Exile

by Aaron Allston

  He noticed that the voices had grown quiet.

  And in that quietness, Ben told Kiara the story of a young Force-sensitive slave boy who won a Podrace on Tatooine and earned his freedom.

  “Did they feed him when he won?” Kiara asked.

  “All he could eat, and even more,” Ben assured her.

  Not long afterward, Ben sensed the eye in the sky. He looked up into the clouds and pulled his all-weather cloak even tighter around them.

  “Is he there?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  This pilot was not subtle. He sent the TIE fighter into a screaming dive that ended up with the vehicle a mere twenty meters above the ground. Then he had to slow and circle, because Ben’s dummy was not visible from the open spaces around the citadel. He had to climb and then drop into the gap between outer and inner wall … and then he lined his lasers up on Ben’s dummy.

  Now. Through the Force, Ben exerted himself against the stones at the top of the inner wall, all along the course of wall above the starfighter.

  It was hard going. He felt so tired, and it was almost impossible to focus. But an understanding that this might be the difference between life and death—from cold, or starvation, or mummification—drove him, and he saw the stones high above begin to rock and then fall free.

  The TIE fighter fired, and Ben’s dummy fell over, the blankets catching on fire.

  The TIE fighter glided forward slowly on repulsors. Ben knew why. The bolt from a laser cannon hitting a human being wouldn’t necessarily destroy his body completely, but it would turn so much of the body to steam that the victim would seem to explode. It wouldn’t simply fall over. The pilot had to be curious about what had just happened.

  The TIE fighter was a mere five meters from the burning dummy when the first stone, no larger than a human head, hit its hull. To his credit, the pilot reacted instantly, veering away and climbing—

  Straight into the thickest portion of falling stone.

  The rocks had fallen more than a hundred meters. Some weighed a quarter ton or more. All had sharp right-angled edges, and some of them hit edge-first.

  The TIE fighter spun wildly out of control, hit the citadel’s inner wall, and bounced off again. The twin ion engines were still firing, but the starfighter was spinning so fast that they merely added to the energy of its spiral.

  It landed beyond the outer wall, its hull collapsing on impact, and continued to roll, shearing off its solar array wings as it did.

  It rolled half a kilometer before coming to a stop against a natural rock abutment.

  Ben rose and immediately felt light-headed, but drew on the Force to strengthen and stabilize himself. He helped Kiara up. “We have to hurry,” he said. “More fighters may be coming.”

  Ben told Kiara to climb a tree while he examined the wreckage. When he saw what was left of the pilot, a pale-skinned Chev in a bronze uniform, he was glad he had.

  It didn’t take him long to pry open the hatch into the starfighter’s small cargo bay. Its contents had broken free of the cloth webbing that had restrained them, but were otherwise intact: two days’ worth of rations for a grown man, a medical kit, power packs, a long-range comlink, a self-inflating raft, water purification tablets … He took it all, and scavenged other goods from the Chev’s body. Then, as fast as they could manage, he and Kiara ran from the site of the crash and back toward the dubious safety of the citadel.

  It didn’t occur to Ben to be sorry about the being whose life he had just taken.

  CORUSCANT

  ERRANT VENTURE

  “Alema Rar just commed me.”

  Leia stared incredulously into her display. But Lavint seemed earnest enough. “What did she want?”

  “You two, of course.”

  “And what did you tell her?”

  “I said you were going to be at Gilatter Eight in a few days. The way I figure it, she’ll go there and get herself blown to pieces. A shame about the why-vee six-six-six, I guess.”

  “Well, you didn’t lie,” Leia said. “That’s exactly where we’re going to be.”

  “We are?” said Han.

  “You are?” On the display, Lavint’s jaw skewed to one side, an exaggerated expression of dismay. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Not to worry,” Leia said. “I didn’t decide until just now. It’s not enough to be told that someone like Alema Rar has been blown to bits. I really need to see it myself.”

  “Or even pull the trigger,” Han muttered.

  GILATTER SYSTEM RESORT STATION ORBITING GILATTER VIII

  From the distance of several hundred kilometers, Luke watched the activity at the station. He employed passive sensors only, including a holocam utilizing high-grade visual amplification hardware, and knew that Mara, floating less than a hundred meters away in her own StealthX, was doing the same.

  Half a dozen vehicles were docked at the station. The crews inside were presumably effecting repairs and making the antiquated station ready for the ceremony that would soon take place.

  Luke, Mara, and their fellow pilots—including Corran, Kyp, Jaina, and Zekk, plus Jag, finally getting some shift time in Jaina’s StealthX—had scouted out the system pretty thoroughly. There were indeed droid sensor satellites along the standard approaches into the system, but none situated elsewhere, and there were routes to which the sensor array was blind from outside the system to the far side of Gilatter VIII. The Jedi had already led several ships from the Ninth Fleet to orbits within the outer atmosphere of Gilatter VIII. Another vessel they had guided into place was Admiral Niathal’s temporary flagship, the aged but still-mighty Mon Calamari cruiser Galactic Voyager.

  Luke shook his head over that choice. Was Niathal simply making use of an available resource? Or, recalling that the Voyager had once been the flagship of Admiral Ackbar, was she trading on the revered strategist’s name to promote herself? Luke didn’t know.

  But thinking about that was much better than wondering about Ben.

  ZIOST

  Ben and Kiara rested the remainder of the day, and from the top of the rock pile, just inside the citadel entrance, they watched the shuttle.

  It descended from the clouds less than fifteen minutes after Ben, Kiara, and the revitalized Shaker reached the entrance. It was an old shuttle with fold-up wings and a bronze paint job, and it did not land. It circled the crash site endlessly, then took off for the skies once more.

  Ben was curious about that. Were the crew members afraid to touch down on Ziost? That actually made sense.

  Hungry as they were, Ben insisted that they eat no more than half the rations they had scavenged from the TIE fighter. The rest they could eat over the next three or four days. Perhaps by then they’d be able to find more food, or find their way offplanet.

  They slept well that night, with Shaker keeping its sensors alert for nocturnal movement. But there was none.

  In the morning, glow rods attached to new power packs, they went searching.

  It didn’t take long. All Ben had to do was open himself up to the voices. They led him down several levels, to where the corridor floors were coated in ancient muck, to a long side shaft that carried them well away from the citadel proper. It led them to an unlit circular chamber. Its walls were decorated with eighteen niches, each large enough to hold a life-sized statue of an average human, but all empty.

  “It’s gone,” Kiara said.

  Ben shook his head. The images in his head were clear. The ship was here. “Come out,” he said.

  He heard laughter.

  Kiara seemed to sense it, too. She drew back to stand next to Shaker and stared all around, looking for the source.

  Ben frowned. His instincts, and what the voices had whispered to him when he only half understood their words, told him that emotion was the key. Nor would kind, soft, welcoming emotion do.

  He deepened his voice, put some anger into it. “Come out!”

  Had he tried it the day before, when he’d been at his weakest
from lack of food, he doubtless would have failed. But now there was a rumble in the ground, and a crack appeared in the half-dried muck of the floor—a crack as straight as a laser beam, bisecting the room.

  Shaker, whose legs straddled the crack, gave a tweetle of alarm and quickly moved to one side. Kiara joined him.

  The gap widened more quickly at the room’s center than toward the edges. There it became circular, and up from it, inadequately illuminated by Ben’s glow rod, came a segmented metal arm several meters long … and then the top portions of a vehicle’s spherical main body. Its circular central viewport, lit from behind and glowing an unhealthy yellow, seemed to be an eye regarding them. The sphere was some ten meters in diameter, half of it protruding above floor level; a gap of three meters separated the edge of the floor from the nearest portion of vehicle hull.

  Ben swayed, both from weakness and relief. The vehicle was here, it was real … and if the presence he felt within it, a malevolent set of emotions detectable through the Force, was any indication, it was functional, even after centuries in the ground.

  “Open,” he commanded.

  After a moment, a vertical line appeared beneath the viewport and lowered as a hatch, its near end just reaching the edge of the floor.

  Ben bounded across and up into the vehicle.

  But if he’d anticipated finding a control couch, a pilot’s yoke, hyperspace and weapons controls, he was disappointed. The interior, which could have occupied only a fraction of the vehicle’s volume, was a single disk-shaped chamber, four meters across and two and a half high. The corridor channel leading to the ramp was the only exit. The walls looked like orange pumice, glowing as though they were thin sheets over molten lava, and the vehicle’s interior was very warm.

  When he got to the center of the disk-shaped chamber, Ben turned around and around, looking for the controls. But he found nothing.

  And now even the voices were gone. In their place was a powerful expectation, a sense of waiting.

  Ben closed his eyes and tried to get a sense of this place, this vehicle … and he did. For a moment he saw a red-skinned woman in robes of volcanic hues kneeling, her golden polearm on the floor beside her.

  That was it, then. The pilot had to communicate with the vehicle through the Force. Quickly he knelt where the woman in his vision had been.

  Command. The voice, male, rich in expectant malice, spoke directly into his mind.

  Ben looked down the ramp and beckoned for Kiara and Shaker. “Time to go.”

  The little girl shook her head. The astromech tweetled at her.

  “Kiara, we have to leave.”

  “I don’t want to go in that thing,” she wailed. “It’s going to eat me.”

  Ben shot her a reassuring grin. “And if it does?”

  She took a moment to answer. “You’ll jump down its throat and we’ll cut our way out together.”

  “That’s right.”

  Still reluctant, she came forward, tentatively took her first step onto the ramp, and ran up into the room. She flopped down to sit beside him. A moment later, Shaker rolled into place on his other side and locked its wheels.

  “Close,” Ben commanded, and the ramp lifted.

  Now was the part he wasn’t sure of. “Launch,” he said.

  For long moments nothing happened, and Ben wondered how many words he would have to go through before he found the correct command. But apparently intent was enough—intent, and visualizing what he wanted to happen.

  The light outside the vehicle brightened. Suddenly, blinding white, it reached all the way to the niches in the walls. Ben looked up, seeing only the ceiling above him. Then he closed his eyes again and attempted to see as the vehicle saw.

  And he did. The ceiling above the vehicle had drawn aside in two pieces, and sunlight shone down into the chamber. The vehicle began to tremble like a wild animal preparing to spring.

  “Get ready,” Ben said, “I think it’s going to—”

  The vessel accelerated straight upward, its movement pressing Ben and Kiara down onto the floor.

  chapter twenty

  GILATTER SYSTEM APPROACHING GILATTER VIII ORBIT

  The greatest reward came from the greatest risks, Jacen had said, and Lumiya had agreed with him. “So long as you accurately assess the reward and the risks,” she’d added.

  And then she had volunteered to accompany him on this expedition to infiltrate the Confederation election ceremony.

  Setting it up had been easy enough. It had been Galactic Alliance Intelligence that had discovered there would be representatives of the Hapes Consortium Heritage Council—the conspiracy that had collaborated with Corellia to kill Tenel Ka—at the meeting. And Admiral Niathal had been the first to propose that authenticated independence groups, even from worlds most devoted to the Galactic Alliance, might find admission.

  It hadn’t been too much work for Jacen to persuade Niathal that he be the Galactic Alliance agent assigned to attend the meeting—his status as the Jedi with the closest ties to the military ensured him that right. Manipulating things so that Lumiya could accompany him had been trickier, but she admitted to maintaining a number of fully detailed false identities that would withstand scrutiny from either side’s intelligence division, and one of them, that of smuggler Silfinia Ell, had a registered world of birth that would fit the profile GA Intelligence needed. So Jacen had arranged for documents for himself and “Silfinia” from the Ession government, and now, his features heavily disguised under dark spray-on skin color and a beard, he carried an identicard showing him to be a member of Ession’s most violent revolutionary party. Working through Captain Lavint and her mysterious contacts, he had been able to wrangle an admission to the ceremony … but not a vote.

  That was fine. He wasn’t there to vote. He was there to note faces, identify traitors, and distract everyone present—perhaps by killing them all—when the battle began.

  And Lumiya was beside him, acting as backup in case of trouble. Her scarred features concealed under her expertly applied makeup, she now had dark skin and hair like his.

  Jacen guided the ugly disk-shaped shuttle, of Corellian make, into the approach vector the stern voice on the comm board had assigned to him. “Quite a force,” he said. Through the viewport and on the main sensor display, he could see Bothan Assault Cruisers, Corellian cruisers and frigates, an Imperial-class Star Destroyer, numerous other capital ships, and shuttles. There was a lot of shuttle traffic to the station, which resembled a dome-shaped manual fruit juicer resting on a plate—but a kilometer across.

  “And it’s ready for action,” Lumiya said. “Can you feel it in the Force, the readiness of the crews and officers? They want blood. That suggests they’ll be going after the closest of the likely targets.”

  “Coruscant herself. Though Kuat’s not that much farther.” The shuttle shook as if fired upon. “Hey.” He’d had no advance warning through the Force of an imminent attack. “Tractor beam,” he said.

  “Their security people obviously like to be in complete control,” Lumiya answered.

  In minutes, the shuttle was drawn to an external docking station, and Lumiya was proved correct. When the station-side hatch opened, personnel in CorSec uniforms boarded, with their commander stating, “Give your vehicle access codes to Sergeant Mezer. He’ll take your craft to the designated retrieval zone.”

  Her voice low and amused, Lumiya asked, “Will he expect a tip?”

  The officer blinked. “Regulations of the meeting prohibit any vehicle from remaining within ten kilometers of the station,” he answered, then he realized he hadn’t addressed her question. “No tip is necessary. He couldn’t accept one if you offered it.”

  “Pity.” She swept out through the open hatch.

  Jacen gave his code to the temporary pilot, then followed Lumiya. He found her being greeted by a white-furred Bothan of decidedly friendlier disposition than the CorSec agents. “Silfinia Ell,” she said, as she allowed the Bothan to squee
ze her hand. “Ession Freedom Front. And my nephew, Najack Ell.”

  The Bothan blinked, clearly never having heard of either the Front or the Ell family. “Delighted,” he answered. He reluctantly shook Jacen’s hand in turn. “Breyf T’dawlish. One of your hosts.”

  “When does the voting begin?” Jacen asked. “We haven’t received a schedule of events.”

  “Very funny.” The Bothan waved to the far door out of the antiseptically white and clean room they had entered. “This was once a decontamination chamber. It is, sadly, almost immune to decoration. But beyond that door you’ll find far more congenial surroundings. Food, drink, good company. Like-minded company.”

  “I could use some of that,” Jacen said, and heard Lumiya stifle a laugh.

  * * *

  From this shallow depth within the atmosphere of Gilatter VIII, the crews of the Alliance force had a decent view of the distant space station and the stars beyond. The atmosphere made the stars twinkle just a little and made their view slightly hazy; that was all.

  “Tight-beam transmission from Stealth One,” Niathal’s aide told her on the bridge of the Galactic Voyager. “A Hutt light cruiser arriving. But that’s the only capital ship in the last half hour. The rate of major arrivals has dropped nearly to zero.”

  Niathal, sitting in her multiply articulated swivel command chair, grimaced. The odds were now just the wrong side of even, which would be problematic in a straight-up fight. Fortunately, the Alliance had the advantage of surprise. “Very well,” she said, her words merely acknowledging that she’d heard her aide’s report. “Any major players still missing?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Niathal raised her voice so that it could be heard across the entire bridge. “Issue the order to the fleet. All ahead slow. The outlying vessels are not to jump until they receive a direct command.”

  Jacen and Lumiya separated once inside, the better to acquire information across a broader area.

  The main chamber of the resort, the dome above recently cleaned to provide an unobstructed view of Gilatter VIII, was laid out with long tables full of food and drink. Delegates wandered from one to the next, or from one small standing group to the next. There was no urgency or animosity to be seen among them.