“Well, maybe I’ll stay here, too,” Dair told him. “We can both go to the university and then we’ll open up our own business!”
Jos’ brow wrinkled in disapproval. “No, Dair. You have to go.” The frown on his face turned to a sly grin. “Yeah, I want you to go. Then you can tell me all about it. okay?” he said, picking up his macrobinoculars to scan the hillsides. “Yep, I want to hear all about crawling around in the muck and getting yelled at by drill sergeants!”
Dair laughed. “I won’t leave out any of the details!” he promised. He knew that behind the smart remarks it had been harder for Jos to tell him to go than it had been for him to offer to stay.
“Look! Two troopers at 1-2-0,” Jos said. “Boy, those speeder bikes sure are something. I heard they have top speeds of 500 kmh! Can you just imagine?”
“Quiet!” Dair whispered.
“I bet they’re looking for that naval officer who deserted.”
“Where’d you hear that tale, Jos?” Dair asked.
“Down at Chado’s Pub. They were talking about this lieutenant — I think his name was Chanceller.”
“Chanceller?” Could it really be the officer he’d seen at the medical center a few days earlier?
“One of the guys said he was an aide to some officer from the Judicator!” Jos shook his head like he could hardly believe anyone would consider desertion. “C’mon, let’s take a closer look at those scout troopers!”
“Are you crazy? It’s too late anyway,” Dair said. “They just disappeared over the ridge. C’mon, let’s go home.”
Suddenly, Dair heard the whine of engines. Through a break in the trees he spotted the two speeder bikes. The scout troopers had circled around them and were moving in swiftly.
“C’mon. Jos! To the caves,” he said, scampering across the hillside. Jos hesitated a few seconds then scrambled through the trees in the opposite direction from Dair.
Shots rang out. A few meters ahead of Dair, a sapling cracked as a blast ripped it in two. He dove into the underbrush just as another shot whipped over his head. Crawling on hands and knees, he fumbled through the bushes and into a cave.
Dair didn’t even have time to catch his breath when he heard one of the speeder bikes stop nearby. Fallen tree branches crackled under armored footsteps. The scout trooper drew closer.
Dair’s heart pounded. He crouched, unmoving, in a dark recess of the cave, hoping the trooper would give up his search. From experience Dair knew that the mineral content of the mountains on this part of Garos played havoc with sensors. And inside the cave, he’d be shielded from their probes.
The scout trooper batted aside some bushes near the entrance to the cave. Then suddenly he stopped, and Dair realized that someone was shouting in the distance. Blaster fire echoed through the hills. The scout trooper bolted back toward his bike.
Dair cautiously poked his head through the bushes, catching a fleeting glimpse of the speeder bike as it whipped over the crest of a nearby hill. He was safe. But what about Jos? That blaster fire he’d heard — what if they’d caught Jos?
Dair dashed up the hillside after the scout trooper. From his vantage point a few minutes later, he spotted two deserted speeder bikes halfway down the hill. He moved silently toward them.
Muffled voices floated through the air in a deathlike litany. Then, some 10 meters away from the bikes, he saw the white armor against the greenish-brown backdrop of forest. One blaster rifle was trained on a prone figure.
“Please, no,” Dair whispered to himself as he moved behind the bikes for cover. Jos’ hand twitched. Dair breathed a sigh of relief as his friend slowly rose to his knees.
“Where’s your comrade?” one of the troopers asked Jos.
“Get up, spy!” the other one shouted.
Dair couldn’t hear Jos’ reply, but watched as he tried to stand.
“You’re not? Then what are you doing out here near the mines? Didn’t you know this is a restricted area?”
Jos answered, but still too softly for Dair to understand.
“Hiking? Makes for a good story, spy!” the trooper grunted. “Let’s take him back to headquarters,” he told the other trooper. “Move it!”
Suddenly, Jos lunged forward, taking one scout trooper down. They rolled across the ground, and Jos struggled to gain control of the man’s blaster rifle. But as he ripped it away from his opponent, the rifle flew through the air, landing only an arm’s length from Dair. Jos untangled himself from the scout trooper’s grasp. He scrambled to his feet and took off, not knowing that Dair had retrieved the blaster.
The other trooper aligned his gun sight on the fleeing figure. One deadly shot pierced the air. Jos collapsed to the ground.
“No!” Dair screamed. Two startled scout troopers turned simultaneously to face him. Another blast echoed across the mountainside.
Jos’ killer was dead.
Visibly shaken, Dair kept the blaster rifle trained on the other scout trooper. “Don’t move!” Dair yelled at him. He didn’t want to kill an unarmed man.
The trooper ignored him, recovering his fallen comrade’s rifle in a diving roll across the forest floor. Two shots were fired. And suddenly the mountainside seemed coldly silent.
The second scout trooper lay dead. Dair stared at the rifle in his trembling hands, then threw it to the ground.
“Jos!” he cried out, running to his fallen friend.
Dair took the lifeless hand into his. Stunned, he sat beside Jos for a long time unable to move, unable to think.
As darkness crept in upon the mountain, Dair wept. Through his tears he gently closed Jos’ eyes.
Dair collapsed on the stone steps of the patio. He stared at the sea. It offered no peace for him tonight. A breeze swept gently off the water. It mingled with the smell of fresh-baked shrail, one of his grandmother’s special treats, which wafted from the kitchen. He could hear her working there.
There was no way he could sneak into the house. She’d hear him. He allowed himself a smile. He remembered that Jos had said his grandmother had ears as sharp as the wild boetays that roamed the Garosian mountainsides. Jos. A tear formed in his eye. Jos was dead.
“Dair, is that you?” her voice rang out from the kitchen.
“Yes, Gram, it’s me,” he called, wiping the tear with a dirt-streaked hand as the door onto the patio opened.
She couldn’t help noticing how filthy he was. “Good skies, son! What in the worlds happened to you?”
Biting his lip, Dair turned to look at her. She could see the pain in his eyes.
“We need to talk,” she said firmly. “Get cleaned up. I’ll make us some tea.”
He nodded, his head hung low. Then he trudged up to his room.
Fifteen minutes later. Gram Haslip poured their tea and sat down across the table from her only grandson.
“Well, you look a whole lot better,” she said, trying to cheer him up.
“Oh, Gram — ” Tears welled up in his eyes.
She placed her hand on top of his. “What happened?”
“It’s Jos, Gram. He’s dead.”
“What!” she exclaimed. “How?”
“We were near the mines. Two scout troopers thought we were spying. They killed Jos! They shot him in the back, Gram!”
If she was shocked by that revelation, he could see no sign of it in her face. “What happened to the scout troopers, Dair?”
“I — I killed them.” He hesitated. “And I hid their rifles in a cave near the cliffs,” he said, trying to sort through his feelings — he wasn’t sure why he’d done it, but it just seemed the right thing to do at the time.
Keriin Haslip pulled her chair around the table. She wrapped her arms around Dair and held him tightly. “It’s okay, Dair,” she reassured him. “Everything will be all right.”
“I can’t believe they’d shoot an unarmed man in the back, Gram!” Dair finally said when his tears stopped flowing. “Is that what I will become if I join the Imperial Army?”
<
br /> “The Empire doesn’t follow the rules of civilized beings, Dair,” she told him. “It follows it own rules and changes them to suit its own needs.”
“Is that how you’ve always felt about the Empire, Gram?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“But you sold the mines to them! And you were going to let me go to the Academy!”
“I was forced to sell the mines, Dair. I had no choice. And you had to make up your own mind about the Empire — what is right, what is wrong.” She paused, searching his eyes. Past the grief, she found what she was looking for. “In time, I knew you would find the answer.”
Dair nodded. “What do we do now. Gram?” he asked.
“The Imperials will assume the underground did this. I must get word to — ” She stopped mid-sentence.
Dair stared at his grandmother and frowned. “Get word to whom. Gram?”
Keriin Haslip studied her grandson’s handsome face, his dark eyes so like his father’s. He’d grown up quite a bit in these last few hours. He’d learned a hard lesson about life. About the Empire. It was time.
“Gram?”
“I have certain friends who will need to know what happened near the mines today.”
“Friends?”
“Dair, I think its time you knew the truth about your old Gram. C’mon, let’s go. There are some people I want you to meet.”
The chamber deep beneath the university library was dank, not unlike the caves where Dair had played as a child. Air whistled through a vent in the ceiling, and Dair could have sworn he felt the vibrations of the sea pounding the nearby cliffs.
Bare except for a table and some chairs, the room was lit by a holographic map of the city of Ariana and the area surrounding the mines. Even in the dim light, Dair could see the grim expression on a half dozen faces as they listened to his story.
Dair glanced around the table. He knew the two men on either side of his grandmother: Assistant Minister Magir Paca, whom he’d spoken to only a few days before, and Desto Mayda, his friend’s father. A third man he recognized from newsvid releases covering the Garosian civil war. Camron Gelorik, a leader of the radical Sundars, now sat peacefully with Garosians he once ordered his followers to hunt down. Garosian and Sundar united. Their fight against the Empire had begun.
“He was just a boy!” Mayda exclaimed as Dair finished describing what had transpired near the mines. “Damn them all!”
“You realize the Imperials will blame the underground for this,” Keriin Haslip told the group.
“I can see the newsvid now,” Gelorik added. “‘Scout troopers shot while trying to protect innocent boy from underground hooligans!’”
Several murmured their agreement, but Paca held his hand up to silence them. “Unlike the Empire, we don’t kill innocent people,” he reminded them. “Our friends know us better than that.”
“But we should still get word out,” Keriin Haslip said. “Everyone should know what animals they are!”
Desto Mayda shook his head. “That could be dangerous for your grandson, Keriin. Dair’s friendship with Jos is well known,” he said.
“Yes,” Paca agreed, “Desto is right. If word gets out that someone was with Jos at the time of his murder, the Imperials would no doubt investigate Dair.”
“That could lead to too many questions,” Gelorik said quietly. He studied Dair’s face. “And it could lead them back to us.”
“You mean we have to cover up the truth?” Dair asked. “You’re going to let them accuse you of murder?”
“I’m afraid so, son,” Desto said. “At least for now.”
Dair nodded, understanding these people were doing more than just placing their trust in him. This was a sacrifice that could make more enemies for the underground. It was a sacrifice for him. And he wasn’t even one of them. Yet. “Can I do anything to help?” he asked.
“Well.” Paca said, “we’ll need to send a team in to retrieve those blaster rifles that you hid.”
“I’d like to go with them, Minister, I mean, Paca,” Dair told him.
“Good, son. We’re glad to have you for as long as you’re on Garos. You’ll be headed to Raithal Academy soon, won’t you?” Paca asked him.
“What!” Dair shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t go to the Academy now. I don’t want to be one of them!”
Desto Mayda grabbed Dair’s hand from across the table, startling him. “Don’t you see, Dair? You have the opportunity to work against the Empire from the inside, like Paca does at the Ministry.”
“You can’t turn down your acceptance now. Think how suspicious that might look,” Paca said.
Dair began to see a career with the Empire in a whole different light.
“It may take you years. Undercover work can be a slow and tedious process. But little things, like supplies sent to the wrong command — ”
“Minor computer glitches — ” Mayda added.
“Orders not processed in a timely fashion — ” someone else said.
“All will undermine Imperial efforts,” Paca continued. “Just think of the possibilities.”
“Eventually, you ask for a transfer back to Garos. You’ll be invaluable to us!” Gelorik told him.
“Think about it, son,” Paca said.
Looking at each face in turn. Dair’s eyes finally came to rest on his grandmother. Her eyes glistened with tears. Keriin Haslip knew what his choice would be. She might be losing her grandson to the Empire, but it wasn’t on their terms. It was on hers.
Dair stood in the hallway staring at the reflection in the mirror — the reflection of someone who’d matured quickly to manhood these last few months. He felt stronger, more confident than ever. But as he embarked on this journey, he realized that he’d be alone out there, surrounded by people who blindly served the Empire. But he was determined to play the game their way, to learn everything he could learn. He would make a difference!
Straightening his blue-gray tunic, he nodded to himself. The double doors of the great room opened and Keriin Haslip beckoned to her grandson.
Dair took a deep breath and joined her in the doorway as applause broke out. He looked at the faces of his friends and blushed with embarrassment. A group of former classmates rushed up, slapping his back and shaking his hand.
Across the room Dair saw newly-appointed Imperial Governor Winger in an animated discussion with Magir Paca. Though he was no longer naive about the true nature of the Empire, Dair still had to admire Uncle Tork. Winger had turned out to be the voice of moderation, calling for an end to the Imperial purge of radicals on both sides of the civil war. Dair understood now what Paca had meant by “force a peace.”
“Good luck, son,” Paca said, shaking Dair’s hand firmly.
“Thank you, Minister Paca,” he replied. They’d said their private good-byes in the underground operations center only a few hours before.
“Dair, I couldn’t be more proud if you were my own son,” Winger said.
“Thank you, Governor,” Dair replied. “I only hope I live up to everyone’s expectations.” He glanced toward his grandmother and Paca.
“You will, son,” Winger said. “I’ve no doubt about that. You’ve been through some rough times here.” He shook his head. “I’m still hoping they find those radicals who killed poor Jos Mayda — ”
Keriin Haslip nodded, almost imperceptibly, to Paca.
“I know you’ll come through Raithal just fine,” Winger said. “It’s an experience you’ll never forget. Or regret. Why, I remember when I was at the Academy on Carida — ”
“Oh, Tork! None of your old war stories now! We’re supposed to be celebrating,” Sali Winger said, playfully pushing her husband aside to give Dair a hug.
“Ah, yes. Well, Dair, you show them we’re a tough bunch.”
“I will, Governor. How are you. Madame Winger?” Dair greeted her.
“Dair, I can’t believe you’re leaving us! Just look at you! Your parents would be so proud!” she said, reac
hing back to grasp an unseen hand. “Alexandra, come and say good-bye to Dair,” she urged the dark-haired child.
Sparkling blue eyes peeked around Sali’s gown.
“Hello, Alex.”
“Hi,” she said holding her hand out for him to shake.
“I’m gonna miss our weekly card games,” he said.
“You promised to teach me to play sabacc, remember?”
“Yeah, so you could beat me at that, too!” he laughed. “C’mon, let’s check out our favorite view one more time,” he said, taking the small hand into his and leading her outside on to the patio. He felt her fingers tighten around his.
“I bet you’ll be all grown up when I come back,” he told her as Garos’ second moon made its debut on the horizon. And suddenly, a lump formed in his throat and his heart ached. He found himself thinking about Jos again.
“You miss him, don’t you?” Alex asked quietly.
“Yeah,” he nodded. “Huh? How did you know I was thinking about Jos?”
Alex shrugged. “Why do you have to leave?” she asked.
Dair picked her up in his arms. “You know I’m joining the Imperial Army.”
Alex shrunk back from him for a moment. Then she looked at him, studying his face with those blue eyes of hers. He’d never seen such intensity in someone so young. It was almost as if she could see right through him.
Crooking her finger to draw him close, Alex whispered into his ear. “I don’t believe you,” she said. “But I won’t tell.”
Dair stared in amazement, then smiled at her. “Okay,” he whispered back to her. “Thanks.”
A cold wind blew across the clifftops. Dair and Alex watched the sea pound the cliffs, the violent forces of nature at work. There were other violent forces at work on Garos, forces of a man-made nature — and they had changed Dair’s life forever.
The Origins of the Conflict on Garos IV
Compiled from the Archives of the University Library in Ariana:
Difficult navigation of the Nyarikan Nebula has made travel to and from the Garos system less than desirable, though this system lies only four days from the Imperial capital of Coruscant. The two inhabited planets in the system — Sundari and Garos IV — have had only occasional contact with the Empire.
Star Wars - The Adventures of Alex Winger 1 - Turning Point Page 2