Star Wars - Black Fleet Crisis 1 - Before the Storm

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “If she'd just draw on the Force,” Luke said, shaking his head. “It's inexhaustible.”

  “Well—she's not. For whatever reason. I guess you'd better come back.”

  “No,” Luke said. “I'm going to talk to her. She has to realize how important this is to both of us.”

  “Kid, I can't recommend it—”

  “It'll be all right,” Luke said, and started up the path.

  The valet droid helpfully told Luke that Leia was in the private kitchen. He found her sitting on a stool at the meal bar, cupping a tall glass in both hands and staring out the window with faraway eyes.

  “That's perfect,” she said as he entered. “I was just trying to remember if you'd ever done anything I asked you to.”

  “Once or twice, by accident,” he said lightly, hoping to draw a smile from her. “But we made it through anyway.”

  Leia said nothing, choosing instead to sip from her glass.

  “This is important for both of us, Leia. For your children, too,” Luke said. His glance acknowledged Han, who had followed as far as the doorway and taken up a position leaning, arms crossed, against the frame. “I think there really might be a chance to break through and discover our mother as a real person.”

  “Why?” She turned her face toward him for the first time, and he saw the weariness in her eyes.

  “You've probed me more times than I can remember. You had Artoo and Threepio on Obra-skai for months, searching the libraries for any clue.” She emptied her glass and set it down on the bar. “You and I sat in a Jedi meditation circle for hours on end, night after night, calling on Obi-Wan and Anakin and Yoda, Owen and Beru, my foster parents, anyone we knew of who might have known her. Calling her, too—remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “And when we were done, we knew exactly as much as we had before. A conspiracy of silence, you called it.”

  “It seemed that way,” Luke said. “But I think the silence has just been broken. I think I know why we never found any trace of her.”

  “You're obsessed with the past,” she said, her tone sharp. “I just can't let myself keep caring that much. Father and Mother are dead, and nothing you do can change that. My children are the future.”

  “How do we know that Mother's dead?” Luke asked, easing onto a stool on the opposite side of the meal bar. “Where's her grave? Who saw her die? Did you?”

  “No—”

  “How do we know she didn't leave Alderaan, leave you on Alderaan, to hide from Father? How do we know she didn't succeed?”

  “There's a simple answer to that,” Leia said, raising her head. “She's dead, Luke. If she were still alive, there'd be nothing to stop her from coming here for a reunion.”

  “She might be as young as fifty,” Luke said. “It could still happen.”

  “It's been twelve years, Luke,” she said. “And we're not hard to find—at least, I'm not.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Luke.

  “I'm going to tell you something I've kept from you, just because of the way you are about this thing,” Leia said slowly. “Since the end of the war—since I made Coruscant my home, and the work of the New Republic my life—there's been a steady stream of women coming here and claiming that they're our long-lost mother.” She looked to Han. “How many have there been now, honey?”

  “More than two hundred,” Han said, nodding.

  “More of them lately, for some reason—almost one a week so far this year.”

  “The security staff calls them 'mad grannies,' ” Leia said. “Some of them aren't old enough by half—some aren't even human. But they're all firmly in love with the idea that they married the monster and gave birth to the heroes of the Rebellion.” She shook her head sadly.

  “But there might be reasons we don't know of for her not to come,” Luke said earnestly. “She may need to protect those who protected her. She might not want to face our questions. For all she knows, we curse her memory. That's why we may have to find her. Please, Leia—let me look into your mind one more time. I have a signpost this time—a name.”

  “And what if you find what you're looking for?”

  “Then I'm going away with the woman who brought me the name, to find the rest.”

  Leia raised her hands in exasperation. “You see? You see? There'll never be an end to it—you'll never be able to let it go.”

  “I just have to know the truth,” Luke said. “I don't understand why you don't feel the same way—”

  “Listen to me—we're never going to have a tidy family tree,” Leia snapped. “Why can't you realize? We're never going to know our parents better than we do right now. We're never going to have fond stories of our grandparents to tell our children. We're better off telling them about Owen and Beru, about Bail—the real people who cared for us, protected us, loved us like we were their own. You make too much of blood.”

  “It's more than blood—” Luke began.

  “I don't care,” Leia said, slapping the top of the bar with the flat of her right hand. The noise was so sudden and loud that it made Han jump. “You can't invent a normal childhood for us, no matter how much you turn up about Mother and Father. And if you do find the truth, as you call it, you just might find you don't like it very much. You might end up wishing you'd let them stay dead.”

  “Could anything be worse than what we already know?”

  “I'd rather not know the answer to that question,” Leia said curtly, pushing herself back from the bar so violently that her stool toppled to the floor as she slipped off it. “You and I are foundlings, Luke. That's how it is, like it or not. Our family tree starts here—with this family, and these children. And they're going to know their parents, and their uncle, and all our wonderful friends.”

  Leia's face and voice filled with a rising fury as she spoke, fury at the world, the past, at Luke, at all who stood as obstacles to her vision of what should be.

  “My children are going to have normal family stories to tell their children, little funny stories about everyday nothings, stories where no one dies too young or has to carry a burden of shame. I'm going to see to that, with your help or without it—”

  Han approached from the doorway. “Leia—”

  “Nothing matters more to me, do you understand?” she demanded, jabbing a finger in Luke's face. “Nothing. So you do what you think you have to, brother—go wherever you have to with whoever you want to, chasing whatever shadow of a hint of a promise of a clue you like. I don't care about any of it. Don't ask for my help again. And don't bring the past into this house. It's all just pain and death. You wallow in it if you want to. I've had enough of it for ten lifetimes.”

  Stunned by the vehemence of her outburst, both men stood mute as Leia stalked out of the kitchen.

  “I'm sorry,” Luke said at last. “You were right. I let myself think I know her better than you do.”

  “I don't know who's right and who's wrong, kid. I just know you're both stubborn as tauntauns,” Han said. “And that this would probably be a good time to be leaving.”

  Luke did not argue.

  Like most small sport spacecraft with bold names, Akanah's Verpine Adventurer offered few amenities, technical or personal.

  It had no weapons, combat shields, or astromech droid, and its sublight speed rating was a meager 2.5.

  The navigational deflector array had been upgraded to the Block 3 standard somewhere during its history, but its hyperdrive motivator was still Block 1. There was only a single pressurized compartment, which the flight stations shared with a single-width sleeper and tiny curtained refresher unit. The meal-service console was limited to three drink selections, Akanah explained apologetically, since she hadn't been able to afford repairs to the food dispensers.

  But the pilot's station was roomy enough for Luke to forgo his service flight suit in favor of looser, more casual clothing, and the small cargo hold had more than room enough for Luke's one modest bag beside Akanah's luggage and suppli
es.

  “Is that all?” Akanah shouted over the wind.

  “That's all,” Luke said, retrieving a comlink from a concealed pocket. “Go on, get inside—you're shivering. Artee, can you hear me?”

  The comlink chirped brightly.

  Luke helped Akanah climb through the narrow access chute, then moved away from the Adventurer.

  “Artee, I'm going away for a while,” he said, cupping the comlink in one bare hand. “Maintain Security Protocol Five. If anyone breaches the perimeter, send Code Alpha-five-zeal-alpha on Control Channel One. Acknowledge.”

  R7-T1 acknowledged the instructions obediently.

  It was innocent of the fact that the code it had been given would topple the hermitage into the sea, shattering it on the rock spires and plunging the E-wing below the waves.

  “End link,” Luke said, and switched the comlink off. Turning away, he returned to the Adventurer and climbed the access ladder two rungs at a time.

  “Is everything all right?” Akanah asked as he joined her.

  “Everything's fine,” he said, pushing the lever that folded the ladder and sealed the hatch behind him.

  “Do you want the controls?”

  “That's not necessary,” she said, slipping in the second seat.

  “If you don't mind, I'll help,” Luke said as he buckled himself in. “But first you have to tell me which way to point the little end of the ship.”

  “Our destination is Lucazec,” she said. “That was our last home. We'll start our search there.”

  Chapter 7

  In deep space far from any star, the Teljkon vagabond drifted in the darkness, silent and inert.

  Gmar Askilon, the nearest of the cold lights woven into the eternal curtain of night, was too far away to raise more than the faintest gleam on the vagabond's gray metal skin.

  Trailing well behind was the much smaller black-hulled Intelligence ferret IX-44F—one ghost shadowing another. The ferret was nearly as inert as its quarry.

  It announced itself only with periodic position updates broadcast to Coruscant by hypercomm, and by an optical-laser pulse aimed directly aft.

  The laser pulse was the rendezvous target for Pakkpekatt's approaching armada, which had come out of hyperspace on tiptoe, one ship at a time, hundreds of thousands of klicks behind the vagabond. Following the ferret's beacon, the armada had taken days to close the gap, its slow, silent approach that of an infinitely patient predator.

  For most of that approach, the armada was arrayed single file on a heading that allowed the hull of the tiny ferret itself to hide the approaching ships from the vagabond. Only two days ago had the armada broken file and, using thrusters only, begun to spread itself out into the intercept formation.

  The three pickets that made up the interdiction screen moved the farthest out and forward. Their orders called for them to flank the vagabond on three sides, and move ahead of it. By the time the rest of the armada caught up to the ferret, the interdiction pickets were to be in position to cut off a hyperspace escape.

  Spreading out almost as widely were the three spotter ships—two escorts and the Lightning, a converted Prinawe racer—assigned to make complete visual and full-spectrum recordings of the intercept attempt.

  If the vagabond tried to run in real space, it was Lightning’s job to run with it.

  Glorious, the gunship Marauder, and the pilotless ferret D-89 remained on the initial intercept heading, closing with the shadowing ferret so slowly that at times an impatient Lando thought they would never reach it.

  “This Pakkpekatt is so cautious, he makes you look impetuous, Threepio,” Lando complained in the privacy of Lady Luck’s main cabin.

  “I agree with his tactics,” said Lobot.

  “You would,” Lando said wryly.

  “Is it not prudent to take all pains to avoid alarming one's prey?”

  “We've gone far beyond prudent,” Lando grumbled. “I'm beginning to suspect the Hortek hunt by boring their prey to death.”

  But finally the hour came when all ten ships were in position, and IX-44F and its three-man crew were relieved from their seventy-nine-day deployment.

  “Captain, you are free to return to base, with our thanks,” Pakkpekatt signaled the ferret. “I'm afraid you will have to make a stealth withdrawal from the target zone, however.”

  “Thank you, Colonel,” came the response. “A couple of days more or less in this closet don't mean much to us at this point. Good luck and good hunting.”

  As IX-44F veered slowly off the intercept heading and fell behind, the cruiser Glorious took up its position.

  “What do you think is inside, General Calrissian?” asked Pakkpekatt as they stood together at the main bridge viewport. “Why is it here? Where is it going? Tell me what you're thinking.”

  “Wherever it's going, Colonel, it's not in a hurry,” Lando said easily. “Just like us, eh? Have you made a final decision on when to send in your ferret?”

  “I intend to establish an observation baseline before making any approach,” Pakkpekatt said. “Have you and your staff made any progress on the signal fragment from the Hrasskis contact?”

  “Colonel, you know our hands have been tied by your blackout orders. We've had hardly any bandwidth available to us on the HoloNet. Lady Luck doesn't have the kind of data capacity you have here on Glorious. We depend more heavily than you do on access to records located elsewhere.”

  “I will take that as a report of 'No progress,' ” Pakkpekatt said. With a light touch on the main viewport's controls, he increased the gain on the photo-amplifiers until the outline of the vagabond sharpened and the body of the vessel brightened enough to show the gross detail.

  “Look at it, General,” he went on. “For all we know, it may be five hundred years old, or fifty thousand. It may have been roaming space since both our species were too young to raise our eyes to the stars. Perhaps the only reason we can get this close is that the work of some ancient engineer has at long last begun to decay and fail.”

  “The odds favor a shorter history,” Lando said, surprised at the Hortek's sentimentality. “There are many dangers in space.”

  “Yes,” said Pakkpekatt, “and to the vagabond, we are one of them. Do you know, General, that no ship like this, no plan or design, appears in any registry of any New Republic world? No shipwright we've found will claim it as his handiwork, though all seem to admire the craft evident in it. If the vagabond was built by any species we know, no other like it was ever made.”

  “Our catalog of everything that ever was is a long way from being complete,” said Lando. “The odds favor a less exotic history.”

  “How can a gambler post the odds without knowing the game?” scoffed Pakkpekatt. “Perhaps this ship before us is home to a species which has no other home. Perhaps it's a new and curious visitor to this part of the universe, from places for which we have no names. Or perhaps it comes here from deep in the Core, where we have vanishingly few friends. All are possible—as are a universe of possibilities beyond our present imagining.”

  “Yes, possible,” Lando admitted. “Not likely.”

  “But reason enough to be cautious, wouldn't you agree?” Pakkpekatt said pointedly. “Reason enough for patience, even to the point of pain. Even to the point of boredom. We will watch them for a while, General. We'll let them watch us for a while as well. And I'll tell you when we're ready to do more. Can you live with that, General?”

  Lando's skin prickled to hear echoes of his private conversations in Pakkpekatt's words. It seemed more than a coincidence, and yet he had, on many occasions, seen charlatans perform even more convincing feats of mind reading through trickery.

  “For now, Colonel,” Lando said. “I just hope whoever or whatever's inside that thing isn't busy making plans to destroy it to keep it out of our hands. That's part of your universe of possibilities, too. I hope you won't forget it.”

  Pakkpekatt's expression was unreadable. “I will ask the communications officer
to allot what slack time there may be in our HoloNet queue to your staff. Perhaps that will allow you to make faster progress.”

  “Thank you, Colonel,” Lando said with courtly politeness. “That'd be a step in the right direction.”

  “What a mess,” Lieutenant Norda Proi said, studying the high-resolution scan of space directly ahead of the Steadfast. The three-D display showed more than twelve thousand objects, from hundreds no larger than a stormtrooper's combat boot to one that promised to be the aft third of an Imperial Star Destroyer.

  “Must have been one wild party.”

  Captain Oolas nodded. “We'll be here a month, at least. Where would you like to start, Lieutenant?”

  “The big piece of cake, of course,” Proi said, pointing. “But we can launch droids on the way in, and let them start picking up the crumbs.”

  For nearly a year the fleet hauler Steadfast had traced a solitary course through some of the most famous regions of what had once been Imperial space.

  Known in Fleet Office slang as a junker, Steadfast had served in the Battle of Endor, in the defense of Coruscant against Admiral Thrawn, and in the pursuit of the Knight Hammer.

  But with the cessation of hostilities, the four oldest fleet haulers had been recalled—at the request of the Intelligence Section—from the combat groups they usually served. Equipped with dozens of specialized droids and with Intelligence officers supplementing the usual crew, the junkers were reborn as scavengers.

  Their mission orders took them to the coordinates of major battles between the Empire and its enemies, where they searched through the wreckage for objects or information of potential value.

  “Do you think we're the first ones here this time?” asked Captain Oolas.

  Norda Proi studied the spectroscopic analysis of the objects being tracked. “Just possibly so, Captain. I don't want to get my hopes up, though. We'll know pretty quickly when we board the wreck if the mice have been here before us.”