Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Conviction

by Allston, Aaron

  And Boba Fett.

  She gaped at the sight of him, floating into the chamber atop a column of fire and smoke, dominating the scene. But the door behind him was now open. Visitors were already running through it, seeking escape from the chaos and danger of the room. Tahiri got up and sprinted past Fett’s rocket thrust. Just on the other side of the door, she spun, looking for the door’s control panel, hoping to send the metal barriers slamming shut to trap the YVH droid inside. But there was none, not on this side or the other.

  The YVH droid rose and charged toward Booth Six, its gait suggesting that it would leap through the gap.

  Boba Fett tilted forward. The small missile atop his rocket pack flew free, striking the YVH droid in its torso. The droid and several meters around him were suddenly replaced by a fireball that glowed evilly in yellows and reds. Tahiri ducked sideways, getting behind the blast shield offered by the edge of the door. The metal wall between her and the explosion rang with its force.

  She peeked out. There was nothing but a smoking crater where the YVH droid had stood. Perhaps it wasn’t destroyed; an explosion that great could have picked it up and hurled it out of sight rather than destroying it, could have collapsed the floor and sent it plummeting to a lower level of the prison. But it was gone.

  FETT ROARED OUT OF THE HALL. DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF TAHIRI, A black-haired man in health worker’s clothes jumped onto the control stand of a repulsor gurney waiting there, and an instant later a woman in prisoner yellows leapt onto the gurney itself.

  Daala.

  The gurney accelerated into motion, following Fett.

  Tahiri sprinted, drawing on the Force to boost her speed, and caught up to the gurney from behind. Its operator and Daala faced ahead, their eyes on Fett, so neither saw her. She grabbed the collar of the operator’s tunic and yanked. As he tumbled off the back, she jumped on in his place and grabbed the controls. The gurney barely slowed or wobbled with the change of operators.

  The hallway was full of purple smoke, shrieking visitors, and guards rushing toward the visitors hall. Some of the latter pointed blasters at the gurney. From above and ahead, Boba Fett fired his own blaster, sending them diving or scurrying for cover as the gurney roared past.

  Tahiri couldn’t help but grin. The gurney was accelerating up to speeder bike rates of travel. This was not a stock repulsor gurney fresh from the factory.

  They passed through three sets of blast doors, all of them open, and Tahiri saw daylight ahead. Suddenly they were out in an exercise yard. Streams of blasterfire from tower emplacements converged on Boba Fett, but he was too nimble, too adept in the air for any of the bolts to hit him.

  Almost any of them. Tahiri saw a blast strike the center of his chest armor, dent it, turn the point of impact black. Fett spun in the air. The antenna on the side of his helmet swung free, dropping into the exercise yard. But his forward momentum was unchecked. As he completed a full spin, he regained control and his original course.

  And then he and the gurney were outside the wide-open exterior gate.

  Fett turned to starboard and accelerated. Tahiri followed. She knew Fett was no friend of hers, nor of any Jedi or former Jedi, but he clearly had an exit strategy.

  Two quick kilometers farther, along a channel between two lengthy banks of skytowers, Tahiri saw what it was. On a pedway platform one level up was a large, curved shape beneath a sheet of silver reflective flimsi. Fett flew on ahead and landed beside it. He reached up and grabbed a fold of the cover. Hauling hand over hand, he pulled the flimsi free, revealing the distinctive curvilinear shape of Slave I, his personal spacecraft.

  Tahiri piloted the repulsor gurney to land on that pedway a few dozen meters from Slave I. She brought the vehicle to a rapid stop.

  Daala turned toward Tahiri, her mouth opening to say something, and then she realized it was not the man she expected to be standing there. Her jaw dropped.

  Tahiri stepped off the controller’s platform. She gave Daala a broad smile and a mock salute. “Thanks for the rescue.” Then she slipped over the pedway rail and dropped into the chasm beyond.

  With the Force she shoved herself laterally a few meters, enough to bring her feet into contact with the building front beside her. Just this once she was grateful for footwear; if she’d been barefoot as she preferred, the building’s stone face would have sanded her skin to a bloody ruin. She maintained the pressure provided by the Force for a few meters of sliding descent, then leapt free, straight into the back of an open-topped orange-and-black family airspeeder.

  The pilot and the man beside her, both Sullustans, turned back to look.

  Tahiri gave them a frank stare. “I’m an escaped federal prisoner and I’m very dangerous. If you cooperate, I’ll accept a ride from you and leave you within a few minutes. If you don’t, I’ll steal your speeder. Your choice.”

  The driver jabbered at her in the musical tones of the Sullustans and shrugged.

  Daala gaped over the rail. She looked up at Fett. “That was Tahiri Veila.”

  He didn’t answer. He pressed a button on his forearm. The front hatch of Slave I swung up and open. It seemed curiously wobbly. He waved her forward, his body language impatient.

  She ran to join him. A human male, large and young, probably an athlete, stepped into her path. Maybe he recognized her prison jumpsuit and imagined he’d earn a reward. He reached for her. She kneed him in the groin, cracked her palm against his jaw, and shoved his semi-conscious body out of the way, barely noticing him. She reached Fett’s side.

  But it wasn’t Fett. Slave I was creaking like cheap duraplast. Beyond the open hatch she could see that the interior was mostly empty space—a duraplast shell attached by cables and spars to a late-model, high-performance airspeeder.

  Fett’s armor hadn’t merely been dented by the blaster shot he’d taken; a portion of it had been burned away. Far from being high-grade Mandalorian armor, this was protection on a par with standard-issue stormtrooper armor. And Fett’s antenna was gone, broken off where it normally attached to his helmet.

  She gaped at him. “Who are you?”

  But his voice was pure Boba Fett. “Get in. If you want to escape.”

  She got in.

  * * *

  The first GA Security pursuit airspeeder came within sight of Slave I as the vehicle lifted off and accelerated away. Slave I immediately dived, ignoring traffic lanes, picking up speed in its descent.

  The pursuing security speeder dived in its wake. The pilot, an Ortolan, blue-skinned and pachydermal, activated the external speaker. “Slave One. We have you surrounded. Heave to and prepare to be boarded … or destroyed.”

  His partner, a human female with hair as blue as the Ortolan’s fur, was on her comlink, reporting their location, course, and speed.

  The pilot clamped his jaw shut as he came out of the dive. He piloted one of the more powerful security airspeeders around—he had to, in order to be useful in a pursuit situation, since by himself he massed three times as much as a human male—and the maneuver of pulling out of his dive drove him deep into the pilot’s seat.

  Slave I did not heave to. Nor, for that matter, did it speed up to outpace its pursuer. It simply blasted along, getting out of the way of cross-traffic with a sluggishness the Ortolan found surprising, given its reputation. Boba Fett ignored all comm and loudhailer commands.

  More security speeders dropped into the pursuit, some behind the Ortolan, some ahead of Slave I, some above and below the chase. In barely a minute a dozen speeders surrounded the fleeing craft.

  Finally its pilot appeared to accept the inevitable. Slave I descended to a landing platform large enough to accommodate it. It landed, an awkward grounding that caused it to bounce once, and sat there, rocking in the winds that sometimes howled around Coruscant skytowers.

  The Ortolan grounded immediately behind Slave I. He and his partner left their speeder, drew blaster pistols, and, with security agents from other speeders, approached the craft.

>   When they were three meters away, the front hatch opened.

  The Ortolan peered in. He saw the interior, all open space and an enviably muscular airspeeder with a spindly plate-topped mechanic droid at the controls. The droid looked at him and raised its arms.

  There was no one else in the seats or elsewhere in the shell.

  He sighed loudly enough to cause his trunk to wobble. “Report this. We’ve been chasing a decoy.”

  * * *

  Just minutes before, wrapped up in a voluminous rainproof garment that fit her like a tent, a crude blond wig on her head, Daala had stood not three meters from the ersatz Slave I and watched the craft lift off. Beside her, Boba Fett, draped in a similar rain garment, its hood up to shadow his features, his helmet in a bag under his arm, also watched the liftoff. Moments later the craft dived into the permacrete canyon beyond, pursued by an oversized security speeder.

  Fett gestured. “This way.”

  Daala remained silent while they walked to a parked speeder, as innocuous and homely a brown as one could find on fashion-conscious Coruscant. Fett at the controls, they lifted off.

  Another two kilometers away, they set down at a small-craft charter and rental firm and stepped into a Lambda-class shuttle. Fett gestured for her to take the controls. “The course is already plotted. You need merely transmit it, wait for authorization, and lift off.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “Changing.” He went aft and shut the cockpit door behind him.

  Daala did as instructed, and minutes later achieved Coruscant high orbit. She called up the second portion of the course, a plot to take the shuttle outside the planet’s gravity well, and maneuvered in that direction.

  Fett emerged from the rear compartment. He had left the rocket pack behind, but that was not the only change. The burn crater was gone from his chest and the antenna was restored to his helmet. Daala gave him a careful look. This was indeed the real Boba Fett. She nodded. “I think I understand.”

  “Good of you.” He sat in the copilot’s seat and bent over the control board as if double-checking her course.

  “Boba Fett showed up at the prison to rescue me. That naturally intimidated, even terrified, the guards and everyone else. But careful study of holocam recordings of the rescue will show that the rescuer was wearing false Boba Fett armor. Therefore they will conclude it was not the real Boba Fett.”

  Fett nodded. “An impression enhanced by the use of a false Slave One. The droid I modified to pilot that craft will have holocam recordings that reinforce these ideas. The freelancer who portrayed Tevarkian wore the false armor in those recordings.”

  “I don’t even know when Jedi Veila replaced him. Is he in the hands of the guards?”

  “No. He has reported in safe.”

  Daala breathed out a sigh of relief. It was odd for her, since she was relieved on behalf of someone who had just committed a high-level crime and could well be a lifelong professional criminal. “And so you have plausible deniability, and you avoid drawing yourself or the Mandalorians into a dispute with the Jedi. Did you alter your body language, too?”

  “I did.” He turned to look at her. “The real Slave One is within the Coruscant system, at the orbit of the outermost planet. We will rendezvous with her and get you to a place of safety.”

  “Thank you. The terms I offered in my communication were sufficient?”

  “They’ll do.”

  Fett leaned back in his seat. “You intend to fight to regain political power?”

  “To regain a leadership role, Fett. The galaxy needs leadership.”

  “Yes … Where would you like me to take you so that you can begin?”

  Daala thought about it, about resources, about alliances that she had foolishly set aside years before. There really was only one answer. And she told him what it was.

  KLATOOINE

  NOW DRESSED APPROPRIATELY TO THE PLANET AND TERRAIN, CARRYING identification that would pass at least casual verification, Querdan Dei stood, inconspicuous, in the shadows of the awning of a tent from which a Klatooinian female sold chilled drinks and personal cooling devices to credulous offworlders. Dei bought another drink every half an hour so that the proprietor would not resent his continued presence.

  There was a broad strip of open sand before him, and on the other side of it the largest tent of the encampment, a canopy suited to a circus. It was the political center of the gathering, the place where the leaders of several disparate, half-cooperative, half-feuding rebellion movements were now trying to make themselves more attractive to the Galactic Alliance while maintaining an attitude of rugged independence. It was like a mating dance among unshaven human males, each trying to attract a female while intimidating rivals.

  The place was well defended. In addition to guards posted at intervals around its circumference, Dei saw small turbolaser cupolas at four points along its perimeter, sensor devices and sensor droids all around, and indications—from the way camp workers meticulously restored sand blown away by the winds—that there were probably additional sensors in a net buried just under the surface. Somewhere nearby, another tent would be loaded with monitoring stations where data from all those sensors would be under constant analysis. Dei suspected that the main tent’s interior would also feature shields, possibly as strong as those carried by a starfighter, projecting their protective fields in an overlapping pattern.

  Between Dei and the big tent, out on the hot open sands just short of the clear area maintained by guards, a group of ragged children, mostly Klatooinian, played. It was a local game called Return. Dei had learned about it this morning. The captain of one team, standing alone, would hurl a round ball to an ally in the crowd of other players. The receiver would then attempt to run it back to him through a gauntlet of opponents. The receiver could toss it to any ally except the captain, but there was a danger of it being intercepted, and when running with the ball, the carrier might be borne to the ground and drop the ball. If a member of the other team got the ball, play would stop and that player would become the captain for the next throw. Twice now guards had had to shoo the players back a few meters from the clear zone.

  Finally the party of politicians Dei had been waiting for arrived. He recognized the Solos, their Galactic Alliance guards … and, interestingly, the dome-topped astromech and gold protocol droid that had visited the Hapan landing craft the previous night. Preliminary research had told Dei that they belonged to the Solos. In addition there were several more heavily robed strangers, most wearing veils over their faces. They walked before, behind, and among the Solo family party, conversing with the Solos and their guards.

  Dei nodded. Probably the Hapan contingent. The Hapans’ security unit must have been directed to converse with the Alliance security agents, all very informal, causing trouble to an observer trying to sort out who was who.

  Dei reached up to his collar and, while innocuously scratching his neck, pressed a button on the comlink hidden beneath folds of cloth.

  As the Solos and Hapans entered the clear belt of sand, one of the Klatooinian players of the ball game strode up to the current captain, a red Twi’lek boy. The Klatooinian child growled angry words at him and snatched the ball, then pushed the captain down. His body language contemptuous, he hurled the ball away, paying no attention to direction. It went straight toward the Solos and Hapans. It hit the sand a few meters from the nearest of them and rolled onward.

  The party reacted much as Dei expected. The nearest veiled woman hurled herself on the ball. Veiled individuals and Alliance guards formed up in front of the Solos and three of the veiled Hapans. Not all of them interposed themselves between the errant ball and the individuals they were protecting; several turned outward, covering against possible attacks from other directions.

  Interestingly, the astromech, which had been in the midst of the pack of veiled individuals, maneuvered to be in front of one of the Hapans, and the protocol droid tottered to stand behind the same woman, its meta
l-plate hands up in a placating gesture, its voice dimly audible in a wail of unease. The woman the astromech had moved to protect turned and offered the protocol droid a few words—of reassurance, if her accompanying gesture was any indication. When she gestured, she was careful not to let her robe gape open too widely, and Dei had no opportunity to observe her left arm.

  The Klatooinian child advanced toward them all, speaking in the half-growling, half-barking language of his kind, gesturing angrily at the woman lying atop his ball. He ignored the angry calls and words being directed at him by the other players.

  Several members of the Solo–Hapan party laughed. Others, still on high alert, didn’t. The woman on the sand rose from atop the ball, her body language a bit sheepish, and kicked the ball so it rolled back to the boy. The boy retrieved it and ran back to his fellows, no longer aggressive, then handed it to the Twi’lek he’d shoved.

  The situation resolved, several members of the party continued on into the big tent. Others moved to take up guard positions around the site.

  The droids in particular interested Dei. The astromech had clearly moved to protect one of the Hapans. Why had it not moved to protect the Solos, its owners? Probably simply because it was farther from the Solos than the Hapan woman. It clearly had some regard for her survival. Odds were high that the woman it had sought to shield was Tenel Ka Djo, a personal friend of the Solos. This suggested an unusual assertiveness and courage on the part of the droid, but it was clearly not programmed for tactical thinking, else it would not have betrayed the identity of Tenel Ka in that fashion.

  Tenel Ka’s concern for the protocol droid was another point of interest. Droids that cared about a Hapan queen, a Hapan queen who cared about droids. The seed of a plan began to sprout in Dei’s mind.

  He lingered at the tent, bought another chilled drink. The ball game continued for a time, until its members began to drift off toward other diversions. At last, the only one left was the boy who had thrown the ball toward the Hapans.