“They argue like one.”
“So you are a couple with every one of your political opponents?”
“Oh, well struck, Master Skywalker.”
“And Wei? Other relationships, co-workers, colleagues?” Luke went back to paging through the sheaf of printouts. Most seemed to be meticulous, mind-numbingly boring accounts of the effects of experimental medicines on test creatures and computer simulations, with emphasis on the slightest variations in their responses.
“He technically is retired, now living on medicine patent royalties and interest on his banked capital. So he conducts his scientific explorations chiefly alone. When he wants an assistant, he hires someone from the staff of the hospital or the Enzymar Research and Development facility, usually a new graduate in need of a little more income. I’ll put out word to find out if he has had any such in the last year.”
“Thank you.”
Ben stepped into view behind the mayor. Snaplaunce moved aside. Ben moved in, a sheet of flimsi in his hands, his expression grave.
“Let’s see it,” Luke said.
“I found it under his mattress.” Ben handed him the sheet.
It was a page, slightly crinkled, dominated by drawings in black ink. Luke could see that the drawings had not been rendered by an ordinary stylus; the ink had flowed, smoothly and sometimes broadly, as if from an artist’s instrument.
Part of the diagram was an outline of a human male viewed from the side—a silhouette with a hollow interior. The outline indicated no clothing, but there was something projecting from the back of the figure’s neck. Lines radiating from the projection angled out to a box showing a blowup of that section of the diagram. The blowup was clearly a droch half the size of a human fist.
There were notations all over the page; the lettering was from a printer. Luke read some of them. “ ‘Third thoracic placement—humans—for optimal effect. Signal strength and clarity drop-off not measurable at planetary distances, speed of light transmission the only limiter. Conditioning from childhood beneficial but not crucial. Average life span post-placement: seven point five standard years. Mutation remains a concern.’ ” The first few words created a flutter in his stomach, and it only worsened as he continued to read.
“May I see?” the mayor asked.
Luke handed the page to the mayor, who studied it intently, passing it first below one eye and then the other. “The ink is comparatively fresh. You can still smell it. But what does this mean?”
“It means, at the very least, that he’s considering use of drochs on human hosts for some purpose.” Luke sighed, suddenly weary of all the ways people, human or not, could imagine using, diminishing, and murdering one another for their own gain. “These drochs would have to be altered somehow to keep them from killing their hosts rapidly. Possibly the means of alteration is why he’s concerned with mutation. I’m guessing that they’d serve as some sort of energy-transference mechanism, or perhaps a monitoring or even control mechanism.”
Ben grimaced. “If he already knows how long a host normally lives after one of these things is attached …”
Luke nodded. “Then he’s probably already experimented with the process.”
The mayor handed the flimsi back. “There’s something wrong with this.”
Ben gave him a look of polite inquiry. “Based on your familiarity with Wei?”
“Based on my decades as a police officer.”
Ben’s expression changed to one of respect. “That’s what you did before?”
“Yes.” The mayor was looking at Luke. “I was so employed when I met your father—your father Owen Lars, that is.”
Luke grinned. “I hope you’ve forgiven the subterfuge.”
“Yes, of course. As for the diagram, why would he draw the man and the droch by hand, then let it dry and run it through a printer to add the text? Or go through those steps in reverse order? Why not do it all on the computer and print it out as a single step?”
Luke’s comlink beeped. He brought it out of its pocket and activated it. “Skywalker.”
“Luke, it’s Sel. I’ve spoken to Dr. Wei’s mechanic and he’s allowed me to look at backups of his speeder’s memory.”
“Ah, good.”
“There’s not much to report. The mechanic’s system is a bit of a mess, hard to navigate. One file I found, though, indicates that Wei regularly traveled a distance of exactly four hundred eighty-three kilometers each way from Hweg Shul. In what direction, it doesn’t say.”
Luke looked at the mayor. “Is it possible to plot distances from Hweg Shul to all known homesteads and facilities to see if one matches that distance?”
Snaplaunce offered a little bow. “Possible, and a matter of only a few minutes. I’ll comm my office at once.”
“Thank you.”
There was one such site on record, a failed rock ivory processing camp in the mountains out beyond Bleak Point, uninhabited for years. But it exactly matched the distance shown on Dr. Wei’s landspeeder memory backup file.
Luke assembled the others outside Wei’s home. “Even with a good landspeeder, it’ll take us hours to get there and back. I wonder if Koval Transport will let us charter a shuttle. Or, even faster, we could go up, bring the Shadow down, and use her. Though that means the slower decontamination when we leave Nam Chorios.”
Mayor Snaplaunce shook his head. “No need. Take my shuttle. It will have you there in half an hour.”
Luke smiled. “Perfect.”
* * *
A few minutes later, Luke was no longer smiling. He was looking at a relic of his youth, a weapon of the enemy.
It looked like a TIE bomber—angled solar wing arrays like the more famous TIE fighter, with a double cockpit, two pods side by side. As if to mock its own sinister shape, this one was painted in bright yellow, with words on the outer wings in red: VOTE SNAPLAUNCE.
Luke looked at the mayor. “You have a TIE shuttle.” Even to his own ears, his voice sounded as though he were informing the man of something Snaplaunce might not have realized before now.
Snaplaunce nodded. “Indeed.”
“I’m not sure I can recall ever seeing one in private hands.”
“A mechanic, late of the Imperial fleet, settled here about fifteen years ago and sold off several of the vehicles he had lovingly restored over the years. Seeing this one, how could I resist?”
“How indeed?” Having painted it these colors, how could you resist activating the self-destruct sequence? But Luke did not give voice to his thought.
He slid through the top hatch into the starboard-side pilot’s pod as Ben and Vestara struggled into the port-side passenger compartment. While Snaplaunce checked him out on the vehicle’s eccentricities, such as its lack of a laser weapon and the fact that its port-side ion engine had 10 percent greater thrust than the starboard, Luke heard his son and Vestara arguing over who should sit in front. Moments later they were ready to go; Luke and Ben dogged down their respective hatches, Luke brought the repulsorlifts and twin ion engines up, and they were airborne.
Airborne on a very precise course already transmitted to the port authority. “The commanders of the weapons platforms take a very dim view of spaceworthy craft rising from the surface and then deviating from filed courses,” Snaplaunce had told him. “Best not to practice your astrobatics or to buzz Koval Station.”
But restricted course or not, ugly paint job or not, Imperial symbol of terror or not, it was good to be behind starfighter-style controls again. And though the shuttle felt as maneuverable as a quartet of Hutts fastened together with space tape, it had fair atmospheric velocity. Luke brought it up to an altitude of ten thousand meters and luxuriated in the speed.
West of Hweg Shul, the morning sun had already caused ground-level dust storms to kick up. At this altitude, they looked like thick, motionless puffs of white or silver-gray plant fibers waiting to be harvested and spun into textiles.
Luke’s feeling of good cheer lasted for twenty minu
tes. Then the aged shuttle’s sensors picked up a signal, a small craft rising from a mountain range and coming up behind them. The pursuer kept a much lower altitude than the shuttle, two thousand meters, which meant that it was sometimes within the dust storms and sometimes above them. At this distance, it was too small to see anyway; on the sensors it was nothing but a blip.
Luke keyed his intercom. “Possible trouble, you two. Make sure you’re strapped in tight.”
“Understood, Dad.”
The pursuer was faster than the TIE shuttle. It rapidly closed the distance between the two vehicles. Soon enough, even on the shuttle’s ancient sensors, it resolved itself from a blip to a shape—a recognizable one.
It was spherical, with axial projections top and bottom and winglike projections laterally. At a tremendous distance, perhaps, it might be mistaken on sensors for another TIE-based vehicle, but Luke knew better. This was a Sith meditation sphere. This was Ship, the Sith-built, vaguely sentient vehicle now controlled by Abeloth.
“Potential trouble has turned into real trouble, kids. Ship is here.”
“Great, Dad. Should I throw open the top hatch and hurl rocks at it?”
“Just bring up your own sensor board and lend me a second set of eyes.”
“I’m in back—”
Vestara’s voice cut in. “I’ve got it, Master Skywalker.”
Ship closed to within a couple of kilometers behind, eight kilometers below. Its course was straight and true, just pacing them.
“Attack—”
Luke felt it as an electric thrill of danger as Vestara spoke the second syllable, but he was already reacting to the alarm in her voice. He jerked the controls to port.
There was no flash of light, just the sudden appearance of a white smoke trail in the air from the point Ship had been a moment before to where the shuttle would have been had it kept its course. A moment later there was a distant boom from behind and below, a sonic boom.
Ship’s accelerator weapon. An ancient device, it used high-order magnetism to accelerate masses of ferrous metal—usually durasteel spheres—to incredible speeds toward a target.
In space, debris and asteroid detection sensors would pick up those missiles. In atmosphere, those sensors automatically reconfigured themselves for the size of obstacles normally found in the air.
In other words, Luke was blind through the sensors, seeing Ship itself but not its supersonic missiles.
He could hear Ben and Vestara arguing on the intercom: “I know, Ben, I know, I can barely see the balls emerge.”
“Recalibrate the sensors for vacuum!”
“We’ll pick up every crosswind, every cloud and stream of dust. That dust storm will look like a giant mass—”
“Just do it!”
Luke kept his eye on the sensor screen, focusing on the aperture in the center of the spine emerging from the meditation sphere’s top.
There was just a blur of movement—
He veered again, diving and banking to starboard. It was hard going, using pilot skill, muscle, and willpower to maneuver the sluggish shuttle.
The smoke trail, caused by the metal ball smashing through the atmosphere, friction alone igniting oxygen as it went, appeared to Luke’s left. Moments later there was another distant boom.
“Civilian craft XV 119 ‘Vote Snaplaunce,’ this is Koval Station Control. Cease your maneuvering and return to your original course.”
Luke grimaced. He didn’t know these controls that well, wasn’t wearing a TIE pilot’s helmet with a voice-activated mike, and couldn’t take his eyes off the sensors long enough to find the manual trigger for the comm system.
Then he heard his son’s voice. “Koval Station, this is ‘Vote Snaplaunce.’ We—”
There was a crackling noise, as if lightning had been set free to wander somewhere inside the shuttle. Sparks erupted from Luke’s control board. His sensor-screen image contracted to a tiny white dot and stayed that way. His cockpit lights dimmed to nothingness. The engines skipped, coughed, caught again. Blinking yellow and red alerts began to flash on the main monitor screen, diagnostic warnings, and then that screen, too, failed.
And there was no more noise from the comm system.
“Ben? Vestara?”
“Here.” Ben sounded aggrieved. “They’re not responding.”
“Getting it … Getting it …” Vestara said. “There. Sensors recalibrated.”
“I can’t see them. You’re my eyes, Vestara.”
“Understood. When I say ‘go,’ it’ll—Go!”
Luke jerked the controls again, rolling to starboard, the roll narrowing his profile against the vehicle situated below him.
And, he discovered, from the enemy above. There was immediately another “Go!” and he halted the roll.
The universe above his top hatch flamed into incandescence as a capital-ship-level turbolaser battery discharge flashed just by the shuttle. It was not vertical; it came out of orbit at something like a forty-five-degree angle.
“Surface hit, surface hit.” That was Vestara. “It took out an entire mountainside ledge. Go!”
Luke renewed the starboard roll, turning the shuttle upside down. He saw the smoke trail from Ship stretch, seemingly instantly, from Ship far above—below—to disappear behind his canopy. He finished the roll, returning to a right-side-up orientation.
This was not good. Attacks from below and above: below from a vehicle that was faster and more maneuverable than his; above from an enemy too distant to attack and which he could no longer communicate with …
Something clicked in his mind. He put the shuttle into a power dive.
“Dad, what …”
“Right now it’s two weapons against none, Ben. Let’s make it one against one. Dantooinian firing squad.”
Everyone made jokes about the Dantooinians, of course, even when the remote planet was unoccupied. Residents of any rural, agricultural planet tended to be the butts of jokes about their intelligence, jokes made by more sophisticated neighbors. A “Dantooinian firing squad” was a ring of shooters intending to execute the prisoner at the center of their circle.
Diving let Luke pick up speed. Ship was slow to respond. Luke angled his descent to gain ground on his pursuer.
“Got it, Master Skywalker. You’re five seconds from optimal placement. Four … three … Go!”
Luke jerked to port, minimally—he couldn’t afford a more dramatic maneuver, which would cost him speed he badly needed now.
A shower of sparks erupted from the starboard solar panel array. The shuttle shuddered. There was a boom from below and behind.
It was the most glancing of hits. One of Ship’s shots must have just kissed the starboard wing, barely more than it would take to cause electrons to jump between the two masses.
But it was enough. The middle solar panel on that side began to peel away from the array. Suddenly the shuttle was trailing pieces of solar panel. The shuttle tried to heel over to the right—increased friction on that side. Luke fought the yoke, biting back a curse.
“… One—Go!”
Luke reversed his intent, threw the shuttle into a rightward curve.
The world exploded again in illumination.
A blow, like from a thirty-kilo anvil swung by a rancor, slammed into Luke’s head. He slumped, seeing his surroundings try to fade to gray. His hands, nerveless, slid off the control yoke. The shuttle began to tumble out of control.
LUKE FORCED HIMSELF TO THINK, SHOVED THOUGHTS THROUGH HIS sluggish brain.
Someone had just died. The death agonies had lashed out at him through the Force.
Ship, it had to be Ship. That was his intent, to put his shuttle and Ship along the same line of fire and hope that Ship, knowing the shuttle had no weapons, would be unprepared for a laser battery attack.
But Luke, too, would be dead in moments if he didn’t regain control of the shuttle. He sat up again, forced his shaking hands to grip the yoke once more.
Outside the f
ront viewport, the world spun. Dust storm below, sky above, dust storm, sky …
“Dad. Dad.”
“Got it, Ben.” Even to himself, Luke sounded weary, hurt. He tried to regain control, watched the altimeter numbers plummet.
Four thousand meters. Sky—dust storm—sky. Thirty-five hundred. Dust storm—sky—dust storm. The starboard wing had now lost all three solar panels and was providing lift only with their support strut.
Lift. The fog began to clear from his mind. How good was Snaplaunce’s repulsorlift landing system? Luke activated it, pulsing it at the same moment of each spinning rotation of the shuttle.
Three thousand meters. Twenty-five hundred. The dust storm below was frighteningly close, and it could conceal jagged mountain peaks just below its surface. “Vestara, I need normal atmospheric sensors again.” Sky … Dust storm … The rotation was slowing.
They plunged into the dust storm. Luke tried to ease the shuttle into a gentle starboard bank and descent.
Air bit wing the way it was supposed to. The shuttle made one more roll and came upright, the altimeter reading fifteen hundred meters.
Luke blew out a breath. “Sensors?”
“Nearest mountain altitude twelve hundred meters. Maintain current altitude and we’re safe. Higher might be better.”
“Above the dust storm, the Golan weapons platform will definitely see us,” Luke said. “Now, they either can’t, or are at least dealing with interference. I assume they vaped Ship.”
“No, Master Skywalker.”
“Come again?”
“It missed. It hit something down in a valley. That was the … death convulsion we all felt. I almost blacked out. Ship felt it, too. It wobbled, then turned away and ran.”
“It hit a tsil.” Luke felt deflated. “It killed a tsil.”
A cough from the engines got his attention, but the main monitor was still inactive. “Look, I’m setting this baby down. Storm winds are kicking us around, and we need to know how badly we’re hurt. Any idea where we are?”
“Dad, we’re sixty-two kilometers southeast of our destination. Come to one-three-seven.”
Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Conviction Page 14