Star Wars: Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  Silence now, but he knew, could feel, the Sand People coming near.

  In that silence, very faintly, he thought he heard the almost-whispered thread of melody:

  “The Queen had a hunt-bird and the Queen had a lark,

  The Queen had a songbird that sang in the

  dark.…”

  Luke glanced back over his shoulder at the darkness, then stepped, very quickly, through the door.

  It slid shut.

  For some moments the only sound that came to his ears was his own breathing, steadying as he caught his wind. Shadow clustered thick around him, hid the far end of the long room like an obscuring curtain. Then, dimly, on the other side of the door, the scratch of metal on metal, the swift-moving whisper of feet.

  Luke braced his body against the nearest console and held his lightsaber ready, still unilluminated, in his hand.

  Dim with the muffling of the walls, he heard the harsh gronch of their voices, the crash of gaffe sticks against the other doors along the hall. Six of them at least. If the door before him were to open again he could probably kill two or three, but shooting through the door at him they’d have him. He looked around at the dark chamber. Even the chairs were bolted down.

  The door in front of him rattled under blows, but held.

  If the Will wanted it to open, something else prevented it from doing anything about it.

  It occurred to Luke that the Will had effectively imprisoned him here. All it needed to do was not open the gun room door again—ever.

  The silence returned, lengthened. The pain in Luke’s leg increased, the deep internal burning of infection unmistakable now. Keeping his senses stretched, his mind forced to attention on the corridor, he opened the patch in the leg of his coverall and affixed a new dose of perigen, though his supply was running perilously low. Anything to keep the pain at bay, to free his concentration for the use of the Force. Exhaustion and perigen-suppressed fever made him dizzy. He realized it had been some time since he’d eaten or slept, and his hand, when he straightened up to lean on his staff again, trembled.

  After a very long time, the door opened, again that narrow crack, again that labored, dragging motion, as if against the strength of the Will.

  Luke listened, breathed, sending his senses out. Far off he could still smell the stench of the dead Affytechans, but no whiff of the Sand People. Aching, he limped toward the door, lightsaber still in hand.

  Movement caught his eye. He startled, swinging around, but it was only his own reflection in the dark mirror of the nearest monitor screen. It stared back at him, scarred face, fair hair, the stained gray coverall of a Star Fleet mechanic.

  And beside it, behind it, just past his shoulder, he saw another face. A woman’s face, young, framed in a cloud of smoky brown hair like a thick-leaved tree in summer, the gray eyes looking into his.

  He swung around sharply, but of course there was no one there.

  Chapter 12

  “What? Who is it?”

  Leia prodded her husband’s shoulder. “I told you you should have waited for her to call back.” She turned back to the holo image of the woman in the field, fiery hair tousled, green eyes blinking into the dim glow of the lights on her end of the transmission. She wore a gold chain around her neck and a shirt Leia recognized as belonging to Lando Calrissian. “Mara, I’m sorry …”

  “No, it’s all right.” Mara Jade rubbed her eyes with a quick gesture, and that seemed to take care of any residual sleepiness, as if she’d clicked off a switch. “I must look like one of the Nightsisters of Dathomir. What time is it where you are? What’s up? Is there a problem?”

  “We don’t know, exactly,” said Han. He shoved back the towel from his still damp hair. “We know we got a problem but we’re not sure what it means. What can you tell us about Belsavis?”

  “Ah.” Mara settled back in the white leather of her chair, which shifted around her like a flower, drew up her long legs, and folded her hands around her knees. Her eyes narrowed, as if she watched something scrolling past on some inner readout screen: thought, memory, surmise. “Belsavis,” she said thoughtfully. “You find out what was there that the Empire thought was so important?”

  “You mean the children of the Jedi?” asked Leia.

  “Is that what it was?” Her dark brows lifted, then she thought about it, and a corner of her lip curved down, wry and speculative. “Makes sense. The file on it was closed when I started working for the Emperor, you see. Closed and sealed behind six kinds of security locks.”

  She shrugged. “Well, closed files always have the same effect on me. But in this case even when I broke into it I couldn’t find out anything except that at the end of the Clone Wars there’d been some kind of secret mission whose target was one of the rift valleys on Belsavis. Security was so heavy that even the people who worked on it didn’t know what was going on. If it was a move against the Jedi—against their families and children—I can see why they did it that way.”

  She was silent a moment, a small upright line between her brows as she called back to mind the old data. Beyond the metal shutters that blocked the orchard lights from the bedroom, Leia heard the sleepy trilling of pellata birds and manolliums among the trees, making one final stakeout of their territories before nestling down for the night. Chewie, smelling as only a damp Wookiee can smell, paused in brushing out his fur and growled softly.

  “A fighter wing was sent to Belsavis, interceptors mostly, fast but light,” said Mara after a time. “And a whole chain of remote-trigger relay stations was set up, mostly on satellites, or hidden ground stations; completely automated, but what it was they were supposed to activate or signal I never could find out. The mission file was cut to paper dolls. I gathered there was supposed to be a linkup with something that never arrived, something heavy. But later I got copies of some of the Emperor’s private invoices, and there were millions paid out about that date to an engineer named Ohran Keldor …”

  “I know about Ohran Keldor,” said Leia softly. Even after all these years her body went hot at the thought of his name, as if a thousand needles were rising up through her skin. “He was a student of Magrody’s, one of the designers of the Death Star. One of the teachers at the Omwat orbital platform that produced the rest of that design.” Her hands trembled involuntarily and she tightened them hard; felt Han’s swift, worried glance.

  “That’s him,” said Mara. She regarded Leia for a time, her own thoughts hidden behind the cool mask of her face, but if she understood the hatred of one who has had her world destroyed, she made no comment, and Leia herself said nothing. Could say nothing.

  “Same guy?” asked Han, a little too quickly, seeking to cover. “I mean, that was, what? Twenty years before they put the Death-Star together …”

  “Twenty years isn’t that long,” said Mara. “And Keldor was a boy genius back then, Magrody’s best. Looking at the kind of thing he designed later—military and industrial both—I’d say the Emperor paid him to design a supership of some kind. That was back when they needed a vessel the size of a city to carry the blasting power they wanted. Whatever was on Belsavis, it looks like the Emperor didn’t want anything breathing when the dust settled. Logically, it has to have been an installation, because of the firepower and because of the trade that started up later in xylen chips and gold wire, salvage goods; far too much to be just the gleanings of a battlefield. But I always wondered what kind of installation was so important that they’d go to that much trouble.”

  Han crossed his legs and pulled the dark-patterned native sarong he wore up to cover his knees. “But somebody dropped the ball.”

  Mara shrugged. “That part had been pulled out of the file, but it sounds like it, yes. The supership—or whatever it was that those automated relays were designed to summon—never arrived. Most of the relays were destroyed or lost, so somebody must have guessed what they were. The interceptors got mauled by a small planetary force, pretty badly by the sound of it. The file said ‘su
bjects departed.’ The officers in charge said they strafed everything in sight and did maximum damage with the weaponry available, but most of them were cashiered when they came home. A couple of high-ranking designers of artificial intelligence constructs and automated weapons systems were reassigned to places like Kessel and Neelgaimon and Dathomir …”

  “Real vacation spots,” murmured Han, who’d visited all three.

  Mara’s red mouth quirked in a small, chilly smile. “There are worse places. Ohran Keldor dropped out of sight for a while.”

  Chewbacca growled.

  “Yeah,” agreed Han, “I would have, too. But it looks like somebody reinstated him.”

  “That was probably Moff Tarkin,” said Mara. “He was a man who never lost track of so much as a paper clip. He was in charge of the Omwat orbital and that’s where Keldor showed up again, trying to work himself back onto the Emperor’s good side.”

  She shook her head again, a look on her face that was half speculation, half wonderment. “So it was the Jedi and their families. No wonder he wanted the whole planet done.”

  She was silent for a time, and looking at her, Leia wondered suddenly if that was what had drawn Mara to the Emperor in the first place: that Palpatine, Force-strong as he was, had been the only one who could teach Mara, the only one like herself that she knew.

  Having grown up herself with the knowledge that she was somehow just slightly different, without knowing how, Leia could understand that need. The need to have someone who understood.

  “Nothing in the records about where those ‘subjects’ went?” she asked. The bitter heat in her chest had chilled, but her own voice still sounded like a recording in her ears. “Nothing about the group itself? How big it was? How many ships they had? What direction they took off in?”

  The smuggler shook her head. “The file didn’t even mention who and what they were. Just that they ‘departed.’ ”

  “So you went to Belsavis to see who they’d been?”

  “Not exactly. But I was curious. I filed the whole thing away in my mind, but I kept an eye out for mention of the place. For a few years there was a lot of salvage running out of there: xylen chips, gold wire, polarized crystals, the kind of thing you’d see if an old base was being tapped. Rock ivory from antigrav units. Some old jewelry. I went there once, around the time of the Battle of Hoth, but Nubblyk the Slyte had a tight grip on the locals and I couldn’t stay long enough to figure things out.”

  “Look familiar?” Solo fished the gleaming chip from his pocket. “The Slyte was making a good living off these, but the supply pinching out wasn’t why he quit. You know what happened to him?”

  Mara leaned forward a little to study the chip through the Holonet’s shimmering transceiver field, then sat back with a long flash of white leg. “That’s the stuff. You ever do the Belsavis Run, Han? There’s a spot in the southern hemisphere that’s far enough from any rift or vent to be atmospherically stable about the same time every twenty-four hours. The Corridor, it’s called. Because of the storms and the ionization in the upper atmosphere they can’t track anyone who’s not coming down a charted beam. You come in high, drop fast, and run along close to the ice to one of the pads.”

  “I heard about the pads out on the ice,” said Han.

  Chewie rumbled a comment.

  “Yeah,” agreed Han. “Not something I’d want to do, either. I guess there’s still one or two in operation.”

  “There were twelve or thirteen back then,” said Mara. “Most were within a few kilometers of the rifts, about half of those near Pletwell … Plawal, they call the place now. I could look up the coordinates for you if it would help. Nubblyk started thermoblasting the pads right after the Clone Wars, when Brathflen and Galactic first came to the planet. He’d sound out geothermal fissures below the ice, tunnel down to them, then t-blast the pads within half a kilometer of the tunnel heads. That kept the people running the goods in and out through the Corridor dependent on Nubblyk, because only Nubblyk knew where the tunnel heads were. The Jedi.” She shook her head again. “I’d never have guessed that.”

  Chewbacca stopped brushing his fur long enough to offer a nominal sum against odds that Bran Kemple had been one of the tunnel guides, and Mara said, “Not on your life.”

  Leia rested her hands on Han’s damp, towel-wrapped shoulders. “And Drub McKumb was one of the guys who ran the Corridor.”

  “Drub McKumb?” Mara’s usually cold expression relaxed into a grin at the memory of the man. “Is he still around? Yes, he was one of the Corridor runners. How’s he …?”

  She saw the stillness in Han’s face, and her eyes went cold and flat.

  “What happened?”

  Han told her, and went on to outline his and Chewie’s adventures underground. “They were smugglers, Mara,” he said after a long—and somewhat expensive—silence on both ends of the Holonet transmission. “Whiphids, a Twi’lek, a Carosite, a couple of Rodians … local Mluki. Humans. They looked like they’d been down there years. Like Drub.”

  Mara swore: briefly, comprehensively, and filthily. Then for a time she sat in silence again, staring into the darkness beyond memory and time.

  “Does it sound like anything you know about?” asked Leia. She came around and Han made room for her on his chair. “They didn’t find any drugs in him.”

  “No,” said Mara distantly. “They didn’t use drugs.”

  “Who didn’t?”

  Mara didn’t answer. Leia said, still more quietly, “Vader?” Again her skin grew hot, around a core of bitter ice. Her father. Luke’s father.

  No, she thought. Bail Organa had been her father.

  The smuggler nodded, once. “Vader and Palpatine.” She brought the words out, crisp and cold and without qualification, as if she knew nothing could make it easier. “They mostly did it with semisentients: Ranats, Avogui, Zelosian Aga, cidwen. They’d use them for enclosure guards in places where they needed stormtroopers for other work. Drug them with a hallucinogen like brain-jagger or Black Hole, something that worked on the fear/rage centers of the brain. They’d use the dark side of the Force to burn it into them, make it permanent, like a constant waking nightmare. They’d hunt and kill anything that came their way. Palpatine could drive them with his mind, call them or dismiss them … I don’t know of anyone else that could calm them down.”

  “Would yarrock work?” Han put an arm around Leia’s waist, felt her body rigid as wood. “To calm them? The healers on Ithor seem to think it would, though I don’t know how Drub would get any in the tunnels.”

  Mara shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  In the silence Artoo bleeped faintly from the door, to let them know the coffee and supper Leia had put in the heater were done. Nobody said a word and the little droid, evidently reading the atmosphere of the room, did not signal again.

  “Thanks, Mara,” said Han at length. “I owe you dinner when we get back to Coruscant. If you can get back with me on the coordinates of those pads it might help. Sorry about waking you up …”

  “It beats being pulled out of bed by an airstrike.”

  “One more thing.” Leia looked up suddenly. “You say you were keeping an eye on Belsavis. Did anybody from Palpatine’s Court take refuge there after Coruscant fell? Anyone you know about?”

  The woman who had been the Emperor’s Hand settled back into her chair, running memories, rumor, recollection through her mind like bolts of colored ribbon, seeking some flaw or slub. In time she shook her head. “Not that I know about,” she said. “But Belsavis isn’t that far from the Senex Sector. That’s practically a little Empire itself these days—the Garonnin family and the Vandrons and their kind always wanted it to be. Who were you thinking of?”

  Leia shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I just wondered.”

  “You okay?”

  Leia turned sharply. She’d folded back one of the metal shutters to step out onto the balcony, and the diffuse light from the orchard fell in
a muzzy bar into the room behind her, picking out the hard edge of Han’s arm muscle, the sharp points of collarbone and shoulder, the small scar on his forearm. The dark print of the sarong he wore was like the black-on-black mottling of a trepennit’s hide, lost in the shadows of the room.

  She didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure what she could have said, and she’d long ago learned that lying to Han was impossible. In the sticky warmth of the night his hand, dry and cool from the air-conditioning of the house, was a welcome strength on her bare arm.

  “Don’t worry about Keldor.” His hands went from her shoulders to her hair, gathering its auburn weight against his face. “Somebody’ll find him one of these days. Same—”

  She felt in the very slight flinch of his hand the swift cutting off of speech and thought midsentence. As if, she thought, he believed she didn’t know. Hadn’t been thinking the same.

  “Same way someone found Stinna Draesinge Sha?” she asked. “And Nasdra Magrody … and his family? The way some … some so-called patriot from the New Alderaan movement came to me a month ago hinting there were people ready to foot the bill if I used my ‘influence’ to have Qwi Xux murdered? And all the rest of the list who were just ‘following orders’?”

  “I don’t know about Qwi,” said Han softly, naming the fragile genius whose mind had been manipulated into participating in the Death Star’s design. “She always seemed to me more a victim than anything else even before what she went through later … but I’ve never talked to anyone who didn’t think you had every right to take a shot at the rest of them.”

  “No.” Leia sighed, feeling as if it had been years since she’d last relaxed enough to breathe. It was good beyond words to feel his arms around her, his body pressing into her back. “No. I don’t have any right. Not if I’m the Chief of State. Not if I stand for doing things in accordance with the law. Not if I stand for everything that Palpatine was not. That’s what hurts, I think. That it’s what I want to do—and what I cannot let myself do—and everyone thinks I did it anyway. So why not do it?”