She waved as if to indicate she didn’t know, but her gesture was oddly graceful. Her voice was low and mellow when she spoke. “You don’t need to scan my orders.”
“I don’t need to scan your orders.”
“I’m here on special assignment. If you delay me, the general will be angry.”
“The general will be angry.”
“In fact, it might be better if you forgot you ever saw me.”
He nodded, his eyes blank. “Better.”
Jysella passed him and breathed a sigh of relief. Waiting for days on Koval Station, gathering information on weapons-platform shift changes and security measures, had paid off. Now she was aboard the platform and, for the moment, undetected.
With luck and skill, she’d be able to accomplish her mission here and tip the balance of any engagement that might threaten the mistress of the true Jedi Order.
CRYSTAL VALLEY
Atop a crystal sand dune overlooking the outskirts of the township of Crystal Valley, Luke lay prone and studied the town through his macrobinoculars. The sun’s dim violet rays offered no comfort; the sand was far more successful at affecting him, leaching heat from his body despite his insulating layers of clothes.
He lowered the macrobinoculars. “Standard pump station access building about a third of the way in. Most of the accesses will be in its lower levels. There are supposed to be emergency exit hatches outside the building, but I can’t make them out.”
To Luke’s left, also prone, was Ben, and beyond him lay Kandra. She studied her datapad. “I can’t get into the municipal system. Comm waves are all fouled up. Part of the information blackout I told you about, I’ll bet.”
The Gamorrean lying to her left grunted at length.
Kandra stared at him. “No, we shouldn’t leave. I want to get recordings of this Abeloth.”
Luke shook his head. “They might be the last recordings you ever make. You should get back to Hweg Shul, edit your story, and prepare to file it when I give you the go-ahead … or when you’ve heard bad news about me.”
“But we don’t know this is where she is. If Beurth and I leave, you might not be able to tell us where you’re going next.”
Luke looked down at the town. “No, she’s here.”
Kandra gave him a dubious look. “How do you know? The Force?”
“Not exactly. The tsils don’t understand directions the same way we do, don’t understand locations or map coordinates, but they have a concept of proximity. When I communed with them this morning before dawn, the ones nearest here were uneasy, if that’s an applicable word. Almost mournful. I think she’s using her dark-side powers to create sorrow in those around her, and it’s spilling over to the spook-crystals.”
Kandra sighed. “Esoteric stuff like that is a very hard sell to the viewing public.”
Ben snorted. “Work an advertisement for droch spray into your story instead. Nam Chorios is the only planet where they need it, but I bet you can use scare tactics to sell it all over the galaxy.”
“Good idea … so what do we do next?”
To Luke’s right, Vestara lowered her own macrobinoculars but did not take her eyes off the town. “We wait for the next big dust flurry and sneak in. We patch directly into the city computer network’s land cables and find out where those hatches are. Then we go in. The Skywalkers and I, I mean. Not you, unless you’re determined to get killed.”
Kandra started to reply, but Luke interrupted. “You can have it both ways, Kandra. Get your recording of Abeloth, do us another big favor, and stay safe.”
She looked at him, suspicious. “How?”
“While we’re doing the network slicing, you and Beurth acquire us some extra comlinks and datapads. Plus, even more important, a few kilometers of shielded data cable. We’ll set up a series of data links to relay data out of the pumping station, and one on the surface, attached to a cable you run out beyond the comm jamming. We’ll get you some images of Abeloth; you stay outside the jamming range and leave with your prize.”
She thought about it. “Deal.”
* * *
An hour later one of the periodic dust storms rose, dropping visibility to a few meters. The five of them got up and headed into town. At its outskirts, along the lengthy back wall of a cu-pa stable, they found a municipal data and power junction box. Ben popped the cover and spliced into the datajacks.
In moments he found what they needed, an old emergency evacuation document including a map showing exit points from the pumping station. Luke chose the one that was least likely to be under observation at any time, a hatch located in the middle of a broad topato field. “We’ll rendezvous there in twenty minutes.”
It took Ben, Luke, and Vestara a total of two minutes to reach the field and sneak out to the hatch. The hatch, a durasteel disk with a weatherproof alphanumeric keypad and a large metal ring to dog and undog the lock, was the cap of a permacrete cylinder protruding about a meter above the ground.
Ben gave his father a curious look. “I was kind of expecting us to go to one of the other hatches and leave those two behind. To keep them safe.”
Luke gestured for him to get to work on the hatch security. “No, we actually need the relay setup I asked for. We do; the galaxy does.”
Vestara offered him a puzzled frown. “Why?”
“Jedi secret.”
She made a noise of exasperation. “Not exactly trusting of you.”
“Correction—Jedi Grand Master secret. You’ll notice I’m not telling Ben, either.”
Ben concentrated on the keypad embedded in the hatch surface. “My dad neglects and abuses me.”
“True,” Luke said. “And when you become a father, you’ll discover how much fun that is.”
Ten minutes later Kandra and Beurth arrived. Kandra carried a cloth bag bulging with what had to be small duraplast boxes. Beurth had, over his shoulder, a spool of cable half the height of a man. Both approached in bent-over, holodrama-spy fashion, though the ongoing dust storm made such a measure unnecessary.
Luke looked over their bounty. “Datapads and comlinks in the bag?”
Kandra nodded. “Brand new. We broke in the back of an electronics shop and robbed the place. Well, sort of robbed. We left all our credcoins and some generic credcards as payment.”
Luke unrolled the end of the cable from the spool and turned to Beurth. “Dig a little furrow—your boot heel will do fine—out to the edge of the field, then along any dirt or sand street, out to the edge of town. Then lay the first section of cable in that furrow and cover it over. I don’t want the cable to be visible to anyone in town. Then roll the spool out as far as the cable will go and attach the last datapad at that point.”
Beurth grunted, nodded, and got to work on his task.
“Got it.” Ben unhooked his datapad from the hatch’s exterior jack, then tapped an eight-digit code into the keypad. The hatch hissed. Ben grabbed the metal ring on top and pulled it open. Warm air flowed out.
Luke peered in, gauged which portions of the hatch’s permacrete cylinder were free of electronic housing boxes, and straightened. He unclipped his lightsaber and activated it, then pushed its tip slowly into the side of the permacrete, forcing a hole clean through the material.
Ben looked at him in mock irritation. “And if you were going to do that anyway, why did I go to all the trouble to break their security?”
“Trust me.”
“Grr.”
Luke switched his weapon off, replaced it on his belt, and threaded into the hole a length of Beurth’s cable about ten meters in length. “Use some space tape to affix that to the permacrete and disguise its presence. And plug up the hole I made.”
After Beurth’s return, once he and Kandra began the process of rolling the spool along the furrow and burying the cable, the Skywalkers and Vestara entered the hatch and pulled it closed behind them. Descending a ladder that was nothing but durasteel rungs stapled into the permacrete wall, they climbed down into the pump
ing station. Its floor, five meters below, was natural stone, a sloping tunnel left by water movement in ancient times.
Once he’d reached the floor, Luke used more tape to fix the cable to the wall and then spliced one of the datapads to its end. He spent a few minutes entering a simple comm program. Then he nodded. “We have confirmation from Kandra. They have the transmitter set up at the far end. We have reliable communications with the outside world for the time being.” He looked up at Vestara. “The Sith woman who attacked us—can you get a message to her or her colleagues?”
She gave him a startled look. “I’m not in contact with her. But I know all the normal protocols. Comm frequencies they monitor, alert codes my people customarily use. If I were to transmit a message a handful of ways, one or all of them would reach her.”
Luke handed her the datapad. “Please do. Tell them where we are and that Abeloth is here.”
She took the datapad but looked at him, uncertain.
“Come on, Vestara. You did summon the Sith to Nam Chorios, didn’t you? Because you knew that without the power they could muster, we could never contain and destroy her.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not angry, not disappointed. You made a tactically sound decision in the interest of the galaxy, in the face of what you thought of as a bad decision on my part. I’m not offering criticism. In fact, I was hoping you’d do that. I was counting on the Sith following us here for that purpose, but your involvement made sure that their arrival was faster and more certain.”
She turned her attention to the datapad and began entering a message. “My only concern was destroying Abeloth. I endangered myself by bringing the Sith here.”
“I know.”
Her task done, Vestara returned the datapad to Luke. He tucked the device and its cabling into a shadowy crease in the natural stone wall. Then he led the way down the tunnel.
KLATOOINE
IT WAS ALMOST A PICNIC. THE CREW OF THE CRYPTIC WARNING SAT ON a large flimsiplast blanket in the shadow cast by the ship. The ship itself, convincingly the color of local sand, could have been an unusually smooth boulder projecting up from the desert floor. The crew members were happy to bask in the desert heat if it meant some time outside the cramped conditions the ship had to offer.
Fardan operated the portable holoprojector lying at the center of the blanket. Above it materialized the familiar images of a protocol droid and an astromech. “These are designated See-Threepio and Artoo-Detoo. They’ve belonged to the Jedi Solo, and her father before her, for about sixty standard years. They appear in the background of a tremendous number of holorecordings about Han Solo and Leia Organa Solo, and the astromech with Jedi Master Skywalker. It’s not inconceivable, after all those decades, and knowing how the cultures we are studying are fond of pets of all sorts, that these two have been accorded special privileges.”
Dei nodded. “We’ll need money for bribes—money in excess of what we have available. Fardan, I want you to find nonessential systems aboard Cryptic Warning, redundant systems, any other items of value, and sell them in camp to give us some operating capital. Tooley, I need an explosive charge that will fit in these dimensions.” He passed a flimsi diagram over to his machinist and engineer. “At minimum, it needs to be able to burn to carbon any life-form within three to five meters. I don’t want an explosion throwing chunks in all directions—I want a burn.”
Tooley, a burly human male whose pallor suggested that this trip had seen his first-ever exposure to any sun, nodded. He studied the diagram. “I can do that.”
“I need it fast. End of day. Rumors are circulating around camp that things will be changing soon. It would be painful … fatally painful … if all these elements came together just in time for us to see the Queen Mother lift off and go home.”
Tooley gave his commander a steady look. “It’ll be today. I’ll have to scavenge one of our missiles and scale down the warhead charge.”
“Do it.”
Kyp Durron tucked his helmet under his arm and dropped to the sands, waving off the Klatooinian worker approaching with a ladder. A few meters away, the other members of his party likewise dropped from their X-wing cockpits, helmets in hand.
Sothais Saar, dark-haired, in a dark pilot’s jumpsuit instead of his preferred dark robes, was a face the Klatooinians and members of freedom movements present would recognize. One of the Jedi experts on slave-related activities in the galaxy, he sometimes appeared on HoloNet news broadcasts providing the Jedi perspective on slave traffic.
Bandy Geffer, earnest and young, had no such credentials. He was still an apprentice, would be for some time, but Kyp was confident from his performance during the Mandalorian assault on the Jedi Temple and from his role in the seizing of the Senate Building that he’d keep his cool in this volatile political environment.
The fourth Jedi, Raharra Lapti, dropped to the sand immediately behind Sothais. She’d been in the rear seat of his two-being trainer X-wing. She barely came up to Sothais’s pectorals, she was so young, and she wore Jedi robes rather than a pilot’s jumpsuit. Only the other three Jedi here knew that the lightsaber hanging from her belt was a training weapon, designed to shock rather than cut.
She was a young teenager, and she was Klatooinian, her skin more brown than green. Kyp knew she had been yanked from her fundamental training at the Jedi academy at Ossus and was years from being ready to be active in the field. But the political benefits of trotting a Klatooinian Jedi before a Klatooinian population had been too important to ignore.
She looked up at Sothais as if to make sure that it had been all right for her to jump down without waiting for permission. Sothais gave her a reassuring smile.
“Kyp! Master Durron.” That was Leia, hurrying toward the landing zone, an apologetic smile on her face. Han trotted along just behind her. “I’m sorry we weren’t here when you landed. I was delayed by, um, significant developments.”
As she reached him, Kyp stooped to kiss her hand, then smirked at Han. “What sort of significant developments?”
She retrieved her hand and fetched a datapad from her pouch. “It’s already been broadcast. I recorded.” She brought up a holocam recording with a Klatooinian male—Padnel Ovin, whom Kyp recognized from his last briefing—at the center of the image.
Leia advanced the recording past what had to be introductory remarks, then let it play at normal speed. Padnel’s voice was somber, half mellow and half growl. “… can admire and respect our predecessors without adhering to the notion that they are perfect. All sapient beings are imperfect; we can only strive for improvement, for ourselves and our fellows. In that spirit, and while bearing all love and respect for my brother Grunel, longtime leader of the Sapience Defense Front, I must still condemn his destruction of the frigate Fireborn—as a waste of more innocent lives than guilty, as a step backward in our search for legitimacy. The freedom into which I wish to lead my people means more than the right to govern our borders and guide the lives of our young; it means freedom from the terror that can be visited upon us, or that we can visit upon others, in times of anger and despair. Let us not—”
Leia muted the speech.
Kyp snorted, amused. “Long-winded for a warrior.”
“True.” Leia snapped the datapad shut and replaced it in her pouch. “The price we pay for living up to a civilized standard. But what it means is that instead of trotting the four of you in front of the negotiators as an additional lure, saying Here’s what you get if you fall in line, we can show you off as the Jedi assigned to Klatooine. I can announce your posting here, and the transmission of the planetary membership application, all tonight.”
Kyp noted the position of the sun, not far above the horizon. “Which isn’t too far off. Does it get cooler?”
“It does. Come on back to the Falcon in the meantime and we’ll cool you off even sooner. And you can introduce us to your young Jedi here.”
Elsewhere in camp, Allana led her retinue, the droids once again wit
h her, in another round of exploration.
This wasn’t like the other times, though. For one thing, the camp was very noisy, arguments and discussions going on everywhere, the people of the encampment showing the kind of energy they normally demonstrated only after the sun went down and the breezes became cooler. Allana knew it had to do with that broadcast, but it all seemed so silly. Everyone knew that blowing up innocent people was a bad thing to do; why couldn’t they just say so from the start?
The other reason things were different was because Allana wasn’t just wandering. She was looking for someone—the man with the aura of darkness about him. If she couldn’t see him, perhaps she could feel him.
As she hurried, Javon had to stretch his legs a little to keep up. “Looking for something in particular?”
“No.” She tried to make the lie convincing. “My mother says this is all going away soon. I want to see more of it before it does.”
“Ah.”
Allana felt a little disappointment that she couldn’t confide in Javon. He was nice enough, but a typical grown-up. He wouldn’t take her seriously if she told him about the man she sought. And in the unlikely event that he did, his by-the-book security measures might foul everything up.
Leia would take her seriously, but probably wouldn’t agree with Allana’s feeling that the dreams meant that she, Allana, had to be the one to jump on the fiery man. Leia would try to find some other way to do things, a way that would protect Allana. Allana was sure that would mean her not being there to protect her mother.
She thought that maybe this was why the Jedi traveled alone or in pairs. That way nobody needed to ask permission or arrange things with groups. Everything was faster. Just walking around the camp now would be faster if it were only her and Anji.
Allana led them around a corner in the pathways between tents. Hurrying to catch up, Javon broke into her thoughts. “You’re leaving your droids behind.”
“They’re too slow.” Allana stopped and looked back, impatient for R2-D2 and C-3PO to rejoin them. “They should go back to the Falcon.”
Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Conviction Page 33