Exile

by Aaron Allston

  There was no answer. Lavint relaxed.

  Her eyes closed, and within two minutes she was snoring.

  chapter seventeen

  ZIOST

  Every morning Ben awoke with the memory of the voices in his ears. Some part of his mind tried to listen to them, to puzzle out what they were saying. The rest of him worked harder to avoid comprehending. He knew, deep down, that if he listened long enough to understand, he’d want to do what they told him, and that what they told him would be very, very wrong.

  So sleep was not restful for Ben, even on the nights when his fire burned through all the darkness hours and Kiara huddled against him, sad but trusting.

  During those nights, he often awoke to a sense of worry or a beep from Shaker to see eyes gleaming from the other side of the fire. Nocturnal predators, Jacen would have called them, and Ben could feel them in the Force. They were big, powerful presences there, suffused with energy … and wrongness. He could feel that they were as twisted as the blighted trees of this place.

  So far they hadn’t attacked, but Ben made sure that Kiara was never more than a step or two from him—except when either of them needed to perform some private business in the trees. Then he made sure Shaker stayed near the girl. The droid’s presence seemed not to violate her sense of privacy.

  There was another presence, too. The day after Ben found Kiara, at about noon, they had stopped for a quick meal of canned rations. Ben sat, consuming some grease-packed meat product, and eating quickly so that he wouldn’t taste the stuff. Wary of the wild beasts he still had not seen, he had his physical and Force-awareness stretched to their limits, and abruptly he was certain that someone was looking at him.

  He stood, looking around, and grabbed his lightsaber, but nothing approached. And after a few moments the sensation faded.

  The next day, again at planetary noon, it happened once more, this time as they reached the remains of what must have once been a road. Now trees protruded through it, but there were long stretches where it remained flat and level, and Shaker could make much better time. The astromech had just assumed its tripodal wheeled configuration for greater speed when Ben felt the eyes upon him again. Once more, after less than a minute, the sensation faded.

  The next day at noon, he was waiting for the sensation, and it did not fail him. In the few seconds he had, he sought the viewer through the Force.

  And he was successful. Whoever was staring at him was doing so from straight up. Ben peered up through the canopy of leafless branches. But there was nothing for him to see, just the sun gleaming dimly through a layer of clouds. He said, “Shaker, passive sensors only, look straight up.”

  The astromech chirped an affirmative.

  Again the sensation faded. Ben pulled out his datapad. “Did you see anything?”

  I DETECT A FAINT ION TRAIL.

  “The ion trail—the kind that a TIE fighter would leave?”

  CORRECT.

  So the person who had blown up both the YT-2400 and the Y-wing was shadowing them. But why—and, just as importantly, how?

  Ben spent part of the afternoon disassembling and checking every piece of equipment he had taken from Faskus’s camp, especially the electronics. He found no mystery transmitters in or on them.

  There was Faskus’s datapad, of course, and it, like Ben’s, was a short-range transmitter. To determine whether it was transmitting to their shadow, Ben would have to catch it in the act—its programming could cause it to transmit a single recognition pulse at great intervals, and Ben would have to have Shaker listen on all comm frequencies all the time to detect it.

  But instead he could simply remove the battery from the device, restoring it on those occasions he needed to consult its files. That he did. Then, no more informed than before, he led the way onward, through the snow and the twisted trees.

  STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL

  The hologram of the scrawny, bronze-hued Bothan flickered and jittered. Lumiya pretended not to notice. She’d chosen Dyur and crew in part because their ship had a holocomm, but it clearly wasn’t a very good one. “Right on time,” she said, forcing a note of commendation into her voice. “What do you have to report?”

  “Faskus is dead,” Dyur said. “The boy and the astromech appear to be heading toward one of the old settlements. And there’s a complication.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It looks as though Faskus took his little girl along. She’s still alive. The boy has taken her with him.”

  Lumiya sat back and considered. That was … unfortunate.

  The orders she had meticulously structured with Jacen didn’t specify what Ben should do in such a case. And while rescuing a little girl might initially give him a warm feeling of satisfaction, continuing to protect her had to be a considerable drain on his attention and energies. Taking her along was not survival thinking, not mission-success thinking, not Sith thinking.

  And the boy must know it. He was just too much like his father.

  And that meant he’d never be good Sith material.

  “Kill them,” she said.

  “Consider it done.”

  “I’ll consider it done when you report that it’s done. Anything else?”

  “No, my lady.”

  Lumiya made a subtle gesture with her fingers, which would be beneath the view Dyur had of her, and the hologram disappeared.

  She winced just a bit, though her servitor droids would not be able to see it beneath her facial scarf. She’d just ordered the death of Luke Skywalker’s son. One more reason for him to kill her if he found out about it.

  Ah, well. Perhaps he never would. Even if he did, this was all about Jacen, and now Jacen would not be saddled with an apprentice with a fuzzy, sentimental mind.

  ZIOST

  The next day, at midmorning, they found the first location marked RUINS on Faskus’s map. It was a mass of collapsed stone—dressed stone blocks that had once formed the wall of a small citadel before some tremendous force had pushed them over. Ben found weathering on all exposed surfaces of the stones, but no sign of blaster scoring, melting, or other recognizable indicators of violence.

  And he found no way into the mass. Neither his eyes nor his Force-senses suggested a place he might enter to find intact chambers, nor did Shaker’s sensors.

  “We’ll rest and eat here,” he said. “Shaker, set up to detect ion trails and communications, please.”

  The droid acknowledged with a musical chirp. And fewer than ten minutes later, just as Ben was finishing a chilled can of nerf steak stew, Shaker beeped again, a complex series of notes.

  Ben pulled out his datapad and read:

  YOU JUST SENT A COMM SIGNAL.

  Ben scowled. “I did?”

  OF LESS THAN ONE HUNDREDTH OF A SECOND’S DURATION.

  “Was there a return signal?”

  NO.

  Ben glanced at the time in the corner of the datapad’s screen. There were two listings there, one local and one Coruscant, and the local time was exactly one standard hour short of noon.

  Could his own datapad be betraying him? Or some other item of his gear? Quickly he unpacked everything from both backpacks, segregating the items into two stacks—everything he had examined before, and everything he hadn’t. He attacked the second pile, minutely scrutinizing each item.

  He could probably find out the next day if his datapad were the tracking device. Assuming that the communications were taking place at the same time each day, he’d set his datapad aside just before noon, and he and Shaker would move several meters away. If the datapad sent a signal, Shaker could determine that it was that device and not something else on Ben’s person.

  He methodically checked all the other items, too, to the point of shaking out his belt pouch over the pile of goods to make sure it was empty.

  It wasn’t. Nothing more fell out, but the bottom of the pouch sagged oddly in his hand. The pouch seemed to weigh more than it should, if only fractionally.

  H
e turned the pouch inside out and found the tracking device.

  It looked like a small steel marble, albeit one with spindly spider legs that were threaded into the cloth of the pouch, holding it securely in place. One leg stretched to a length of six or seven centimeters.

  Ben stared at it, perplexed. When had this been planted on him? Or, more to the point—since it looked like a mobile unit—when had it crawled into his pouch? It could have been at any point between the Jedi Temple and his arrival at Faskus’s camp. His mother’s words about spies accomplishing their tasks without ever being noticed came back to Ben, and he smiled. “Good job, spy,” he said.

  Then he felt the eyes in the sky again. He checked his datapad. High noon exactly.

  Except this time, the sensation of being watched did not fade after a few seconds. It intensified, and Ben could feel something with it, emotions of wicked amusement, a desire to commit mayhem.

  He glanced up. There was a tiny dot up in the sky, in the center of the cloud cover blocking the worst of the sun’s rays from reaching the ground. “Shaker,” he said, “get under cover!”

  Kiara, who had been disinterestedly finishing her can of spiceloaf sausages, looked up. She hadn’t said much in the last few days and didn’t say anything now, but she hopped up as Ben reached her.

  That was when the first streaks of laserfire scorched the ground. Green bolts strafed the stand of stones a few meters to Ben’s right. Kiara shrilled a scream. Ben caught her up and leapt leftward, toward the near line of trees, sixty or more meters away.

  The TIE fighter screamed past and began to loop around for another strafing run. Ben saw it as a blur—it was black, with some details, such as the ribs separating the panels on the solar wing arrays, in gleaming bronze.

  He stopped. If he continued toward the trees, he’d be caught out in the open for the next pass. He reversed direction and ran toward the mound of stones; it offered the only protection close enough to reach.

  He leapt behind a partially intact stand of rocks and peeked over. The TIE fighter was low, barely fifty meters aboveground, and coming straight at them. Shaker, waddling back toward the flat roadway, was an easy target, but the starfighter pilot ignored the droid.

  Ben ducked down again as the TIE fired. The stones immediately to his right rocked and fell backward, landing next to him, propelled by the tremendous energy of the fighter’s turbolasers. Black smoke, accompanied by a sharp smell, curled up from the points of impact.

  He glanced down at Kiara. She was huddled against the ground—against the stone surface she lay on, rather—and her face was turned upward, her eyes full of fear.

  For a moment Ben was somewhere else, in a hundred other places with shivering refugees as squadrons, fleets of TIE fighters roaring past overhead. So that was the Empire, he thought distantly. Jacen had shown him that there were some things to admire about the old Empire, including the unwavering fashion with which it had imposed order, but now he could feel what that order was like from the other side.

  He shook his head to clear the images away and looked up. He found the TIE fighter coming around for another pass. He reached for Faskus’s blaster pistol—

  It was still out there on the snow, where he’d dropped it when examining his possessions. He bit off a curse and reached for it. Though he’d never summoned his lightsaber or any other object to himself from that distance, the blaster flew to his hand and he took aim with it.

  Then he shook his head. A blaster pistol against an armored starfighter? He had exactly no chance to harm his opponent. He needed bigger weapons—

  He needed the Force. He was a Jedi, after all, even if only an apprentice, and the Force was his great weapon, his great armor.

  He looked around for a missile, then realized he was surrounded by them. He closed his eyes and concentrated as he had the other day, when freeing Shaker from the Y-wing.

  He heard Kiara’s gasp as the stone that had just fallen over rose a few centimeters into the air.

  The TIE fighter came on. Ben couldn’t so much sense it as he could sense the pilot at the heart of its ball-shaped cockpit. He felt the stone, he felt the pilot … and he tried to send one to the other.

  Sluggishly, the stone rose into the path of the TIE fighter. Ben heard the scream of the lasers firing again and opened his eyes in time to see one green bolt hitting the wall far to his left, the other hitting the floating stone dead center, shattering it into a thousand shards.

  The TIE fighter veered but could not get entirely clear of the cloud of debris. Ben heard the high-pitched klunks and pings as the left solar array wing hit the shards.

  The TIE fighter suddenly gained a lot of altitude, circled once, and then climbed again until it was out of sight.

  Ben looked down at Kiara again. “We’re fine for now,” he said. “The bad man went away.”

  She nodded, half believing.

  “No, really.” He paused, trying to think of what to say to convince her. Then he leaned down and embraced her, felt her shaking. “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

  Her reply was muffled: “Will he come back?”

  “Yes, he will. But next time I’ll be ready for him.”

  “Why does he want to shoot me?”

  “Shoot you?” Ben drew back to look at her. “He doesn’t want to shoot you. He wants to shoot me.”

  She shook her head, solemn. “No. He shot the Black-tooth while I was inside. That’s how Daddy got hurt. Daddy said they wanted to shoot him, but now they want to shoot me. They want me to be dead.”

  “No, they don’t.”

  “You wanted it.” Her tone wasn’t even accusing, just hurt.

  “No, I didn’t. I just …” Ben paused to try to sort his words out. “I’m on an important mission, and I thought that leaving you, even leaving you to die, would make things work out better.”

  “You changed your mind?”

  “I did. I was wrong.”

  Suddenly Ben felt dizzy. He sat down on the stone beside Kiara.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  He couldn’t tell her, though he had a sense of it. He’d done just what Jacen had been doing, deciding that one thing was more important than another, one goal more important than one life, and he’d been too ready to sacrifice one, not willing enough to try to protect both.

  He’d been wrong. Perhaps, sometimes, Jacen had been wrong, too.

  Ben shook his head. No, Jacen was more than twice Ben’s age. He was older, wiser, more powerful. He wouldn’t make that kind of mistake, ever.

  Unless he was human.

  Shaker’s trilled query jarred Ben from his thoughts. “We’re all right,” he called out. “Be with you in a minute.”

  ZIOST ORBIT

  BONEYARD RENDEZVOUS

  Dyur looked at the helmeted face in the display and couldn’t keep from laughing. “He did what?”

  The person he addressed, a man anonymous in the uniform of a TIE fighter pilot—though this uniform was bronze rather than black—sounded abashed. “He threw a rock at me.”

  “And now you’re running back to us.”

  “It’s not like that, Captain. He used Jedi magic to hurl a quarter-ton slab of stone at me. If I hadn’t hit the stone with my lasers, he’d have brought me down.”

  “Ah. Well, that is different.”

  “Orders, sir?”

  Dyur’s voice turned hard, and like any Bothan who intended to sound angry, his tone became very fearsome indeed. “Keldan, you should have gone back immediately and finished him. Without wavering, without asking. Now you won’t get the chance, or the bonus for the kill. Your orders are to report back immediately. Myrat’ur will go down tomorrow at the regular time and finish the job.”

  The pilot sounded appropriately chastised and resentful. “Yes, sir.”

  “We don’t reward foul-ups here, Keldan. Boneyard out.”

  GYNDINE SYSTEM, TENDRANDO REFUELING AND REPAIR STATION COCKPIT OF THE MILLENNIUM FALCON

 
Han finished the preflight checkup.

  Lando’s repair workers appeared to have done a great job. All systems checked out as functioning optimally—except, of course, for the occasional fluctuations in the communications among the vehicle’s droid brains, which were so idiosyncratic, and which interfaced in what was partly a self-taught, self-programmed fashion, that the efficiency of their intercommunications varied anywhere from eerily high to catastrophically low, like Jedi triplets who could go from an undefeatable battle array to a squabbling trio in seconds.

  He flexed his left shoulder experimentally. It felt good. He was healed.

  Everything was fixed. But nothing was tested.

  He forced a crooked smile for Leia, who was once more in the copilot’s seat. “Ready to go, sweetheart?”

  She finished strapping in. “Ready.”

  “Lando?”

  From behind him, in the navigator’s seat, came Lando’s voice: “Oh, I suppose. It just won’t be the same, not being able to order you around.”

  “Leia, remind me to get the navigator’s seat rigged with an ejector option.”

  “You didn’t ask me.” C-3PO’s voice sounded just a touch petulant. The protocol droid stood in the entryway to the cockpit.

  “That’s because I’m looking forward to hitting the thrusters and hearing you roll around for a while.” Han brought the Falcon up on repulsors and sent her gliding forward to the exit from the repair hangar. “Which is going to happen in about five seconds.”

  “Oh. Oh, dear. Perhaps I should find a seat.”

  “Two seconds.” They passed through the atmosphere containment field at the end of the hangar and emerged into gleaming starfield. Han heeled over, putting the stars to starboard and the night side of Gyndine to port, and, despite his words, began a slow, smooth acceleration into a sample high orbit.

  The engines sounded sweeter than they had in quite a while. He grinned, experimentally increasing the thrust, accelerating the transport faster and sending her up into an ever-higher orbit. “Not bad, Lando.”

  “One of the virtues of being rich. You can afford to hire the best.”