Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  "You know what that means, don't you?" She turned, cold-eyed, upon Lando, who backed a step. Neither man had ever seen Mara this angry and the sheer intensity of it was terrifying.

  "It means he had her in reserve to use against me. Or to use me against her. Or who knows who else, to keep either of us from being anything more than the pawns of his lies!"

  She was almost trembling with rage, the rage that had once led her to direct all her energies toward killing Luke Skywalker for taking from her the position that had been her life. "Is she still on the planet?"

  "I don't know. I..."

  For some reason he remembered Leia telling him of the Emperor's concubine, a member of the Emperor's Court... A woman who claimed to be working in a place where she wasn't working. A woman who'd shown up suddenly, bare weeks after Nubblyk's disappearance, knowing exactly what house it was she wanted to rent.

  "Yeah," he said. "I think so. Woman named Roganda..."

  Mara's eyes widened as she recognized the name, then narrowed to green and glittering slits. "Oh," she said softly. ”Her."

  The holo image reached out to where the transceiver switches would be, beyond the range of the transmitters. The image vanished.

  "We simply cannot take the risk." Roganda Ismaren opened the plastene case she carried, took from it the slim silver wand of a drug infuser, and fitted an ampoule into its slot. ”Hold her."

  Ohran Keldor stepped warily toward Leia, who had risen from her chair at the sound of the door lock switching over; she backed to the wall, but Lord Garonnin stood in the doorway, stunpistol in hand. Keldor hesitated--though small, Leia was fit, wiry, thirty years younger than he, and quite clearly ready to fight--and Garonnin said, "If it's risk you're worried about, Madame, I'd say using that drug on her is more risk than I like to see. You don't know what it is--”

  "I know that it works," retorted the concubine. ”I know it will keep her quiet while our guests are here."

  "We know that it works sometimes. On some people. In some doses. It's been in those deserted laboratories in the crypts for thirty years at least, maybe twice that. We don't know whether it's deteriorated with time, whether it's become contaminated... That smuggler we used it on four or five years ago died."

  "He had a weak heart," said Roganda, too quickly. "Oh, Lord Garonnin," she went on, her soft voice pleading, "you know how much depends upon those who will be here tonight! You know how desperately we need backing if your cause--our cause!--is to succeed! You know Her Highness's reputation. We cannot risk even the chance of her somehow escaping and interfering with the reception of our guests."

  The Senex Lord's flat, cold eyes rested on Leia; the muzzle of his stunpistol was unwavering. Then he nodded.

  Keldor stepped forward.

  He was expecting Leia to duck away, so she sprang into his advance, hooked his ankle, and shoulder-blocked him--hard--and as he fell doubled and darted for the door. She'd thought the movement would take Garonnin at least a little by surprise, enough for his first shot to go wild, to give her a chance to get past him, but it didn't. The stunblast hit her like a blow to the solar plexus, winding her at the same moment that her whole body felt as if it had been pulled inside out.

  Even on mildest stun the effect was awful--perhaps worse than a heavier blast, because she didn't even lose consciousness. She just collapsed to the floor, her legs twitching with pins and needles, and Keldor and Roganda knelt by her side.

  "Stupid," remarked Keldor as the infuser was pressed to the side of Leia's neck.

  A blast of cold. She felt her lungs stop.

  She was submerged, she thought, in an ocean of green glass a thousand kilometers deep. Because glass is a liquid it filled her lungs, her veins, her organs; it permeated the tissues of her cells. Though she was sinking, very slowly, the glass was shot through with light from above, and she could hear the voices of Roganda, Keldor, and Garonnin as they left the room.

  his... antidote as soon as the reception is over," Roganda was saying. "We simply haven't the personnel to keep her under constant guard. But the drug's effects aren't as unpredictable as you fear. Everything will be perfectly all right."

  Your cause. Our cause.

  Keldor. Elegin.

  Irek.

  She had to get out.

  The Force, thought Leia. Somehow, with her body suspended in this dense, unbreathing, light-filled silence, she could feel the Force all around her, sense it within reach of her fingertips, hear it like music, a tune that she herself could easily learn.

  If she touched the Force--if she drew the light of the Force into herself--she could see the room in which she lay on Nasdra Magrody's bed, one hand resting on her midriff and dark auburn hair tangled around her on the discolored pillow.

  Cray's right, she thought. I really do have to be more diligent about applying that Slootheberry Wrinkle Creme around my eyes.

  I wonder if I can get up?

  She breathed experimentally, drawing the Force into her like a kind of strange, prickly light, and stood up.

  Her body remained on the bed.

  Panic seized her, disorienting; she called to mind some of the disciplines Luke had taught her, calming, steadying...

  And looked around her at the room.

  Everything seemed very different, seen without physical eyes. Other times, other eras were present, as if she viewed through pane after pane of projection glass. An elderly man with graying hair sat writing on the back of green flimsiplast notes at the table, and broke off to lay his head on his arms and weep. A slim blond Jedi Knight lay in the bed--which had been on the other side of the room then--reading stories to her husband, who was curled up next to her with his dark head pillowed on her thigh.

  Leia looked at the door, and knew she could walk through it.

  I'll get lost!

  Cold panic again, the sense of being naked, unprotected.

  No, she thought. She stepped back to the bed, touched the body that lay there. Her own body. The scent of her own flesh, the sound of her own heartbeat, was unmistakable. If she concentrated, she could find her way back to it, even as she'd followed the far fainter and less familiar traces of Elegin and Keldor in the tunnels.

  Terror in her heart, she stepped through the door.

  Immediately she was conscious of voices. This part of the passageways had been the living quarters of the Jedi, converted from Plett's endless greenhouse caverns: The dreamy consciousness of the plants and the weary, bittersweet benevolence of the old Ho'Din Master permeated the rock of the walls. She followed the voices to a long chamber illuminated not only by a ceiling full of softly radiant glowpanels, but by half a dozen windows of various sizes, thickly glazed against past storms and, like those of her own chamber, concealed in the rock and vine-curtains of the valley wall.

  She recognized a good two thirds of the people present.

  Some of them had aged in the eleven years since she'd seen them at the Emperor's Court. Others--like the representatives of the Mekuun Corporation and the president of the board of directors of Seinar--were of more recent acquaintance. Lady Theala Vandron, acknowledged superior among the Senex Lords by virtue of heading the oldest and noblest of the Ancient Houses, had visited the Senate quite recently, to answer charges of inhumanity and planet-stripping brought against her by the High Court: She'd seemed surprised that anyone had considered it his business if she let slavers run breeding farms on her homeworld of Karfeddion.

  "Your Highness, they're only Ossan and Bilanaka," she'd said, naming those two sentient but low-cultured races as if that placed the matter beyond need of further explanation.

  A heavyset, stately woman in her forties with a blandly superior stubbornness in her blue eyes, she was further expressing her views on the matter to a small group comprised of Roganda, Irek, and Garonnin. "It's simply useless to discuss these matters with people in the Senate who refuse to understand local economic conditions."

  A little R-10 unit rolled up to the group with a tray of gla
sses, and Roganda said, "You must sample the wine, Your Highness. Celanon Semi-Dry, an exquisite vintage."

  "Ah." Vandron tasted a minute quantity. ”Very nice." Leia heard in her mind Aunt Rouge: Only spaceport types go in for the Semi-Dries, my dear. You really must cultivate a more refined taste. Every word of it was compacted into the slight lowering of the painted eyelids and the fractional deepening of the lines around Lady Vandron's mouth.

  "An Algarine, perhaps?" inquired Garonnin. Algarine wines had been her father's favorite vintage, Leia recalled.

  "Of course." Roganda addressed the R-10. "Decant the Algarine from the cellars; chill to fifty degrees and the glass to forty."

  The cellarer droid rolled quickly away.

  "It isn't as if we were kidnapping people from their homes," Lady Vandron went on indignantly. "These creatures are specifically bred for agricultural work. If it weren't for our farming they wouldn't be born at all, you know. And Karfeddion is in the midst of severe economic depression."

  "Not that they care, on Coruscant." Lord Garonnin set his own glass down on the sideboard of marble and bronze, Atravian of the best period, one of the few pieces of furniture in the long, stone-floored room.

  "Which is why, Your Highness," said Roganda in her low, sweet voice, "we must deal with both the warlords and the Senate from a position of strength, rather than one of the hat-in-hand subservience they seem to expect. We will be... a power to reckon with." She laid her hand on her son's shoulder, her red lips curving in a proud smile, and Irek modestly cast down his eyes.

  Close to the buffet, which was laden with a collection of confections and savories clearly put together by a droid of some kind, a bioassisted Sullustan executive asked Drost Elegin, "Doesn't look much like the Emperor, does he?" in the softest of undervoices. The Sullustan glanced across the room at Irek and his mother, both conservatively clad, he in black, she in white; Irek had gone to speak to one of the Juvex Lords whom Leia recognized dimly as the head of the more militant branch of the House Sreethyn. It was clear the boy had a great deal of charm.

  Elegin shrugged. "What does it matter? If he can do what she says he can do..." He nodded in Roganda's direction.

  She was still working hard on getting Lady Vandron to unbend. Leia could have told her she might as well have tried to stuff a full-grown Hutt into her pocket. Ladies of the great Houses do not unbend to women who have been concubines, no matter whose, and no matter what their sons can do.

  "Well," said the Sullustan doubtfully, and adjusted the gain on the eyepieces he wore. ”If the great Houses back him..."

  Elegin made a gesture with his eyebrows, dismissing--or almost dismissing--the dark-haired boy. "At least his manners are good," he said. ”Don't worry, Naithol. When the ship arrives, we'll have the nucleus of a true fleet; more powerful than anything those scattered jarheads can command these days. And indeed," he added with a malicious grin, "once the various warlords have had it demonstrated to them exactly what Irek can do, I think they'll be most eager to ally themselves with us and listen to what we have to say."

  Ship? thought Leia uneasily.

  The Sullustan turned toward the buffet again and paused, the enhanced visual receptors he wore--probably to compensate for the corneal defects many Sullustans developed after the age of thirty--turned in Leia's direction.

  She wasn't sure what he saw--how, or if, the psychic residue of the drug made her register on the pickup--but with a little shrug he went on toward the food. But it was enough to make her move off, drifting like a ghost among the other, fainter ghosts that flickered in this room, dim echoes of children playing obliviously on the floor between the cool aristocrats and the watchful bureaucrats, secretaries, and corporate scouts.

  Irek, Leia noticed, was working the room with the adeptness of a candidate for the Senate, deferring politely to the Lords and Ladies of the great Houses, condescending with just unnoticeable noblesse oblige to the corporates and to the secretaries of the Lords. As Drost Elegin had remarked, he had beautiful manners. Since formal dueling was one of the accomplishments valued by the Lords among their own class, the boy was able to discuss this with the younger aristocrats.

  "We've heard all about this ship," said Lord Vensell Picutorion, who had been one of those presented at the same time as Leia's Senatorial debut. "What is it? Where is it coming from? Are you sure it's large enough to give us the power, the armament, to create our own Allied Fleet?"

  Irek inclined his head respectfully, and the other Senex Lords gathered around. "It is, quite simply, the largest and most heavily armored battlemoon still in existence from the heyday of the Imperial Fleet," he said in his clear, carrying boy's voice. "It was the prototype transition between the torpedo platforms and the original Death Star. It doesn't have the focused power of the destructor beams," he added, and Leia detected a note of apology in his voice, "but it has almost the power capacity of the Death Star..."

  "I think we're all agreed," put in Lord Garonnin, "that planet-killer technology is wasteful, to put it mildly."

  "But you must admit," said Irek, a gleeful glitter far back in his blue eyes, "it makes a wonderful deterrent."

  "In fact, it doesn't," said His Lordship bluntly. "As events leading to the breakup of the Empire can attest." And, when Irek opened his mouth to protest, he went on. "But be that as it may." He turned to the other Lords. "The battlemoon Eye of Palpatine was originally constructed for a mission thirty years ago," he said. "It was built and armed in absolute secrecy, so that when the mission itself was aborted unfulfilled, almost no one knew of the battlemoon itself, and all record of its hiding place--in an asteroid field in the Moonflower Nebula--”

  lost."

  "Careless of them," commented a younger Lady, whose tanned muscles spoke of a lifetime in the hunting field.

  Several laughed.

  Garonnin looked annoyed, but Roganda said smoothly, "Anyone who's dealt with a really large ancestral library will know that one small defect in the computer can result in the disappearance of, for instance, an entire set of wafers, or a good-size book... and the size ratio between one book and, say, four or five rooms is much smaller than between even the largest battlemoon and twenty parsecs of the Outer Rim."

  She would know, thought Leia, remembering Nasdra Magrody's despairing words.

  A battlemoon!

  "And it's on its way here?" asked Lord Picutorion.

  Irek smiled, smug. "On its way here," he said. "And at our service."

  Roganda put her hand on his shoulder and smiled again, that proud smile. "Our guests are thirsty, my son," she said in her soft voice. "Would you go see what's become of that R-Ten?"

  A nice personal touch, thought Leia, observing the approval on the faces of Lady Vandron and Lord Picutorion. Irek suppressed a wicked grin and said, "Certainly, Mother."

  There was a soft murmur at the back of the group about how well brought up and malleable he was as the slender boy strode from the room. Leia followed, uncertain but not quite liking the look in his eyes.

  The R-10 unit was trundling up the corridor, small and square, about a meter tall and rimmed around its flat top with a decorative brass railing. The top itself was black marble electronically charged to grip drinks, glasses, and anything else set on it; Leia had watched almost without consciously noticing the slight rotation with which everyone in the room took up his or her glass from it--she barely noticed herself when she did it back home. It was second nature to anyone with a modern R-10.

  It bore on its surface now the appointed bottle--a twelve-year-old Algarine dry, suitably dusty--and a frosted glass, solitary tribute to the importance of Lady Vandron, as Roganda intended.

  Irek folded his arms and stood in the middle of the corridor with that same evil grin. "Stop," he said.

  The R-10 whirred to a halt.

  "Pick up the glass."

  It extruded one of its long, multijointed arms with their slightly sticky velvet pads and obligingly picked up the chilled wineglass.
<
br />   "Throw it on the floor."

  The droid froze in midmotion. Breaking glasses--breaking any sort of dish or utensil--”

  part of the black-box code hardwired into any household droid.

  Irek's grin widened and he fastened his gaze on the R-10. Leia felt the shiver of the Force in the air, reaching into, digging at, the droid's programming, forcing it synapse by synapse to rearrange its actions in spite of multilayered restraints against it.

  The droid reacted with great distress. It backed, rocked, turned in a circle...

  "Come on," said Irek softly. "Throw it on the floor."

  While his mind, as Roganda had instructed no doubt--as Magrody had taught him--formed the subelectronic commands necessary for the implementation of the act.

  Jerkily, with a flailing movement, the droid hurled the glass down. Then it immediately extruded a brush-tipped arm from its base and a vacuum hose to clean up the broken glass.

  "Not yet."

  The implements stopped.

  "Now take the bottle and pour it out."

  The droid rocked with wretchedness, fighting the most absolute of its programming not to ever, ever, ever spill anything... Irek was clearly reveling in its confusion. His blue eyes did not waver, bending his concentration on the Force, channeling it through the implanted chip in its mind...

  Then his head turned, suddenly, and Leia felt his concentration leave the droid as if the boy had simply dropped a toy he'd been playing with. The droid replaced the wine bottle on its top and bolted for the party as fast as its wheels would carry it, but Irek did not even notice.

  He was turning his head slowly, scanning the corridor. Listening. Sniffing.

  "You're here," he said softly. "You're here somewhere. I can feel you."

  She felt him gather the strength of the Force around him, like a terrible shadow; saw him with changed eyes, like a wraith of mist and coals.

  "I'll find you..."

  Leia turned and fled. Behind her she was aware of him striding two paces to one of the small red wall buttons that were mounted at intervals on the dark stone of the corridor walls, heard him slap it, and then heard the stride of heavy boots, and Garonnin's voice, "What is it, my lord?"