters of the Baran Do.”

  Luke looked thoughtful. “I’d love to learn it. I’ll have to speak to Koro Ziil.”

  “Koro Ziil is dead. You will have to speak to the Hidden One.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  Ben tried to steer the conversation back to Chara’s story. “So the old Master, Tokra Hazz, eventually decided on making this underground shelter.”

  Chara nodded. “He used tunneling equipment to dig the tunnel by which we entered. It’s very long, some two hundred kilometers, circling and winding. It eventually reached natural caverns that he decided to use as the center point for his complex. The first tunnel took years to dig, and the caverns took more years to modify.”

  They reached and passed by a communal sanisteam chamber. The next chamber beyond seemed to be a sort of sauna, not currently in use.

  “Why such a long tunnel?” Luke asked.

  “A practical choice. Tokra Hazz’s intent was to recruit only those Baran Do and servants who were fully dedicated to the cause. But in case someone changed his mind … well, it is impossible for any Kel Dor, or human, to leave by that tunnel. To crawl two hundred kilometers—you couldn’t carry enough food or drink and would die in the attempt. Should someone put together a viable means to ascend through the tunnel, like the little rail vehicles they used during the construction days to go back and forth, the Hidden One can, at the touch of a switch or issuance of a special command through the Force, trigger a series of explosions along the tunnel’s length, sealing it forever.”

  Ben felt a little trickle of worry. “So how do Dad and I get out?”

  “You’ve already been told. You don’t.” Chara looked serene but sympathetic. “Like the rest of us, you are here forever. For your own sanity, you must resign yourselves to the idea that you are already dead—that you now exist only to preserve knowledge.”

  NOT FAR FROM THE ARMAND ISARD CORRECTIONAL FACILITY, CORUSCANT

  Under an assumed name, Winter rented quarters in the residential building nearest the prison in which Valin was being held—in which Valin was stored, since someone frozen in carbonite needed only monitoring, not a cell and sustenance.

  The prison itself was an artifact of early-Imperial-era architecture. Surrounded by a comparatively narrow plaza, which would serve as a kill zone for guards should prisoners escape, it consisted of a tall, tiered single building within an exercise yard surrounded by fifteen-meter walls, all made of black synthstone. Synthstone towers with snipers’ nests rose from the corners; spotlights, bright enough to give a sunburn to a target fifty meters away, were mounted atop the towers and at intervals along the walls. Otherwise the only bright points to be seen were on the upper reaches of the building, where lit viewports indicated the quarters of the warden and senior officers. It was a place of gloom and oppression, and the Darkmeld conspirators’ new quarters looked down upon it from a distance of half a kilometer.

  In those viewports, Jaina’s team placed holocams with powerful zoom functions. On nearby desks and tables were banks of monitors for the holocams deployed to watch Seff Hellin.

  Monitoring had been reasonably successful. Using holocamequipped mouse droids, holocams surreptitiously mounted on government buildings surrounding the prison, and even data feeds stolen from surveillance satellites, the team had not only watched Seff perform his workman deception but had used a mouse droid to follow the rogue Jedi to his temporary quarters a kilometer from their own stakeout. All the darkmeld conspirators took shifts at the stakeout quarters—even Jaina, when she felt she was safe in sneaking away from Dab for a few hours.

  She had done so this night, and she and Jag shared duty at the monitors.

  Jaina looked up from the screen displaying the notes the others had been keeping. “His timing is as steady as public transportation on Kuat.”

  Jag, leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed, nodded. “Seems to be. The eight hours prior to dawn, he’s in his workman disguise, mostly underground in front of the prison. The next eight hours he’s at his quarters, presumably asleep. The next eight hours we can’t reliably track yet, but he seems to use them to acquire gear and maybe get in touch with contacts.”

  “We need to find out what he’s doing in front of the prison. Digging a tunnel? Planting high explosives? Surely he’s not that crazy.”

  “We do.” Jag rubbed his eyes and then looked at Jaina. “Armand Isard. Any relation to Ysanne Isard?”

 
; “Her father. She sent him to prison. Not this prison.” Ysanne Isard was one of the officers who had acted as temporary rulers of the Empire after Palpatine had died. Earlier in her career, she had won a private power struggle with her equally treacherous father. He had been executed; she had replaced him as director of Imperial Intelligence. “I think it was some sort of act of malicious humor rather than contrition on her part to name a prison after him. Bureaucratic inertia has kept it from being renamed. Or repainted. Or torn down.”

  “Well, the New Republic only conquered Coruscant, what, thirty-six years ago? The century’s still young.” He waved the subject away. “At dawn, when Seff leaves, Winter and I are going to do just what you said. See what he’s been doing down there.”

  “Good.”

  “Got a question for you.”

  “All right.”

  “What do you think about bringing Mirax into this?”

  Jaina sat back and considered. “Well, she has skills, useful contacts, some funds, and plenty of motivation.”

  “Right.”

  “But she’d need to keep it a secret from Corran. He’s her husband, a former security investigator, and a Jedi Master. A hard man to keep secrets from.”

  “Also right.”

  “And she and Corran are very, very busy right now.” That was an understatement. Each of the senior Horns was doing everything possible to free Valin from his carbonite imprisonment and return him to the Jedi Order for evaluation. Corran was calling in favors from his careers before joining the Jedi—from veterans of Corellian Security and Starfighter Command. The latter offered more possibility of success, because many of his colleagues from his piloting days were now senior officers in the Galactic Alliance military, but so far they had demonstrated little effectiveness in this task, as the military officers and other government leaders supporting Valin’s sentence were even more powerful. Mirax, similarly, was cashing in favors she had accumulated over the years, but her contacts—chiefly traders and smugglers—were having even less luck than Corran’s. Jaina had seen Corran several times at the Temple since Valin’s sentencing, and it was clear that, as much as he tried to spare his fellow Jedi the pain he felt, he was suffering. Mirax had to be in similar shape.

  That decided matters for Jaina. “Let’s designate her an in-case-of-emergency resource. Maybe get Winter to approach her on a preliminary basis.”

  Jag nodded.

  Jaina’s comlink beeped, a familiar, unwelcome series of notes—two musical tones, a pause, and two more.

  Jaina froze. “Oh, no.”

  “Didn’t you say he checked up on you only an hour ago?”

  “Yes.” She looked stricken. “That should have given me three or four hours more at least. I haven’t heard of any of the observers doing their checks an hour apart.” She pulled out her comlink and glared at it.

  “How fast can you get to the Temple and sneak back in?”

  “Nowhere near fast enough. He’s going to beep again—”

  The comlink did beep again, the same notes.

  Jaina winced. “And then he’s going to assume I’m too deeply asleep to hear him. He’ll go down to my quarters, which takes only a minute, and start ringing the chimes.”

  “If he doesn’t get an answer then?”

  “He’ll comm the Master on duty and they’ll force the door. But I have one chance.” She scrabbled around in her pouch and brought out a second comlink. “I rewired the door intercom with a comlink matched to this one. I can talk to him as if I’m just inside my quarters. Maybe I can bluff him. Maybe I can convince him he doesn’t actually have to see me.” She knew she didn’t sound hopeful. She wasn’t.

  “What happens if you can’t?”

  She sighed. “I get found out having sneaked out of the Temple without my observer. Master Hamner will be obliged to punish me somehow. Teaching basic telekinesis to the younglings out in the Transitory Mists, for example. That’s assuming the government doesn’t prosecute me, which they might.”

  “Which they will. They’re not showing any mercy to the Jedi right now.”

  She glared at him. “Thanks. You’re making me feel much better.”

  The second comlink sounded, this one with a chime identical to the one at Jaina’s Temple quarters. She took a deep breath, then pressed the button. She made her voice sound sleepy. “What is it?”

  “Hello, Jedi Solo. It’s Dab. Routine location check.”

  “Weren’t you—what time is it?”

  “I’m sorry. Yes, it was just an hour ago. My randomizer went off again.”

  “Dab, just go away. I’m tired, I’m in bed, you know I’m here.”

  “I have to see you in person, Jedi Solo. You know the rules.”

  Jaina switched off the comlink and mouthed a curse. She glanced at Jag. “I’m sunk.”

  “Maybe not. Maybe the Empire can rescue a Jedi.” He reached over and plucked the comlink from her fingers, and smiled at her startled expression. He thumbed the comlink on. “Who’s out there?” He made his own voice hoarse, sleepy.

  Jaina stared at him.

  “It’s Dab. Dab Hantaq,” Dab said.

  “Where’s my blaster?”

  Jaina caught on and suppressed a laugh. As she’d heard her mother say many times over the years, she said, “It’s under your pillow. Where it always is.”

  “Give me just a second. All right, let him in. I’m going to burn a hole right between his eyes.”

  “Jag, he’s only doing his duty—”

  “Vape his duty. Come to think of it, vape the neat little hole between his eyes. I’m going to burn his face clean off. Closed-casket funeral for him, diplomatic immunity for me. Let him in.”

  Dab’s voice emerged from the comlink: “Um, Jedi Solo, I’m satisfied that you’re here. I’m just going to mark this one as confirmed.”

  Jaina breathed a silent sigh of relief. “Thank you, Dab. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  She took the comlink back and switched it off. “Staying ahead of the Moffs is keeping you sharp.”

  Wearing workmen’s jumpsuits similar to Seff’s, Jag and Winter clambered down through the street-level access hole into the underground just in front of Valin’s prison. Jag pulled the hatch closed above them.

  This was a well-maintained maze of permacrete tunnels, metal pipes, access hatches, and machinery, some of it ancient. None of the tunnels headed in the direction of the prison.

  “Which is as it should be,” Winter said. “Tunnels to and from the prison would mean a higher rate of escapes.”

  Jag looked up and down the passageways leading from the access. “So what has Seff been doing? We haven’t seen any sign that he’s been removing debris.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  Half an hour’s exploration revealed some of what Seff had been up to. An electronics junction box that was suspiciously free of grime held an oversized, very powerful datapad recently patched into the box’s electronic components. Winter activated it, spent a few minutes bypassing its simple security, and then flipped through the presets in its programming. Each showed a length of permacrete tunnel, walls at right angles to an almost blemish-free floor, dim glow rods in a line across the ceiling. One preset displayed a simple diagram of the underground area, showing the leading edge of the prison and a spot a quarter kilometer away joined by some sort of access tunnel.

  “Got it,” Winter said. “It’s a riot raid tunnel.”

  “Which is what, exactly?”

  “It’s a tunnel with only two accesses. One is at the prison, and it can’t be opened from the prison side. It’s probably not even detectable as a door on the prison side—it’d be disguised as a permacrete wall, maybe in a storage area. The other end goes straight to a law enforcement station of some sort and can only be opened from inside the station. If there’s a prison riot or mass breakout and the prisoners take over, the authorities have a fast, secret way to get into the prison.”

  Jag conside
red. “So he’s sliced into the holocams observing the tunnel and probably subverted them—and he may have already drilled an access into the tunnel itself. He’ll be working on a bypass for the prison-end door next.”

  “That’s it. He goes into the prison from this access, thaws Valin, brings him out the same way. Minimal fuss. But how does he find Valin?”

  “Through the Force. Jaina says she can feel him, even in his present comatose state. More significantly, how did he find out about this tunnel?”

  Winter shook her head. “I’m not sure. Back in the days of the Old Republic, Jedi sometimes helped the authorities in suppressing riots like this. Perhaps he found a reference to such an event in the Jedi Archives?”

  “I’ll ask Jaina to look into that … Can you keep Seff’s holocams from recording? If there’s an access into that tunnel, we need to go down there.”

  “I can.”

  Seff’s access was easy to find. A sheet of durasteel with weld marks all along its edges appeared to be a wall-damage patch, but turned out to be simply held in place by four large blobs of a gluelike substance. Behind the metal sheet was a ragged circular hole, clearly cut by a lightsaber, into the tunnel shown on Seff’s monitor.

  Jag and Winter entered the tunnel and walked its length, finding no sign of sabotage at the security station end. Seff had clearly been at work at the prison end, however.

  Sophisticated bypass gear had been attached to the access console beside the blast door. Winter activated it and ran through its memory, determining that it had been testing thousands of possible activation codes at a rate designed to prevent the security station’s central computer from flagging the events as intrusion attempts. “It shouldn’t take him much longer,” she told Jag. “A few hours, a day, maybe two.”