Jedi Search

by Kevin J. Anderson

  "This is a rare opportunity, Mr. Tymmo," Doole said. He had grown more and

  more loquacious after showing them the spice-processing rooms where the

  blind larvae packaged glitterstim.

  "Spice must be mined in total darkness, so we almost never get to see the

  tunnels in direct illumination. But the avalanche let in sunlight that

  spoiled all this glitterstim anyway. We sealed off the other shafts to

  preserve the rest."

  "So what really happened here?" Lando asked, looking around.

  "Tectonic disturbance," Doole said.

  Luke could see the blackened marks where powerful blaster strikes had scored

  the stone walls, and he knew there was much more to this than simple seismic

  activity.

  He felt a surge of startled fear from Lando. "What's that thing!" Lando

  pointed to the other side of the grotto.

  Buried under a pile of jagged rubble, dozens of glassy spear-like legs

  protruded at all angles. Dim jewel-like nodules dotted the spherical body

  core, eyes glazed in death. The rest of the body seemed to be made entirely

  of fangs. Falling chunks of rock had crushed it, and the creature's

  whip-like legs lay askew as if it had tried to flail the boulders aside.

  Doole strutted over to the carcass. "That, my friends, seems to be the thing

  that creates the spice itself. It's the first such creature we've

  encountered, but there must be others deep in the tunnels. We're getting a

  xenobiologist to study it. The bulk of its body seems to be made of

  glitterstim itself, and the strands we pull from the tunnel walls are what

  it uses as a web." Doole stopped short of actually touching the fallen

  monster.

  The guard in charge of dissection joined them. He nudged one of the sharp

  crystalline legs with his boot. "We want to see if we can extract raw

  glitterstim from the web sac and spinnerets in the dead body."

  Doole bobbed his head up and down. "Wouldn't that be something? Absolutely

  pure glitterstim!"

  Lando nodded noncommittally. Luke, playing his part, fished around for more

  information. "So how does this affect your safety record? Did this creature

  prey on any of the miners?"

  "Yes, it killed several, including the shift boss and my assistant--the ones

  I told you about. How many bodies have you found so far?" Doole asked the

  guard.

  "Three fresh ones and two old ones, and we think it killed a bunch more.

  There's a big Wookiee and some other prisoners still unaccounted for."

  Doole scowled at the guard, but quickly regained his false smile.

  Luke felt cold upon hearing the news. Of course, there was no way of knowing

  whether the Wookiee in question was Chewbacca--the Empire had taken a great

  many slaves from the Wookiee homeworld of Kashyyyk, and many survivors could

  well have been shipped off to Kessel. Luke met Lando's gaze, and the other

  man shook his head ever so slightly. "Very interesting," Lando said.

  "Come on, there's more to see," Doole said as he strode back to the floating

  cars. "I hope all this is impressing you."

  "Certainly is," Lando said. "You have an amazing operation here, Moruth."

  Luke remained silent. All day long he had been straining his senses,

  searching for some echo of Han or Chewbacca, but he had found nothing.

  Plenty of others wallowed in pain and misery here, but Luke found no hint of

  the ones he sought.

  Han Solo might never have reached Kessel, and he was certainly no longer

  there. At least not alive.

  The admiral's quarters on an Imperial-class Star Destroyer were spacious and

  functional, and they had been Daala's only home for more than a decade.

  Year after year she operated in a vacuum, alone as always, following

  Tarkin's parting instructions with no further input from the Grand Moff. The

  great distortion of the Maw itself blacked out all external holonet

  transmissions. Her fleet had been isolated, and the crew on her four Star

  Destroyers had fallen into a routine, but Daala did not relax her grip. She

  was afraid to wonder about events outside in the galaxy, confident at least

  that she could count on the Empire with its unbending rules, sometimes cruel

  but always clear-cut.

  But now, in her turmoil, she was glad her quarters were sealed and locked,

  quiet and empty, so no one could see her like this. It would ruin her image

  entirely. Everything had been cut-and-dried before the interrogation of the

  new prisoners. ...

  Daala punched up the recording and watched it again, though she had already

  replayed the sequence a dozen times. She could mouth the words as the

  prisoner spoke them, but this tiny image could not convey the impact she had

  felt when watching him firsthand.

  The man, Han Solo, sat strapped in a nightmarish, convoluted chair with

  steel tubes and wires and piping tangled around him. The gadgetry looked

  sharp and ominous--most of it served no purpose other than to increase the

  prisoner's terror, and in that it proved effective.

  On the recording, Daala stood by Commander Kratas, the captain of her

  flagship, the Gorgon. She could smell the prisoner's fear, but his demeanor

  was full of bluster and sarcasm. He would crack easily.

  "Tell us where you come from," Daala said. "Is the Rebel Alliance crushed

  yet? What has happened in the Empire?"

  "Go kiss a Hutt!" Solo snapped.

  Daala stared woodenly at him for a moment, then shrugged, nodding to Kratas.

  The commander punched a control pad, and one of the metal bars across the

  restraining chair hummed.

  The muscles in Solo's left thigh began to spasm, jittering. His leg bounced

  up and down. The spasms grew worse. He had a puzzled, confused look on his

  face, as if he couldn't understand why his own body was suddenly behaving so

  strangely. The involuntary seizure clenched the muscles under his skin.

  Daala smiled.

  Kratas adjusted one of the controls, and Solo flinched as the muscles along

  the left side of his rib cage also began spasming, tightening his body, but

  the chair would not let him move. Solo fought back an outcry.

  The seizures were not so painful as they were maddening. Daala had found

  that a most effective interrogation technique was simply to induce an

  unrelenting facial tick that made the eyes blink over and over and over

  again for hours without end.

  "Tell us about the Empire," she said again.

  "The Empire is in the garbage masher!" Solo said. Daala could see the whites

  of his eyes as Solo tried to look down at his rebellious leg muscles. "The

  Emperor is dead. He died in the explosion of the second Death Star."

  Daala and Kratas both snapped their heads up. "Second Death Star? Tell me

  about it."

  "No," Solo said.

  "Yes," Daala said.

  Kratas adjusted another button. The bars in the labyrinthine chair hummed,

  and Solo's right hand began twitching, his fingers scrabbling against the

  smooth metal, jittering and shaking. Solo tried to look everywhere at once.

  "The second Death Star?" Daala asked again.

  "It was still under construction when we set off a chain reaction in its

  core. Darth Vader and the Emperor were on board." Solo
resisted, but he

  seemed to delight in telling the news.

  "And what happened to the first Death Star?" Daala said.

  Solo grinned. "The Alliance blew it up, too."

  Daala was skeptical enough that she didn't believe him entirely. A prisoner

  would say anything, especially a defiant one like this. But in her gut she

  feared it might be true--because it explained other things, such as the

  years of silence.

  "And what about Grand Moff Tarkin?"

  "He's in a billion atoms scattered across the Yavin system. He burned with

  his Death Star. He paid for the lives of all the people on Alderaan, a

  planet he destroyed."

  "Alderaan is destroyed?" Daala raised her eyebrows.

  Kratas increased the power vibrating through the chair. Tiny pearls of sweat

  appeared on his own forehead. Daala knew what the commander was thinking:

  during all these years of isolation they had been assuming the Emperor would

  maintain his iron grip, that the fleet of all-powerful Star Destroyers and

  the secret Death Star would cement Imperial rule across the galaxy. The Old

  Republic had lasted a thousand generations. And the Empire ... could it have

  fallen in just a few decades?

  "How long since the explosion of the second Death Star?"

  "Seven years."

  "What has happened since?" Daala finally sat down. "Tell me everything."

  But Solo seemed to gain inner strength and clammed up. He glared with his

  dark, angry eyes. Daala sighed. It was like a rehearsed show they had to

  perform. Kratas adjusted the controls until Solo's entire body was a

  writhing, spasming mass of twitching muscles, as if a storm were happening

  inside his body.

  Gradually, the prisoner spilled the entire story of the other battles, the

  civil war, Grand Admiral Thrawn, the resurrected Emperor, the truce at

  Bakura, the terrible conflicts in which the waning Empire had been defeated

  again and again --until finally she had Kratas release him. The loud humming

  of the chair suddenly stopped, and Han Solo slumped into exhausted bliss at

  being freed from the onslaught of his own muscles.

  Daala motioned outside the door of the holding cell, summoning a glossy

  black interrogation droid that floated in with hypodermic needles glistening

  like spears in the dim reddish light. Solo tried to cringe back, and Daala

  could see the fear in his eyes.

  "There," Daala said. "Now the interrogator droid will confirm everything you

  told us." She got up and left.

  Later she had found out that Solo was indeed telling the truth in everything

  he said. Alone in her quarters, Admiral Daala switched off the recording.

  Her head pounded with a gnawing, throbbing ache like dull fingernails

  scraping the inside of her skull.

  One of the Maw Installation scientists, learning that the new prisoner had

  actually been on board the completed Death Star, demanded to speak with him.

  Daala would send the scientist this interrogation report--after she edited

  it, of course. Sometimes it was impossible to keep these prima donna

  scientists happy. They had such a narrow view of things.

  Right now Daala had greater worries. She had to decide what to do with this

  new information.

  In her quarters Daala stood between two full-length curved mirrors that

  projected a reflection of her body, head to toe. Her olive-gray uniform

  showed no wrinkle, only crisp creases and near-invisible seams. Through a

  strict regimen of exercises and drills, she had not added a fraction to her

  weight during her long assignment; her appearance, though older and harder

  now, still pleased her.

  Daala wore her bright admiral's insignia proudly over her left breast: a row

  of six scarlet rectangles set above a row of blue rectangles. To her

  knowledge she was the only woman ever to wear such a rank in the Imperial

  Navy. It had been a special promotion, given directly by Grand Moff Tarkin

  himself, and it was possible the Emperor did not even know of it. He

  certainly did not know about the Maw Installation.

  Her coppery hair flowed over her shoulders, rippled down her back to below

  her hips. More than a decade ago Daala had arrived at Maw Installation with

  her hair cropped short and bristly, part of the humiliation the Imperial

  military academy inflicted upon female candidates.

  After being sealed inside the Maw, though, Daala was placed in charge by

  direct order from Tarkin. Asinine regulations-for-the-sake-of-regulations

  meant nothing to her anymore. She refused to cut her hair, as a gesture of

  her own independence: rank had its privileges. She felt Tarkin would have

  approved. But Tarkin was dead now.

  Turning, she dimmed the lights, then activated the door. Outside, two

  bodyguards snapped to attention and continued staring ahead. Despite Maw

  Installation's isolation, Daala insisted on peak performance, regular

  drills, war-gaming sessions. She had been trained in the Imperial military

  mold; though the system had done its best to squash her ambitions, Daala

  followed its tenets.

  Beneath their armor the two guards were well built and attractive; but Daala

  had not taken a lover since Grand Moff Tarkin. After him fantasizing had

  been enough.

  "Escort me to the shuttle bay," she said, stepping into the corridor. "I'm

  going down to the Installation." She strode off, hearing the bodyguards

  march behind her, weapons ready. "Inform the duty commander that I have a

  meeting with Tol Sivron." One of the bodyguards muttered into his helmet

  comlink.

  She strode down the corridors, pondering the complexity of her ship, the

  troops, the support personnel. In the Imperial fleet a single Star Destroyer

  housed thirty-seven thousand crew and ninety-seven hundred troops, but

  because of the secrecy of the Maw Installation, Tarkin had assigned her only

  a skeleton crew--people without families, without connections to the

  outside, some recruited from worlds devastated by the early battles of the

  Empire.

  Even under rigid discipline, though, her crew had been trapped here for

  eleven years with no furloughs, no R and R other than the meager amusement

  facilities available on board. Her troops had grown weary of the

  entertainment libraries--restless, bored, and angry at being placed on

  standby alert for so long without word from the outside. They were well

  armed and itching to go out and do something--as was Daala herself.

  At her fingertips Daala had the might of sixty turbolaser batteries, sixty

  ion cannons, and ten tractor-beam projectors, one of which had just been

  used to capture the battered Imperial shuttle. Inside the hangar bays the

  Gorgon alone carried six TIE fighter squadrons, two gamma-class assault

  shuttles, twenty AT-ST walkers, and thirty AT-ST scout walkers.

  Three more identical ships, the Manticore, the Basilisk, and the Hydra,

  orbited Maw Installation, also under Daala's command. Years ago Moff Tarkin

  had taken Daala herself to the Kuat Drive Yards to watch her four Star

  Destroyers under construction.

  Tarkin and Daala had flown a small inspection shuttle around the enormous

  superstructures being ass
embled in orbit. The two remained silent for the

  most part, staring at the enormity of the project. Around them in space the

  tiny lights of workers, transport vessels, rubble smelters, and girder

  extruders made a hive of activity.

  Tarkin had placed a hand on her shoulders, squeezing with a grip made of

  steel cords. "Daala," he said, "I am giving you enough power to turn any

  planet to slag."

  Now, aboard the Star Destroyer Gorgon, Admiral Daala entered a personnel

  lift that took her and her bodyguards from the command quarters below the

  bridge tower to one of the hangar bays. She did not announce her arrival

  when the doors slid open. Daala was pleased to see her troops bustling about

  the TIE fighters, the shuttles, and service vehicles. After so many years of

  boredom, her personnel kept every system functioning perfectly.

  Only months after the completion of Maw Installation, Daala had noticed a

  malaise creeping through the personnel. Part of it was because of her, she

  was sure; commanded by the only female flag officer, assigned to baby-sit a

  bunch of scientists in the most protected spot in the galaxy, the troops had

  grown lax. But a few graphic executions and continual threats kept Daala's

  crew constantly on edge, honing their skills and making it inconceivable for

  them to shirk their duties.

  That tactic had been one of Tarkin's prime lessons. Command through the fear

  of force rather than force itself. Daala had 180,000 people at her disposal,