by James Luceno
“Again, Tee-seven.”
“Aryn,” Zeerid said.
“Again.”
“Not again, Tee-seven.” Zeerid turned around so that they were facing each other. “What are you doing? What more do you need to see?”
“I’m not seeing it. I’m feeling it. Leave me alone, Zeerid.”
He must have understood, for he released her and she turned back to the monitor.
“Magnify Master Zallow’s face and play it again, Tee-Seven.”
She watched his expression as he died over and over. His eyes haunted her, but she could not look away. Each time, before the light went out of them, she saw in his eyes what he was thinking the moment he died:
I failed.
And then Malgus’s words. “It’s all going to burn.”
Whatever walls she had built around her pain collapsed as thoroughly as the Temple. Her eyes welled and tears poured freely down her face. Yet still she watched. She wanted to remember her Master’s pain, tuck it away and hold it inside of her, a dark seed to yield dark fruit when she finally faced Malgus.
Before she killed Malgus, she desperately wanted him to feel the same kind of pain Master Zallow had felt.
A gentle touch on her shoulder—Zeerid—brought her around. The monitor screen was blank. How long had she been sitting there, staring at a blank screen, imagining death and revenge and pain?
“Time to go, Aryn,” Zeerid said, and helped steer her from the room.
T7 whistled sympathy.
“Are you all right?” Zeerid asked.
She knew how she must look. Using the sleeve of her tunic, she wiped the tears from her face.
“I’m all right,” she said.
He looked as if he wanted to embrace her, but she knew he would not take the liberty without her giving him a sign that it was all right.
She gave him no such sign. She did not want relief from her grief, her pain. She simply wanted to pass it on to Malgus somehow.
“Keep a copy of that footage, Tee-seven,” she said. “Bring it with you.”
The droid beeped an affirmative.
They walked back through the Works and to the surface in silence. By the time they returned to their speeder, Aryn had rebuilt the walls around her emotions. She managed the grief, endured the pain, but put it within reach, so she could call on it when she needed it.
She and Zeerid lifted T7 onto the droid mount at the rear of the speeder.
“I need to get up to that cruiser,” she said.
Zeerid activated the magnetic clamp to hold T7 in place. “You can’t attack a cruiser, Aryn.”
“I don’t want to attack it. I just want to get aboard it.”
“And face him. Darth Malgus.”
“And face him,” she affirmed with a nod.
“And how do you think that plays out if you get aboard? Are you just going to walk through all those Imperial troops? Think he’ll just let you through and meet you in honorable combat?”
She did not like Zeerid’s tone. “I’ll bring the cruiser down. With him on it.”
“And you on it.”
She stuck out her chin. “If that’s what it takes.”
He slapped a hand in frustration on T7’s body. The droid beeped in irritation.
“Aryn, you’ve been watching the HoloNet too much. It won’t work like that. You’ll get captured, tortured, killed. He’s a Sith. They flew a ship into the Temple, killed dozens of Jedi, bombed Coruscant. Come on. Think!”
“I have. And I have to do this.”
He must have seen the resolve in her eyes. He swallowed, looked past her, as if gathering his thoughts, then back at her.
“You said you would help me get offplanet.”
“I know,” she said.
“I can’t follow you to the cruiser. I have a daughter, Aryn. I just want to get off the planet and get back to her before The Exchange or anyone else gets to her.”
The heat went out of her in a rush. “You’ve done more than enough, Zeerid. I wouldn’t let you come even if you volunteered.”
They both stared at each other a long time, something unsaid hanging in the air between them. T7’s head rotated from Zeerid to Aryn and back to Zeerid.
“You don’t need to face him,” he said to her.
Grime from the Works stained Zeerid’s coat and trousers. Lack of sleep had painted circles under his brown eyes. He hadn’t shaved in days and black stubble coated his cheeks. His appearance once more struck Aryn as that of a mad prophet, though it seemed she was the one acting out of madness.
“Yes, I do,” she said.
She reached out a hand and wiped away some dirt on his cheek. At first he looked startled at her touch, then looked as if he wanted to say something, but did not.
“We go our separate ways here, Z-man,” she said. She sensed his alarm at the thought. “You keep the speeder and T7. I’ll figure something else out. Good-bye, Zeerid.”
T7 uttered a doleful whistle as she walked away. Zeerid’s words pulled her back around, just as hers had pulled him back around earlier in the day.
“Let me help you, Aryn. I’m not going at that cruiser, but I can help you get aboard.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you stow away on an Imperial transport heading for it.” He pointed at a distant black form moving across the afternoon sky. “They come and go regularly and always to the same spaceport. And I know that spaceport. I’ve parked Fatman there myself a few times. I’ll figure out a way to get you aboard a transport while I find a ship to get me offplanet. So no good-byes yet. I still need your help and you still need mine. Good enough?”
Aryn did not have to consider long. She could use Zeerid’s help, and she wanted to keep his company for as long as possible.
“Good enough,” she said.
“And who knows?” he said as she climbed into the speeder. “Maybe you’ll come to your senses in the meantime.”
Zeerid drove the Armin speeder low, hugging the urbanscape, until he reached a bombed-out apartment building. There was nothing particularly notable about it. It just seemed a decent place to hole up.
The façade had fallen away from the building’s upper levels, exposing the interior flats and rooms. It looked as if the Empire had peeled the rind off the building to expose its guts. Zeerid supposed the Empire had done just that to all of Coruscant: they had vivisected the Republic.
The rubbled façade of the building lay in a heap of glass and stone at the building’s base, a pile of ruin intermixed with furniture, shattered vidscreens, and the other indicia of habitation.
The interior remained largely intact, though the dust of pulverized stone coated everything. Shards of shattered glass like fangs hung from windows. A few live wires spat sparks. Water leaked from somewhere, formed a minor cascade pouring down from one of the upper floors. Not a single light glowed in the entire building. It appeared abandoned.
“This should serve,” he said to Aryn and T7. He piloted the speeder around and through the rubble until he had it near one of the exposed lower apartments.
“Serve for what?” Aryn asked, and T7 echoed her question with a beep.
“I’m going to scout the spaceport. You both are going to stay here.”
Aryn shook her head. “No, I should come.”
“I work better alone, Aryn. At least when it comes to surveillance. Take some time—”
“I don’t need time. I need to get to that cruiser.”
“And this is the best way to do that. So take some time to eat and … pull yourself together.” He winced as he said that last, thinking she’d take offense, but it appeared barely to register. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
He tossed her another of the protein bars he’d taken from the speeder’s console compartment.
“Zeerid …,” she said.
“Please, Aryn. I’m just eyeballing it. I won’t do anything without you.”
She relented with a sigh and climbed out of the
speeder. She unclamped T7 and lowered him to the ground.
“I’ll return as soon as I can,” Zeerid said. “Keep an eye on her, Tee-seven.”
The droid whooped agreement and Zeerid sped off.
Avoiding the search-and-rescue teams working in the still-smoldering ruins, Zeerid made his way toward the quadrant’s port, the Liston Spaceport. He could see it in the distance, framed against the night sky, the curved appendages of its large craft landing pads raised skyward like the hopeful arms of a penitent. It appeared undamaged by the attack, at least from a distance.
As he watched, the roof doors to one of the many small-craft landing bays opened in the main body of the port, a mouth spitting light into the dark air. He killed the speeder’s thrusters and pulled to the side.
In the sky above the port, the running lights of three Imperial shuttles came into view as they descended into the port. The mouth of the doors swallowed them, closed, and killed the light once more.
At least he knew there were ships there.
Zeerid stayed where he was and for a time watched to see if there was more traffic. He saw none. In normal times, even a small spaceport like the Liston would have been buzzing with activity.
He fired the speeder back up and drove on, wanting to get a closer look. The area around the port to a distance of several kilometers had been hit hard by Imperial bombs. Burned-out buildings tilted like drunks on their foundations. Jagged, charred holes pockmarked the ground. Autowalks hung askew, forming a mad web of walking paths that led nowhere. Live wires spat angry sparks. Chunks of duracrete lay here and there, haphazardly strewn about by the force of the bombs.
He drove slowly, without lights, avoiding the hazards. He saw no one in the area, no movement at all. It felt like a ghost town. The stink of char hung in the air. So, too, the faint, sickly-sweet stink of organic decay. The ruins were the tombs of thousands. He tried to put it out of his mind, hoping that many had been able to flee into the lower levels before the bombing began in earnest.
He saw an unattended multistory parking structure. Half of it lay in ruins. The other half looked stable enough, and it was only a few blocks from the port. He drove the speeder into the lower level and parked it there. He’d cover the rest of the way on foot. He wanted to eyeball the port unseen and could do that best without a vehicle.
Republic flight school had taught him ground evasion—to prepare him should his ship ever go down in enemy-held territory—and he put his skills to use. As unobtrusively as a shadow, he moved among the stone rubble and steel beams and abandoned vehicles, keeping undercover as much as possible to avoid being seen from the air. He knew the Empire sometimes used airborne surveillance droids.
Ahead, a ten-story hotel, The Nebula, stuck out of the smoking, rubbled urbanscape. Unlike almost everything else around it, it looked mostly intact except for a few shattered windows on the lower floors. Zeerid saw no lights in any of the rooms so he assumed it had no power and was unoccupied. He dashed across the street to the hotel, pried open the doors, and entered the lobby. No welcoming droids, no one at the concierge desk, deep darkness.
“Hello!” he shouted. “Anyone here?”
No response.
With the power out, he ignored the lifts and headed for the stairs. He was mildly winded by the time he reached the roof access door. He kicked it open, blaster in hand. Nothing. He ducked low and headed for the edge of the roof. From there, he had a good view of the spaceport. He pulled out the macrobinoculars he had taken from the Armin speeder and glassed the port.
The control spire was a dark spike of transparisteel, obviously unoccupied. All the entrances appeared locked down except one, and a dozen Imperial soldiers in full gray battle armor guarded it. Zeerid imagined there were more Imperial troops within the complex itself. It seemed the Empire had shut down all of the port save for a few of the small-craft landing pads, probably to give the already stretched troops less ground to secure.
Large transparisteel windows in the wall opened up on the near pads. Through them, he saw the three Imperial shuttles that had just landed. All of them had a numerical designation written above the word VALOR, the name of Darth Malgus’s cruiser.
“Looks like you’ll get your wish, Aryn,” he muttered.
He saw another ship there, too, a modified Imperial drop ship, Dragonfly-class. He rolled a dial on the macrobinoculars to magnify the image.
No Imperial markings, and the landing ramp was up as if it were ready to launch.
A couple of dozen workers in dungarees went about the business of operating the port, as did half a dozen or so droids wheeling among the ships, fuel lines, loading cranes, and comp terminals.
A flash of lavender filled the binoculars’ field of vision and he backed out of the high modification.
A Twi’lek female had walked in front of the window and temporarily filled the lenses with her lavender skin.
Lavender skin.
He watched as the Twi’lek and a squad of uniformed Imperial soldiers in half armor put six hooded and manacled sentients into one of the shuttles. Zeerid tried to keep the binoculars on the Twi’lek, who appeared to be giving orders to the troops, but it necessitated hopping the binoculars from window to window as she moved, and he sometimes lost her.
Like the Twi’lek in the vid at the Jedi Temple, she wore twin blasters on her hips. She also wore the tight-fitting trousers and high boots.
“Has to be her,” he said. But he wanted to confirm, so he waited, and watched, and at last she turned her face to the window and he saw it, the jagged scar on her throat.
“Gotcha,” he said.
The Twi’lek spoke into her comlink, and the shuttle with the civvies started to wind up. As it rose on its thrusters, the roof doors of the pad slid open, once more spilling light into the night sky. When the shuttle broke the roofline, it engaged its engines and took off, presumably heading back to Valor. The doors closed behind it.
The Twi’lek and about a dozen troops remained on the pad. Workers, too, and droids. Zeerid watched a team of workers and the treaded box of a maintenance droid start refueling one of the shuttles from a thick hose connected to an underground tank.
Seeing that, Zeerid struck on a plan. He pocketed the binoculars and hurried back out of the hotel, to the speeder, and back to Aryn.
The shuttle flew a silent vigil over the ruins of the Jedi Temple. Malgus’s pilot’s voice carried over the intership comm. Boredom tinged his tone.
“Shall I remain here, my lord?”
“You will remain until I say otherwise,” Malgus answered. “Internal and external lights are to remain off.”
“As you wish, my lord.”
Malgus’s shuttle hovered over the ruins of the Jedi Temple at about three hundred meters. From that height, the Temple was little more than a tumble of stones in the starlight. He had lingered over the ruins for hours, as day had faded to night, and still Aryn Leneer had not shown.
But she would come. He knew she would.
Aryn unwrapped and ate the protein bar Zeerid had given her. She and T7 had sheltered in one of the apartments. She sat on a dusty couch, the stink of a burning planet in her nostrils. She replayed in her mind Master Zallow’s death, the look on his face. She saw once more the ruins of the Temple and she knew that his body lay beneath the mountain of rubble.
Fighting the rising tide of grief, she adopted a meditative posture, closed her eyes, and tried to drift into the Force.
“Still heart, still mind,” she intoned, but both proved impossible.
Eventually, she sat back on the couch and stared up at the sky. The omnipresent smoke looked like black clouds against the stars. Now and again she saw a ship’s lights in the distance and presumed them to belong to an Imperial patrol craft.
In time, her emotional and physical exhaustion chased her down and she drifted off to sleep.
She dreamed of Master Zallow. He stood before her on the ruins of the Jedi Temple, his robes billowing in the breeze. The
cracked stone face of Odan-Urr watched them. Master Zallow’s mouth moved but no sound emerged. He seemed to be trying to tell her something.
“I cannot hear you, Master,” she said. “What are you saying?”
She tried to get closer to him, picking her way through the debris, but the closer she tried to get, the farther he moved away. Finally her frustration got the better of her and she screamed, “I don’t know what you want me to do!”
She woke, heart pounding, and found T7 standing before her. He whistled a question.
“No, I’m fine,” she said, but she wasn’t.
She stood and pulled her cloak tight about her.
She checked her chrono. Zeerid had been gone for over an hour. He would probably be gone another hour, at least.
Her dream had left her shaken. She took the hilt of Master Zallow’s lightsaber in her hands, turned it over, studied its craftsmanship. Its design mirrored his personality: solid, without flourish, but wonderful in its plainness.
She wanted to return to the Temple, to the scene where murder had occurred. She should have made Zeerid set down the speeder when they’d been over it earlier. She wanted to walk among the ruins and commune with the dead. She hooked Master Zallow’s weapon to her belt.
“I have to go somewhere, Tee-seven. I’ll be back soon.”
He whistled another question, alarm in the beeps.
“Tell him I’ll be back. There is nothing to worry about.”
She left the ruined apartment building and headed back toward the Jedi Temple.
There was something there for her. There had to be.
When Zeerid returned to their safehouse in the ruined apartment building, he found Aryn gone. Her absence put a lump in his throat. T7 whistled to him from one of the apartments.
“Where is she, Tee-seven?” he asked.
The small droid chattered, whistled, and beeped so fast that Zeerid could scarcely follow. In the end, he gathered that Aryn had left the apartment after a short rest, and that she did not tell T7 where she was going.
But Zeerid knew where she would go. She’d go to where Master Zallow died.
“Let’s go, Tee-seven,” he said, and loaded the droid up onto the speeder.