by Sean Stewart
is out. Equally obviously, your old friend Asajj Ventress is gunning for him.
She killed both the Jedi traveling with him; only two Padawans remain. I would
like—"
"Uh-oh," Obi-Wan said. "Why do I get the feeling we aren't inbound to
Coruscant after all?"
"—the two of you to proceed to Vjun with all possible speed and give Master
Yoda whatever help he requests and requires."
"Isn't there someone else?" Anakin said unexpectedly. "We were supposed to
return to Coruscant three weeks ago. I've already broken one promise to be back
. . ."
The words hung in the air, irrevocable.
"Promise?" Mace said. "To whom did you make this promise?"
"The students in Master Iron Hand's class," Obi-Wan said smoothly. "Anakin
has been promising to teach them some tricks."
"Your chance to show off will have to be delayed," Mace said. His look of
distaste was one with which Anakin had become wearyingly familiar. Mace's
disapproval of Anakin seemed so general, so reflexive, it was hard not to resent
even in a case like this, where there was actually far more to disapprove of
than Windu knew. "Get to Vjun, please. Windu out."
Anakin colored a little, and did not look at Obi-Wan. "Thanks."
Obi-Wan shrugged it off, nettled. "I don't know why I bother sticking my neck
out for you." He busied himself checking out a course for Vjun. "Especially
since I feel, with every nerve in my body, that someday you won't thank me for
it."
After the fight in the Phindar Spaceport, all Scout wanted to do was curl up
in a ball and cry.
Yoda had other ideas.
He talked the station authorities into letting them take a rental to Jovan.
Then it was a public shuttle to the low-rent end of Jovan Station, packed with
used-ship dealerships and scrap yards. Yoda didn't want to take public transport
anymore, he said. He pushed the Padawans from junkyard to junkyard, looking for
a ship they could take to Vjun.
They'd had their choice of several decent-looking ships, but Master Yoda
turned all of them down: too flashy, too new, too expensive. "Expensive?" Scout
had asked. "You can use the credits of the Jedi Temple , can't you? Or the
Chancellor's office, for that matter."
Yoda's face had sucked in and his ears had curled down in an expression of
repugnance. "So waste the people's money I should?"
Scout had thrown up her hands in frustration.
So the four of them kept looking—Yoda, Whie, Scout, and Fidelis, the
gentleman's personal gentlething. They had seen no sign of Solis since the
spaceport. No prizes for guessing why. Ventress had come there looking for them.
Her droids had targeted the R2 unit right away. When Solis disappeared after the
battle, it was obvious he had betrayed them. Scout's face went grim, remembering
how the droid had set her up, dragging her away from the others with his story
about needing a human escort in the spaceport. Whittling away their numbers.
Maybe if she had stayed it wouldn't have made any difference. Maybe she wouldn't
have been able to save Maks Leem and Master Maruk. But at least she wouldn't
have been a hundred meters away on a staircase, watching their murders.
Fidelis had been inconsolable. At first Scout wanted him scrapped or
abandoned, but his anguish at having brought along a confederate who had
endangered the heir of the Malreaux line was so deep and obsessive, so obviously
hardwired, that even she didn't believe he had been involved in their betrayal.
They had thought about sending him away, but in the end that, too, seemed
impractical. Having found Whie at last, nothing short of being cut in half with
a lightsaber was going to keep the droid from following him. "If you refuse to
let me come inside your ship, I'll just rivet myself to the hull," he'd said,
and frankly they had believed him.
Yoda finally found what he was looking for in the fifth junkyard they visited
on Jovan Station: a sway‑backed old nag of a ship, an ancient B-7 light
freighter with red blotches over the cargo bay doors.
"Rust?" Whie said. "How do you get rust with no air and no water?"
That got a big belly laugh out of the junkyard operator. "Naw, this little
girl got held up by pirates, you see. Those red splotches aren't rust, they're—"
"How much?" Yoda said quickly.
Scout and Whie grimaced at one another. Master Yoda preferred not to use the
Force for something as simple as arguing over a price. He said it was
disrespectful to the Force, and to one's opponent in commercial combat, but the
real truth, Scout privately thought, was that Yoda was a gleeful, cranky,
relentless bargainer who thought haggling was fun. So much of bargaining is
about patience, and bazaar-stand shysters on a hundred planets had learned to
their sorrow that one doesn't know what patience is until one has tried to
outlast an eight-hundred-plus-year-old Jedi skinflint. Whie and Scout had
already heard Master Yoda spend hours dickering over price at the last two
junkyards, only to stump away unsatisfied, waggling his stick and muttering,
leaving the poor owners looking as if they'd been slowly crushed in a garbage
compactor.
The two Padawans drifted away from the Haggling Zone. Whie looked terrible,
Scout thought: gaunt and red-eyed from grief and lack of sleep. "Hey," she said.
"You hanging in?"
"Sure."
"You're lying."
"Yeah." He gave her a long, searching look, almost desperate. She saw his
eyes flick toward Yoda, still haggling.
Scout jerked one thumb toward a little aisle between the B-7 and the next
hulk, an old Epoch-class freighter with a single laser cannon turret, its barrel
bent like a broken antenna. Obviously there was something on Whie's mind; Scout
figured a little privacy might make it easier to talk about. As benevolent as
Yoda was, there were some kinds of weakness, some kinds of doubt one didn't want
to be confessing in front of the being with the power to make or break one as a
Jedi Knight.
She ambled over to the narrow lane, running her fingers lightly along the
Epoch's fuselage. Its hull was dinged and scuffed and pocked with a sprinkling
of micrometeor punctures: the ship had probably spent her last few years as an
insystem trader, swimming in dangerous solar space, murky with asteroid debris
and other kinds of particulate matter. With starships, as with deep-water craft,
only the lubbers loved the sight of land. To a sailor's eye, blue water or hard
black space were the places to be, far from the perils of leeward shores and
gravity wells.
When they were safely out of sight, Scout said, "All right, spill it."
Whie kicked absently at the old freighter with one space-booted toe.
"Yesterday—was it yesterday, or the day before? I've lost track of the hours. It
doesn't matter. The last time I slept, I had a dream." He paused. "A special
kind of dream."
"The one where you . . ."
"Where I was killed by a Jedi. Yes." He swallowed and gave her a wan smile.
"But it wasn't the only dream
I've had recently. There was another, just before we left Coruscant. You w
ere
in it."
"Me!"
"Yes." For the first time since Master Leem died, a little color crept into
Whie's face. "We were in a room, a beautiful, terrible room. And you were
bleeding—"
"Master Whie?" called the anxious voice of the Malreaux family gentleman's
personal gentlething from behind the Epoch's hull. "Master? Where are you?"
"Here! What is it?" Whie snapped.
"There you are!" Fidelis came hurrying around the corner. "I was doing
currency calculations for Master Yoda, and when I looked up, you had gone!"
"Twenty meters, Fidelis. It's not like I was abducted by space pirates."
"That's no fault of yours," the droid said tartly. "Please don't go wandering
off alone. Don't you know what hangs around places like this?"
"Uh, nothing?" Whie guessed. "We're not exactly in the cabana quarters of
Jovan Station. It's not like a bunch of naval ratings in spacesuits are going to
roll out of a nearby bar and pick a fight with me."
"Though noble and accomplished, you are still naïve in the ways of the
world," Fidelis said starchily. "A salvage yard like this is exactly where you
might expect to find rogue droids. Runaways, looking to salvage parts.
Masterless creatures that are not above taking a human hostage, if their
programming has gone sufficiently awry."
"This warning's a little bit late," Scout said hotly. "Why didn't you think
of that before you hired Solis?"
"The fact that I made an error in judgment is no reason to—"
"Fidelis, get lost," Whie grated.
The droid drew himself huffily upright and retreated to the end of the aisle
between the two freighters, pointedly maintaining eye contact.
"Do you suppose he can read lips?" Scout murmured.
"Yes," Fidelis called.
"Shut up, droid," Whie growled. Obviously the chance for a private chat had
gone.
Scout blinked. "I don't think I've ever heard you be rude before."
"Sorry."
"Don't be." She laughed. "I think it's cute."
". . Cute?"
Even Scout had to admit Yoda got a fantastic bargain on the B-7. "How'd you
get it so cheap?" she asked, gaping at the smirking old Jedi as he stuffed a
datapad into his belt. "You must have used your Jedi mind powers. I thought you
said that was unfair?"
"Not interested in fair, am I. Interested in results," he wheezed. "Besides,
Jedi powers used I not. Paid fair price I did."
Scout and Whie looked doubtfully at the shabby hulk. "What's wrong with her?"
Scout said. "I mean, besides the obvious?"
Yoda rapped the outside of the ship with his stick, raising a little cloud of
dust. And paint. And meta-ceramic. "Good hull. Good lines," he said.
"One laser cannon," Whie said. "No concussion missile tubes. No blaster
cannon."
"She's got a Hanx-Wargel SuperFlow II aboard and a Siep-Irol passive sensor
antenna," the junkyard owner said vehemently. "Backup generators, Carbanti
active sensor stack, and almost new aft deflector shields, local-made but
nothing wrong with them."
"What about bow shields?"
"If anything comes at you with a gun, you should run," the dealer said.
"If that doesn't work?"
"Surrender."
"Very encouraging," Scout said.
"I take it very hard, you talking down my beautiful little"—the dealer
glanced quickly at the side of the ship where the name had been
painted—"Nighthawk. I've a good mind to raise my price, you being so uppity."
"If she's got all these features," Scout persisted, "why were you selling her
so cheaply? What doesn't she do?"
The dealer hemmed and hawed. Scout turned to Yoda, who smiled beatifically.
"Fly," he said.
" 'A bargain it is!' he says. 'Fix it up in no time, we will!' Pass me the
sonic wrench," Scout growled. Pale honey-colored fluid dripped from the
engine-starter array she was trying to install, each drop drifting and spreading
out in Jovan Station's comparatively light gravity.
"I think I've almost got these couplers installed," Whie said.
"Red ends up?"
"Yeah."
They worked side by side, installing the engine-starter unit Yoda had
salvaged from a Corellian light freighter at the back of the yard.
"What's Master Yoda doing while we're working?" Scout grunted.
"Know that, I do not! He said something about supplies. Did you hear about
the water?" Scout looked over. "Both for our use and coolant, ten five-hundred
kilo casks. We'll be loading it on ourselves," Whie said.
"Five hundred!"
"Master Yoda felt it would be wasting money to rent a lifter pallet for just
one job," Whie said.
They exchanged looks.
Another fat blob of lubricant dripped free. This one had a dead bug in it, a
metal borer with feathery antennae and mouthparts stained rust red. "Ew," Scout
said.
"Pass me the solder-blaster, would you?" Whie was working about five meters
away. Scout tossed him the tool in a gentle underhand. In the low g, it floated
into his hand. She pitched him a stick of solder to go with it.
"Thanks."
Whie peered up. He had a mainplate off, exposing wires and tubes coiled like
multicolored intestines. No wonder people talked about the "bowels" of a ship,
he thought. He was working on the vaccum-pump housing; the casement was cracked,
so the vacuum seal kept failing. Funny to think—a little hairline fracture
causing all this trouble, because it let the nothing out.
A ship's vacuum like Jedi honor—nothing one could notice, until it was gone.
"Scout? Do you ever wonder if you're a bad person?"
"Wonder? I know," she said, laughing.
"Be serious. If you discovered you weren't a good person, that would bother
you, wouldn't it?"
"I've never been a good person." Scout used the sonic wrench to pry open a
nut that had rusted in place. "I just shoot for good enough. Why do you ask?"
"No reason."
Scout waited, not looking at Whie. According to the calendar, she was a year
older than him, but he was so accomplished, so poised, that she usually forgot
about the age difference. Today he sounded young, and she felt older than him by
far. She remembered something Yoda once said—Age more than a count of heartbeats
is. Age is how many mistakes you have made. Counting by screwups, she was an
easy ten years older than Whie.
"I used to think I was a good person," Whie said quietly. "But then some
things happened. I had this dream," he said. "And in this dream, I was thinking
bad thoughts."
"Whoa there, boy. You're can't get down on yourself because of what you
thought when you were asleep."
"You don't understand. This wasn't a dream, this wasn't my unconscious
speaking: this really happened. Is going to happen," he corrected himself. The
pain in his voice was obvious now, and Scout realized this was deadly serious to
him.
Whie pressed solder into the cracked vacuum-chamber casing and ran the
blaster-iron over it. Strange these sticks of metal, which seemed so hard and
straight, could be so easily made soft. Inconstant. "And then there was the
&
nbsp; other dream. The one about dying. I've never dreamed about that before."
Scout waited.
"The whole thing was confused. I'm not sure where I was, or what I was doing.
I was in my own head; there was a lightsaber flashing. I tried to defend myself,
but the other was too strong for me. Too fast. Then the light like a bar across
my eyes. Like a sun." The soldering iron sparked and glowed in the dim recesses
of the battered freighter. "Then nothing."
"Just because it was a lightsaber, that doesn't mean it was a Jedi."
"Oh, but I knew. The dream was so short, I didn't even see who it was, but
when I fell into the moment, I wasn't even frightened yet, I was just so
surprised. I was thinking, This is how I'm going to die? Isn't that weird. Even
having had this dream, my death is still going to come as a surprise, when it
happens. I guess it always does," he added.
Scout gave the reluctant nut another shot of loosening solvent. "Maybe you
got it wrong. Maybe you won't die. You didn't die in the dream, right? Not that
you know for sure. Maybe it was a test, or an exercise. If you thought it was a
Jedi, that's the most likely answer—a drill, or a tournament like the one we had
just before we left," Scout said. "I bet that's it."
"Maybe," Whie said. She knew he didn't believe it. "Do you want the
solder-blaster back?"
"Nah, I'm okay." Scout finally managed to pry off the rusted nut. "The dream
you had with me in it. Did I die?"
"Not in the part I saw."
This was not as comforting an answer as Scout had been hoping for.
"Scout, I think I'm going to go over to the dark side," Whie said in a rush.
"That's how it makes sense. That's why I'm thinking what I'm thinking in the
first dream. That's why a Jedi cuts me down."
"That's ridiculous," Scout said, genuinely shocked. "You're the last person
in the world to go over to the dark side. Everyone knows that. You're better
than any of us. You always have been. I used to hate how good you were. There's
no way," she said positively.
"I always used to think of myself as a good person," Whie said. "I was proud
of it. But now, looking back, I was just pretending to be good. You know?
Acting. It wasn't real at all. I was just . . . pretending to be a Jedi."
For the first time Scout put down her tools and sidled over under the belly