by James Luceno
So far, so good, he told himself. Now all he had to do was find a locker room, shed the clothes he was wearing—whatever sensor they’d been using to make sure the door would close when he came near it had to be in his clothes or gear somewhere—and substitute a local uniform, then find his way to a hangar and steal some hyperdrive-equipped starfighter or shuttle, with Intelligence Section crawling all over the place looking for him.
Easy.
chapter eight
CORELLIAN SYSTEM,
OUTBOUND FROM PLANET TALUS
The shuttle was not elegant; it was just an oblong mass with thrusters and hyperdrive at one end, a viewported bridge at the other, and plenty of room for passengers in between. But in the passenger compartment, the seats were well spaced and well padded. In the back of each one was a monitor allowing the passenger behind to watch Corellian news or entertainment holocasts, or to see what the holocams spaced around the shuttle’s exterior were viewing.
Dr. Seyah kept his monitor switched to the bow view. In it, he could watch, as he always did, Centerpoint Station first appear, then grow larger and larger and larger. Just now, there was nothing to see but stars; the shuttle hadn’t performed its final hyperspace jump to drop it into the vicinity of the station.
Seyah wore a plastic shirt. It was comfortable enough that it didn’t always feel plastic, but plastic it was, and embedded with circuitry. Just now it was orange, with violent purple flames crisscrossing it, a design suited to someone wandering around in a warm and sandy vacation paradise, which was precisely what Dr. Seyah’s documentation said he’d been doing for the last few weeks. The spray-on suntan he sported, covering the fact that he’d only become paler while training Jedi to destroy Centerpoint Station, supported his cover story.
But the thing about the shirt, sold to wealthy tourists, was that whenever it was poked with sufficient energy, it would make an audible boop noise and change both color and design.
The little human boy in the next seat, dark-skinned like his mother and perhaps three standard years of age, had discovered this when he’d kicked Dr. Seyah, minutes after they’d taken off from Talus. He’d been persuaded by his apologetic mother not to kick Dr. Seyah anymore, but couldn’t be restrained from reaching over and poking the scientist-spy, causing the shirt to make its pleasing boop noise and change its color scheme. And the little boy would chuckle, and look at the new colors, and about a minute later reach over to poke the shirt again.
Dr. Seyah barely noticed. Inside, he was sick. As long as he’d been assigned to Centerpoint Station, he’d known that the sheer power and destructiveness it represented might someday result in it being destroyed. It could destroy entire stars, and the only thing that could ever keep it from being civilization’s greatest weapon of terror was the wisdom of its controllers … or its destruction.
And wisdom was in increasingly short supply.
Boop. Now his shirt was pink, with frothy clouds on his shoulders and upper chest, recreational seaspeeders skimming across red waters at his waist.
He didn’t want Centerpoint Station to be destroyed. Like almost everyone who’d worked there, he was desperate to learn more about the long-vanished species that had built it and used it to drag habitable planets to the Corellia system. It was a rare system that had two worlds lush enough to sustain life; Corell was orbited by five. If the station’s secrets could be cracked, the intelligent species of the galaxy, could re-create that feat, engineering whole systems to please or accommodate the beings who would live there.
More importantly, in harnessing the very forces that held the universe together, the station promised an improved scientific understanding of how the universe itself worked. If Centerpoint was lost, that opportunity might be gone forever.
But perhaps it wouldn’t come to that. Dr. Seyah had stressed to the Jedi again and again his belief that destroying the computer controls the Corellians were installing throughout the system would be sufficient to keep control out of Corellia’s hands. With any luck, they’d listen. With any luck, they’d agree.
Boop. Now his shirt was a deep blue, with a stylized rancor rearing up on the front, arms outstretched. The little boy chuckled.
Dr. Seyah looked over at the boy’s mother. “Will you two be debarking at the station?”
She nodded, sending into motion her blue-frosted black hair, so fine that every little breeze from the shuttle’s life-support system stirred it. “I’m a cartographer, a member of the station-mapping project. Loreza Plirr.” She extended a hand across her boy.
Dr. Seyah shook it. Words bubbled up inside him. Don’t get off at the station. In hours, you could be superheated gas. Go back to Talus. Instead, he said, “I’m Toval Seyah.”
This was his job. This was the dark side to being a scientist and spy, something he’d never even tried to explain to the boy Jedi. He might just have to let a pretty young woman and her innocent son die.
Blast it.
“And this is my son, Deevan.”
“Hello, Deevan.” Gravely, Dr. Seyah shook the little boy’s hand.
Deevan chuckled.
On the monitor screen, the stars twisted and elongated. Of course they didn’t in reality—but that was the visual effect of entering hyperspace. The ship left hyperspace almost as quickly, the duration of the greater-than-lightspeed portion of this flight mere seconds … and when the stars were returned to normal, in precisely the same positions as before, Centerpoint Station occupied the center of the monitor screen.
The station wasn’t pretty, wasn’t even elegant like the Death Stars whose size it exceeded. A gray-white blob with axial cylinders protruding at two opposed points, it was merely impressive in its scale and in the potential damage it could do.
At this distance, of course, its scale was not apparent. What looked like a smooth surface would, as they got closer, be revealed to be a rough, scaly exterior of towers, spires, antennae, parabolic dishes, conduits, traffic tubes, ports, spacescraper-sized battery arrays, shield generators, and other apparati, something like the surface of Coruscant in its busiest sectors but without that world’s feeble attempts at maintaining a consistently pleasing set of architectural standards.
Home, to Dr. Seyah, was an ugly spot in space.
He tugged at his shirt collar, and as he did so he squeezed a chip embedded there. The pressure activated the chip, causing it to transmit a single coded pulse on a single frequency. The transmission lasted a few thousandths of a second.
Boop. This time the shirt changed without the boy poking it. It was the shirt’s acknowledgment that it had received a countertransmission. The boy chuckled anyway.
Dr. Seyah settled in to watch the station grow larger on his monitor, and to compose himself for the struggle, and perhaps tragedy, that was to come.
In the shuttle’s cargo hold, in a cargo container the size of an average groundspeeder, Jacen Solo was awakened by a melodious alarm chime. His eyes flickered open.
There wasn’t much to see. The interior of the compartment was dimly lit by the device to the left of his head, a combination computer and life-support system. It blew cool air on him.
The air wasn’t cool enough. The heavy enviro-suit he wore kept him too warm. He’d been sweating as he slept, and the crate smelled like a rancor nest.
He glanced over at the computer monitor screen. Text there indicated that Dr. Seyah had just transmitted that they’d completed their final hyperspace jump before arriving at Centerpoint Station.
Jacen reached over and switched the computer off, plunging the crate interior into darkness.
By touch, he located the valve knob just inside the collar of his bulky suit. He turned it until it locked in the open position. Gas hissed out from the valve—breathable atmosphere. Half an hour’s worth was contained in the bottles he’d be carrying with him.
He reached up to the right of his head and found the suit helmet waiting there. He pulled it into place over his head and twisted it against his collar until it
locked. Only then did he reach down to the latch beside his waist and trip it.
The top of the cargo box lifted away from him, revealing a dimly lit cargo-hold roof only a couple of meters above him.
Awkward in the enviro-suit, Jacen struggled into an upright position, dragged his atmosphere bottles to lock them into place against his back, and clambered out of the box.
His box was situated atop a stack of cargo containers the size of refresher stalls. One stack over, another box was opening identically, and Ben, similarly suited and helmeted, was struggling upright.
It had taken some careful bribery of cargo porters to make sure that these two boxes were situated at the tops of their respective cargo stacks. If they hadn’t been, of course, it would have been harder to exit. The Jedi could have done so, by igniting their lightsabers and cutting their way out, but the damaged cargo boxes would then have been noticed, potentially endangering the mission. Fortunately, the porters had stayed bribed.
And the enviro-suit … Jacen encouraged himself to be patient, refrained from cursing the suits even as he stepped out of his cargo box and pushed the lid down into place. The suit was the heaviest, most awkward thing he’d ever worn.
All its radiation shielding lay in physical materials, none from electronic screens or energy fields. The atmosphere supply came from bottles opened and closed by hand. There were no electronic sensors, no servomotors designed to assist in movement and ease the burden of the suit’s weight. The helmet had no comm gear, no visual enhancers.
There were, in fact, no electronics whatsoever installed in the suit. The only electronic items within were the lightsabers, datapads, data cards, and comlinks the two Jedi carried—and for the time being, those items were switched completely off, their power supplies physically disconnected.
Slowly, clumsily, Jacen finished climbing down from his cargo stack and observed that Ben was beginning his own descent.
The advantage to the crudeness of the suits was that they were essentially immune to the varieties of security scanning performed by Corellian Security customs units at Centerpoint Station. With no detectable electronics, the suits would simply not register on CorSec scanners. Of course, life scanners would pick them up … but CorSec customs chiefs, in a cost-saving effort, had decided long ago that it was sufficient to scan for electronics. What life-form could move around on the station’s exterior without electronic support? Only mynocks and other unintelligent space parasites.
So Jacen and Ben would be mynocks this day, and that’s why their portion of the operation’s forces had been code-named Team Mynock.
He helped Ben down to the floor, and together they moved to the aft air lock. There, on the hull beside the control panel, almost invisible in the dim cargo-hold lighting, there was an X-shaped mark scratched into the paint, a sign that someone else had remained bribed—that the security sensors on this air lock had been disabled. Jacen pulled open the air lock door; he and Ben crowded into the tiny chamber beyond, and Jacen awkwardly punched the buttons to cycle the air lock.
A minute later, the cycle finished, and Ben impatiently pushed the exterior door. It opened onto a starfield of dizzying beauty; Jacen could see stars, distant nebulae, even a comet whose tail was just beginning to be illuminated by the star Corell.
Jacen poked his head out and turned toward the shuttle’s bow. In the distance ahead, he could see Centerpoint Station, now close enough for its moon-like immensity to be evident and its convoluted surface to be obvious.
CORONET, CORELLIA
The conveyance, a ten-meter-long airspeeder that seemed to be mostly windows and standing room, deposited Jaina and half her team on the street outside the Prime Minister’s official residence. It drifted away, carrying with it the remaining heavy load of commuting workers, tourists, and people on errands.
Jaina took a deep breath and looked around, wary for signs of too much attention being directed their way. There shouldn’t be any. After having made planetfall hours ago, she and her team had had time to check into a hostel, clean themselves up, sleep, and eliminate disguise elements that would cause them to stand out. Jaina now wore a cumbersome Commenorian traveler’s robe; her hair was back to its natural dark color; her false tattoo was gone.
“I miss the tattoo,” Zekk said. He was now dressed in Corellian common citizens’ garments—dark pants and open jacket, a lighter, long-sleeved shirt, knee-high boots in black. His long black hair hung in a braid.
A passerby, a young woman with orange hair and a green, filmy dress, flashed Zekk a smile as she passed. Jaina felt a stab of irritation, pushed it from her mind.
Zekk grinned at Jaina. “What was that I felt?”
She scowled at him. “We’re on duty. Concentrate on your mission.”
“Yes, Commander.” The grin didn’t leave his face, but he turned his attention back to the ministerial residence.
A few years earlier, Jaina and Zekk had bonded, a union of mind and personality that went beyond even a Forcebond. It was something that had resulted from their interaction with the Killiks, a hive-mind species. Eventually the intensity of that union had largely faded, but Jaina’s and Zekk’s thoughts and feelings remained intertwined to a degree unusual even for Jedi. Sometimes it was comforting, even exhilarating. Other times, like now, it was uncomfortable and distracting.
Nothing suggested to Jaina that she or her companions were attracting attention. The broad, multilane avenue before her was thick with groundspeeder traffic—and the Corellians were such maniacal speeder pilots that anyone near the street with any sense kept his or her attention on their lane-changing, position-jockeying antics. The huge, gated building behind them was, by contrast, inert, some parts of its grounds in deep shadow from trees and creeping vines. Even the guards at the sidewalk gates and main doors were still.
The other two members of their team, female Bothan Kolir Hu’lya and male Falleen Thann Mithric, moved up to join them. Kolir, the youngest member of the team, having completed her trials and achieved Jedi Knight status only weeks before, wore an abbreviated dress in white that contrasted nicely with her tan fur and would not overheat her on this warm day. Thann, dressed in a traveler’s robe, looked the most Jedi-like of the four of them but was still thoroughly unremarkable of appearance in this cosmopolitan city; he had his hood up over his long black topknot and was maintaining his skin color at a light orange, making him virtually indistinguishable from a human.
“I don’t see any problems,” Kolir said.
Not that reassuring coming from someone who’d been an apprentice a few days ago, Jaina reflected. She heard Zekk snicker. Kolir looked curiously at him, but Jaina said, “Transmit that we’re onstation.”
Kolir nodded. She dug around in her white carry-bag, the same bag that held her lightsaber and an array of other destructive weapons, and brought out a comlink. She smiled as though she were calling a boyfriend and spoke into it: “Team Purella here, just checking in.”
OUTER SPACE,
NEAR THE CORELLIAN SYSTEM
Luke, dressed in what looked like standard brown-and-tan Jedi gear but which actually had all the equipment and functionality of a pilot’s suit, sat on the rolling staircase that was meant to give a pilot or mechanic access to the X-wing’s top surfaces. It wouldn’t be needed for that purpose. The mechanics were finished for now with his XJ6 X-wing, and Luke wouldn’t need any assistance in getting to the cockpit—for a Jedi, it was just one quick leap away.
The bay where his squadron’s X-wings waited was frantic with activity. A broad expanse, all scuffed and burned permacrete flooring and pristine glow-white ceiling, it was the size of a sports arena, with room for Luke’s squadron, a squad of Eta-5 interceptors, two squads of shield-equipped TIEs from the Imperial Remnant, and a half squad of B-wings for support. Mechanics fueled some starfighters, made last-minute repairs on others. Pilots arrived to perform inspections of the craft they’d be flying. Commanders moved from pilot to pilot, machine to machine, issuing orders,
offering advice.
Luke didn’t feel the need to do so. His pilots were all Jedi, all calm in the face of the storm to come, in the face of possible death.
One X-wing over, Mara, similarly garbed, made some final ratcheting motions with her hydrospanner, finishing adjustments to her laser cannon positioning, and slapped closed an access panel on her craft’s S-foil underside. She dropped the hydrospanner in a toolbox and moved over to join her husband. “Any word about Ben?”
Luke shook his head.
“You’re very quiet.” Mara leaned over to stroke his forehead. “Is everything all right?”
“I meditated earlier,” he said. “And I had a vision of Ben talking to the man who doesn’t exist.”
“Not a dream,” Mara said. “A vision.”
He nodded.
“Could you tell when?”
“The future. Ben was a little older, a little taller.”
“At least,” she said, “that argues well for what he’s up to today.”
Finally, he smiled. “Thanks for not killing me.”
“When we met?”
“When I told you that I left it to Jacen to decide whether Ben would go on this mission.”
“Oh.” She didn’t return his smile. “I might have been tempted … if I had any sense of what the right answer was. I’ve fouled up in the past, clinging too tightly to him, trying to protect him. What’s the right amount?”
Luke shrugged. “You’re asking a Jedi Master. Not a Parenting Master.”
“Is there one, somewhere?” Finally, she did smile. “I’ve spent more than thirteen years worrying about him. Which has given me great wisdom about why the Jedi of old didn’t allow marriages within the order, discouraged attachments, that sort of thing. If they hadn’t, it wouldn’t have been Sith or alien empires or natural disasters that killed the Jedi. It would have been worrying about their kids.”