Outcast

by Aaron Allston

  “Going to be?” Kyp looked amazed. “Are you trying for some galactic record in the understatement event?”

  The dark-haired female bounty hunter and her Rodian companion arrived, showed identification to the spaceport security officers, and moved through their line, confronting Luke. The woman smiled with what seemed like genuine good cheer. “Care to surrender the prisoner? It will save everybody trouble.”

  Luke shook his head. “We’ll manage this. You can save everyone a lot of trouble by convincing the security forces to fall back and leave us to our business.”

  She shook her head. “The Chief of State has ordered us to take the rogue Jedi into custody. Surely you’ve heard of her. Natasi Daala.”

  “I have, but I haven’t heard of you. Who are you?”

  She offered him a slight bow. “Zilaash Kuh. Not, I am afraid, at your service.”

  “You’re not a Jedi.”

  She nodded. “And may I present Kaddit.”

  The Rodian offered a minimal glance in Luke’s direction, but he clearly had his eye on the growing numbers of Jedi and GA Security personnel.

  The noise was incredible—the Falcon’s repulsors howling, people shouting.

  “Stand back! Stand back! GA Security has jurisdiction here!”

  “Hand over the prisoner; this is not your jurisdiction.”

  “Take one more step and you’ll be picking your nose with a prosthetic!”

  “Luke! Luke! When did you first realize you were a criminal?”

  Master Cilghal was among the later Jedi arrivals. The security troopers let her enter, and she injected Valin with enough sedatives to keep a wampa unconscious for a couple of days. But the security troopers and bounty hunters clearly would not open ranks to permit the Jedi to carry Valin out. Zilaash and Kaddit took the opportunity to retreat to the security lines.

  Han and Leia forced their way into the Jedi circle. Han stared out at the thickening lines of security troopers and shook his head. “This is getting way out of control, old buddy.”

  Luke nodded. “GA Security has legal jurisdiction, those others have a profit motive, and all we have is the fact that we’re right. No one’s going to back down until someone gets hurt.”

  Ben gestured toward someone in the security ranks. “There’s a familiar face.”

  Luke peered in that direction. Captain Savar stood there, waving the security men and women around him to silence. “This could help,” Luke said.

  Leia’s expression was one of irritation. “It certainly couldn’t hurt.”

  Luke calculated odds and resources. He now had twenty Jedi here, including six Masters. If violence erupted, the security troopers would be slaughtered—or perhaps not, depending on how well their two bounty hunter allies fared.

  Luke gestured until he got Captain Savar’s attention. The officer headed his way, ignoring the guns at his back and lightsabers ahead of him, until he stood before Luke. “Quite a mess you Jedi have made here.”

  Luke shook his head. “It would have been a lot worse without us here. Is there any way you can pack those bounty hunters into a spent fuel drum or something?”

  “I wish. That’s not on the list of options.”

  Luke felt as glum as the man looked. “Well, we’ve got to figure something out. One twitch like your boy had yesterday, and we’re going to have blaster bolts, arms and legs, and who knows what else flying everywhere.”

  “So hand Valin Horn over.”

  “How do you know his name?”

  “He was caught on holocam and identified when he stole a classic starfighter and crashed a Kuati shuttle at the Senate Building.”

  “Tell you what, you conduct us all to the Jedi Temple and we’ll let you have an observer on hand while we study Jedi Horn to see what’s wrong.”

  “Why would we want you to study our prisoner?”

  Han and Leia, breaking from a bout of hurried consultation, stepped forward. Leia’s voice was at her most diplomatic; this was the voice she’d used for all her Chief of State speeches. “Grand Master, Captain, I believe my husband and I can offer a solution that will defuse the immediate situation.”

  Captain Savar gave her a not entirely hopeful look. “Please.”

  “Mon Mothma Memorial Medical Center is pretty close to equidistant between the Temple and the Senate Building. That makes it a sort of halfway point for respective jurisdictions. Let’s take Jedi Horn there. It’s a secure facility and an enclosed space, so we can limit the number of people with access to the situation—say, six Jedi and six security agents.”

  Han nodded. “And no bounty hunters or press. None living, anyway.”

  Savar considered, took a look at the growing number of press and onlookers arriving, and nodded. He looked back over his shoulder. “Carn! Commandeer a civilian vehicle suitable for carrying fifteen or more. With a civilian driver. We need it here, now.”

  “Yes, sir!” A broad-shouldered male trooper pushed his way through the ranks of security troopers and onlookers, then set off at a dead run.

  It was almost a re-creation of the previous day’s events in the Temple medical center, but with a bigger and more diverse cast. Jedi, troopers, and the Horns waited for the doctors’ reports while Valin lay unconscious. News of the rampage spread like a tenement fire through the newsnets. And the Jedi had little to do but watch the news coverage for the first several hours.

  It wasn’t good. Amateur recordings showed Valin’s dressing-robe paranoia outside the hostel the previous morning. Commentators asked why the Jedi had not surrendered him to the authorities then, which would have prevented today’s outrage. Luke’s arrest was briefly covered, with many angles on the Jedi, lightsabers lit, looking menacing. There were security recordings of Valin performing overrides on the X-wing and shuttle security, followed by gloriously detailed scenes of the shuttle smashing out of the Senate Building and crashing nearby.

  And then Valin’s final rampage, covered in exacting detail by high-quality holorecorders and far too many members of the press.

  Analysts cast the Jedi Order in the guise of ungoverned, unprincipled superhumans content to gratify themselves whatever the cost might be to the common population—every Jedi a potential Jacen Solo. No such stigma was attached to Luke Skywalker; his benevolence was too well known, too ingrained in the public consciousness. Instead, he was cast as an out-of-touch autocrat, kindly but dangerously clueless, dedicated to a culture of entitlement that was decades behind the times.

  After the ninth news cycle, Leia heaved a sigh. “I can feel the public turning against us from here. Minds are slamming shut like malfunctioning turbolift doors.”

  Luke gave her a glum look of agreement. “Any recommendations?”

  “Daala’s masters of reinterpretation already have the public half convinced that the only way to save civilization is to muzzle the Jedi. You need to prepare yourself for a fight.”

  The civilian doctors studying Valin reported just what Cilghal had: high stress levels, no physical abnormalities, no evidence of poisoning or drugs, no way to test his neurological functions—Jacen’s scanner-scrambling technique stayed in effect even as Valin remained under heavy sedation. By the next day, Luke and Captain Savar had agreed on a reduced number of observers from each camp, the Horns not to count against the Jedi total. Luke returned to his duties.

  The government prepared a case against Valin Horn and cleared dockets to advance Luke’s first hearing. Nawara Ven confirmed that the prosecutors were exploiting Valin’s actions for all they were worth. The situation was very, very bad for Luke’s case.

  As Nawara explained it, “The public is still hurting from a war where everybody suffered and nobody gained—a war worsened by a Jedi. They’re pretty worked up. They want someone to take responsibility for Jacen Solo. They want a change they can point to, a change that means problems like Jacen Solo and Valin Horn will never happen again. You can tell them all you want that muzzling the Jedi won’t fix things. It’s what they wa
nt, and they’re turning against you.”

  It was true. Jedi on ordinary missions were booed. Ordinary people they dealt with were suddenly unhelpful, stalling investigations, and not just on Coruscant—the news, spreading throughout Alliance space, caused anti-Jedi sentiment to swell like a pond ripple that never seemed to weaken. Jaina, assigned at her own request to be the Imperial Remnant–Jedi liaison, suffered catcalls and was even thrown filth while in Jag’s company. Public speaking engagements for which Jedi had been solicited months earlier were canceled. A years-old academic thesis proposing that interacting with the Force contributed to a tendency toward madness was uncovered and redistributed, and its author, now an obscure philosophy professor on Corellia, was suddenly the darling of interview shows.

  Valin slept through it all, fruitlessly studied by doctors and chronicled by the press.

  The Unification Summit moved on, relegated to second-tier news coverage. Perhaps the sudden absence of spotlights was a boon; political analysts reported promising responses from the Imperial Remnant and the Confederation.

  A week after Valin’s rampage, Luke went to bed, lay sleepless for three hours, then rose and dressed again. He walked the Temple halls for the next several hours. The Jedi he passed sensed his deep immersion in his thoughts and did not trouble him. Ben watched him during the hour he paced the Great Hall; then, distressed but unable to help, he went to his quarters to spend his own sleepless night.

  Two hours before dawn, Luke used the comlink in his quarters to make a series of quick calls.

  Not long thereafter, on foot, he approached the Senate Building. In a few hours, participants in the Unification Summit would collect again, but for now it was a still office building.

  He was greeted with courtesy at the main entrance and escorted to the floor where the Chief of State’s offices were located. Outside those offices, another set of guards offered equal courtesy but required him to hand over his lightsaber and submit to a brief full-body scan, which he did.

  Then, finally, he was conducted into a large inner office, one darkened and unoccupied in this predawn hour. An aide activated the overhead lighting and offered him caf. He declined, and the aide left.

  The office showed that this Chief of State had different aesthetic sensibilities than Jacen Solo or Cha Niathal, who had preceded Daala in the position. Jacen had preferred natural woods and landscape tones, though his taste had graduated toward even darker décor in his last months. Niathal, a Mon Calamari, had preferred militaristic themes in blues and greens.

  Daala, it seemed, chose to surround herself with the trappings of the old Empire. Her personal office gleamed white, with desks, chairs, and computer equipment that could all have been recently transferred from the bridge of a Star Destroyer.

  The door behind him hissed open, and Luke turned to see Daala enter. The Chief of State was once again in admiral’s whites. Guards waited in the hall outside, their forbidding expressions, directed at Luke, vanishing as the door closed.

  Daala extended her hand. “Master Skywalker.”

  Luke rose and shook it. “Chief Daala.”

  She moved around him to sit at the main desk. “Please, sit.”

  He did. It was a little odd—he had expected to feel something from her, anger or resentment or a desire for vengeance, but he could detect no strong emotions, no aggression.

  “Something to drink?”

  He shook his head.

  The Chief of State propped her elbows on her desk and rested her chin atop interlaced fingers. “When my staff tells me that the Jedi Grand Master wishes to see me, I take it as a serious matter, even if we are locked in legal battle. And I assume, when the message does not indicate a purpose for the meeting, that it is one best expressed face-to-face. So here we are, face-to-face. What can I do for you—or you for us?”

  “I’m actually not one hundred percent sure. Earlier this evening, I had a feeling that we should meet. A presentiment in the Force.”

  “What did it mean?”

  “I’m not certain, but I suspect it means that, somewhere, I now have the argument that will convince you to drop the case. Whether that’s true or not, I have to be here. It might actually mean that I need to be in your presence when someone makes an attack on you.”

  “Perhaps the Force was telling you that you need to be here to suddenly discover that I’m just an imposter with Daala’s face, and that you need to cut me down.”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, let’s wait and find out.”

  “Yes.”

  “You will let me know if you change your mind about caf.”

  “Yes.”

  “Or sweetcakes.”

  Luke sighed. The impulse that had brought him here seemed no closer to revealing itself, and Daala clearly thought he was wasting her time.

  “While we’re waiting for the Force to announce its presence,” she said, “I did want to say something. I want you to understand, this suit is not personal. Even when we were on opposite sides, representing enemy forces, I had every respect for you. In reviewing your records, it became clear to me that you have had a significant and beneficial effect on the galaxy.”

  Luke raised an eyebrow. “But you still need so very much to make the Jedi a mindlessly obedient branch of the government that you’re pursuing the trial.”

  “It’s not about obedience.”

  “Oh, that’s right. It’s about not detecting a Jedi turning to evil. Which we should be able to do far more easily than, say, noticing an Imperial leader growing so callous that he’d obliterate an entire innocent world to convince other worlds to obey.”

  Daala became very still. Her face gave away no emotion, but Luke could feel, just for a moment, the pain she had experienced long ago as her love, respect, and even understanding for Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin withered and faded in the wake of the atrocities he had committed in the Emperor’s name.

  Luke was sorry to make her relive that. But she clearly wanted to exchange blows, and Luke was not unarmed in this match.

  She regained her composure a moment later. “It’s not about that, either. You’re as guilty of not detecting Jacen Solo’s turn to evil as others were of not checking the excesses of Imperial officers. But that’s not why you’re being tried. It’s just the argument that will allow us to convict you.”

  “Why am I being tried, then? Give me the next layer of truth. Or the next layer below that.”

  “It has to do with fairness, and responsibility, and the rule of law.”

  “Things the Jedi have always supported.”

  “Things the Jedi have always subverted, at least under your leadership.”

  Luke couldn’t keep his astonishment from his face or voice. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Let me give you a hypothetical example. A Coruscant bar in seedy sublevels. Two patrons decide they don’t like the looks of a third. They assault him. A Jedi intervenes, out come blaster pistols and a lightsaber, whoosh, whoosh, severed arms litter the barroom floor. Law enforcement officers are called, the Jedi gives them a terse statement and then flits off to his next adventure.”

  Luke nodded. “That’s a simplistic and overly colorful way of putting it, but, yes, it happens.” It had, in fact, happened almost exactly that way to him, with Luke in the role of the patron about to be assaulted, back before he was a Jedi himself, many years before.

  “Do you not see anything wrong with the way the situation was resolved?”

  “Not really.”

  “First, there’s the maiming of the suspects. Would it have been possible for the Jedi to have defeated them without cutting off their arms?”

  Luke nodded. “Possibly. Probably. But once the blasters came out of their holsters, the situation became a lot more dangerous for everybody, patrons and Jedi included.”

  “Could the Jedi have disarmed them with some use of the Force?”

  “That does happen. But we know the Jedi in your example made the correct choice.”
/>   “How so?”

  “He was not just reacting to what he saw with his eyes and knew from his experience. He was in tune with the Force. The Force alerted him to the true level of danger and he responded appropriately.”

  “Sad that the Force can never be sworn in to testify about the suggestions it offers to the Jedi.”

  “True.”

  “Or to the Sith. The Force talks to the Sith, too, doesn’t it?”

  Luke blinked. “The dark side of the Force, yes.”

  “You didn’t say your Jedi was only listening to the bright side—”

  “Light side.”

  “Yes, thank you. You just said the Force. But let’s stipulate that the good Force is the only one our hypothetical Jedi listens to. It still suggests maiming an awful lot of the time.”

  “Hardly a life sentence of disfigurement and handicap. Modern prosthetics are indistinguishable from flesh and bone.” He held up his own prosthetic hand, waggling its fingers at her, as evidence.

  “Though they have to be paid for by someone—often the state, when the amputee is of the lower classes—and then maintained, at a cost in credits and technical skill in excess of the upkeep of an ordinary flesh-and-blood arm.”

  “Granted.” Luke suppressed an impatient sigh. “Is that what the suit is about, then? A perception that arms are being cut off at a higher rate than the government recommends?”

  “No, it’s about the Jedi giving a cursory statement to law enforcement and then leaving. Or dashing off without giving one at all. Or just refusing to answer one crucial question the investigating officer asks. And, in every case, getting away with it.”

  “I still don’t understand, then.”

  “I’ll walk you through it. The officers show up and ask questions, the Jedi gives a fifty-word statement, the officers say, ‘Thanks, now we need to go back to the neighborhood station for a full statement,’ the Jedi says, ‘Sorry, I have places to be,’ and he’s gone. Did the Jedi respond with appropriate force? You think so, but at the government level we never learn, because a short while later he’s on Commenor dealing with an organized crime family, then in the Hapes Cluster …”