Exile

by Aaron Allston

  He was happy. He could relax for a moment, and all he had to do at this point was make a covert search of the offices, find the display case, swap the amulet, and make his way to the ground again. Easy.

  Ben looked at the display case and his heart sank.

  It hadn’t taken long to find. The Tendrando offices all seemed to have been emptied by the hour, so there were no people to dodge. The display case was not in any of the individual executives’ offices, but in the central chamber, dominated by a big desk and a receptionist/protocol droid whose optics were unlit, indicating that it was in sleep mode.

  The chamber itself contained a dozen or so displays, chiefly statuettes and plaques commemorating unusually advantageous business deals made on Drewwa. Some of the items were unusual presents given to the local office, such as a set of tiny acrobat droids, each no taller than Ben’s hand was wide, even now doing tumbling routines on their shelf of the display case.

  But the transparisteel top had been carefully removed from the display case and the Amulet of Kalara was gone.

  The red velvet pillow it had rested on was still there, as was the silver-on-black sign next to it: AMULET OF KALARA. PRESENTED TO STONIAS LEEM BY THE GRATEFUL VICTORS OF THE INSURRECTION OF ILIABATH.

  But there was no amulet on the pillow itself. Instead there was a hand-lettered piece of flimsi. It read, I will return the Amulet to where it belongs. Be grateful that I spared your lives. It was signed, Faskus of Ziost.

  There was something else in the case, too. It was a trace of emotion Ben could detect through the Force, a sensation of happiness, glee. The gloating of a Sith lifetime had to have infused the amulet, and a little of that emotion had been left behind in the case.

  Ben sat on the carpet and tried to sort out what it all meant.

  Someone else had stolen the amulet he meant to steal. That wasn’t fair.

  And it had to have been done recently, within the last couple of hours. If it had been done yesterday or earlier, the local authorities would have been here to investigate already, and the case wouldn’t have looked like this. It would be closed up, the piece of flimsi removed.

  Ben closed his eyes and tried to feel something, anything about the theft. But he couldn’t. There was no tragedy here to detect, no vast outpouring of emotion concerning the amulet. He could not see the perpetrator’s face or get a sense of his spirit. And he could detect no one in these offices, meaning that the thief had already made good his escape. With only a few minutes’ head start, he could be anywhere in the city, and he could have had much more than a few minutes.

  Ben opened his eyes and sighed. He’d failed. He’d failed Jacen, and now all the Jedi were at risk.

  No, wait a minute—maybe he hadn’t, not yet. Perhaps, instead of slinking home and admitting to failure, he could continue the mission, improvising. He might be able to follow this Faskus and take the amulet back from him.

  But where would Faskus take it? Ben took out his data-pad and accessed files that he hadn’t read before, those pertaining to the amulet’s origin and history.

  The main file on the subject said that it had been fabricated on Ziost some two thousand standard years ago, and that the dark side energies invested in it kept it from corroding or showing wear. Ben frowned. Jacen didn’t believe in dark side energies, or the dark side of the Force per se, and so Ben didn’t, either … but so many of the Jedi they dealt with were so old-fashioned on that point that Jacen did grudgingly employ terms like light side and dark side to communicate with them effectively.

  Stolen by a man from Ziost, crafted on Ziost—Faskus was obviously going to take the amulet back to Ziost.

  Ben recognized the name of that planet, and it gave him a little shiver. Ziost was the homeworld of the Sith—the species that had given their name to the later order. In subsequent centuries Sith referred to Force-users of any species who followed the order’s traditions.

  His datapad yielded a little information on Ziost, and Ben was surprised to discover that, as galactic distances went, Ziost was not far from Almania—a few hours’ ride away by shuttle. But no shuttles would be going there; worlds noted for their inhospitable weather and ancient horrors just were not common tourist destinations. He’d have to acquire transport some other way.

  But what to do now? Leave the display case as he’d found it?

  Jacen had said that his core mission was to put the amulet in his, Jacen’s, hands. If it were reported stolen, it might be harder to acquire. If the authorities picked up this Faskus of Ziost, it might be very hard indeed.

  Ben pulled his copy of the amulet from an inner pocket and laid it on the velvet pillow. He took several looks at the holo of the real amulet on his datapad and was careful to arrange the fake and its chain on the pillow just as they appeared on the image. Then he took Faskus’s note and remounted the display case top.

  There. Now no one would know that the real amulet had been stolen, unless they took out the fake and studied it. Maybe not even then; it was clear the local Tendrando office had no idea what they’d had, and perhaps they’d never recorded enough information about it to tell the real one from a fake.

  Ben spent extra minutes covering his tracks. At the viewport by which he’d entered the offices, he used the Force to untie the cable and drag it in to him, then closed the viewport again.

  Now there would be no sign that any unauthorized person had been here.

  He left the offices by the front way, summoned the turbolift, and descended to street level.

  Two minutes after Ben’s departure, the protocol droid in the reception area came alive. Its optics lit up, and its head swiveled to look at the display case. The image its visual sensors picked up was compressed and transmitted over a specific comm frequency.

  Kilometers away, at the Drewwa Spaceport, a hundred-meter-long bulk freighter rested in one of the outlying hangars. In the days it had been in port, the inoffensive-looking vessel had attracted little attention, her minimal crew carrying on a small-scale disinterested trade in droids from discontinued lines.

  But the squat, inelegant vessel would have attracted more interest had anyone gone aboard to examine her. Inspectors would have found that half the cargo bays had been converted to starfighter bays, and that the black-and-bronze starfighters were well known on the space lanes as pirate vehicles.

  The freighter’s name of record was false. Her transponder indicated that she was the High Tide, while her crew, and victims, knew her as the Boneyard Rendezvous.

  The comm board’s computer received the distant droid’s message, interpreted it, and popped a text message onto the display of its captain, whose name was Byalfin Dyur. Dyur, an underfed-looking Bothan with lovely bronze-colored fur, looked away from his holodrama and read aloud to the other crew members on the bridge: “Red Braid in motion. Tracker activated. Confirm handoff.” He sat back and sighed, glad that the stopover on this overly lawabiding moon would not be protracted.

  Hirrtu, his comm officer, tail gunner, and cook—a Rodian who spent every spare credit having every fifth scale on his body dyed from a light green to a dark blue, giving him a curiously dotted appearance—jabbered a question.

  “Yes, answer,” Dyur said. “ ‘The captain and crew of the Boneyard Rendezvous acknowledge that your safe, undemanding part in this escapade is at an end, and accept handover of responsibility. Sleep untroubled, and know that parties far more interesting than you shall carry this torch evermore.’ Got it?”

  Hirrtu stared at him for a few moments. Then he typed HANDOVER ACKNOWLEDGED on his comm board and sent the message.

  Dyur sighed and returned his attention to the holodrama. “There is no immortal spark within you.”

  Hirrtu nodded, admission that the captain was correct.

  “Track the boy. I want to know where he is every minute of the day.”

  chapter twelve

  BOTHAWUI SYSTEM GALACTIC ALLIANCE FRIGATE SHAMUNAAR

  The door into the command center slid open and
the admiral, a paunchy, middle-aged man who nonetheless looked commanding in his white uniform, entered, flanked by two junior-officer escorts. One of them called out, “Admiral on the bridge!”

  Shamunaar’s commander, a stocky Devaronian, leapt up from his chair and saluted. “Admiral Klauskin. Happy to have you aboard.”

  Klauskin returned the salute, his gesture as crisp as his uniform. “Captain Biurk. Good to meet you.” He shook the captain’s hand and glanced around the bridge. “We need to speak in private.”

  “At once.”

  Biurk led the admiral through another door into his private office, which was decorated in shades of deep brown and tan. Rather than take his customary chair behind the desk, he stood by one of the two chairs in front of it and gestured for the admiral to take the other.

  Klauskin sat and, as Biurk seated himself, handed the captain a data card. “These aren’t exactly orders,” he said, “but authorization for you to take my verbal orders. Shamunaar has been detached from ordinary fleet activities and assigned to the Galactic Alliance Guard on a special assignment.”

  “Sir, I don’t understand. Shamunaar’s current assignment is anything but ordinary. We’re coordinating all the Alliance’s reconnaissance and fighting forces in the Botha-wui system, and we’re charged with preventing the Bothan fleets from secretly leaving the system. Our assignment is strategic … and important.”

  “It would have been, if you hadn’t been betrayed.”

  That caused Biurk’s spine to stiffen. “Betrayed how?”

  “The GAG has been assigned this mission because certain portions of the military have been compromised,” Klauskin said. “Not too surprising in a time of war, of course. I’ve spent the last several weeks on special assignment, ferreting out traitors and planning a response.”

  Biurk had heard that Klauskin had been hastily removed from his command of the task force at Corellia awhile back. There had been rumors that he had experienced some sort of breakdown … but any sudden reassignment of a commander was likely to spawn such rumors.

  “Here’s the situation,” Klauskin continued. “Several of the officers under your command are actually in Bothan employ. On the day the Bothans decide to send their fleet into action, they’re going to do whatever it takes to keep Alliance forces from discovering that fact … until too late.

  “But we’re not going to let that happen. You’ll supply me with a list of all officers under your command, and I’ll indicate which ones are the traitors. We’ll reorganize their duty shifts to leave each of them unobserved and unprotected at specific times, at which point we’ll capture or eliminate them. Then we, by which I mean Shamunaar, will take the observation zone they would have been covering—we’ll plug the hole their absence leaves.”

  “Understood. But, sir, I know many of these officers very well. They’re not traitors.”

  “I’m sure the ones you personally vouch for are completely loyal. When you give me the list of officers, be sure to indicate which ones you’re certain of.” Klauskin leaned forward to give Biurk a sympathetic clap on the shoulder. “I know this comes as a shock, son. But we’ll get it straightened out, very quietly, and it won’t reflect on your service record.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  DREWWA, MOON OF ALMANIA

  Ben spent the better part of two days planning his trip to Ziost. In that time, he performed his credcard-stealing technique twice more, and was pleased to discover that it became easier, smoother, and less detectable each time.

  He did do some planetary database research to find out whether any shuttle carrier or excursion service made trips to Ziost. The answer was a definite, unequivocal no—since Ziost did not appear in any public database. Still, its coordinates were in the files Jacen had given him.

  Nor was there, as far as he could determine, much smuggling activity here—there was nothing to suggest that desperate shipowners, as his uncle Han had been so many years ago, lurked in every tavern, willing to take aspiring young Jedi wherever they needed to go.

  Well, then, he’d just have to steal a vehicle.

  He knew that wouldn’t be as simple as sneaking onto some flight line, jumping into a B-wing, and taking off. Vehicles had security codes that made stealing them difficult.

  Security around the spaceport was not exactly lax, but neither was it set up to deter a Jedi. The chief danger of detection he faced lay with the small security droids used all across the base—half the height of a human, spindly, with conical head/sensor packages atop a humanoid arms-and-legs arrangement. Scores of these droids wandered individually across the spaceport environs, sometimes hiding in the thrusters of hangared vehicles, sometimes riding on the backs of luggage-delivery vehicles. Ben watched them for an hour or so through the viewport in the waiting lounge outside the secure areas and noticed that they did not react to people wearing the bright yellow jumpsuits of spaceport personnel.

  That knowledge made it easier. A touch of Jedi telekinesis kept doors from closing and latching firmly behind port personnel entering secure areas. Ben wandered through, eventually finding a locker room and helping himself to a jumpsuit and the corresponding transponder that kept security droids from paying attention to its wearer.

  That gave him the freedom to walk around the port for a day. He still kept well away from most human personnel; they might ask questions about an obviously offworld teenage boy doing what looked like a thorough inventory of all craft on the base. But droids were no longer an issue.

  It didn’t take him too long to find the craft he thought best suited to carry him to Ziost. It was an old Y-wing starfighter, carefully maintained, its hull paint unscarred. It rested beneath an environment blanket covered by a thick layer of dust.

  The hangar’s door computer listed the owner as Hemalian Barkid of Drewwa and indicated that his last flight with the Y-wing had been half a standard year earlier. A little time on the planetary net tracked down personal data for Hemalian Barkid. He was an employee of Trang Robotics, and messages to him were now being forwarded to Kuat. Clearly he had been assigned offworld and left his personal vehicle behind.

  The Y-wing’s astromech was nowhere to be seen, and its weapons systems were dismantled and missing, probably due to local ordinances about private citizens having lasers, ion cannons, and proton torpedoes. But its hyperdrive was intact, and the little glow on the control board Ben could see through the cockpit canopy made it clear that the computers were charged—probably diagnostics running on a battery.

  And this, at last, told Ben what he needed to do to get the Y-wing operational. “In the field, when you can’t do something yourself,” his mother had told him once, “your obvious solution is to find someone who can do it for you.”

  He downloaded contact information for Hemalian Barkid into his datapad, then spent several more hours searching on the planetary database for more information he needed and letters like the one he had to write. Carefully, doggedly, he extracted a fact here, a sentence there, and ended up with something that, to his eye, seemed authentic.

  From: Hemalian Barkid

  Account 7543 BH (Hangar 113)

  To: Hangar Manager, Drewwa Spaceport

  I will be returning home tomorrow. I’d really like my Y-wing to be ready when I get there. Please do a power-up, standard maintenance check, and astromech analysis of the computer, particularly the nav computer, and bill at your standard rate to my account.

  It was that last part that Ben thought would sell the spaceport managers on this task. Everyone said that people loved doing last-minute tasks at their standard rates, because last-minute standard rates were always three or four times what standard rates would be if arranged in plenty of time.

  Ben sent the message from the hangar door computer, which could plausibly have received and relayed the message from the real Barkid. He took his pocket holocam, the one he’d been carrying ever since his mission with Jacen to Adumar, and affixed it to the rafters, pointed down at the Y-wing’s security
access panel, then made sure it would accept commands transmitted from his datapad. Finally he restored the environment blanket to the top of the Y-wing, smoothed out the dust as much as he could, and made himself a hiding hole behind some discarded plasteel crates to wait.

  It didn’t take too long. Three hours later, the hangar door rolled open and two shapes entered—a female human mechanic in the standard yellow jumpsuit and an R2 astromech.

  Ben’s heart sank. He’d assumed, based on how automated things were around here, that an operation as simple as a routine vehicle check would be handled by a mechanic droid. He’d planned to wait until the droid was finished with its task and then cut its head off, preventing it from leaving with the R2.

  But he couldn’t cut the woman’s head off.

  Well, technically he could. He just shouldn’t. Though if it came down to a question of doing that or failing in this mission—an important mission—what would he do? He frowned, struggling with the answer.

  The woman—thirtyish, muscular, dark hair up under a yellow cap—swept the environment blanket off the Y-wing, sending a tremendous amount of dust into the air. She immediately began sneezing. Her R2 unit tweetled at her.

  As the airborne dust reached Ben, he felt like sneezing, too. He held a finger under his nose and scowled at the woman.

  As the woman moved up to the cockpit, Ben activated the holocam. The R2 unit tweetled again, spinning the dome-like top portion of its body around, its sensors obviously searching for something. Ben crouched further, as if it would make him even more invisible.

  “Don’t be silly, Shaker,” the woman said. “What do you bet the owner has anti-theft sensors set up? We probably set one off.”

  Mollified, the R2 unit tweetled again and returned its attention to its companion.

  In a matter of a few minutes the woman punched her security code into the cockpit side panel, raising the canopy, and then used the hangar’s magnetic winch to lift up the astromech and lower it into its berth behind the cockpit. Ben watched as she undogged side panels along the Y-wing’s fuselage and plugged her own oversized datapad into them, one by one, checking readings as she went. As the R2 went through its own series of checks and analyses, the woman left the hangar for a few minutes; she returned behind the controls of a small fuel tanker and proceeded to refuel the starfighter.