Shield of Lies

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  To Luke’s surprise, Akanah allowed herself to be directed. She lingered a long time under the water, longer than Luke himself had. When she emerged, she was standing a bit straighter, with better color in her face and a little life in her eyes.

  But it seemed to Luke that whatever strength the shower had returned to Akanah went directly into stubbornness. She flatly refused to take him back out into the city, or to talk about what she had done and where she had gone.

  “I want to sleep,” she said, standing at the foot of the mounting ladder with her soiled dar-cloak draped over one arm, the sun glistening in the last drops of water beaded on her bare shoulders. “I’m going to sleep, or I’m going to fall down where I’m standing.”

  “I’ll hire a speeder—”

  “No!” she said sharply. “We’re finished here—I didn’t miss anything, and I can tell you everything I found when I’m rested. Just take us away from here. Lift ship and jump us a few hours toward the Core. I should be human again by the time you’re done doing that. But right now, I need to be alone, and I need to sleep. And that’s what I’m going to do.”

  Brushing close enough past him that he caught the scent of soap on her hair, Akanah clambered back up the spindly ladder into the skiff. Frowning resignedly, Luke walked to the bow of the skiff and started his preflight inspection. By the time he made his way up the ladder into the flight compartment, the bunk was sealed as tight as a cocoon, with as little clue to what would eventually emerge.

  He slipped back into the pilot’s couch with a sigh, switching off the datapad and tucking it under a tie-down. “Mud Sloth to Talos tower,” Luke said. “Departing A-Thirteen, requesting clearance to orbit.”

  “Talos tower. Please hold, Mud Sloth. There’s traffic ahead of you.”

  Luke glanced at the chronometer and shook his head with a wry expression. They had been on Atzerri a few minutes short of a full day. His reply was far more Luke than Li Stonn.

  “Talos tower, copy, I have the traffic on my sensors, and it looks from here like a slow accountant making an extra pass,” he said. “Do you think it’d help him along if I rattle the walls with my thrusters while I’m waiting for him to count to one?”

  Clearance to lift came a few moments later. But Luke was not greatly surprised to find that the final bill, transmitted to him as he cleared the atmosphere, still assessed him for two days’ berthing.

  Free Traders, Luke thought with disgust. Thieves with business cards.

  Just before jumping the skiff out from Atzerri, Luke remembered to retrieve the report on the Mud Sloth from the New Republic Ship Registry on Coruscant.

  It was much shorter than the report on Star Morning, as befitted a ship that Luke guessed had probably spent most of its life grounded. The little ship was impractical for anything more than the occasional businessman’s vacation or off-the-spacelanes sales call. Most of its value was as a status symbol, something a Have could talk about where the Have-Nots could listen in envy. To judge by the skiff’s lines and detailing, Verpine had very consciously traded comfort underway for a design that looked fast while sitting still.

  But Luke’s only interests were the ownership records and the most recent entries in the traffic log. After Akanah’s behavior on Atzerri, Luke had developed a renewed interest in independent confirmation of the things she had been telling him. He still wanted to believe her, but was no longer sure that he could. And, one way or another, he had to know.

  Luke also found he had developed a renewed curiosity about the things Akanah was not telling him. It had occurred to him, for instance, that almost every time Akanah spoke about her past, she spoke about her life on Carratos, not Lucazec. Knowing how hungry he was for information about his mother, he had expected Akanah to be generous with anecdotes and remembrances about the part of her life she claimed to look back on most fondly.

  But such remembrances had been few, and Nashira had figured in even fewer. It made Luke wonder, and wondering led to doubt, and doubt to suspicion—a highly undesirable state of affairs.

  So Luke was relieved at first when the initial screen of the report informed him that NR80-109399, a Verpine Adventurer, Model 201, production group E, belonged to:

  Akanah Norand Pell, being an adult resident of Chofin, a settlement belonging to the autonomous state of Carratos, under the authority of which this registration is granted.

  And the recording date for the articles of registration was recent—not quite half a year past.

  Turning to the traffic log, Luke found more welcome news. The only planetfalls recorded for Mud Sloth since Akanah had taken ownership were at Golkus and Coruscant, and Golkus was near enough to being on a line from Carratos to Coruscant that a stop there en route needed no explanation. Curiously, though, there was no record of their departure from Coruscant, nor of their stops at Lucazec, Teyr, or Atzerri.

  The latter omission Luke could explain by the update cycles—there must not have been time for the routine transmission of data from those flight control centers to Coruscant, or for the addition of that data to the master record. But the former omission was puzzling. Luke’s cloaking work as they left Coruscant should only have concealed their point of origin from watching eyes and discouraged curiosity about any out-of-trajectory alarms at Flight Control.

  But as far as Coruscant was concerned, Mud Sloth had never left. The skiff had never requested clearance to lift to orbit, had never requested clearance through the planetary shield—except they never could have left without it. And shield passage required not only that the skiff answer a transponder interrogation, but also that Ship Registry verify the ID. It was impossible to imagine how their passage had gone unrecorded.

  Luke wondered what would happen when the out-world updates arrived and Mud Sloth was suddenly in two places at once.

  Then, just for a moment, he toyed with the idea that both places were really the same—that they were still on Coruscant, perhaps even still in his hermitage, and some elaborate deception was under way.

  He quickly rejected the idea as too extreme a solution to the mystery. But it left a worrisome question in its wake: Just what was Akanah capable of? What were the limits of her power?

  May I cloak us as we leave? she had asked.

  And he had not thought to question it.

  What had she done? Something that could hide them completely from the best planetary security the best engineers could devise? He realized he had missed a pattern. How had she gotten into his hermitage without his knowing it? How had she gotten past the security droid and into the commonal on Teyr? All the questions pointed toward the same answer—some gift of deception, illusion, or concealment that went well beyond what he himself could call upon.

  She can pierce my projections, he realized. I wonder if I can pierce hers. I wonder if I can even tell when she’s using one.

  Distracted by such thoughts, Luke almost overlooked the other surprise in the report from Coruscant. It waited for him in the section on ownership history, and fell under his eyes while he was wondering why, if she had such a talent for concealment, Akanah had needed to buy a ship at all.

  You could have stowed away on any ship at any time, he was thinking. You wouldn’t have been trapped on Lucazec. Stang, you could have stolen the price of passage, even the price of the ship—

  Then he noticed that the sole prior owner of the skiff was a man named Andras Pell, and that the transfer category given was:

  CLASS III NONTAXABLE—INHERITANCE BY MARRIAGE

  He rose out of the couch and turned to stare at the closed curtain screening the bunk. Just how did you buy your freedom? he thought at Akanah. And what else are you keeping from me?

  Akanah hibernated—or hid—for nearly ten hours. But rather than frustrating Luke’s curiosity, her absence redirected it. For the last five hours of her isolation, Mud Sloth drifted in realspace on the fringe of Atzerri’s Oort Cloud with only the cold methane-ice comets for company. With all his inhibitions about making inquirie
s behind Akanah’s back gone, Luke made full use of the time, his credits, and his priority access codes.

  From Carratos he requested any information available from newsgrid, political, or police records on Akanah Norand Pell, Andras Pell, and Talsava. He sent the same query to Coruscant’s criminal records office and citizen registry and to the home offices of both the Coruscant Global Newsgrid and the New Republic Prime Newsgrid.

  From the New Republic Reference Service, he requested a quickreport on naming conventions on Lucazec and Carratos, thinking he might parse another lead from the names in hand.

  A second request to the same source asked for five-hundred-word excerpts from all matches on the key words “Fallanassi” and “White Current.” After a short debate with himself, and despite the pathetic and sensational inaccuracies of Secrets of the Jedi, Luke also contacted an information broker on Atzerri and paid a hundred credits for a search on the same keys.

  He also requested a Current Terms & Conditions brochure from the chief librarian’s office on Obroa-skai. The library computers there were the only resource offering both a greater variety and a greater volume of records than those held by Coruscant.

  But Obroa-skai’s generosity with its planetary treasure was limited. To protect against theft of the library, and to provide the resources needed to maintain it, accessing the records meant either going to Obroa-skai or hiring one of the library’s own trained contract researchers.

  In either case, Obroa-skai was not a resource one turned to for quick answers. The official language of New Republic recordkeeping was Basic, and everything held by Coruscant was kept in one of several readily searchable data specifications. But the Obroa-skai library was a collection of primary documents, in ten thousand storage formats and uncountable languages. The most complete general index covered only fifteen percent of the library’s holdings, and all the specialty indexes combined added only a few percent to that.

  Those were the principal reasons why the brochure—which Luke received within minutes of requesting it, as the first response to any of his inquiries—reported that a normal single-part library search was averaging eight days. The waiting list for terminal time was holding at fifteen days, and the backlog for contract researchers had climbed to seventy.

  Discouraging as those numbers were, Luke dispatched a command-control message to Artoo and Threepio on Yavin 4, instructing them to go to Obroa-skai and search the library on his behalf, as they had done once before.

  The only request he made that was refused outright was for the Fleet Office’s daily Tactical Briefing Memorandum, also known as the trouble map—a compendium of situation reports from all the various Fleet and base commands. Unlike that aboard his E-wing, Mud Sloth’s hypercomm wasn’t military-rated, and there was no persuading the Intelligence Section to send a white-star file to what they considered an unsecured receiver.

  Luke thought about comming Admiral Ackbar directly to ask his appraisal of the trouble in Farlax—the news digest Luke had picked up on Atzerri was almost as sensational and unbelievable as the Jedi document. But doing so promised to invite questions Luke wasn’t ready to answer, and possibly force a decision he wasn’t ready to make.

  Instead, he chose to contact the public information offices of both the Senate and the General Ministry. He asked for the official record of the past twenty days, hoping he could read between the lines well enough to know if it was time to head home.

  Then he lowered the lights in the flight compartment, stretched out on the deck behind the control couches, and closed his eyes. All his pending requests required patience, from minutes to hours to days. But just reaching out had left him feeling better about his circumstances. Even if some of his efforts returned nothing useful, the next time he and Akanah talked, he expected to be in a much stronger position.

  Sorry as I am to say it, what I have to have now is reason to trust you, not just reason to want to, he thought. If we’re going to go on any farther together, you’re going to have to start trusting me.

  Prompted by a sensation like a feather tickling somewhere inside his skull, Luke became aware of two things at once: that he had fallen asleep on the deck, and that he was being watched.

  He turned his head in the direction of the sensation and opened his eyes. He found himself looking directly at Akanah. She was sitting on the edge of the bunk, hands folded on her lap, her hair bed-tousled.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m sorry I monopolized the bunk for so long. I didn’t mean to do that.”

  Taken aback by her apology, Luke pulled himself up to a sitting position. “ ’s all right,” he slurred. “You must have needed it. You looked like you did, anyway, back at Talos.”

  She nodded. “About Talos—there’s some things we have to talk about,” she said. “You’ve been very patient with me, and I’ve been terribly unfair to you. You deserve to know what’s been happening with me.”

  Having had his own opening speech preempted, Luke could find nothing more to say than “Go on, then—I’m listening.”

  Akanah nodded toward the foredeck. “You have some messages. You’ll probably want to look at them first.”

  Eyeing her quizzically, Luke moved to the copilot’s couch and browsed the list of waiting replies.

  There was an acknowledgment from Streen on Yavin 4, which Luke skipped for the moment. He also skipped the press folders from the Senate and General Ministry, which were irrelevant for the moment.

  The New Republic Reference Service had responded with a short précis on naming, ending in the messages:

  Search Key: FALLANASSI—Not Found

  Search Key: WHITE CURRENT—Not Found As Single Term

  Search Key: FALLANASSI + WHITE CURRENT—Not Found

  It was the same with the response from the information broker on Atzerri—an apologetic note and an offer to apply half of the search fee to Luke’s next request.

  With increasing agitation, Luke skimmed through half a dozen more replies from various agencies and companies on Carratos and Coruscant. All were singularly uninformative—a few dates, a few facts that fell into the category of vital statistics, and several NO RECORD and NOT FOUND messages, with a pair of REQUEST DENIED rebuffs scattered among them.

  “Let me tell you what your messages say,” Akanah said gently. “My full name was Akanah Norand Goss, now Akanah Norand Pell. I was married on Carratos to Andras Pell, a man thirty-six years my senior. Andras died a year later, and I inherited this ship and a few thousand credits. His obituary says it was an innocent death, and no one official seems to have taken any notice of his passing, but you wonder if I might have both married and killed him to escape from Carratos. And no matter who and where you asked, there’s nothing at all to be found about the Fallanassi.”

  “How do you know?” he demanded, twisting around to face her. “Did you read my mail?”

  “No. I didn’t need to.”

  “You knew I was going to check up on you,” he said.

  “Oh—I thought you would, eventually. I rather thought it would be sooner.”

  “So you checked yourself, and you knew how little I’d find.”

  “I checked for myself,” she corrected. “You’re not the only one looking for pieces of your past.”

  He sat down on the edge of the copilot’s couch. “Why are there so few?” he asked, the accusatory tone leaving his voice.

  “Talsava and I lived in the shadows on Carratos. We came in unregistered. We lived in a part of Chofin where people come and go without notice. When Talsava left, I became one of the invisibles—I owned nothing, did nothing that put my name in the identity records of the occupation. The only time I ever lived above the line on Carratos was the last two years—the years I was with Andras.”

  “No one questioned who you were, where you came from?”

  “No. The old records were seized by the Empire, and the occupation records were destroyed by the liberty movement. Everyone was given a fresh start. I took a name in the local custo
m for women—given name, mother’s name, father’s name. But it means nothing anywhere but there, anytime but then.”

  “So there’s no reason for it to be anywhere in Coruscant’s records.”

  “Or Lucazec’s, or Teyr’s. It’s not that there are other names behind which the records hide—”

  “As far as the bureaucrats and census-takers were concerned, you didn’t exist.”

  She smiled. “On Carratos, the census is of property and the owners of property,” she said. “When I owned nothing, I did not count. When Andras took me, I was his property. Now that I own this”—she raised her hands to indicate the skiff—“I am a person.”

  Luke nodded slowly. “I guess that all makes sense, the way you explain it,” he said. “But something else I learned still doesn’t have an explanation. The traffic records say we’re still on Coruscant, and I’m starting to think that we’re still going to be there no matter how many systems we visit.”

  Inexplicably, Akanah giggled. “Did your tracking report mention a visit to Golkus?”

  “Yes,” Luke said. “On your way to Coruscant.”

  “And did it say why I went there?”

  “No. I didn’t think about it much, either,” Luke admitted. “I guess I figured that, it being your first trip in the skiff, there was either some little problem you needed fixed, or you just didn’t like being alone out here.”

  “Well—the second is true, absolutely true. But so is the first. The problem I needed fixed was the ship’s identification transponder. I told you—we leave no trail that an outsider can follow. There was someone on Golkus who could help with that.”

  “Someone? Altering ID profiles is no mean trick.”

  “His name would mean nothing to you but could harm him,” Akanah said. “I believe he once worked with—or for—Talon Karrde.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “He came through Carratos once, years ago,” she said. “When I heard why, I arranged to meet him and to do him a favor. But the price was still dear. I paid him with most of the credits I had, plus favors I had collected from others.”