by James Luceno
“Filli, what’s going on?” Jula shouted.
The slicer’s right hand pointed to Starstone, while his left continued to fly across the keys of a control pad. “She told me to do it!”
“Do what?” Shryne said, looking from Starstone to Filli and back again.
“Boost the transceiver with a burst from the power generator,” Dix answered for Filli.
“We didn’t have enough juice to download from the database,” Starstone said. “I thought it would be fine.”
Shryne’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. “So what’s the problem?”
“The generator wants to reactivate the entire facility,” Filli said in a rush of words. “I can’t get it to shut down!”
Slamming, hissing sounds began to replace the rumble of sliding doors.
Jula looked sharply at Shryne. “This entire place is sealing up.”
A series of determined clicks and ready tones punctuated the din raised by descending hatches. All at once every battle droid in the control room powered up.
Swinging its thin head toward him and raising its blaster rifle, the battle droid standing closest to Shryne said: “Intruders.”
Behind Armand Isard and the two Internal Security Bureau technicians seated at the Temple beacon control console, Vader stood with his arms folded across his chest, Commander Appo at his right hand.
“I want to know how the beacon was accessed,” Vader said.
“By means of a Jedi transceiver, Lord Vader,” the tech closest to Armand said.
“Cross-check the transceiver code with the identity database,” the ISB chief said, anticipating Vader.
“The name should be coming up in a moment,” the other tech said, eyes glued to rapidly scrolling text on one of the display screens. “Chatak,” he added a moment later. “Bol Chatak.”
The sound of Vader’s breathing filled the ensuing silence.
Shryne and Starstone, he thought. Obviously they had been in possession of Chatak’s beacon transceiver when they had evaded him at Murkhana. Now they were attempting to determine the location of other Jedi when Order Sixty-Six had been issued. Certainly they were hoping to establish contact with survivors, hoping to pick up the pieces of their shattered order.
And … what?
Devise their revenge? Unlikely, since that would entail calling on the dark side. Formulate a plan to kill the Emperor? Perhaps. Although, ignorant of the fact that Palpatine was a Sith, they would not plot an assassination. So perhaps they were contemplating an attack on the Emperor’s enforcer?
Vader considered reaching out to Shryne through the Force, but rejected the idea.
“What is the source of the transmission?” he asked finally.
“The Jaguada system, Lord Vader,” the first technician said. “More precisely, the moon of the system’s only inhabited world.”
A large holomap of the galaxy emerged from the console’s holoprojector. Linked to myriad databases throughout the Temple, the map made use of a palette of colors to indicate trouble spots. Just now, in preservation of the moment Order Sixty-Six had been executed, more than two hundred worlds glowed blood red.
Perhaps this explained why Sidious hadn’t had the Temple dismantled, Vader thought. So he could regard it from his lofty new throne room and gloat.
The holomap began to close tighter and tighter on a remote area of the Outer Rim. When, finally, the Jaguada system hung in midair, Vader strode into its midst.
“This moon,” he said, gesturing with the forefinger of his black-gloved hand.
“Yes, Lord Vader,” the tech said.
Vader glanced at Appo, who had already comlinked Central Operations on Coruscant.
“The moon is the site of an abandoned Separatist communications facility,” Appo said. “Whoever is in possession of the Jedi transceiver must have brought the facility’s hyperspace communications network online.”
“Do we have any vessels in that sector, Commander?”
“No vessels, Lord Vader,” Appo said. “But there is a small Imperial garrison on Jaguada.”
“Instruct the garrison commander to scramble his troopers immediately.”
“Capture or kill, Lord Vader?”
“Either would please me.”
“I understand.”
Vader cupped the holoimage of the tiny moon in his hand. “I have you now,” he said quietly, and made a fist.
The lightsaber Klossi Anno had given Shryne felt foreign in his hand, but it was finely wrought, and its dense blue blade was perfect for deflecting the hail of blaster bolts the battle droids had unleashed. Beside him Jula was firing steadily and with impressive accuracy, dropping those droids Shryne’s parried bolts didn’t. Crouched behind the control console, Filli and Dyx were somehow managing to continue entering commands on the keyboards while the flashing lightsabers of Starstone, Forte, and Kulka provided cover.
In the control room and elsewhere in the facility, alert sirens were warbling, lights were flashing, and hatchways were sealing.
“Whatever you did, undo it!” Shryne said to Filli without missing a blaster bolt. “Deactivate the droids!”
A glance at display screens that had been sleeping moments earlier showed that scores of infantry droids and droidekas were hurrying toward the control center from all areas of the complex.
“Filli, hurry!” Jula added for emphasis. “More are headed this way!”
Shryne took a moment to look around the control room. The doorway through which he and Jula had entered was one of three, positioned 120 degrees from one another.
“Filli, can you seal us in here?” he shouted.
“Probably,” the slicer yelled back. “But we may have bigger troubles.”
“We can handle the droidekas,” Forte assured him.
Filli raised his head above the console and shook it negatively. “Someone at the Temple knows that we’ve sliced in!”
Starstone whirled on him. “How do you—”
“We’re getting an echo from the beacon,” Eyl Dix explained.
Redirecting a flurry of bolts, Shryne reduced six droids to shrapnel. “How long before the Temple ascertains our location?”
“Depends on who’s at the other end,” Filli said.
“Then cancel the link!” Jula said.
“We’re still downloading,” Starstone said. “We need all the data we can get.”
Shryne glowered at her. “What good is all the data in the Temple if we’re not around to put it to use?”
She narrowed her eyes. “I knew you’d say that. Do it, Filli,” she said over her shoulder. “Zero the link.” Glancing apologetically at Forte and Kulka, she added: “We’ll make the best of what we have.”
“Done,” Filli announced.
Shryne’s deflection shot dismantled another droid. “Now shut the power down before we’re shot to death or entombed in here!”
A moment later the droids returned to their inert status, and the control room was plunged into darkness. Five lumas provided just enough light to see by.
“I trust that someone knows the way out of here,” Forte said.
“I do,” Dix said, her antennae standing straight up.
“Then let’s hope the exit’s still open,” Shryne said.
Filli nodded. “It is. I got a look at the security screen before we cut the power.”
“Good job,” Shryne started to say, when blasterfire erupted from somewhere outside the control room.
“You said you zeroed it, Filli,” Jula snapped.
He spread his hands in confusion. “I did!”
Shryne listened closely to the distant discharges. “Those aren’t droid blasters,” he said after a moment. “Those are DC-fifteens.”
Starstone stared at him. “Stormtroopers? Here?”
Jula’s comlink chimed and she grabbed for it. “Archyr,” she said for everyone’s benefit.
“Captain, we’ve got company,” Archyr said from the drop ship. “Troopers from the Jaguada ga
rrison.”
Shryne traded looks with Starstone.
“Whoever’s at the Temple didn’t waste any time,” she said.
Shryne nodded. “They must have been monitoring us from the start.”
“How many troopers?” Jula was asking Archyr.
“A couple of squads,” he said. “Skeck and I are pinned down on the landing platform. But most of the troopers have headed inside.”
“I can try to seal the entrances …” Filli said.
“No, don’t,” Shryne cut him off. “You think you can you rig a delay to the power generator?”
His luma grasped in his teeth, Filli began to riffle through his tool kit. “I’m sure I can cobble something together,” he said.
Shryne turned to Jula. “How long will it take us to reach the front entrance, closest to the cliffs?”
She threw him a questioning look. “That’ll dump us way downvalley, Roan. A good kilometer from the drop ship.”
He nodded. “But we avoid engaging troopers on the way out.”
Her brow continued to furrow. “Then why do you want Filli to—” She grinned in sudden revelation and turned to Filli. “Set it to power up in a standard quarter, Filli.”
“That’s cutting things pretty close, Captain.”
“The closer, the better,” she said.
By the time a holotransmission from the commander of the Jaguada garrison reached the Temple beacon room, Vader already knew that something had gone wrong.
“I’m sorry, Lord Vader,” the helmeted stormtrooper was saying, “but we’re trapped inside the facility with several hundred reactivated infantry and destroyer droids.” The commander dodged blaster bolts and returned fire at something distant from the holocam’s transmission grid. “All accesses sealed when the facility powered up.”
“Where are the Jedi?” Vader asked.
“They left before the facility went online. We’re trapped in here until we find a way to blow one of the doors.”
“Did you destroy the ship the Jedi arrived in?”
“Negative,” the commander said as bolts lanced the air around him. “The smugglers detonated a magpulse while the second squad was advancing. My troopers were expecting it, but in the time it took our hardware to reboot, the Jedi got their ship airborne.”
Off cam a trooper said: “Fallback positions two and three have been overrun, Commander. We’ll have to make a stand here.”
“There’s just too many of them!” the commander said as diagonal lines of noise began to interfere with the transmission.
Abruptly, it derezzed completely.
Armand Isard and the ISB technicians busied themselves at the beacon controls, if only to avoid having to look at Vader.
“Lord Vader,” Appo said, “Jaguada base reports that jump points are limited in that system, and that they are scanning for vagrant traces of the Jedi ship. They may be able to calculate possible escape vectors.”
Vader nodded.
Infuriated, he turned and stormed from the beacon room, wishing he had the power to simply reach out and pluck the Jedi from the sky.
Conclude their extermination.
Sidious was wrong, he told himself as he hurried through the empty hallways.
They are a threat.
The Drunk Dancer tore through mottled hyperspace, leaving desolate Jaguada light-years behind. Skeck had sustained a nasty blaster burn to his right arm during the troopers’ attempt to disable the drop ship, but no one else had been hurt. Emerging from the facility moments before Filli’s time delay initiated the power generator, Shryne and the others had raced upvalley to the landing platform and had arrived in time to catch a squad of Imperials in a crossfire.
Sealed inside the facility, the remaining squads were up to their T-visors in reactivated battle droids.
After Skeck’s wound had been bandaged, Shryne had retired to the dormitory cabin space Jula had provided for the Jedi. He had always had a fondness for hyperspace travel—more, the sense of being outside time—and was kneeling in meditation when he sensed Starstone approaching the cabin. Simultaneous with her excited entry he rose to his feet, eyes on the sheaf of flimsiplast printouts she was holding.
“We have data on hundreds of Jedi,” she said, rattling the printouts. “We know where more than seventy Masters were at the end of the war—when the clone commanders received their orders.”
Accepting the proffered flimsies, Shryne thumbed through them, then glanced at Starstone. “How many of these hundreds do you think might actually have survived the attacks?”
She gave her head a quick shake. “I’m not even going to try to guess. We can begin our search with systems closest to Mossak, and fan out from there toward Mygeeto, Saleucami, and Kashyyyk.”
Shryne shook the flimsies. “Has it occurred to you that if we have this information, then so does the Empire? What do you think our adversaries were doing in the Temple beacon room, playing hide-and-seek?”
Starstone winced at the harshness of his tone, but only briefly. “Has it occurred to you that our adversaries, as you call them, were there precisely because a good many Jedi survived? It’s crucial that we reach those survivors before they’re hunted down. Or are you proposing that we leave them to the Empire—to Vader and his stormtroopers?”
Shryne made a start at replying, then bit back his words and motioned to the edge of the nearest cot. “Sit down, and try for a moment to stop thinking like a HoloNet hero.”
When Starstone ultimately lowered herself to the cot, Shryne sat opposite her.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” he began. “Your goal couldn’t be more noble. And for all I know there are five hundred Jedi scattered throughout the Rim in need of rescue. My point is, I don’t want to see your name added to the casualty list. What happened at Jaguada is only a foretaste of what’s in store for us if we continue to band together.”
“I—”
Shryne stopped her before she could go on. “Think about the final beacon message we received at Murkhana. The message didn’t tell us to gather together and coordinate a strike on Coruscant, or on Palpatine, or even on the troopers. It instructed us, each of us who received it, to hide. Yoda or whoever ordered the transmission knew that the Jedi were in a fight we couldn’t win. The message was a way of saying just that—that the order is over and done with. That the Jedi are finished.”
He hid his ruefulness. “Does that mean that you have to stop honoring the Force? Of course not. All of us will live out our lives honoring the Force. But not with lightsabers in hand, Olee. With right action, and right thinking.”
“I’d rather die honoring the Force with my lightsaber,” she said.
He had expected as much. “How is dying honoring the Force, when you could be out doing good works, passing on to others all that you’ve learned about the Force?”
“Is that what you plan to do—devote yourself to good works?”
Shryne smiled. “Right now I only know what I’m not going to do, and that’s help rush you into a grave on some remote world.” He held her gaze. “I’m sorry. But I’ve already lost two Padawans to this rotten war, and I don’t want to lose you to it.”
“Even though I’m not your learner?”
He nodded. “Even though.”
She sighed with purpose. “I appreciate your concern for me, Master—and I will call you that because right now you’re the only Master we have. But the Force tells me that we can make a difference, and I can’t turn my back on that. Master Chatak instilled in me every day that I should follow the Force’s lead, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
She adopted an even more serious look. “Jula believes that you can turn your back. The Force is with her, but she’s not a Jedi, Master. You can’t unlearn overnight the teachings and practices of decades. Even if you should succeed, you’ll regret it.”
Shryne firmed his lips and nodded again. “Then you and I will be parting ways at Mossak.”
Sadness pulled down the c
orners of her mouth. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way, Master.”
“That doesn’t begin to say how I feel about it.”
They stood, and he hugged her tenderly.
“You’ll tell the others?” he said while she was gathering up the flimsies.
“They already know.”
Shryne didn’t watch her leave. But no sooner did she exit the cabin than Jula entered. “Jedi business?”
Shryne looked at her. “You can probably figure it out.”
Jula averted her gaze. “Olee’s a fine young woman—they’re all decent beings. But they’re deluded, Roan. It’s over. They have to realize that and get on with their lives. You told me that attachment is the root of many of our problems. Well, that includes being so attached to the Jedi order that you can’t leave it behind. If being a Jedi means being able to accept what has happened and move on, then they honor the order best by letting go.”
She looked at him now. “For some of them it’s all about the loss of prestige, and the power to decide what’s right or wrong. To believe that everything you do is motivated by the Force, and that you always have the Force on your side. But that’s not always the way it works. I’ve no love for the order, you know that. Sometimes the Jedi caused as many problems as they solved. Now, for whatever reason, whether it’s Palpatine or the fact that the Jedi couldn’t accept the idea of taking second place to the Republic—the Force isn’t necessarily your best ally.”
She reached for his hands. “They took you from me once, Roan. I won’t let you go a second time without a fight.” She laughed lightly. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes my little speech.” Gazing at him, she said: “Join us.”
“In crime, you mean.”
A fire came into her eyes. “We’re not criminals. All right, we’ve done some questionable things, but so have you, and that was in the past. If you come aboard, I promise we’ll stick to taking contracts that will allow you to keep on doing good deeds, if that’s what it’s going to take.”