Star Wars: I, Jedi

by Michael A. Stackpole

  “Maybe, but not in the way you think I will.” I narrowed my eyes. “And as for your responsibility for Mirax, I just remembered something. In the past ten weeks, you’ve never tried to get a message to me asking after Mirax. You never even got a message to Wedge about her.”

  I stood and leaned forward on his desk. “All the concern you’ve showed for her has been from my ship to this office. And that tells me one thing, Booster: you knew! You knew all along that she was working for Cracken to track the Invids, didn’t you? She probably worked from here, using the Errant Venture as her base of operations.”

  Booster laughed slowly. “I can see the Horn blood runs strong in those veins. Very good.”

  His casual admission stunned me. He’d grabbed me, slammed me up against a bulkhead and all but accused me of having abandoned his daughter to whatever fate her enemies had in mind for her. Part of me wanted to reach across the desk and throttle him, while yet another part wanted to feed my anger through the Force and slam him up against the wall.

  Neither of those parts won in the war for control. “Were you just beating up on me for fun?”

  Booster shook his head solemnly. “When I realized Mirax was missing and heard you were off playing Jedi games, I was mad enough to come here to Yavin and beat you to within a micron of your life. A great chunk of me still is, but I respect your father enough to think you wouldn’t abandon Mirax. Just now, in bracing you like this, I gave you a chance to put the blame for your actions on others. You didn’t. Got to admire a man who accepts responsibility even when it might hurt.”

  I straightened up, crossing my arms over my chest. “And your reason for this little test?”

  “I didn’t know how much your time down there changed you. I wanted to make sure you could still do what has to be done to save Mirax.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t remember Corellian Jedi Knights, but I do. A bit. I wasn’t sure a Jedi would care for my daughter anymore.”

  I stared at him in disbelief. “What gets taught at the academy doesn’t make students less human.”

  “Tell that to the people of Carida.”

  Echoes of their death agony pounded through me. “You have a point.”

  Booster nodded. “How did you know I was testing you?”

  “Attitude and what I sensed about you. Smug satisfaction.” I shrugged. “You also mentioned General Cracken and you couldn’t have known why I’d be talking to him unless you knew Mirax was working with him. Since I didn’t know that, and since she’d not confided in Wedge, I assumed she confided in you. You must have blistered Cracken’s ears when you found out she was gone.”

  Booster smiled like wampa scenting tauntaun. “Told him I’d found a cache of guns to put on this monster before I went hunting for Mirax myself.”

  A fully armed Errant Venture was one of General Cracken’s recurring nightmares, especially with Booster at the helm. “Get anything useful from him?”

  “Not much.” Booster scowled. “I know the galaxy is a big place, but she can’t have vanished so completely.”

  “She hasn’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A woman named Mara Jade …”

  “Karrde’s confederate?”

  I nodded and sat back down. “The same. She said she had inquiries from a rare properties dealer on Nal Hutta about a deal for an item that he’d been holding for Mirax. Mirax had bought an option on purchasing the item and she was supposed to pick it up within days of when she disappeared. Sounds to me like a legitimate deal she would have set up to bolster her cover when seeking the Invids.”

  Booster smiled. “A number of the Invid crews ship out of Nal Hutta, or used to, anyway. Lots have been moving in the last two months.”

  “Because Mirax’s presence was proof positive that the New Republic was looking in that area.”

  The older man stroked his goatee. “It’s as good a place as any to start. We’ll be on our way within the hour.”

  “No.”

  Booster frowned at me. “No? We have the first lead that’s come up and you don’t want to follow it up?”

  “I want to follow it up, yes, and follow up the more important clue.” I laced my fingers together and pressed the index fingers against my moustache. “Mirax is detected on Nal Hutta, captured and the Invid crews there scatter. This firmly establishes a link between her capture and the Invids; and it also suggests she’s being held to forestall my doing anything rash.”

  “You won’t be doing it, I will.”

  I shook my head adamantly. “Booster, we won’t find Mirax until we find the Invidious, and you’re not going to have any more luck at finding it than the New Republic has. Tavira’s got people who can use the Force. They will know when you’re coming and they’ll leave or, worse yet, they’ll use their fully armed Impstar to blast the Venture to scrap.”

  Booster pounded his fist in his open hand. “She’s my daughter, CorSec, I have to do something!”

  “I know that. She’s my wife, and I have to do something, too. I have to act, but not before I’m ready.” I leaned forward. “Meet me halfway, Booster. If you don’t, she’ll die, and neither one of us will be happy for the rest of our lives. In your case that won’t be long because I’ll kill you.”

  Booster scoffed. “You’ll try.”

  “There is no try, Booster.” I let the edge bleed out of my voice. “I need you to do two things. First, use your network and get me as much data as you can about the Invid crews. I want to know who is shipping on what and out of where. If it gets to a point where we have to hit, I want to make sure we hit hard and hurt them badly.”

  “Done.” Booster smiled. “Karrde may think he’s the data-lord of the New Republic, but I’ve flipped bits he’s not even aware exist.”

  “Good.”

  My father-in-law picked up the holocube and froze a recent shot of Mirax so she smiled at both of us. “What’s the other thing?”

  I tried to sound nonchalant. “Get me into Corellia and out again.”

  Booster lost his grip on the holocube, dropping it to the desk. “Get you in past the Diktat’s watchmen? And out again? Have you lost what little mind you have?”

  “I hope not, because if I have, neither one of us will see your daughter again.” I stood and held my lightsaber aloft. “It’s going to be a Corellian Jedi that saves your daughter, and unless I get home and back out again, there just flat out aren’t going to be any Corellian Jedi around to do the job.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  My perspective as a member of the Corellian Security Force had never really led me to a proper appreciation for how well Booster Terrik operated. Our animosity had shielded me from his professionalism. Now, with his being galvanized by his effort to find and save his daughter, Booster pushed himself into overdrive with truly remarkable results.

  Securing for me false identification documents took less time than I would have imagined. Booster’s people accessed a database of pre-existing dataphantoms and merely attached my holographs to them. Using the Destroyer’s own Imperial-issue document fabrication machinery, I had three sets of documents in no time. One for getting me onto Corellia, one for walking around on Corellia and a third for getting me back out.

  I smiled. The Rebellion’s insertion of Rogue Squadron onto Coruscant hadn’t provided documentation this good.

  After that Booster sent me to the middle of the three “luxury” deck levels on board. These decks were each fitted out with a variety of establishments suited to the clientele allowed access to them. The lowest of the decks made pestholes like Mos Eisley look luxurious. On Black Level the denizens consisted mostly of out-of-work crews, poor folks looking for cheap transit, criminals, petty thieves, swindlers and con men. I’m not exactly certain why Booster allowed them on his ship, but even they might have information he could sell elsewhere.

  Blue Level, where he sent me, was a bit more respectable than Treasure Ship Row down in Coronet City on Corellia. I saw
just enough unsavory characters—Boba Fett wannabes, Han Solo wannabes and, albeit too few, Princess Leia wannabes. Mostly I saw traders and dealers and adventurous sorts who seemed to find shipping aboard a fearsome Star Destroyer thrilling. And Traders’ Alley—the cash-only bazaar—meant one could always find something thrilling here.

  Of major import on this level was the central courtyard area. It actually linked up with Diamond Level above it through a massive refitting effort that cored through three decks in the heart of the ship. In this airy well each day was displayed a brilliant holographic presentation of the Thyferra campaign. I noticed that Booster’s role, and that of the Errant Venture, were expanded, and that my role was all but eliminated. That niggled a little bit, but I decided the presentation was theatrical not historical, so hyperbole was bound to creep in.

  On Blue Level I visited a tailor who scanned me and started fabricating clothes that would fit my identities. I had him double-check the measurement on my collar. It would have been just like Booster to have him trim three or six centimeters off so I’d choke my way through my trip. The tailor, a Sullustan, cheebled at me that he’d never do such a thing—proper fit was his stock in trade, after all.

  Booster’s final effort to get me onto Corellia was a masterwork. He wouldn’t even let me up on Diamond Level—he said just having someone from CorSec on Blue Level was dampening the hedonistic abandon of luxury passengers—but he found me help up there. He convinced a Corellian couple that the only real way to feel the illicit thrill of being a smuggler was trying to smuggle something onto Corellia. He went so far as to say that even though they were Corellians, he didn’t think they could pull it off. They demanded he let them try. He demurred. They pressed. He relented, after they bribed him, and even thanked him for finding them replacement crew members for two of their yacht crew who had run into trouble in a Black Level entertainment establishment.

  I had no idea what the couple was smuggling, aside from me, but watching them pretend to be smugglers was rather amusing. When we arrived at the Coronet City spaceport, they decided to brazen out their effort by dumping a hefty bribe on the Customs inspector who greeted them. The inspector, taken aback by the bribe, began to question them closely. His colleagues in Immigration were intrigued with what was going on, and undoubtedly wanted their share of his bribe, so they passed the crew through without more than cursory glances at our identification, then zeroed in on the couple.

  Shouldering my two satchels of clothing and equipment, I departed the spaceport and found a fairly clean transient housing facility just off Treasure Ship Row. Despite my having worked the Row in years past, I wasn’t worried about running into old colleagues and being discovered. CorSec had changed through the years—it wasn’t even the Corellian Security Force any more. The Diktat had morphed it into the Public Safety Service, and had exchanged the traditional emerald and black uniforms for something darker and more Imperialistic. The PSS’s mission had become more snoopy and more concerned with maintaining public order than solving crimes.

  The past I knew here is dead. A shiver ran down my spine. Treasure Ship Row had changed in the six years I’d been away. It had always been seedy and disreputable, but the bright lights had provided a carnival veneer to the whole place. People of all types had been able to come here and find amusement. Certainly there were places good and respectful folks didn’t go except by accident, but the slight air of menace made the jaunts here more memorable—much like shipping aboard the Errant Venture.

  The changes on Treasure Ship Row might have seemed an improvement to many. The main street had been cleaned up considerably. All the paint was fresh, and graffiti was obliterated before it had time to dry. The lighting appeared less garish and the establishments were milder in tone. It had moved from being a place to being a showplace, leaving it all artificial and shallow.

  Out and around it, in the area that had not been transformed, the shadows had deepened and the menace festered, until anyone venturing a block away from the safe zone would drown in reality. The government, in cleaning up Treasure Ship Row, clearly believed it had gotten rid of all the unsociable elements that used to call it home, and was using the Public Safety Service to insulate themselves from reality and its consequences.

  The only positive point about the change was that I found it very easy to hire a speeder-cab. I gave him the directions to my grandfather’s home and the driver, a Klatooinan, graced me with a smile that was all tooth. I sank back into the rear seat, but refrained from drawing in a deep breath to relax myself. A Jedi might not know pain, but the scents in the back seat of a speeder-cab could gag a Gamorrean.

  I hoped I was not on a fool’s errand. While in the bacta tank I had realized that I’d taken my father’s message to be encouragement to join the Jedi academy. What Luke had told me about the Force allowing one to see pieces of the past or present or future suggested my father had somehow known the academy would come into being. That was an unwarranted assumption. Moreover, my father always hedged his bets. Knowing the future was mutable, he couldn’t be certain the academy would exist. As a result, I had to assume that he had made arrangements for information to be left behind for me so I could recover my heritage.

  I smiled slowly. Even if my father had left nothing behind, seeing my grandfather again would be fun. Nearing his home, back in the hill district where I had grown up, I began to realize how much I missed him and Corellia. I had gone away—had been forced to flee—to avoid Imperial entanglements and death. From that point I had pretty much been in hiding or up to my neck in missions with Rogue Squadron. While we had exchanged holographic greetings, the Diktat’s censors had chopped the messages up enough that little of my grandfather’s wit or warmth had gotten through.

  The speeder-cab came to a halt at a gate that blocked the whole street on which I’d grown up. My father had purchased a house across a circle from my grandfather, and there had been eight other houses scattered around that circle. We’d never had a wall surrounding the area and certainly no gate. “Are you sure this is the right place?”

  The Klatooinan nodded and tapped the display unit on his vehicle’s local navicomp. He reached out, plucked a wired comlink from its holder beside the gate and threaded it back to me. “Hello?”

  A stiff and formal voice answered back. “The Horn Estate.”

  Estate? “I’d like to speak with Rostek Horn, please.”

  “Director Horn has asked not to be disturbed.”

  I ducked my head and tried to peer through the gate’s bars at the houses further in, but I couldn’t see my grandfather’s place. Nor could I see the home I’d grown up in. Instead all I could see was a huge, sprawling building of very recent manufacture. It gleamed brightly against the green of the hills behind it, all white and silvery where tinted transparisteel sheets took the place of walls.

  “Please, tell him it’s his …” I hesitated. If I said grandson, I could cause trouble since I still had murder warrants out for me in the Corellian system. “Tell him it’s an old friend. Keiran Halcyon.”

  “Director Horn knows no one by that name.”

  I put an edge into my voice. “You clearly have not been with him long. I grew up in this neighborhood. He was like a grandfather to me. Tell him that.”

  “Just a moment.”

  The Klatooinan passed the time by bringing me up to speed on the local Zoneball league standings. He tried to impress me with the fact that Staive Pedsten, the local star—who, did I know, had once been romantically linked with Princess Leia—had sat where I sat. I was assured the athlete was not as handsome as I was, but the Klatooinan remembered him because he was a most generous tipper.

  I smiled back at my driver and nodded, but before he could regale me with Pedsten’s latest scoring coup, the gate opened. The Klatooinan hit the accelerator, which jolted us forward and tore the wired comlink from my hands. It clipped him in the back of the head as it snapped out his window. He grumbled a bit as he rubbed at the rising lump, but m
anaged to run me up to the estate’s front door without further incident. I paid him off and tipped very well—it was Booster’s money, after all, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t counterfeit.

  Once outside the speeder, I realized that the distant view of the building had failed to convey its actual size. My grandfather’s house had only ever been a modest two-story affair, with all the spare capital and his spare time going into maintaining the gorgeous sunken gardens in the back. The building I stood before now occupied three times the footprint of the old house, and rose another whole level above the old house’s roof. In its construction I could see bits and pieces of things my grandfather would love, but if he’d had the money to build this house, he would have just expanded his gardens even further instead.

  I walked up to the door, but before I could ring the bell, a small, wiry man with olive skin pulled the door open. He wore a black uniform festooned with white buttons. White gloves encased his hands and he eyed me suspiciously. He gave me no smile and looked me over carefully before he stepped aside and let me into the home’s grand foyer.

  The man spoke in the same clipped tones I’d heard over the comlink. “Director Horn is waiting for you in the garden.” He set off at a brisk pace, his shoes clicking sharply against the rose and black granite flooring. In the center of it, fashioned out of black marble and slices of malachite, the old CorSec logo had been rendered beautifully. I hopped over it, breaking my stride, which brought the man’s head back around to see what I was doing.

  It didn’t surprise me that my grandfather was in the garden. When he retired he said he wanted to dig and plant there, until he was dug in and planted. After a long walk, we emerged onto a veranda that was amply shaded from the noontime sun. Beyond it, down a short green pathway leading to a central fountain within an amphitheatre of colorful flowerbeds, stood my grandfather.