The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  Tawaler shrugged, trying to appear unconcerned. “A security officer has to be able to provide security. Even when commanding officers are killed or subverted. He has to be able to see where everyone is, know what everyone is thinking. Otherwise things aren’t safe.”

  “You’re right, of course.” There was amusement in the woman’s tone, and again Tawaler was surprised that he wasn’t even a little offended. The woman’s words sounded like condescension. But of course they weren’t.

  Of course they weren’t. This woman had come to him with the news that he, Captain Siron Tawaler, was under consideration to be the telbun of a lady—to be the consort chosen to father her child in the ancient tradition of the great ruling merchant houses of Kuat. His intelligence, his personal strength, his determination had brought him to her attention … and somehow she had looked past the indifferent service reports that had been written about him, had dismissed the petty jealousy and backstabbing competition that had led superior officer after superior officer to label him as “unmotivated” and “adequate.” His personal and financial success, and those of his family, were now assured, despite the curiously low regard with which the people of other worlds viewed the role of telbun.

  But first, he had to pass a test of loyalty. He had to help this grand lady preserve her house by eliminating the rogue Jedi assigned to kill her.

  Why Jedi would want to kill a Kuat mercantile princess was beyond Tawaler. But that was all right. His specialty was point security, not anticipatory security. Besides, he didn’t like the Jedi. They strutted around without any respect for security or authority, they dressed like beggars or hermits when everyone knew they were rich—and the quality of their boots gave them away every time: the poor couldn’t afford high-grade footwear—and they lorded it over normal folk with their so-called mystical powers. Unacceptable, unacceptable.

  Tawaler again felt a moment of unease. The woman leaning over his shoulder had presented documents proving her identity as a representative of a great house, but at this precise moment he couldn’t remember the exact content of those documents—just that he had accepted them without question, had accepted the woman’s explanation and mission without hesitation.

  Well … just more proof that Tawaler wasn’t unmotivated, was far above adequate. He was decisive and bold, as he was demonstrating now, as he would demonstrate from now on in his new position. His fate was assured.

  His eyes were drawn to a constantly updated readout on the first information screen. “Four minutes until dock,” he said.

  “Good. Let’s go meet them.”

  There were twenty of them, all human, men and a few women uniformed in gleaming black body armor. The chest plates were rigid carapaces, the helmets narrower than pilots’ protective gear. Upper arms, legs, and hands were protected by a mesh-like material, heavy but flexible; lower arms and legs were encased in the same heavy material as torsos. They carried gleaming black rifles of types unfamiliar to Tawaler, three different designs, all of them curiously oversized, one of them intended, as the placement of the padding and sights indicated, for shouldermount use.

  And their faces—Tawaler didn’t know what to make of their faces. Slightly obscured as they were behind the amber faceplates of the helmets, they seemed just a little wrong. The analytical portion of his brain went to work on the problem even as the men and women began streaming in through the air lock.

  Age range: thirty to sixty, he estimated, older than ordinary recruits, averaging older even than a standard unit of elites. Planets of origin: it was never easy to calculate such a thing, but a certain characteristic leanness of features and the way they made eye contact suggested Corellia. Yet in other ways their mannerisms were strikingly non-Corellian; Tawaler saw none of the good cheer and cockiness that usually characterized the soldiers and citizens of that system.

  And there was something wrong with them, a hollowness to their cheeks, an odd intensity to their expressions.

  “They’re dying.” The woman whispered the words in Tawaler’s ear as if answering his unspoken question. “Each of them, from various wasting diseases that medicine can’t arrest. They’re all still at something like full strength, with painkillers to keep them that way for a while, and they have no worries about mortality to hold them back. It’s delicious, isn’t it?”

  Tawaler tried to suppress a shudder and did not entirely succeed. “Delicious,” he repeated, as if agreeing.

  The woman shut the air lock, then held up a datapad and moved to stand at the head of the column of armored soldiers. “I’m transmitting the station plans and the locations of your targets. This information should be appearing in the heads-up displays of your helmet visors.”

  Tawaler saw dimly glowing green shapes flickering over the visors, and several of the soldiers nodded. None spoke.

  The woman’s lean features twisted up into a smile. “Good. Get to it.”

  In two columns, silent except for the faint creaking of their armor, the soldiers passed to either side of the woman and headed down the passageway. The passageway’s curve soon took them out of Tawaler’s sight. He was glad to see them gone.

  “The shuttle that brought them will take you to Kuat,” the woman said. “You’d better board.”

  Tawaler turned and slapped the control board for the air lock. He entered and peered in some confusion through the transparisteel viewport in the door on the opposite side. It showed nothing but stars. “It’s gone,” he said. “The shuttle.”

  He heard the air lock door hiss closed behind him. The woman’s voice came across the air lock speaker. “No, it’s still there. Look harder.”

  Tawaler felt light-headed. He wanted nothing so much as to sit down and rest for a minute. But he did as told, leaning closer to the viewport.

  Oh, yes, he’d been wrong. Through the viewport he could see the docking tube in place, the door into the belly of the shuttle invitingly open.

  “You’d better hurry.”

  Tawaler pressed the control for the air lock door to open. But its speaker made a disagreeable noise and its text screen flashed red. He had to concentrate to read the words appearing on the screen. IT HASN’T RUN ITS DEPRESSURIZATION CYCLE. That was wrong. It didn’t need to depressurize. A boarding tube was coupled to the other side. Atmospheric pressure should be approximately equal.

  Now his companion sounded exasperated. “Go ahead and depressurize. After all, you have your pressure suit on.”

  Tawaler glanced down at himself. Yes, he was in his pressure suit. He couldn’t remember putting it on, but he was clad head-to-foot in the industrial gray of one of the station’s vac suits. He entered the code to pump the air out of the air lock and open the outer door.

  In a moment, his ears popped and he felt even more light-headed.

  “Don’t worry, Tawaler.” Her voice grew increasingly faint. “The feeling will pass soon.”

  * * *

  The unit of twenty dying killers moved briskly down the corridor from the air lock to a turbolift. They entered, keyed in a command to take them two floors down, and moments later emerged on the same level as Kallebarth Way.

  This passageway, which ran at right angles to and intersected with the passageway that was their destination, was dark, faintly illuminated only by emergency glows along the floor. But there was a glow in one direction. The men and women turned that way and began marching. On the space station floor diagram on their helmet visors, a red dot moved to show their location.

  Eventually the glow ahead resolved itself into a lighted area situated at the intersection of this passageway and Kallebarth Way. The armored soldiers could make out walls of transparisteel set up as a security station. At the station, a portion of the passageway was given over to a battery of sensors and a small enclosure, just large enough for a desk and two security officers. The rest of the passageway at that point was a lock, a stretch of walkway with a secure door at each end. The barriers separating the sensor area from the lock, and separating both
sensor area and lock from original passageway, were made of transparisteel, as were the secure doors themselves, giving the whole station an oddly delicate, crystalline appearance.

  Just as the killers came close enough to take in these details, the guidance map on their visors disappeared and the word WAIT appeared. They stopped in place and waited.

  In the station sat two officers, human men in the gray-and-white uniform of Toryaz Station Security. At this late hour, with all the members of the delegation parties retired for the evening, they were relaxed, chatting over cups of caf.

  Then a datapad sitting on the desk before them erupted in a cloud of white smoke. The smoke completely filled the tiny chamber, looking like a patch of thick fog cut into a square by some supernatural force.

  It began to fade. Through it, the twenty intruders could see the two security men slumped over their desks.

  Colored lights danced over the control pads of the security station doors, then those doors swung open.

  The instruction showing on the helmet visors switched from WAIT to PROCEED, then as abruptly was replaced by the maps to the intruders’ destinations.

  They marched forward.

  Jacen awoke from fitful sleep. The compartment he and Ben had been assigned, one of several chambers arranged around a central living area that offered access to the main passageway, had two beds and its own refresher, quite comfortable by the standards of traveling Jedi. It was dark, the only illumination coming from a dim glow panel above the door to the living room.

  Something was—not wrong, but different. He glanced around, saw only the inert shape of Ben in his bed, and the rectangular openings into the refresher and the closet.

  Jacen sat up into a cross-legged posture and closed his eyes, sinking effortlessly into a contemplative state.

  He looked for treachery, hatred, anger. He could feel little twinges of them, but no more than would be expected at any political gathering.

  Satisfied, he lay down again.

  A handful of meters away, in a chamber on the other side of the same living room, Luke Skywalker also sat up.

  Beside him, Mara opened an eye and offered him a lazy smile. “Nerves?”

  Luke shook his head. He turned his head back and forth, but his gaze was unfocused. “Something’s going on.”

  Mara stretched and opened the other eye, giving her husband an exasperated look. “You think I couldn’t sense an attack or danger?”

  “I think that looking for an attack or danger is a mistake.” Luke slipped out from beneath the blanket and stood, dressed only in briefs and undershirt. “If you look for banthas, you fail to notice hawk-bats.”

  Mara cast the blanket aside and stood, now suspicious and alert. “I still don’t feel any aggression—”

  “Not aggression, fatalism. Disease—” Luke threw up his left hand toward the door as if to ward off an attack.

  With a boom that shook the floor and walls and deafened Mara momentarily, the chamber door blew off its tracks and hurtled toward Luke. Still in midgesture, Luke grimaced and the door instantly reversed direction, slamming back through the portal it had covered and crashing to the floor of the central living chamber beyond.

  Luke leapt toward the doorway, gesturing with his other hand. From the nightstand beside the bed, his lightsaber flew into his grasp, and he thumbed it to life, its snap-hiss only faintly audible to his concussed ears, before he landed outside the doorway.

  Ahead of him was the metal door. It was on the floor, warped to conform roughly to the shape of a large humanoid form—the man who’d triggered the explosion.

  The circular room was thick with doors. Three more of them, like his, were off their tracks and smoking. To his left were black-armored figures, two pairs, one pair at each of two destroyed doorways that faced each other. Smoke curled from the barrels of their oversized rifles. To his immediate right was an armored figure within reach, swinging her rifle to bear on him, and farther down, another pair of armored figures stood in front of another ruined doorway. The attackers were moving into the doorways …

  Ignoring the riflewoman next to him, Luke gestured right and left, and expulsions of Force power swept the armored figures in both directions off their feet, hammered them into doorjambs, caused them to drop their weapons. Simultaneously he twisted, bringing the center of his body out of line of the riflewoman’s barrel.

  She fired. The shot should have passed harmlessly behind Luke’s back, but it was not a blaster shot. Something shining and thread-like expanded from the barrel. It settled across Luke, as unavoidable as a sudden forest fog, and tightened across his head, arms, legs. It was a silvery net, contracting as it touched its target.

  He heard it crackle as it wrapped across the blade of his lightsaber, saw it blacken where it touched the green energy blade. In a moment, he knew, he’d be able to use his Force skills to wrench the net off him.

  He didn’t have a moment. As the net clamped his arms to his sides and drew his legs together in an awkward, unbalanced pose, he saw the riflewoman twist a dial on the rifle’s barrel. The interior of the barrel glowed.

  Mara’s blue lightsaber blade, flashing out from the doorway, cut up through the barrel at an angle and continued across the attacker’s neck. The front half of the rifle and the woman’s hand fell away, then her head rolled off, smoking at the point of the lightsaber contact, to topple to the floor.

  Down the curved wall to Luke’s left, armored invaders who’d been preparing to enter the next chamber down turned to fire on him and Mara. One had a weapon like the riflewoman’s; another carried a bigger, shoulder-mounted device. Luke could feel their sudden, growing anger, and identical emotions from the invaders down the wall in the other direction.

  Luke turned left, rotating on the ball of one foot. He dropped his lightsaber and gestured with the hand that had held it. Ahead of him, the ceiling, a cool-blue, sound-insulating foam over metal, buckled and tore free, slamming down across those invaders. The attackers must have fired; in an instant, the ruined ceiling began to superheat from the blasts, the insulation on the far side bursting into flame and sending sheets of smoke up into the air.

  Behind him, Luke heard the hum and crackle of Mara’s lightsaber—and a scream from one of the attackers.

  Luke flexed both his body and his control of the Force, and the remaining silver netting on him tore away. His lightsaber popped back up into his hand. His Force-senses focused, he walked forward, pushing the glowing metal panel before him, driving it toward his attackers.

  * * *

  Jacen had barely closed his eyes again when his compartment door blasted inward. The shock of the concussion startled him, delaying him a deadly half second … but as he rose, as he gestured for his lightsaber, as the long barrel of the first intruder’s black rifle entered and swung toward him, the attacker was suddenly bowled off his feet. Jacen felt the pulse in the Force that did it, felt the characteristic traits of Luke’s exertion within it. Lightsaber in hand, Jacen snapped it on, took a fraction of a second to wave at Ben’s bed and flip it over, sending the boy into the wall and covering him with the bed. Only then did Jacen leap out into the central chamber.

  Before him was the attacker who’d just tried to enter his room. To his left was another black-armored figure bringing his weapons to bear on Mara, who advanced toward them clad in black sleepwear. So we were all caught asleep.

  He trusted Mara to be able to deal with the second attacker. He flicked his lightsaber blade up, slicing through the first intruder’s weapon.

  Fast as an attacking slashrat, the rifleman stepped back in a crouch, drawing and firing a holstered blaster in a single, practiced move. Jacen tapped the bolt out of the way with a negligent readjustment of his lightsaber blade, then thrust, shoving the blade through the man’s armor at the shoulder. Jacen felt it penetrate the armor, burn its way through flesh and bone beneath, and emerge from the armor on the other side. The man screamed and fell, dragging his body off Jacen’s weapon.
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br />   Jacen glanced left. Mara’s foe was falling, a smoking line from shoulder blade to stomach marking the injury that had defeated him. Beyond, Luke was in the midst of four enemies, all of them firing; the oversized bolt from one of their weapons, missing wildly, flashed toward Mara and Jacen, and the two Jedi ducked out of its way. At the end of his spin, Luke stood up, and something fell away from each of his attackers—a rifle barrel, an arm, a severed head. Three of them fell down. The fourth cast his destroyed weapon to the floor, raised his hands … then, oddly, followed his companions to the floor, his body limp.

  From the door nearest Luke emerged Jaina, wearing a brown sleep shirt, her lightsaber lit. From the destroyed door opposite her emerged Zekk, soot smearing his face, smoke rising from the forward portion of his hair. “They keep trying to blow me up,” he complained.

  chapter twenty

  Han and Leia snuggled together on the couch, sitting in the darkness, wordlessly watching the galaxy rotate outside beyond the viewport. The door to the passageway hissed open behind them, spilling light into the large room. Han and Leia turned to look. Four armored figures marched in, quiet and confident. Apparently not noticing the Solos on the couch, they walked straight to the doorway leading to the main bedchamber. The one with the largest weapon, a shoulder-mounted blaster rig, set up to destroy the door while the other three readied their own weapons.

  Han and Leia exchanged a puzzled look. Leia shrugged.

  Han drew his blaster. He’d spent frustrating hours not permitted by the various security staffs to carry his favorite weapon, so he had recovered it the instant he’d returned to his own quarters. Now he aimed it at the four intruders, bracing it against the top of the couch. “Hey,” he said.

  The four turned. One, fastest on the uptake, began to aim more quickly than the others. Han shot him in the throat.

  Leia sprang up from the couch, a Force-assisted leap that carried her toward the ceiling of the tall living chamber. She lit her lightsaber on the way up. One of the intruders, the one carrying the shoulder-mounted blaster, aimed at her. Han, not knowing whether her skills and lightsaber could deflect the blast from such a weapon, shot him, too, his blaster bolt burning its way into the side of the man’s helmet.