Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Outcast

by Aaron Allston

  The flooring beneath them gave way. The speeder's repulsors, set to maintain an altitude of a meter above the ground, were not strong enough. Han, Leia, and their vehicle dropped into pitch blackness, with more stones and boulders following them.

  CITY OF DOR'SHAN, DORIN

  Luke could tell that Ben was finding the temple of the Baran Do both alien and comfortably familiar. The décor was characteristic of the Kel Dors, a constant barrage of symbols and metaphors stylistically representing their natural surroundings and forces of nature, but the chambers had obvious purposes he instantly understood. Training halls. Classrooms. Meditation rooms. Dining halls. It all operated on a much smaller scale than the Jedi Temple; Luke did not ask Tistura Paan, their student guide, but estimated that there were perhaps six Masters here and no more than twenty students of various ranks.

  The combat training hall was comparatively small and very lightly equipped. Staves rested on weapon racks; padded body armor hung on wall hooks. There were padded mats on the floor for practice. The hall could accommodate perhaps two sets of sparring pairs at a time.

  Ben asked Tistura Paan, “Don't all your students train in combat?”

  “No. The Baran Do are not a militant order like the Jedi.”

  “We're not that militant.”

  She offered him a smile, showing her grinding palates. “You all study fighting. That's militant. Our role is one of advice and advance warning. The first Baran Do were village seers who had a heightened weather sense and could warn their fellows of impending storms. Over the centuries, they and their descendants corresponded with one another, exchanging techniques and philosophies. The best became personal advisers to the rulers of our kind. Eventually the order became a scholarly one, collecting and cataloging knowledge of the arts and sciences, as well as of the ways of the Force.”

  They passed through an angled archway into a meditation chamber furnished only with small circular mats on the floor. The chamber had no viewports and the walls were a soothing, rough-textured gray-white, like the inside of a cloud.

  Luke asked, “I've been assuming, but did not ask yesterday, that Master Plo Koon was once a member of your order.”

  Tistura Paan nodded. She sat on one of the foam circles and, by gesture, invited Luke and Ben to do likewise. They complied. She said, “Over the centuries, many of the Koon family have been Baran Do. The Force runs strong in that line, as, it is said, in the Skywalker line. It is said of Plo Koon that he never grew weary of living among oxygen breathers, of having to cope with claustrophobic masks and strange faces. Me, I would grow weary of it within weeks or months.”

  Ben tapped the transparisteel mask over his own face. “I know how you feel.”

  “Your father will be instructed by Master Tila Mong in the hassat-durr technique, which I understand you are not learning. Would you like to get in some fighting practice?”

  “You promise not to yank my mask off this time?”

  “No promises.”

  “Oh, well. Sure.”

  Once the two were gone, Luke did not have long to wait. Tila Mong entered, gestured for Luke not to rise, and sat on a pad opposite his. “One Master to another,” she said. “You will not object to an accelerated course, devoid of learning rituals and training artifacts?”

  “That would be most agreeable.”

  “Well, then. The technique you asked to learn is the ayna-seff technique of the hassat-durr family. In our language, the term hassat-durr means ‘lightning rod.’”

  “Why do you call it that?”

  “Because if you are not absolutely perfect in your mastery of the technique and perform hassat-durr during a storm, you will be repeatedly struck by lightning and killed.”

  Despite himself, Luke laughed. “You're kidding. Right?”

  She shook her head. “The hassat-durr techniques suffuse your body with a very low level of electromagnetic radiation. You produce the radiation as an interaction between the Force and your own mental influence over your central nervous system. The energies a student produces early in his study of the technique attract lightning much like a lightning rod. It is for this reason that this skill, like that of dismantling high explosives, is best perfected before it is ever attempted in the field.”

  “Other than scrambling brain scans and permitting a rather difficult-to-solve form of suicide by lightning, what do the other hassat-durr techniques do?”

  “They can disable one's own prosthetics and electronic implants, can interfere with shock shackles, can cause one to be perceived by animal senses as something terrible or something inoffensive, and can allow one to act as a very effective range-boosting antenna for com-links. And there are other uses.”

  From a pocket in her robes, she drew out two objects. One looked like an ordinary sphere of durasteel-gray metal about four centimeters in diameter. The other was a flat plate of the same material; it had a rimmed depression that was clearly intended to accommodate the ball. An insulated cable was attached to the edge of the plate. About a meter long, it ended in an elastic strap with an electrical lead embedded in it.

  She set the plate down in front of Luke, put the ball in the depression, and handed him the elastic band. “Please attach that to your hand, placing the lead in your palm.”

  Luke began to comply, then thought better of it and put the strap on his flesh hand instead of the prosthetic one.

  “This device,” Tila Mong said, “is a simple teaching tool. It is attuned to the precise intensities and frequencies of electromagnetic energy produced by someone correctly practicing the ayna-seff technique.”

  “How, by the way, does ayna-seff translate?”

  “Dead brain.”

  Luke grinned. “You Baran Do have very practical naming conventions.”

  “Our artistic senses lean toward the tactile and visual, not verbal. For us, learning Basic is always a ritual of discovery of colorful adjectives and breathtaking arrays of synonyms. Anyway, your first step is to learn to channel energies that will cause the ball to lift off the plate.”

  Luke looked at the ball. He allowed himself to sink into a meditative state. He resisted the urge to push at the ball with the Force; he could certainly lift it telekinetically, but that would not benefit his training. Instead, one by one, he cycled through all the Force techniques he had learned, not utilizing them but putting himself in the mental state required by each.

  Half a minute later, as he prepared for a technique that caused holocams briefly to go to static, a method by which Jedi could bypass many security setups, the ball sprang up and began spinning, bobbing up and down between ten and twenty centimeters above the plate.

  Tila Mong nodded. “Well, that's about eight weeks of apprentice training bypassed.”

  “But that's only the first stage. What are the others?”

  “You learn to stop the ball from spinning. That means you have found the exact form of energy necessary for the dead brain technique. You learn to maintain the ball at an altitude of about one centimeter. That means you have found the correct amount of energy to exert, an amount that makes it hard for any but the most delicate and most correctly attuned devices to discover that there is any anomaly in your electromagnetic energy output. And you learn to sustain the output without tiring yourself—for days, weeks, or even longer.”

  “Is this how Jacen Solo learned the technique from Koro Ziil?”

  Immediately, something shut down in Tila Mong's mind.

  Luke wasn't sure whether someone who was not a Jedi Master would have noticed it. He wasn't even sure most Masters would have detected it. But something, the equivalent of a durasteel vault door, slid shut within Tila Mong's consciousness.

  Her face and manner betrayed no sign of it. She just said, “Yes.”

  “How long did it take him?”

  “As I recall, about three days.”

  Luke smiled. “It's very un-Jedi-like of me, but I want to break his record.”

  CALRISSIAN-NUNB MINES, KESSEL
>
  “WHERE'S UNCLE HAN?” CHANCE, SITTING BESIDE ALLANA AT THE gleaming white cafeteria table, rhythmically kicked the underside of the tabletop.

  “Not back yet.” Allana paid him no attention. Her gaze was on Tendra and Lando, who sat alone at an adjacent table, whispering urgently to each other.

  She glared at them. While Nanna prepared dinner in the adjoining, cavernously empty personnel kitchen, Nien Nunb waited in the communications room for a call from Han and Leia, and Chance was busy being a toddler. The Calrissians, it was clear, were discussing the Solos' fate but not doing anything about it.

  Allana spoke in tones so low they couldn't hear her. “They're not dead, you know. I'd have felt it.”

  “Where's Aunt Leia?”

  “Not back yet.”

  Chance's kicks grew more energetic. Allana felt like joining him in punishing the table. Finally, she raised her voice. “Why don't we go looking for them?”

  Lando and Tendra looked her way. Lando flashed her a smile she knew was supposed to be reassuring. She resented him for it.

  “We're not sure that it would do any good at the moment, sweetie,” he told her. “We're trying to figure out what to do next.”

  “We should just go down there and look. I'm really good at looking.”

  She saw Lando suppress a shudder. “Amelia, do you know what a transceiver is?”

  She nodded. “It's like a comlink, except you talk into comlinks, and you don't talk into all transceivers.”

  “Right. Your mommy and daddy are carrying several transceivers, some of which they don't even know about. In their speeder, in their equipment.”

  “I know about tracking devices, too.” She shot him a suspicious look. “You put tracking devices on them.”

  “Of course! Comm signals don't go very far in the mines. They don't go through stone. So I had special transceivers put in their gear that communicate with the seismic sensors we've got all over the tunnels. A while ago, after we stopped receiving signals and we had that groundshake, your aunt Tendra and I did go down to look.”

  “Why didn't you tell me? I would have gone with you.”

  “Yeah … Anyway, there's a lot of fallen stone between us and Han and Leia right now. We have to dig through to them.”

  “And none of our miners are here right now,” Tendra added. “Most of them are away on paid leave. We've sent out word asking for volunteers.”

  “Well, until they get here, we can—”

  “We can stay here,” Lando said, sounding stern for the first time in the conversation. He fixed her with a stare, and when she did not reply, he turned back to Tendra.

  “I could find them,” Allana whispered.

  “What's that, Miss Amelia?” C-3PO, dithering beside R2-D2 on the other side of the table, leaned forward as if it would help his au-dioreceptors to pick up her words.

  She gave the droid a resentful look. “Nothing.”

  R2-D2 tweetled, a lengthy statement for him. Allana glanced at C-3PO for a translation.

  The protocol droid leaned toward her again. “He says he approves very highly of adventuresome young girls being adventuresome young girls. But not this time.”

  Allana sighed.

  NINTH HALL OF JUSTICE, CORUSCANT

  She was the same Falleen judge who had handed down Luke Skywalker's sentence, and she was identically impassive now. “It is the determination of this court that Jedi Valin Horn is not competent to stand trial for his actions in the above-named suit.”

  At the back of the chamber, standing among the handful of Jedi who had been allowed into the packed courtroom, Jaina heaved a sigh of relief. This was good news. Valin would not be going to trial after all.

  The judge's next words shattered her misapprehension. “This court has further determined that the defendant, because of the extraordinarily dangerous nature of his abilities and the overt criminality of his mental illness, is too dangerous to be confined in any conventional facility. For this reason, he will be detained through carbonite imprisonment until such time as—”

  Her words might as well have been an unexpected reversal in a crucial bolo-ball game. Suddenly half the observers in the court were on their feet, the Jedi and friends of the Jedi among them shouting protests, the press standing tall or even getting up on benches the better to holorecord the proceedings. Nawara Ven, alone at the defendant's table, was roaring to make himself be heard above the crowd: “Your Honor, this is an outrageous violation of my client's rights, of the rights of all citizens—”

  The judge pressed a button on her bench. A musical note like a nautical ship's warning bell sounded through the chamber; it was just loud enough to be painful to those with normal hearing. As the shouts continued, she pressed it again and again, each time creating a louder tone, until all the chamber was silent, most of those present covering their ears or tympanic membranes.

  The judge glanced around the chamber, her expression cool. “Would everyone who desires a month in jail on a charge of contempt of court please speak up?”

  No one spoke. Few were even daring enough to lower their hands from their ears.

  The judge gestured for everyone to sit. All did except those who, like Jaina, had found no empty seats.

  “To continue, he will be detained through carbonite imprisonment until such time as a treatment for his condition, based on evaluation of his test data, can be determined. He will be brought out of carbonite stasis at intervals, as new and relevant tests, as well as periodic mental evaluations, are ordered. He will be brought out not less often than twice per standard year regardless of test and evaluation concerns.

  “That concludes this hearing.” Her movements brisk, perhaps irritated, she rose. The advocates and onlookers did, as well. When she was gone, voices erupted again, this time the press hurling questions at the advocates, the Jedi, and the Horns.

  Jaina ignored the heartfelt but irrelevant complaints of the Jedi around her. She watched Corran and Mirax Horn embracing in their shared misery, watched as the forbidding stare of Master Saba Sebatyne kept the members of the press from approaching them, watched as Nawara Ven sat again at his table, slumped in temporary defeat, shoulders knotted in frustration and anger.

  And she was struck by a sense of foreboding. They're all killers, she thought. Jedi and combat pilots and smugglers, killers all, who waged war for the New Republic or who killed to stop the Yuuzhan Vong. The government is turning this situation into a war, and the people they're offending, beneath the surface, are killers. Myself included. This can't end well.

  UNEXPLORED DEPTHS, KESSEL

  The speeder plummeted into darkness. The underside almost immediately slammed into a slab of rock angled at about forty-five degrees to their descent. The repulsors, overrevving themselves to compensate, bounced the speeder away from the slab and flipped it. In the beams of the headlights, Han saw rocks seemingly spin around him as the speeder rolled.

  He clicked the repulsors off the standard setting and brought them up toward full strength, trying to slow the speeder's descent and eventually hover. Then Leia shouted something he didn't understand. She was staring upward and he could feel more than see the immense shelf of rock falling into the shaft after them.

  He killed the repulsors and fired the thrusters, rocketing the speeder straight down the shaft. In the spare second he had before further action was required, he flipped the repulsors to collision reduction, a forward projection that would reduce the severity of the crash when they hit.

  They entered a huge cavern—or perhaps a tunnel, for it was of an almost constant diameter, more than a hundred meters, and there were faint glows to the right and left. He flipped over to normal flight mode and rolled to starboard. The sensors screamed that a collision with the floor was imminent—

  He'd almost managed to pull out of the dive when the front portions of the speeder smashed into the stone floor. They hit at an oblique angle, a lifesaving circumstance. The impact was powerful, slamming the two of them forwa
rd in their restraints, but the speeder continued forward, bouncing like a flat stone being skipped across a pond.

  The repulsors kicked off. The speeder hit again, jarring Han's spine, and bounced up again in Kessel's low gravity. Then it hit a third time and stayed down, skidding forward for another forty meters or more.

  They stopped, but the thundering noise of descending stone didn't. Well behind them, an avalanche of rocks, boulders, and billowing dust poured out of the ceiling, creating an enormous hill directly beneath the hole through which they had fallen.

  Hurried but detached, Han went through his emergency checklist. Leia: unhurt, unstrapping herself, checking for her lightsaber. Himself: minor pains in neck and arms, nothing significant. Control board: dark. Sensors: off. Odors: recycled air, nothing toxic. No sign that the recyclers were still functioning.

  He let out his breath for the first time since the floor had dropped away. He unstrapped. “Be ready to run in case more of the ceiling drops.”

  She gave him a look no other person could have interpreted—half appreciation for his concern, half aggravation that he was telling her things she was already prepared to do.

  The air around them dimmed as the outer edges of the dust cloud rolled over them. But the noise of the avalanche diminished. A few moments later, it was reduced to the sound of an occasional rock tumbling onto the mound, and stony grumbling as the mound itself settled.

  Carefully, quietly, Han and Leia emerged from the speeder. There was no pop of the atmosphere seal breaking as they did so; the speeder's frame must have twisted, ruining seal integrity, during their crash.

  Leia found a powerful glow lamp in the jumble of equipment in the backseat. She snapped it on and played it toward the cavern ceiling. Though weak at this range, the beam showed that the hole in the ceiling was no more; it was plugged by jagged chunks of stone, some of them weighing dozens or hundreds of tons.