Shield of Lies

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Akanah was silent, looking down at her lap. “We have to go to Teyr,” she said at last. “The circle may not have been able to stay there, but that is where they went from Lucazec.”

  “Teyr is—um, that way,” Luke said, pointing up and to the right.

  “More or less,” she said, and reached out to raise his arm slightly. “That’s closer. I was planning on a double jump, in case anyone is thinking about following us.”

  Luke nodded his approval. “That’s one of the worlds the children were sent to.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Didn’t you say you’d already been there, looking for them?”

  “No. I said I couldn’t find them there,” Akanah corrected. “I was never able to make the journey. I made inquiries, from Carratos, when I could.” She looked up then. “But the Fallanassi change names, styles of dress, habits of speech, even the way we groom our hair, to blend in, to disappear. Unless I can be face-to-face with them, exchange the signs, let them feel me beside them in the Current, they would not reveal themselves, out of fear that I was not what I seemed to be.”

  “You think they’re still hiding?”

  “After what just happened, can you not say we have reason?”

  Luke nodded. “I think we need to talk about what just happened.”

  “So do I,” she said. Her eyes flashed darkly. “But I would prefer not to have that conversation with an Imperial interrogation team. Can’t you do something so we can jump out of here sooner rather than later?”

  “I don’t really want to. I think so far, we’ve managed to slip out of here without attracting any special attention,” Luke said. “But if we suddenly blast out of a Flight Control Zone, especially in this bucket, we’re going to go right to the top of the alert list. And when we arrive at Teyr, they’re going to insist on talking to us. They might even insist on inspecting our ship and pulling its license.”

  “I had not thought of that,” she said, frowning. “But what if you’re wrong, and six hours from now an Imperial warship comes out from behind Lucazec, or drops out of hyperspace in front of us? Wouldn’t you like—”

  “To be able to show them our tail? Yes.” He squeezed his eyes shut, as though trying to visualize something without distractions. “Maybe there’s a way to do this without getting near the motivator. What do you have for tools?”

  “I—I’m not sure. I thought you would use the Force somehow,” she said. “Bend a contact, or break a trace—”

  Luke shook his head. “You have to know exactly how something’s put together before you try that sort of trick—and I’ve never even had my hands inside the access panel of an Adventurer.”

  “You’re destroying all my illusions about the all-powerful Jedi,” Akanah said with a hint of a smile.

  Laughing lightly, Luke climbed out of the pilot’s seat. “The truth is that, most of the time, the Force is no substitute for a tech droid or a tool kit. And I’ve never known a Jedi who wanted it to get around that he could fix broken appliances.”

  Her smile broadened at that.

  “Did you get a key to the equipment bay when you bought this thing?”

  “No,” she said, suddenly worried.

  “It’s all right,” Luke said, touching her shoulder as he slipped by her. “I can handle an idiot lock without a tool kit. Stay here and keep an eye on the nav scanner. I’ll see what I can do about giving us another option.”

  Luke sat on the edge of the open drive compartment, his feet dangling inside, just above the fuel pumps for the realspace thrusters. It felt both strange and pleasantly familiar to be tinkering again. It took him back to the hot breezes of Tatooine, to surprisingly fond memories of his years in the Lars household.

  “Boys and machines,” he could hear his Aunt Beru saying with bemusement. “What is it about boys and machines?”

  His life then had consisted of little more than tinkering. The greater part by far of his chores on the farm had been trying to keep Uncle Owen’s motley collection of secondhand droids and second-quality moisture vaporators running. After chores, Luke had invested his free time in coaxing a little more speed from the XP-30 landspeeder he had rescued from the Anchorhead salvage yard, and tweaking the performance of the family’s T-16 skyhopper for those races in Beggar’s Canyon.

  Teenage impatience had made him view Tatooine as a wasteland and the farm as a prison. But that world looked better seen through a filter of time and experience. And he realized belatedly just how much he had enjoyed those hours with his head and hands inside an engine service panel, in a simple, knowable world of which he was the master.

  “You look happy,” said Akanah softly. She had returned from the flight deck without his noticing.

  “I am,” he said, twisting and looking up at her. It was a surprising discovery.

  She nodded toward the drive. “Do you think you’ll be able to fix it? Or break it—I suppose that’s more descriptive.”

  “It’s already done,” he said. “It wasn’t that hard once I got into it. The lockout doesn’t go into the drive at all—it’s here at the nav controller, see? If it doesn’t get a signal from the FCZ interface, the controller can’t enable the drive—” He saw her expression and stopped himself. “Anyway, I’m just studying up for the next problem now.”

  “Already done? That’s wonderful!” she said. “I’m terribly impressed—I’ve never had so much as a single home tech course, and when I look down in there, I have no idea what I’m seeing. You could probably tell,” she added.

  “Well—we should test it before we need it. I need to know if any of this was important,” he said, letting a small handful of metal plugs, clips, and wires cascade to the deckplate.

  When he saw the sudden alarm in her eyes, he laughed and quickly said, “Just kidding. About the parts, anyway. We ought to test it, though. I was thinking we could jump out just a little early. Even fifteen minutes would be enough.”

  “What about the alert list?”

  “The boundary of the FCZ isn’t a hard line—there’s a yellow zone. We can jump out of there without attracting any attention, but it’ll still be a fair test. I’m sure it’ll work, though.”

  “So you do fix appliances,” she said mischievously, sitting on the deck in a spill of skirt. “What were you thinking about when I came in?”

  “Home,” he said simply.

  She settled back against a wiring panel. “It’s funny—I spent most of my life on Carratos, but ‘home’ always means Lucazec to me.”

  “Tatooine,” Luke supplied. “Which I always said was a better place to be from than to be. I’m not so sure about that now.”

  “Almost all of my memories from Ialtra are good ones,” Akanah said. “I suppose that’s one reason what you did there upsets me so much. Now I have that memory, too, and I would rather not.”

  “At least you’re here to have it,” Luke said. “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to feel guilty about saving you.”

  “What about killing those two men—do you feel anything about that?”

  “One of them killed himself,” Luke said, pulling his feet up out of the hatchway and turning to face her.

  “Commander Paffen.”

  Luke nodded. “He said something about poison, remember? I didn’t want him dead. I was trying to question him.”

  “And the other? The one you eviscerated with your lightsaber? Were you trying to kill him?”

  “He had a personal shield,” Luke said. “It takes a lot of force to get through one—and when your blade does pop through, it’s hard to stop it before it does a lot of damage.”

  “I understand. Were you trying to kill him?”

  “Didn’t I just answer that?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said with a shy smile.

  Luke eased himself back against the bulkhead on his side of the compartment. “I guess the truth is that, at the moment, I wasn’t particularly worried about whether I killed him or not.”

  She sh
ook her head slowly. “That is so hard for me to understand—how you could not be aware of the power in your hands.”

  “The power that mattered to me was the power to protect you from them,” said Luke. “You told me afterward that you weren’t in any danger, but that wasn’t how it looked.”

  “Yes,” said Akanah. “I understand that. But, Luke, there’s something I must ask of you—that you never again kill to save me. I am glad that you cared about me, but it makes my heart sick, my spirit heavy, to have the screams and the blood of those men in my memory, in the ruins of a place that I loved.”

  “I don’t know if I can make you that promise,” Luke said. “I have my own conscience to satisfy. And sometimes it demands that I fight for my friends.”

  “That you kill for your friends.”

  “When it’s necessary.”

  “Is that how you see the Jedi? Are they ready to kill to protect their friends on Coruscant?”

  Luke’s gaze narrowed. “What are you trying to say?”

  “I’m trying to understand,” Akanah said. “I want to know what your Jedi mean to the New Republic, and what the New Republic means to you. Are you training the Jedi Knights to be Coruscant’s warrior elite? What are you willing to do when the commander-in-chief calls on you?”

  “That isn’t the way it works,” Luke said. “Leia doesn’t give orders to the Jedi. She can ask us for help-one of us or all of us—but we can refuse. And sometimes do.”

  “But the Republic supports your academy. You had a military spacecraft in your hangar. Can you afford to offend them?”

  “The Jedi aren’t mercenaries,” Luke said, an edge in his voice. “When we fight, it’s an individual choice—and it’s in defense of the principles of our creed. Coruscant supports the academy because the memory of the Jedi is a powerful force for stability. Our presence is what they want most.”

  “That’s the part of the tradition that concerns me,” said Akanah. “The guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic for a thousand generations, or so the legend has it. But if you cannot have both peace and justice, which will you choose?”

  “Which would you have me choose?”

  “I would choose for you to keep your great gifts beyond the reach of politicians and generals,” she said. “For you to owe them no debts, and take on no causes—”

  “I’ve been careful to protect our independence,” said Luke. “Despite appearances.”

  “You aren’t sworn to uphold the government on Coruscant? You’ve taken no oaths of allegiance?”

  “No. Only those few who’ve chosen to serve in the Fleet, or the ministries. It’s not forbidden. But it’s not common. The Jedi aren’t the Republican Guard. And never will be.”

  “That’s something,” she said. “But how much better it would be if the most powerful symbol of your order—the very emblem of that long tradition—was something other than a deadly weapon.”

  “We didn’t ask for that,” Luke said. “It just happened. Old weapons have a cachet.”

  “All weapons have a cachet,” said Akanah with sorrow. “Too many men want to either conquer the world or change the world. The second is nearly as dangerous to living things as the first. Can you tell me why is it not enough to find a safe and comfortable place in the world, or—at worst—to find shelter from the world?”

  Luke frowned. “No. I can’t.” He nodded toward the work bay. “But I can tell you how to disable the FCZ lockout on a Verpine Adventurer. Which I couldn’t have told you this morning. Maybe tomorrow I’ll figure out something else.”

  She smiled ruefully at him. “I guess that will have to do for now.”

  In the end, three days of watching the nav scanner like a nervous mouse watching for the predator in the dark yielded only a handful of wholly innocent contacts. No warships appeared, and the few private and commercial craft that left Lucazec after them or passed the Mud Sloth inbound took no apparent interest in the little skiff.

  “Whoever Commander Paffen was reporting to must have been far enough away that his controller simply wrote him off,” Luke said, leaning forward over the controls.

  “But they’ll be looking for us everywhere now,” said Akanah from behind. “For you in particular.”

  “Looking and finding are two different things. I’ve had to make a habit of disguising myself in public just to be left alone, to go where I please without being gawked at,” Luke said.

  “How do you do that?”

  “Oh—I make myself look older where youth is honored, and younger where age is honored, female where males are the ones who strut, male where they aren’t. It’s the nearest thing there is to being invisible, being unattractive.”

  “Show me.”

  Akanah saw his shoulders rise and fall, heard the deep breath that came out almost as a sigh. When he turned his couch toward her and looked up, she saw a sixty-year-old face that reminded her at once of everyone and no one. The eyes were unguarded but vacant, the expression open but bland. There was nothing distinctive about his features, nothing at all to remember him by or for.

  “Very good,” she said. “May I try something?”

  He gestured silently with open hands.

  Drawing a shuddery breath, Akanah closed her eyes and moved the focus of her senses behind where Luke seemed to be, groping for an anchor in what was real. When she found it, she opened her eyes again and blew away the illusion with the soft breath of disbelief.

  “There you are,” she said, and smiled.

  “Very good,” he echoed. “It takes a strong mind to penetrate the illusion.”

  “I wanted to make certain I could find you, if we had to separate on Teyr. Do you change your voice, too?”

  “I can. It requires more concentration, because the ear isn’t as easily fooled. I’m not sure why that is, but it is—with humans, anyway. Speaking of Teyr—we’re in the yellow zone.”

  “Is it safe to jump out now?”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Luke. “And we’ll pick up almost an hour, jumping from this point. Assuming that I didn’t break more than I meant to back there.”

  She smiled. “Let’s find out.”

  “Let’s,” he said, turning back to the controls. “Do you still want to make a misdirection jump, or shall we go directly to Teyr?”

  “I still want to,” Akanah said, letting one hand settle lightly on his shoulder. “Someone could still be watching us from Lucazec. But a short one, please. I want to get to Teyr as soon as we possibly can. I just know that we’ll find something more than ruins there.”

  Her touch caught Luke momentarily unguarded and made her mind open to his as well. He felt the barely restrained urgency of her need for reunion, the brightness of her hope, the depth of her anxious fears.

  “Well, better strap in, then—just in case,” he said.

  The jump-out was reassuringly uneventful. By the time the Mud Sloth would have been released from the FCZ, it had already completed its first jump and turned to the heading for Teyr.

  Then there was time to think, in the quiet, undisturbed hours while Akanah slept and nothing could touch them. Luke thought most about Ialtra, returning to his mother’s dusty, crumbling cottage, searching his sense-memories again for her presence.

  Luke knew he would have to return there when it was safe to do so, and wondered if something should be done to preserve the site. He wondered how the authorities on Lucazec would react if he asked them to protect his mother’s onetime home. If the burned-out ruin of the Lars farm could be rebuilt as a historic monument, perhaps the ruins of Ialtra could be rescued from a hostile neglect by the Skywalker name. Perhaps the reputation of those who had been driven from there could even be rehabilitated.

  But that would have to come later, when there were fewer secrets to protect. For now, Luke would have to count on the shame of the Fallanassi to shield Ialtra from being further disturbed.

  Let the nackhawns take the bodies, he thought, and the shadows keep Ialtra u
ndisturbed. Let her memories sleep until I can return to awaken them.

  When Luke heard Akanah moving in the bunk behind him, he planted a bare foot on the control console and pushed off, spinning the couch around to face aft.

  “Hey—are you awake?”

  “It’s hard to sleep,” she said, invisible behind the privacy curtain. “Perhaps we should change places.”

  Luke looked back over his shoulder at the displays. “It’s only two hours to the end of the jump,” he said. “And there’ll be plenty of chance for me to rest up during the crawl to Teyr.”

  “Couldn’t we use your military waiver, now that you’ve disconnected the interlock?” Her voice was clear and unmuffled, and Luke pictured her lying on her back. “We could microjump right in, couldn’t we?”

  Luke’s surprised laugh was a loud noise in the confined space. “Not in this bucket. The navigator won’t take microjump parameters. And even if it would, chances are the resonances would shake her to pieces. There’s an entry shock wave in hyperspace, and when you microjump you have to let it catch you just when it’s at its strongest. We’d arrive at Teyr as a bright smudge in the sky.”

  “Oh,” she said. “But we could have jumped all the way in if we’d planned to back at the last waypoint.”

  “Right. If we were willing to answer all the questions and deal with the extra attention. I hate the crawl as much as you do, but, trust me, this is better.”

  Akanah sighed. “I’ll try to sleep, then. It’s the easy way to make the time pass.”

  “Good luck,” he said, and started to turn back to the console.

  Then he realized it had almost happened again—the conversation he had started for a specific purpose had wandered away and disappeared before he could get to his question.

  “Akanah?”

  “Yes?”

  “Before you fall asleep—there’s something I’ve been wondering about.”

  “What is it?”

  “Back at Ialtra—was there a date in that message you found?”