by James Luceno
The vidscreen did as he’d ordered, and there she was—Aryn Leneer. She still wore her long, sandy hair loose, still had the same green eyes, the same hunched posture, as if she were bracing herself against a storm.
Which she was, Zeerid supposed, given the keenness with which she felt the emotions of those around her.
He hadn’t seen her in years. They had become friends during the months they’d served together on Balmorra. He’d come to know that she could fly pretty well and fight very well. He respected that. And because he fought pretty well and flew still better, he thought she had respected him. She never drank with Zeerid and the commandos, but she always hit the cantina with them. Just watching them.
Zeerid had assumed she came along because she liked the emotional temperature of the commandos when they drank—relief and joy at having survived another mission. She always had an openness to her face, an expression in her eyes that said she understood. Her openness had drawn drunk soldiers like sweet flies to nectar honey. They’d wanted to look in her eyes and confess something. Zeerid imagined it must have been exhausting for her. And yet she’d always been there for them. Every time.
The vid cut to a shot of Coruscant and a commentator said, “Until today, when an attack …”
The ship’s comm unit chimed receipt of a signal and Zeerid killed the vid. Expecting planetary control, he reached for it but stopped halfway when he realized it was the encrypted subspace channel he used with The Exchange.
He considered ignoring the hail. Speaking to Oren so near to Vulta would soil his reunion with Arra. He did not want business on his mind when he saw his daughter.
The steady, red blink of the hail continued.
He relented, cursed, and hit the button to open the channel, hit it so hard that he cracked the plastoid. He tensed for what he would hear.
“What?” he barked.
For a moment Oren said nothing, then, “If voice analysis didn’t show it to be you speaking, I might have assumed I’d hailed someone else.”
“I have something else on my mind right now.”
“Oh?” Oren paused, as if awaiting a more thorough explanation. Zeerid offered none, so Oren continued: “As I alluded to before, I have something urgent. Delivery requires someone with extraordinary piloting skills. Someone like you, Z-man.”
“I just finished a job, Oren. I need time—”
“This job will wipe your slate clean.”
Zeerid sat up in his chair, not sure he’d heard correctly. “Say again?”
“You heard me.”
Zeerid had heard him; he just couldn’t believe it. Mere hours ago, he imagined he could never get clear of The Exchange. Now Oren was offering him just that. He tried to keep his voice steady.
“This just a drop?”
“It is a drop.”
“What’s the cargo?” He tried not to choke on the next word. “Spice?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it going?”
He figured it had to be heading to some seriously hot hole of a planet for Oren to have offered to clear his debt.
“Coruscant.” Oren pronounced the name reluctantly, as if he expected Zeerid to balk.
“That’s it?
“Did you hear what I said?”
“I did. You said ‘Coruscant.’ So what’s the catch?”
“The catch?”
“Coruscant ain’t exactly a hot LZ. It’s a vacation compared with what I’m used to. So what’s the catch?”
“You haven’t caught the holo?”
“I’ve been in hyperspace.”
“Of course.” Oren chuckled. “The Empire attacked Coruscant.”
Zeerid leaned in close, once more not sure he had heard correctly. Oren’s simple statement and the flat tone in which he delivered it did not seem to have the wherewithal to carry the import of the words Zeerid thought he’d heard.
“Repeat? There were peace negotiations taking place on Alderaan. I just saw them on the holo. What do you mean by ‘attacked’?”
“I mean attacked. An Imperial fleet is in orbit around the planet. Imperial forces occupy Coruscant. No one knows much else because the Empire is jamming communications out of Coruscant.”
Zeerid’s thoughts still could not quite wrap around the idea. How could the Empire have attacked any of the Core Worlds, much less the capital?
“How could they have gotten past the defense grid? It doesn’t make sense.”
“I neither know nor care about the particulars, Z-man. Though I gather it was a surprise attack that occurred right in the midst of the peace negotiations. If nothing else, one can appreciate the Empire’s boldness. You fought against the Empire, didn’t you, Z-man?”
Zeerid nodded. He had traded shots with Imperial forces many times, originally as a commando in the Republic army, then as … whatever he was now. For a moment, he flashed on the ridiculous notion that he should re-up with the army. He chided himself for stupidity.
“You can get the rest from the holo,” Oren said. “Meanwhile, start planning for this drop.”
The drop. Right.
“You want me to fly a ship full of spice into a freshly conquered world occupied by the Empire? You said they locked down comm traffic. They’ll have orbital traffic to a minimum, too. I can’t sneak through that, even flying dark. They’ll blow me out of space.”
“You’ll find a way.”
“I’m open to suggestions.”
“I have faith you’ll figure something out.”
“At the least we should wait until matters settle. The Empire will probably allow regular commercial ship traffic to resume in a week or so. At that point—”
“That will not work.”
“It’s got to work.”
“No. The cargo needs to move immediately.”
Zeerid was starting to like things less and less. His sense of smell picked up something turning to rot. “Why?”
“You don’t need to know.”
“I do if I’m hauling it. Which I haven’t even decided yet.”
Oren fell silent for a moment. Then, “This is engspice.”
Zeerid blew out a sigh. No wonder the job would wipe his slate clean. Chem-engineered spice was not only especially addictive, it also altered users’ brain chemistry such that only more of the same “brand” of engspice could satisfy their need. Mere spice would not do. Dealers called engspice “the leash,” because it gave them a monopoly over their users. They could charge a premium, and did.
“We have a buyer on Coruscant whose supply is running low. He needs this order to get to Coruscant quickly, Empire or no Empire. You know why.”
Zeerid did know why. “Because if the users can’t get their brand of engspice, they’ll go through withdrawal. And if they get through that …”
“They break their addiction to the brand and our buyer loses his market. His concern over this is great, understandably.”
“Which means The Exchange got to name its price.”
“Which works well for you, Z-man. Don’t sound so contemptuous.”
Zeerid chewed the corner of his lip. He felt a bit nauseated. On the one hand, he could be free with just this run. On the other hand, he’d seen an engspice den on Balmorra once, while serving in the army. Not pretty.
“No,” Zeerid said. For strength, he stared through the cockpit canopy at Vulta, where his daughter lived, and shook his head. “I can’t do it. Spice is bad enough. Engspice is too much. I’ll earn my way out of this some other way.”
Oren’s voice turned hard. “No, you won’t. You can die trying to make this drop, or you can die not making this drop. You understand my meaning?”
Zeerid ground his teeth. “Yes. I understand it.”
“I’m glad. Look at it this way. If you make the drop, you’re even with The Exchange. Maybe you even walk away, huh? If you don’t make the drop, you’re dead and who cares?”
Oren chuckled at his own cleverness, and Zeerid wished for nothing more than to choke the bastard
.
“Then I need more,” Zeerid said. If he was going to get dirty, he wanted enough credits in hand to buy a shower for his conscience. “Not just a clean slate. I want two hundred thousand credits on top of wiping out the debt, and I want a hundred of it paid before I land on Vulta, which means you’ve got a quarter of an hour.”
“Z-man …”
“This is non-negotiable.”
“You need some play money, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“Very well. Done. The first one hundred will hit your account before you touch down.”
Zeerid bit his lip in anger. He should have asked for more. “When do I go?”
“The cargo is en route to Vulta now. And when I say it’s time to go, you move your tail.”
“Fine.” Zeerid drew a deep breath. “You done talking, Oren?”
“I’m done.”
“Then I’ve got one more thing.”
“What is it?”
“The more I come to know you, the more I want to shoot you in the face. Just so you heard it from me at least once. Two hundred thousand or no two hundred thousand.”
“This is why I like you, Z-man,” Oren said. “Put your ship down as Red Dwarf and follow the docking instructions. I will contact you when the cargo is ready.”
“You loading Fatman, or am I flying something else?”
“I don’t know yet. Probably we’ll load Fatman in the usual way—a modified maintenance droid. You’ll know when I know.”
“If it ain’t Fatman, make kriffing sure it’s something else fast.”
“I will be in touch.”
“Fine,” Zeerid said, though it wasn’t fine. He closed the channel, sat back in his chair, and stared out into space.
Dar’nala dismissed Aryn and Syo, presumably so she, Satele, and Senator Am-ris could take private counsel with Master Zym. With nothing to do and nothing more to say, Aryn returned to her chambers to …
To what?
She did not know what to do. She felt as if she should be doing something, but she had no idea what. So she ate without tasting, paced the floor, and meditated, trying to keep the pain at bay by staying busy.
When that did not work, she checked the HoloNet for news. Unsurprisingly, the reports were filled with breathless speculation about the Imperial attack on Coruscant and what it meant for the peace negotiations. She could not bear the sound of the newscasters, so she muted the vidscreen.
There was no footage of Coruscant post-attack so Aryn assumed the Empire must have jammed communications. Instead, the footage showed old images of the Republic’s capital. Millions of speeders, swoops, and aircars moved in organized lines above the landscape of duracrete and transparisteel. Thousands of pedestrians strode the autowalks and plazas.
The image changed to a view of the Jedi Temple taken from an airborne recorder. Aryn could not take her eyes from the image, the towers, the tiered layers of the structure. Towering statues of old Masters, lightsabers pointed skyward, lined the broad avenue that led to the enormous doors to the Temple.
She remembered the sense of wonder she’d felt walking under those statues for the first time, side by side with Master Zallow. She’d been a child and the Temple and the statues had seemed impossibly big.
“This will be your home now, Aryn,” Master Zallow had said, and smiled at her in his way.
She wondered how the Temple looked now, after the attack, wondered if it even still stood.
She imagined Master Zallow, commanding the Jedi Knights and Padawans, fighting Sith warriors in the shadows of those statues, just as she had fought the Sith warrior in the midst of the Alderaanian statues. She imagined him falling, dying.
Tears welled anew. She tried to fight them but failed. She could not level out her emotional state, wasn’t even sure she wanted to. The pain of Master Zallow’s death was all she had left of him.
A thought struck her, and the thought transformed into an urgent need. An idea rooted in her mind, in her gut, and she could not unseat it.
She wanted to know the name and face of Master Zallow’s murderer. She wanted to see him. She had to see him. And if she could see the Sith, learn his name, then she could avenge Master Zallow.
The more she pondered the notion, the more needful it became.
But she could learn nothing on Alderaan, as part of a peace negotiation. She knew what Zym, Dar’nala, and Am-ris would decide, what they must decide. They would put up a show of negotiating, then they would accept whatever terms the Sith offered. They would betray the memory of Master Zallow, of all the Jedi who had fought and fallen at the Temple.
It was obscene, and Aryn would not be party to it.
Unable to contain her emotion, she shouted a stream of expletives, one after another, a wide and long river of profanity of the kind she had not uttered since her adolescence.
Moments later, an urgent knock sounded on her door.
“Who is it?” she called, her voice still rough and irritable.
“It is Syo. Are you … well? I heard—”
“It was the vid,” she lied, and powered off the vidscreen. “I want to be alone now, Syo.”
A long silence, then, “You don’t have to carry this alone, Aryn.”
But she did have to carry it alone. The memory of Master Zallow was her weight to bear.
“You know where to find me,” Syo said.
“Thank you,” she said, too softly for him to hear.
She passed the hours in solitude. Day gave way to night and no word came from Master Dar’nala or Satele. She tried to sleep but failed. She dreaded what the morning would bring.
She lay in her bed, in darkness, staring up at the ceiling. Alderaan’s moon, gibbous and hazy, rose and painted the room in lurid light. Everything looked washed out, ghostly, surreal. For a moment she let herself feel as if she’d stepped into a dream. How else could matters have transpired so? How else could the Jedi have failed so?
Master Dar’nala’s voice replayed in her mind, over and over: I fear we will have no choice.
The pain of the words came from the fact that they were correct. The Jedi could not sacrifice Coruscant. The Republic and the Jedi Council would accept a treaty. They had to. All that remained was to negotiate terms, terms that must be favorable to the Empire. In the end, the Empire’s betrayal, the Sith betrayal, would be rewarded with a Jedi capitulation.
While Aryn recognized the reasonableness of the course, she nevertheless could not shed the feeling that it was wrong. Master Dar’nala was wrong. Senator Am-ris was wrong.
Such a thought had never entered her mind before. It, too, brought pain. Everything had changed for her.
Her fists balled with anger and grief, and she felt more shouts creeping up her throat. Breathing deeply, regularly, she sought to quell her loss of control. She knew Master Zallow would not have approved it.
But Master Zallow was dead, murdered by the Sith.
And soon he would be failed by the Order, his memory murdered by political necessity.
Her mind walked through memories of Master Zallow, not of his teachings, but of his smiles, his stern but caring reprimands of her waywardness, the pride she knew he’d felt when she was promoted to Jedi Knight.
Those were the things that had bonded them, not pedagogy.
The hole that had opened in her when she’d felt his death yawned still. She feared she might drain away into it. She knew the name of the hole.
Love.
She’d loved Master Zallow. He’d been a father to her. She had never told him and now she never could. Losing something she loved had ripped her open in a way she had not expected. The pain hurt, but the pain was right.
The Order had wrought a galaxy in which good capitulated to evil, where human feelings—Aryn’s feelings—were crushed under the weight of Jedi nonattachment.
What good was any of it if it brought matters to this?
Her racing thoughts lifted her from bed. She was too restless for sleep. S
he put her feet on the carpeted floor, hung her head, tried to gather the thoughts bouncing chaotically in her brain.
She realized that she still wore her robes, not her nightclothes. She crossed the room and stepped through the sliding doors to her balcony. The brisk wind mussed her hair. The scent of wildflowers and loam saturated the air. Insects chirped. A night bird cooed.
It would have been peaceful under other circumstances.
A hundred meters down, the Alderaanian landscape unrolled before her, a meadow of tall grasses, shrubs, and slim apo trees that whispered and swayed in the breeze. She could not see the walls of the compound through the vegetation.
It was beautiful, Aryn allowed. Yet she still had the sense that she was standing at the scene of a crime. The cool night air and calm setting did nothing to assuage the feeling that the Jedi had failed catastrophically. She gripped the top of the balcony so tightly that it made her fingers ache.
Beyond the compound, in the distance, the surface of a wide, winding river shimmered in the moonlight. The running lights from a few boats dotted its surface. She watched their slow, hypnotic traverse over the water. The sky, too, was dotted with traffic.
She found it infuriating that life went on as it had for everyone else, while for her, everything had changed. She felt as if she had been hollowed out.
“Thinking of jumping?” a voice said, a gentle smile in the tone.
She started before placing the voice as Syo’s. For a moment, he had sounded exactly like Master Zallow.
Syo stood on the balcony of his own chambers, five meters to her right. He had to have been there the whole time. Perhaps he could not sleep, either.
“No,” she said. “Just thinking.”
His usual calm expression was marred by a furrowed brow and worried eyes. “About Master Zallow?” he asked.
Hearing someone else speak her master’s name at that moment pierced her. Emotion welled in her, put a fist in her throat. She nodded, unable to speak.
“I am sorry for you, Aryn. Master Zallow will be missed.”
She found her voice. “He was more to me than just a master.”
He nodded as if he understood, but she suspected he did not, not really.
“To speak of nonattachment, to understand it, that is one thing. But to practice it …” He stared at her. “That is another.”