Star Wars

by Charles Soule

  Whatever the Nihil were doing here, whatever this group had been…it was over.

  Lourna Dee looked at the Jedi’s lightsaber. It was pretty, sort of, but it made her nervous to even hold the blasted thing. It was magic, they said.

  I’m holding a magic sword, she thought. What the hell is going on?

  “Give it to me,” Marchion Ro said, holding out his hand.

  She handed it over, happy to be rid of it. Marchion gave it his own look, then began to tap it against his mask, the eye right in the center.

  Tap.

  Tap.

  “You sure you want to do that?” Lourna said. “I mean, if it turns on…”

  “It won’t.”

  Tap.

  They were in a cargo hold on the Gaze Electric, where Lourna had brought the last Blythe as well as their captured Jedi. She hadn’t caught either of their names. They were both still passed out from the gas, which made sense. She hadn’t wanted to take any chances with Jedi magic, and had dosed them again on the journey back from Elphrona.

  “They work like this,” Marchion said, holding out the hilt.

  He twitched his finger and the blade hissed into life, throwing the hold into golden relief.

  He swung it a few times, like an experiment, seeing how it felt, listening to the humming, buzzing sound it made.

  “I’m going to keep this,” he said.

  Lourna Dee took an involuntary step backward, hating herself a little for it. But Marchion Ro was no Jedi. She wasn’t sure what he was these days, actually. He’d always had an edge, but he knew his place. He was the Eye, and nothing more.

  Now…all that was gone. He seemed…confident, in some new and deeply unsettling way. Like he had changed, grown, become something greater than he previously was.

  Or, as she was beginning to suspect, this was always what he’d been, and he’d just decided to hide it from her and the other Tempest Runners. But they’d all known it, hadn’t they? Down on some instinctive level.

  Marchion Ro was a predator.

  He spun, swinging the lightsaber faster now, big, deadly sweeps. Lourna stepped back again. She didn’t care if he thought she was a coward. If it slipped out of his hand, that thing could cut her in half with no trouble at all.

  “Kassav’s Tempest encountered a trap set by the Republic, Lourna Dee,” Marchion Ro said. “A huge battle fleet. It was tragic. They all died. What do you think about that?”

  “About Kassav?”

  “Yes.”

  Swing. Swing.

  Lourna Dee didn’t respond, not for a long time.

  “I think your spy in Senator Noor’s office told you the Republic already had the location you sent Kassav to. I think you knew that battle fleet would be waiting, and sent him and his Tempest there to die. So what I think…is that you just killed a third of the Nihil.”

  Marchion Ro stopped swinging the lightsaber, ending its arc so it was pointing directly at her.

  “Look at you, Lourna,” he said, “Smarter than I would have guessed. The question is…what will you do now?”

  Lourna Dee’s attention was completely focused on the tip of the lightsaber, hovering and humming just a few centimeters from her face.

  “You could leave, I guess,” Marchion said, “but the Republic has all the specs for that beautiful ship of yours. Transponder signal and everything. You’d have to leave it behind, and you named it after yourself. That’d hurt, I bet.”

  It took her a moment to understand the meaning of the words he’d just used. She shifted her gaze to look at his masked face, at the swirling storm carved into it. She knew he was smiling behind it. She could hear it in his voice.

  “The flight recorder mission,” she said. “You gave the Republic the information on my ship. That’s how they found me. How they were able to attack me.”

  “Technically, Jeni Wataro gave it to them—but I gave it to her.”

  “You wanted me to fail. Why, Marchion?”

  “The Republic needed the flight recorder so they’d figure out where to send their fleet to look for us. If they didn’t have it, I wouldn’t have been able to sacrifice Kassav’s Tempest. Now they’ll think they destroyed us. They’ll relax for a while. They’ll stop hunting us.”

  Lourna Dee didn’t care that Kassav was dead. Not in the slightest. But the audacity of what Marchion Ro had done, the casual way he had just sent a third of the organization to certain death…who was this man?

  “You think that’ll work?” she said, her eyes returning to the lightsaber blade. Maybe she could throw herself backward, get her blaster out in time. Maybe.

  “It will, Lourna Dee. I’ve got it all figured out.”

  He deactivated the lightsaber, and she said a silent prayer of relief. Not that he couldn’t just turn it on again. She knew she remained in extreme danger. What she was realizing was that she always had been, from the moment Marchion Ro—and his father, for that matter—had come to the Nihil.

  “We are all the Republic,” he said, spitting out the words. “Whether we like it or not, eh?”

  He looked at her, the eye in his mask seeming to glow.

  “I never told you much about my family, and I doubt I ever will—but I came from something I wanted to escape. This ship was part of it, actually, until it all went bad. My father and I both got out. We worked hard, and we had a plan…for the Paths, for the Nihil…for all sorts of things.”

  He gestured at his mask.

  “It was always gonna be like this. Since the day I was born. I thought I escaped. I didn’t, though. Not really.”

  Lourna Dee shook her head. She just…

  “I don’t understand why you sent me out there after the flight recorder, Marchion. If you wanted the Republic to have it, why did I have to go after the damn thing?”

  “So your Tempest would see you fail, Lourna Dee, and start thinking about new leadership,” Marchion said. “And so you’d have nowhere else to go. I’m going to need you, I think.”

  “For what?”

  Marchion Ro tilted his head, and she knew he was smiling again.

  “You’ll find out,” he said.

  She had to get away, to think. It felt like Marchion had trapped her in a box, and she could barely understand its shape. It was like the Great Hall—the walls were invisible, but it didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  “Look, Marchion,” Lourna said. “I’m gonna get back to my people. They had some questions—like why you sent my whole Tempest to rescue a few Strikes and a Cloud. Kind of like overkill, you know?”

  She pointed her thumb at the homesteader, the man they’d grabbed, the one remaining family member from the group Dent’s Cloud had grabbed. He was still unconscious, ankles and wrists all lashed up in binder cuffs, propped up against a crate in the hold.

  “My feeling is that it has something to do with that guy. Fine, whatever—you don’t need to tell me why he’s so valuable. You can even run the ransom, if you want. I don’t care about the Rule of Three. You can have it all. Maybe just throw some of the proceeds back down my way so I can spread them around to my people.”

  Marchion Ro walked across the hold, the sound of his boots echoing off the durasteel walls.

  “This guy?” he said, looking down at Ottoh Blythe.

  He pulled the lightsaber from his belt again, igniting it and bringing it down in the same motion, a golden slash right across the man, dead in an instant, cut apart.

  A weird smell filled the hold, and Lourna Dee wanted to get away from that particular odor as quickly as she could, but she was frozen.

  Marchion’s lost his mind, she thought. His entire mind.

  “I don’t care about that guy,” he said. “Never did.”

  Marchion Ro shifted the lightsaber, pointing its blade a meter or so to the left, at the other pers
on Lourna Dee had pulled from the ship above Elphrona. The owner of the weapon Marchion had just used to murder someone.

  The dark-skinned Twi’lek Jedi.

  He was bound even more thoroughly than the Blythe—triple-strength binders, chains, stun-packs, and a gag. She was glad, too, because the man’s eyes were not friendly. She’d heard a lot of stories about Jedi; everyone had. She didn’t know which were true, but she could now verify that at least one was false. Clearly, the Jedi could not shoot death-beams from their eyes, because if they could, then Marchion Ro would be stone-dead.

  She couldn’t believe Marchion had taken the man’s weapon and used it to kill someone right in front of him. It seemed like tempting fate, even with the Jedi all tied up. You never knew what they could do.

  “I didn’t give your crew Paths to run that job on Elphrona to bring me a family of miners, Lourna Dee,” Marchion Ro said. “I did it because that planet has a Jedi outpost. I figured there was at least a chance your crew might be able to bring me a Jedi. Why not try, right? Lo and behold, now I have one. Which is good, because a Jedi…”

  He deactivated the lightsaber, and very ostentatiously hung it on his belt.

  “…is just what I need.”

  Chancellor Lina Soh considered whether the choice she was making felt right, after everything learned and lost in the past several weeks. She was in her office on Coruscant, with Matari and Voru at her side, all three looking out through the broad viewport behind her desk at the endless cityscape beyond. She had no idea what the targons thought about what they saw, but to her, the Coruscant skyline always felt like the Republic in miniature. Always moving, always changing and evolving, endlessly deep and strange and infinite. At that moment, the sun was setting, and the lights were coming up on the buildings. Stars in the heavens. Worlds in the Republic.

  Yes. She was making the correct decision.

  Lina turned away from the city-world to face the people she had called to her office, the group she had met in Monument Plaza when this all began. A senator, an admiral, a secretary, and, as always, Jedi. The Jedi were never anything less than helpful, solved every problem they were given and many they were not. Without their assistance, there was no question the mystery of the Legacy Run would not have been solved as quickly or decisively. Many of their number had died trying to help the Republic, including Master Jora Malli, whom she knew had been slated to run the Order’s temple on the Starlight Beacon station. They had sacrificed and fought and triumphed, as they nearly always seemed to. She loved the Jedi.

  But sometimes she wondered if they were too useful.

  “I am reopening the Outer Rim,” Chancellor Soh said.

  She pointed at her aide, Norel Quo, his pale skin tinted orange in the light of the sunset.

  “Put out a statement to that effect immediately. Hyperspace transit through the territories is once again authorized. I’ll use executive orders to temporarily ease taxation on those trade routes as well, which will help repair any economic damage caused by the quarantine. Just for a month or so, though, which should incentivize merchants to get their goods out there quickly. That will ease the shortages.”

  A quick glance at her transportation secretary.

  “Do you see any issues with that, Secretary Lorillia?”

  “None,” he said. “The only potential issue is a shortage of navidroids due to Keven Tarr’s array on Hetzal, but I think we all agree that was well worth the expense. I’ve already asked manufacturers to ramp up production. Perhaps some sort of stimulus for them as well, just until the inventory levels come back?”

  “We’ll figure something out. That’s good news, though. Speaking of Tarr, I know he generated a report on other potential uses for his array, before he headed off to work for the San Tekkas. Have you read it?”

  “I have, Chancellor. Some brilliant ideas there. Could revolutionize hypertravel, and even has applications in realspace, if we can figure out how to do it in a way that doesn’t require tens of thousands of rare, expensive droids.”

  “Keep me posted, Jeffo. Could be there’s a Great Work in it, at some point. And of course, try to find a way to thank Keven Tarr. A medal or something. A high-level posting at one of the Republic universities, perhaps. A job, if you can find him one that would keep him interested. I hate to think of losing a mind like that to private industry when there’s so much to be done in the Republic.”

  “I will consider,” the secretary said.

  She turned her attention to Senator Noor, whose face had lit up the moment she said she was going to open the Outer Rim, and had stayed that way all through her conversation with Secretary Lorillia.

  “Izzet, on a personal note,” Lina said, “I realize how trying this was for the worlds you represent. I appreciate your patience and theirs. I hope you will agree that everything we did was necessary for security and safety in the Republic.”

  He gave her a grave, dignified nod. “Of course, Chancellor. I never thought otherwise.”

  Lina Soh had learned to keep her emotions off her face decades before—she was a politician born and bred. Inwardly, though, her eyes rolled back so far she was once again looking out at the Coruscant sunset through the window behind her.

  Noor turned to his aide, standing behind his seat with a datapad at the ready.

  “I’ll make a speech as well, Wataro. We’ll need to thank the worlds for their patience and let them know that the Nihil threat has been eradicated. Schedule a tour, too. I think we start with Hetzal, Ab Dalis, and Eriadu, the worlds hit hardest by the Emergences, and then move to—”

  “Senator, if I may.”

  Admiral Kronara lifted his hand. Senator Noor looked at him, not hiding his annoyance at a military man daring to interrupt him.

  “Admiral,” he said.

  “We don’t yet know if the Nihil are gone.”

  “I read your report, Kronara. Your task force destroyed hundreds of their ships in that engagement. You found their entire fleet, and you ended it. There hasn’t been a single raid since. If that’s not evidence, I don’t know what is.”

  “Senator, respectfully, I think you saw what you wanted to see in that report. I can confirm that we destroyed a significant Nihil force. But at this point, we have very little intelligence about their operations. We know they had hyperspace capabilities we still don’t understand, but we don’t know how they got them, how many there were, where they’re based, if they have goals beyond just simple raiding…”

  He shrugged.

  “Say whatever you want in your speech. It’s not my problem. But if the Nihil aren’t gone, and they start attacking worlds in the Outer Rim again, you’ll look pretty foolish if you’ve already told your constituents they have nothing to worry about.”

  Chancellor Soh enjoyed that exchange very much. Senator Noor, perhaps less so. He turned back to his aide.

  “Revise the phrasing. Let’s just say that great strides have been taken toward making the Outer Rim Territories safe and secure, and we look forward to peace and prosperity in the months and years to come.”

  “You know what else you might mention, Senator?” Chancellor Soh said.

  Senator Noor raised an eyebrow.

  “The Starlight Beacon. It’s going to open on time. I just got a report in from Shai Tennem. If the Nihil aren’t in fact gone, or if anything else pops up out there, the Beacon will be a big part of handling it.”

  And the projection of Republic authority it represents will make it that much easier to negotiate the Quarren–Mon Calamari peace accords, she thought, and the Beacon itself will serve as a communications relay that will increase the reliability of transmissions across the region and act as a linchpin for the rest of the new network, and once people see how effective it is, getting a vote through to authorize the other stations just like it will be simple.

  Her Great Works, fa
lling into place one by one.

  The Republic was not one world. It was many, each unique in ways large and small. Solving one problem inevitably caused others. There were intractable cultural, historical, economic, and military conflicts among inhabitants of worlds. There were warlords and agitators and malcontents and other less-easy-to-handle enemies—plagues and strange magical factions on hidden worlds who believed they should conquer the galaxy and, yes, even hyperspace anomalies.

  But the key was this—and Chancellor Soh believed it to her very soul, and had made it the cornerstone of her entire government: You could not solve those problems individually. It was ridiculous to even try. What you could do, however, was make the various peoples of this high era of the Galactic Republic see one another as people. As brothers and sisters and cousins and friends, or if nothing else, just as colleagues in the shared goal of building a galaxy that welcomed all, heard all, and did its best to avoid hurting anyone. Truly tried its best.

  If you could make that happen, then problems didn’t have to be solved. Many would solve themselves, because people believed in the Republic more than they believed in their own goals, and would be open to that magical word—compromise.

  That wonderful day had not yet come, not fully, and perhaps it never would. But she would work toward it with every hour and day she retained her office. All she wanted, truly, was for five words to live on past her term, even past her life. The words that had already become emblematic of her Great Works and so much more. Every time she heard them, her heart lifted. That was the goal. One idea. One sentiment.

  She could do it. Everyone could do it.

  Chancellor Soh knew it was true. Five words.

  We are all the Republic.

  The Nihil stood assembled, a host of a few thousand people, masked and terrifying. They watched, silent.

  The space above the Great Hall was a dome-shaped energy shield protecting the platform from the vacuum of No-Space. Ordinarily, it was invisible. But now images played across it, projected by hovering comms droids.