“Such power,” Sawj Luzo said, watching the metal monster rise. “She won’t even need us to sever the moorings.”
“Moorings?” Flen looked beneath the ship. Two tiny monofilament cords tied around the landing struts were just visible now in the light. As the lines pulled taut, the young Lord’s yellow eyes darted to the other ends, buried in the muck where the vessel had parked.
There, in the ground, tiny pins snapped—and brought down a Dark Lord’s dreams.
The security device had gone in before Jelph had brought the first starfighter part down from the jungle. The Aurek had sat hidden beneath a mound of manure in the barn—but beneath it was buried something else: two of the ship’s proton torpedoes, surrounded by thousands of kilograms of ammonium-nitrate-based explosive. Transforming the fertilizer into something fit for an anti-theft system had required much patience and care—but it had given Jelph a way to turn his nominal job into something helpful to his mission.
Now the anti-theft system worked exactly as planned. When the cables yanked upward, triggers snapped shut on the torpedo warheads. The weapons detonated, igniting the surrounding explosives.
Thunder struck the farm as the fireball ripped and tore itself free from the surrounding clay, consuming the stable and its occupants in milliseconds. Outside, Jelph tackled Ori, plunging them both into the water even as the shock wave shredded the ground behind them.
Jerked through the disintegrating barn roof, the strikefighter rode aloft on a geyser of heat and force. For a split second the woman inside rejoiced at the motion, assuming it a natural demonstration of the vehicle’s power. Her elation ended when, the vessel’s shielding inoperative, the other four torpedoes detonated in their launch tubes. Night laborers as far away as Tahv saw the new comet flash into being and die just as quickly, bathing the southern sky with an eerie light.
Lillia Venn had found her way to the sky.
Chapter Four
The little hut was taking shape. Under a dense canopy of foliage no uvak scout could penetrate, the new structure sat atop a relatively dry lump in the middle of the thicket. The hejarbo shoots grew much stronger up here in the jungle; if it weren’t for Jelph’s lightsaber, Ori never would have cleared the grounds.
Eight weeks had passed since the blast claimed the farm. Jelph and Ori had descended from the jungle only once, under cover of night, to investigate what was left. There wasn’t anything to see. The entire riverbank had fallen into the Marisota River. Dark waters eddied and swirled over the blast crater. All that remained was the stub of a weed-covered path terminating at the river’s edge. The pair had returned to the jungle that night confident that no one would learn there had ever been a starfighter on Kesh. Ori had laughed for the first time in days, quoting her mother’s favorite line.
“The Confidence of the Dead End.”
Since that trip, their focus had been entirely on carving a place for themselves in hiding. There was no returning, Ori now realized; not after her mother’s betrayal. Venn’s death certainly had been broadcast through the Force—and just as certainly, would have set the remaining High Lords against one another all over again. The game was renewed; maybe Candra might even find a role to play. Ori wanted nothing to do with any of it. That part of her was past.
And if no one mourned Lillia Venn, no one had come to look for Ori and Jelph, either. In fact, the two of them had spied fewer Sith and Keshiri in the surrounding lands of late than usual. Presumably, a Grand Lord vanishing mysteriously in an area feared as haunted since the tragedy of the Ragnos Lakes would have that effect.
It was fine with her. Ori had a new vision for herself now—based on an old story she’d heard as a child. Keshiri legend held that soon after the Sith arrived, some of their native population had escaped over the ocean. They’d chosen a one-way trip to privation and likely death over lives of service to the Tribe. Today’s more devoted Keshiri told it as a cautionary tale: choice of destiny was a luxury reserved for the Protectors, not their servants. The cost of arrogance, for a servant, was isolation.
Ori saw it differently. If the exodus really had happened, whoever had led those slaves away was the greatest Keshiri of all time. Their fates had been decided—and defied. Jelph was right. There had to be a way to win at life besides climbing to the top of a fractious order—only to be stabbed by a shikkar or poisoned by a presumed ally. Had Venn been happy, she wondered, being immolated in her moment of triumph? The Tribe members seemed as hopelessly bound to their paths as the Keshiri who remained slaves. And they thought they were smarter?
Looking to the sun vanishing between the trees, Ori began cutting down the last of the meter-length shoots that would form their side door. It felt strange using the Jedi’s weapon, she thought. All the lightsabers the Sith on Kesh used were red, but some of the original castaways kept captured Jedi lightsabers as trophies. She had seen a green one in the Korsin Museum. This one’s color was strange and beautiful, a brilliant blue found nowhere in nature. The only artifact of Jelph’s alien origin.
Well, not the only one, she thought, extinguishing the lightsaber.
That’s where he was now, she knew. As usual, he had risen at dawn to trap breakfast and gather their fruit for later. While offering nothing like the gardening conditions in the lowlands, the jungle provided other means of sustenance year-round; in this latitude, she doubted she would notice when winter came. He spent the rest of his day building their shelter, before retiring, at dusk, as he always did, to keep vigil beside the device—the one part of his space vessel he hadn’t brought down to the farm. She walked there now, to the spot in the trees where Jelph sat on a stump for hours, staring at the dark metal case and fiddling with its instruments.
He hadn’t kept it from her. For the Sith, the “transmitter,” as he called it, could be as explosive a discovery as the starfighter. Jelph had kept it for what it represented: his lifeline to the outside. He’d never been able to get a message out; as he explained it, something about Kesh and its shifting magnetic field prevented such attempts. That might not be a permanent situation, but it could be centuries before it changed. Ori wondered if that same phenomenon had thwarted the castaways centuries before. All he was able to do was set the device to scan for signals from the ether, recording them for later playback. Perhaps, if some traveler came near enough, he might be able to get a message to the beyond. She now understood his trips upriver in earlier months: he came to the jungle to see what sounds he’d snared.
Normally, he heard nothing but static. But whatever Jelph had just heard had thrown him.
“I can’t go back,” he said, looking blankly at the device.
Ori looked at the flashing thing, not understanding. “What happened?”
“I caught a signal.” It took him several moments to be able to say the words. “The Jedi are at war with one another.”
“What?”
“A Jedi named Revan,” he said. “When I lived there, Revan was like us—trying to rally the Jedi against a great enemy.” Jelph swallowed, finding his mouth dry. “From the sound of it, something’s gone wrong. The Jedi Order has split. It’s at war with itself.”
Jelph replayed the recorded message for her. A fragment of a warning from a Republic admiral, it cautioned listeners that no Jedi could be trusted. The ages-old compact between Republic and Jedi had been sundered. Now there was only war.
The message ended.
Shaken, Jelph deactivated the device. “This … is our fault. The Covenant.”
“The Jedi sect you belonged to?”
“Yes.” He looked up in the twilight, unable to find any evening stars through the foliage. “And that’s the trouble. There aren’t supposed to be any Jedi sects. The Order is divided now—but we divided it first.” He shook his head. “May the Force help them all.”
He turned his gaze to the wilderness again. Ori let him sit in silence. It occurred to her that during all her days of complaining about the world she had lost, Jelph was living with the los
s of a whole galaxy. And he was losing it again now.
At last, he stood and spoke. “I don’t know what to do, Ori. We kept the Tribe from discovering a way off Kesh. But I always held out hope that with the transmitter, I could make contact one day. Make contact,” he said, looking back at her for a moment, “to get us out of this place.”
“And to warn them about my people,” Ori said.
Jelph looked away. There was no avoiding the truth. “Yes.”
Ori touched his shoulder. “It’s only fair. I tried to warn my people about you.”
“Well, it’s pointless now,” he said, stooping to lift a stone from their future front garden. “If the Jedi are divided—or, worse, if Revan or someone else has fallen to the dark side—then bringing a planetful of Sith to their attention is the worst thing I could possibly do for the galaxy.”
“You don’t know that,” she said. “You could be wrong. The Jedi could still come here and wipe everyone out.”
“Yes, I could be wrong.” Laughing to himself, he looked at her. “You know, that’s the first time anyone’s heard me say that. Maybe if I’d said it more often back home, I wouldn’t be here now.” He tossed the stone into the stream and knelt again. “I’ve lived my whole life thinking I knew what I was supposed to do. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”
Watching him, Ori saw the look she’d seen in him in her previous visits to the farm. It was the expression he’d worn when toiling in the muck. Then he had been doing something unpleasant, but he’d been doing it because he had to do it, to keep his garden alive and his customers happy. His duty.
Duty. The term didn’t mean the same thing to the Sith. In the Sabers, Ori had had missions she was charged to perform—but she had taken them on as personal challenges, not out of some loyalty to a higher order. The galaxy didn’t have the right to give her odd jobs. Truly free beings had lives. Slaves had duties.
And now Jelph was suffering, certain that he had some duty to perform, but unsure what it was. What service did he owe the galaxy—a galaxy that had already cast him out?
“Maybe,” Ori said, “maybe Sith philosophy has the answer for you.”
“What?”
“We’re taught to be self-centered. We don’t think us and them. It’s just you, versus everyone else. No one else matters.” Placing her arms around him from behind, she looked out at the dark stream, burbling quietly past on its way to feed the Marisota River. “The Sith cast me out. The Jedi cast you out. Maybe neither side deserves our help.”
“The only side worth saving,” he said, turning toward her, “is ours?”
She smiled up at him. Yes, she had been right from the beginning. He was so much more than a slave. “Give it a try, Jedi,” she said. “If I can do something selfless—then maybe it’s time for you to do something selfish.”
He looked at her for a long moment, a twinkle in his eye. Wordlessly, he broke the embrace and stepped over to the receiver. Uprooting it, he grinned at her. “Shall we?”
Ori watched him cradle the blinking machine for a moment before she realized what he intended. Exhaling, she stepped over and helped him carry the transmitter to the side of the stream. With one great heave, they tossed it in. Striking a shoal beneath the current, the contraption splintered noisily into shards. They watched together for a moment as bits of casing bobbed and vanished into the darkness. Then they turned back toward their house.
The cords were cut.
It was time to live.
Read on for an excerpt from
Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Conviction
by Aaron Allston
Published by Del Rey Books
Coruscant, Jedi Temple
Infirmary Level
The medical readout board on the carbonite pod flickered, then went dark, announcing that the young man just being thawed from suspended animation—Valin Horn, Jedi Knight—was dead.
Master Cilghal, preeminent physician of the Jedi Order, felt a jolt of alarm ripple through the Force. It was not her own alarm. The emotion was the natural reaction of all those gathered to see Valin and his sister Jysella rescued from an unfair, unwarranted sentence imposed not by a court of justice but by Galactic Alliance Chief of State Daala herself. Had they come to see these Jedi Knights freed and instead become witnesses to a tragedy?
But what Cilghal didn’t feel in the Force was the winking out of a life. Valin was still there, a diminished but intact presence in the Force.
She waved at the assembly, a calming motion. “Be still.” She did not need to exert herself through the Force. Most of those present were Jedi Masters and Jedi Knights who respected her authority. Not one of them was easily panicked, not even the little girl beside Han and Leia.
Standing between Valin’s and Jysella’s gurneys with her assistant Tekli, Cilghal concentrated on the young man lying to her right. His body still gleamed with a trace of dark fluid: all that remained of the melted carbonite that had imprisoned him. He was as still as the dead. Cilghal pressed her huge, webbed hand against his throat to check his pulse. She found it, shallow but steady.
The readout board flickered again and the lights came up in all their colors, strong, the pulse monitor flickering with Valin’s heartbeat, the encephaloscan beginning to jitter with its measurements of Valin’s brain activity.
Tekli, a Chadra-Fan, her diminutive size and glossy fur coat giving her the aspect of a plush toy instead of an experienced Jedi Knight and a physician, spun away from Valin’s gurney and toward the one beside it. On it lay Jysella Horn, slight of build, also gleaming a bit with unevaporated carbonite residue. Tekli put one palm against Jysella’s forehead and pressed the fingers of her other hand across Jysella’s wrist.
Cilghal nodded. Computerized monitors might fail, but the Force sense of a trained Jedi would not, at least not under these conditions.
Tekli glanced back at Cilghal and gave a brisk nod. All was well.
The pulse under Cilghal’s hand began to strengthen and quicken. Also good, also normal.
Cilghal moved around the head of the gurney and stood on the far side of the apparatus, a step back from Valin. When he awoke, his vision would be clouded, and perhaps his judgment as well. It would not do for him to wake with a large form standing over him, gripping his throat. Violence might result.
She caught the attention of Corran and Mirax, parents of the two patients. “That was merely an electronic glitch.” Cilghal tried to make her tones reassuring, knowing her effort was not likely to succeed—Mon Calamari voices, suited to their larger-than-human frames, were resonant and even gravelly, an evolutionary adaptation that allowed them to be heard at greater distances in their native underwater environments. Unfortunately, they tended to sound harsh and even menacing to human ears. But she had to try. “They are fine.”
Corran, wearing green Jedi robes that matched the color of his eyes, heaved a sigh of relief. His wife, Mirax, dressed in a stylish jumpsuit in blacks and blues, smiled uncertainly as she asked, “What caused it?”
Cilghal offered a humanlike shrug. “I’ll put the monitors in for evaluation once your children are checked out as stable. I suspect these monitors haven’t been tested or serviced since Valin and Jysella were frozen.” There, that was a well-delivered lie, dismissing the monitor’s odd behavior as irrelevant.
Valin stirred. Cilghal glanced down at him. The Knight’s eyes fluttered open and tried to fix on her, but seemed to have difficulty focusing.
Cilghal looked down at him. “Valin? Can you hear me?”
“I … I …” Valin’s voice was weak, watery.
“Don’t speak. Just nod.”
He did.
“You’ve been—”
She was interrupted by a stage-whispered notification from Tekli: “Jysella is awake.”
Cilghal adjusted her angle so she could address both siblings. “You’ve been in carbonite suspension for some time. You will feel cold, shaky, and disoriented. This is all normal. You are amon
g friends. Do you understand me?”
Valin nodded again. Jysella’s “yes” was faint, but stronger and more controlled than Cilghal had expected.
“Your parents are here. I’ll allow them to speak to you in a moment. The Solos are here, as well.” And little Amelia and her pet Anji, both of whom smell like they’ve been rolling in seafood shells left rotting for a week. Cilghal had to blink over that fact. The child should have received a thorough disinfecting before being allowed in this chamber. Come to think of it, Barv also reeked. Where could a youngling and even a Jedi Knight go in the clean, austere Temple and end up smelling like that?
She set the question aside. “Bazel Warv is here, and Yaqeel Saav’etu, your friends. They can answer many questions about an ailment that afflicted the two of you just prior to your freezing.”
Jysella looked around, barely raising her head, her attention sliding across the faces of friends and loved ones, and then she looked at Valin. He must have felt her attention; he looked back. A thought, the sort of instant communication that only siblings can understand, passed between then. Then the two of them relaxed.
Jysella looked again at her parents. “Mom?”
At Cilghal’s nod, Mirax and Corran came forward, crowding into the gap between the gurneys. Tekli moved out of their way, circling around the head of Valin’s bed to rejoin Cilghal. She craned her neck to look up at the Mon Cal. “All signs good.”
Cilghal nodded. She turned to the others in the room. “All but the immediate family, please withdraw to the waiting area.”
And they did, exiting with words of encouragement and welcome.
In moments only the Horns and the medics remained with Valin and Jysella. Cilghal took a few steps to the nurse’s station and its bank of monitoring screens, giving its more elaborate readouts a look … or pretending to. Tekli found a mist dispenser and sprayed its clean-smelling contents around the chamber, driving away reminders of Amelia’s, Anji’s, and Barv’s recent presence. Then she rejoined her superior.
Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #6: Sentinel Page 3