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Star Wars - Black Fleet Crisis - Shield Of Lies

Page 22

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell


  planetfalls recorded for Mud Sloth since Akanah had taken ownership

  were at Golkus and Coruscant, and Golkus was near enough to being on a

  line from Carratos to Coruscant that a stop there en route needed no

  explanation. Curiously, though, there was no record of their departure

  from Coruscant, nor of their stops at Lucazec, Teyr, or Atzerri.

  The latter omission Luke could explain by the update cycles--there must

  not have been time for the routine transmission of data from those

  flight control centers to Coruscant, or for the addition of that data

  to the master record. But the former omission was puzzling.

  Luke's cloaking work as they left Coruscant should only have concealed

  their point of origin from watching eyes and discouraged curiosity

  about any out-of-trajectory alarms at Flight Control.

  But as far as Coruscant was concerned, Mud Sloth had never left. The

  skiff had never requested clearance to lift to orbit, had never

  requested clearance through the planetary shield--except they never

  could have left without it. And shield passage required not only that

  the skiff answer a transponder interrogation, but also that Ship

  Registry verify the ID. It was impossible to imagine how their passage

  had gone unrecorded.

  Luke wondered what would happen when the out-world updates arrived and

  Mud Sloth was suddenly in two places at once.

  Then, just for a moment, he toyed with the idea that both places were

  really the same--that they were still on Coruscant, perhaps even still

  in his hermitage, and some elaborate deception was under way.

  He quickly rejected the idea as too extreme a solution to the

  mystery.

  But it left a worrisome question in its wake Just what was Akanah

  capable of? What were the limits of her power?

  May I cloak us as we leave? she had asked.

  And he had not thought to question it.

  What had she done? Something that could hide them completely from the

  best planetary security the best engineers could devise? He realized

  he had missed a pattern.

  How had she gotten into his hermitage without his knowing it? How had

  she gotten past the security droid and into the commonal on Teyr? All

  the questions pointed toward the same answer--some gift of deception,

  illusion, or concealment that went well beyond what he himself could

  call upon.

  She can pierce my projections, he realized. I wonder if I can pierce

  hers. I wonder if I can even tell when she's using one.

  Distracted by such thoughts, Luke almost overlooked the other surprise

  in the report from Coruscant.

  It waited for him in the section on ownership history, and fell under

  his eyes while he was wondering why, if she had such a talent for

  concealment, Akanah had needed to buy a ship at all.

  You could have stowed away on any ship at any time, he was thinking.

  You wouldn't have been trapped on Lucazec. Stang, you could have

  stolen the price of passage, even the price of the shipm Then he

  noticed that the sole prior owner of the skiff was a man named Andras

  Pell, and that the transfer category given was CLASS III

  NONTAXABLE--INHERITANCE BY MARRIAGE He rose out of the couch and turned

  to stare at the closed curtain screening the bunk. Just how did you

  buy your freedom? he thought at Akanah. And what else are you keeping

  from me?

  Akanah hibernated--or hid--for nearly ten hours.

  But rather than frustrating Luke's curiosity, her absence redirected

  it. For the last five hours of her isolation, Mud Sloth drifted in

  realspace on the fringe of Atzerri's Oort Cloud with only the cold

  methane-ice comets for company.

  With all his inhibitions about making inquiries behind Akanah's back

  gone, Luke made full use of the time, his credits, and his priority

  access codes.

  From Carratos he requested any information available from newsgrid,

  political, or police records on Akanah Norand Pell, Andras Pell, and

  Talsava. He sent the same query to Coruscant's criminal records office

  and citizen registry and to the home offices of both the Coruscant

  Global Newsgrid and the New Republic Prime Newsgrid.

  From the New Republic Reference Service, he requested a quickreport on

  naming conventions on Lu-cazec and Carratos, thinking he might parse

  another lead from the names in hand.

  A second request to the same source asked for five-hundred-word

  excerpts from all matches on the key words "Fallanassi" and "White

  Current." After a short debate with himself, and despite the pathetic

  and sensa tional inaccuracies of Secrets of the Jedi, Luke also

  contacted an information broker on Atzerri and paid a hundred credits

  for a search on the same keys.

  He also requested a Current Terms & Conditions brochure from the chief

  librarian's office on Obroa-skai.

  The library computers there were the only resource offering both a

  greater variety and a greater volume of records than those held by

  Coruscant.

  But Obroa-skai's generosity with its planetary treasure was limited.

  To protect against theft of the library, and to provide the resources

  needed to maintain it, accessing the records meant either going to

  Obroa-skai or hiring one of the library's own trained contract

  researchers.

  In either case, Obroa-skai was not a resource one turned to for quick

  answers. The official language of New Republic recordkeeping was

  Basic, and everything held by Coruscant was kept in one of several

  readily searchable data specifications. But the Obroa-skai library was

  a collection of primary documents, in ten thousand storage formats and

  uncountable languages.

  The most complete general index covered only fifteen percent of the

  library's holdings, and all the specialty indexes combined added only a

  few percent to that.

  Those were the principal reasons why the brochure-which Luke received

  within minutes of requesting it, as the first response to any of his

  inquiries--reported that a normal single-part library search was

  averaging eight days. The waiting list for terminal time was holding

  at fifteen days, and the backlog for contract researchers had climbed

  to seventy.

  Discouraging as those numbers were, Luke dispatched a command-control

  message to Artoo and Threepio on Yavin 4, instructing them to go to

  Obroa-skai and search the library on his behalf, as they had done once

  before.

  The only request he made that was refused outright was for the Fleet

  Office's daily Tactical Briefing Memo randum, also known as the tr ouble

  map--a compendium of situation reports from all the various Fleet and

  base commands. Unlike that aboard his E-wing, Mud Sloth's hypercomm

  wasn't military-rated, and there was no persuading the Intelligence

  Section to send a white-star file to what they considered an unsecured

  receiver.

  Luke thought about comming Admiral Ackbar directly to ask his appraisal

  of the trouble in Farlax--the news digest Luke had picked up on Atzerri

  was almost as sensational and unbelievable as the Jedi document. Butr />
  doing so promised to invite questions Luke wasn't ready to answer, and

  possibly force a decision he wasn't ready to make.

  Instead, he chose to contact the public information offices of both the

  Senate and the General Ministry. He asked for the official record of

  the past twenty days, hoping he could read between the lines well

  enough to know if it was time to head home.

  Then he lowered the lights in the flight compartment, stretched out on

  the deck behind the control couches, and closed his eyes. All his

  pending requests required patience, from minutes to hours to days. But

  just reaching out had left him feeling better about his

  circumstances.

  Even if some of his efforts returned nothing useful, the next time he

  and Akanah talked, he expected to be in a much stronger position.

  Sorry as I am to say it, what I have to have now is reason to trust

  you, not just reason to want to, he thought. If we're going to go on

  any farther together, you're going to have to start trusting me.

  Prompted by a sensation like a feather tickling somewhere inside his

  skull, Luke became aware of two things at once that he had fallen

  asleep on the deck, and that he was being watched.

  He turned his head in the direction of the sensation and opened his

  eyes. He found himself looking directly at Akanah. She was sitting on

  the edge of the bunk, hands folded on her lap, her hair bed-tousled.

  "Hi," she said. "I'm sorry I monopolized the bunk for so long. I

  didn't mean to do that."

  Taken aback by her apology, Luke pulled himself up to a sitting

  position."

  "'s all right," he slurred. "You must have needed it. You looked like

  you did, anyway, back at Talos."

  She nodded. "About Talos--there's some things we have to talk about,"

  she said. "You've been very patient with me, and I've been terribly

  unfair to you. You deserve to know what's been happening with me."

  Having had his own opening speech preempted, Luke could find nothing

  more to say than "Go on, then--I'm listening."

  Akanah nodded toward the foredeck. "You have some messages. You'll

  probably want to look at them first."

  Eyeing her quizzically, Luke moved to the copilot's couch and browsed

  the list of waiting replies.

  There was an acknowledgment from Streen on Yavin 4, which Luke skipped

  for the moment. He also skipped the press folders from the Senate and

  General Ministry, which were irrelevant for the moment.

  The New Republic Reference Service had responded with a short precis on

  naming, ending in the messages Search Key FALLANASSI--Not Found

  Search Key WHITE CURRENT--Not Found As Single Term Search Key

  FALLANASSI + WHITE CURRENT Not Found It was the same with the response

  from the information broker on Atzerri--an apologetic note and an offer

  to apply half of the search fee to Luke's next request.

  With increasing agitation, Luke skimmed through half a dozen more

  replies from various agencies and companies on Carratos and

  Coruscant.

  All were singularly uninformative--a few dates, a few facts that fell

  into the category of vital statistics, and several NO RECORD and NOT

  FOUND messages, with a pair of REQUEST DENIED rebuffs scattered among

  them.

  "Let me tell you what your messages say," Akanah said gently. "My full

  name was Akanah Norand Goss, now Akanah Norand Pell. I was married on

  Carratos to Andras Pell, a man thirty-six years my senior. Andras died

  a year later, and I inherited this ship and a few thousand credits.

  His obituary says it was an innocent death, and no one official seems

  to have taken any notice of his passing, but you wonder if I might have

  both married and killed him to escape from Carratos. And no matter who

  and where you asked, there's nothing at all to be found about the

  Fallanassi."

  "How do you know?" he demanded, twisting around to face her. "Did you

  read my mail?"

  "No. I didn't need to."

  "You knew I was going to check up on you," he said.

  "Oh--I thought you would, eventually. I rather thought it would be

  sooner."

  "So you checked yourself, and you knew how little I'd find."

  "I checked for myself," she corrected. "You're not the only one

  looking for pieces of your past."

  He sat down on the edge of the copilot's couch.

  "Why are there so few?" he asked, the accusatory tone leaving his

  voice.

  "Talsava and I lived in the shadows on Carratos. We came in

  unregistered. We lived in a part of Chofin where people come and go

  without notice. When Tatsava left, I became one of the invisibles--I

  owned nothing, did nothing that put my name in the identity records of

  the occupation. The only time I ever lived above the line on Carratos

  was the last two years--the years I was with Andras."

  "No one questioned who you were, where you came from?"

  "No. The old records were seized by the Empire, and the occupation

  records were destroyed by the liberty movement. Everyone was given a

  fresh start. I took a name in the local custom for women--given name,

  mother's name, father's name. But it means nothing anywhere but there,

  anytime but then."

  "So there's no reason for it to be anywhere in Coruscant's records."

  "Or Lucazec's, or Teyr's. It's not that there are other names behind

  which the records hide--" "As far as the bureaucrats and census-takers

  were concerned, you didn't exist."

  She smiled. "On Carratos, the census is of property and the owners of

  property," she said. "When I owned nothing, I did not count. When

  Andras took me, I was his property. Now that I own this"--she raised

  her hands to indicate the skiff "I am a person."

  Luke nodded slowly. "I guess that all makes sense, the way you explain

  it," he said. "But something else I learned still doesn't have an

  explanation. The traffic records say we're still on Coruscant, and I'm

  starting to think that we're still going to be there no matter how many

  systems we visit."

  Inexplicably, Akanah giggled. "Did your tracking report mention a

  visit to Golkus?"

  "Yes!" Luke said. "On your way to Coruscant."

  "And did it say why I went there?"

  "No. I didn't think about it much, either," Luke admitted. "I guess I

  figured that, it being your first trip in the skiff, there was either

  some little problem you needed fixed, or you just didn't like being

  alone out here."

  "Well--the second is true, absolutely true. But so is the first. The

  problem I needed fixed was the ship's identification transponder. I

  told you--we leave no trail that an outsider can follow. There was

  someone on Golkus who could help with that."

  "Someone? Altering ID profiles is no mean trick."

  "His name would mean nothing to you but could harm him," Akanah said.

  "I believe he once worked with---or for--Talon Karrde."

  "How do you know him?"

  "He came through Carratos once, years ago," she said. "When I heard

  why, I arranged to meet him and to do him a favor. But the price was

  still dear. I paid him with most
of the credits I had, plus favors I

  had collected from others."

  "So he changed the profile--what, to some other Adventurer? So some

  other ship left Coruscant."

  "Oh---he did more than change it," Akanah said.

  "If that's all I'd asked for, it wouldn't have been quite so dear. No,

  he put what he called a smuggler's kit in the transponder."

  "This ship's black-boxed?" Luke stared wonder-ingly.

  "I guess that's what it's called. Every time we jump, the profile

  changes--to something that looks legitimate but isn't. If I'd had the

  price, I could have bought bootleg IDs instead of counterfeits."

  "And I suppose the system doesn't activate until after you've jumped

  out from wherever the work was done, so the trail doesn't point back to

  this gentleman."

  Luke frowned. "Stang, the days we've wasted--we could have jumped out

  from Lucazec, or Teyr--" "I encouraged you to," she protested. "I'm

  the one who asked you to disable the interlock."

  "Yeah, but you neglected to mention that it'd be safe to do it," Luke

  grumbled. "We blast out of one system under one ID, tiptoe into the

  next under an-other--and no one connects the two. Very sweet. This

  fellow on Golkus is going to do a brisk business."

  "He chooses not to," Akanah said. "I had the impression he considers

 

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