Star Wars: I, Jedi

by Michael A. Stackpole

  The crewmen themselves presented no problem since they were on leave and only looking to enjoy themselves. This kept them indoors on a hot and humid evening, where a cantina’s environmental control unit could make the night bearable, drinks could make it pleasurable, and company could make it exquisite. Dirt-patrols, meant for picking up sick, stupid or belligerent spacers and returning them to the ship, barely gave us a second glance. Elegos’ nose picked up the scent of the armor well before we saw the stormies, allowing us time to slip away down a sidestreet, or gather on a corner unobtrusively.

  Finally we reached a building across a small greensward from the Imperial Governor’s palace. The building itself had an eight-meter-high wall running around it, with towers at each of the four corners that rose up another two meters. A large, recessed, arched entryway split the wall in two, but had been closed for the evening with two massive metal doors. Stormtroopers patrolled in pairs along the walls, and two each stood in the corner towers.

  The palace itself had been set up in a triangular pattern with towers at each of the points. Left and right were two smaller towers, each a good fifteen meters in height and twice that in diameter. Directly back from the gate, the triangle’s furthest point had a rectangular tower that rose to thirty meters in height. The central third of it had been shrunk by a couple meters on each side, as if a giant fist had closed around it. It made for an interesting architectural look that differentiated the palace from most of the local buildings. A four-story-tall foundational building connected all three towers, and a private shuttle pad had been built into the roof of the big tower—which is why it had blinking lights crowning it.

  “Twenty meters to the gate.” I crouched down, unfastening my cloak and letting it slide off my back. I boosted a pinch of dust into the air and watched it blow toward the palace. “At least we have a tail wind.”

  “Good. Ooryl and Elegos cover us, we weave our way there.”

  Elegos cleared his throat. “The gate is closed. How do you propose to get in?”

  We each brandished our lightsabers. “We’ll knock,” Luke offered, “real loud.”

  “What are you doing there?” A stormtrooper and his partner appeared from nowhere around the corner of the building shielding us. “Let’s see some identification.”

  “Sure.” I stood slowly and held my lightsaber like a glowrod while I motioned with my left hand as if digging for identification. “I know I have something here.…” I thought that I might be able to project an image into his brain that would get him to go away, but my mind blanked.

  The stormtrooper took a half-step toward me. “You look familiar.”

  “Me? No, can’t be.”

  “Trying to be smart?” The stormtrooper’s blaster came up to cover me. “You’re coming with us.”

  I glanced at Luke, then shrugged and depressed my thumb, shooting the silver blade straight through the stormtrooper’s chest. I shoved him back into his partner, knocking his blaster aside. The second stormtrooper still pulled the trigger, spraying shots out into the night. My lightsaber came across and trimmed his shoulders down to the level of his armpits, ending his attack.

  Luke stared at me. “You need to work on this idea of warning.”

  “Didn’t get a chance with them, no.” I ducked down as the stormtroopers on the palace wall started shouting and firing shots in our direction. Alarms began to blare. “But the others, I think they’re all sorts of warned.… I suggest we go, now!”

  Luke and I sprinted toward the palace gate, cutting back and forth to make ourselves difficult targets. As I ran I opened myself to the Force and felt a flood of data pour in. I planted with my right foot, cut to the left and whipped my lightsaber around to the right, batting a blaster bolt out into the night. Another two steps, then hesitation as fire from an E-web mounted in the right tower slashed across my path, then a dive-and-roll over the stream of bolts starting to track toward me. I fended off two more bolts, wishing I could manage, as Luke did, to direct them back at the men who had fired them, then reached the sanctuary of the recessed gate.

  I pushed my sphere of responsibility to see what was on the other side awaiting us, but found no one. I pushed further and then smiled. “I have her, Luke. This close, I have Mirax. Tower your side, down.”

  The Jedi Master smiled. “Let’s not keep her waiting.”

  In tandem we slashed left and right from the center of the gate and down through the big metal doors, carving a hole large enough to admit a landspeeder. I stepped inside, then slashed up and through the elbow of a stormtrooper shoving his blaster carbine down to spray us. He screamed and reeled away. I tugged the carbine from his falling hand and triggered a burst of bolts at a stormtrooper hunkering down from Elegos’ covering fire. I hit, sending him spinning from the wall, then sprinted after Luke.

  Luke scattered a half-dozen bolts fired at him, sending four back at the tower from whence they had come. One stormtrooper went down, the other just ducked, but the E-web sparked and started to burn. Luke sliced the barrel from the blaster rifle carried by the lead stormtrooper running from the tower where Mirax lay, then dropped him with a backhand blow that separated the man’s pelvis from everything that normally rested on it.

  I snapped the selector lever over to stun, then shot the next man in line. Elegos came through the gate and peppered the next three with stun shots. They all tottered and fell. Luke dashed into the tower doorway. I saw a flash and heard a blaster whine, but the green lightsaber continued to hum.

  Ooryl came through the gate and laid down a pattern of suppression fire that held off the stormies coming from the far tower. Elegos and I covered him as he retreated to the tower, then we entered and I sprinted straight for the stairs leading down. This took me past two stormies with their assorted parts scattered in awkward positions. One level down I caught up with Luke at the mouth of an octagonal corridor festooned with sunken doorways.

  He stood by a control panel scanning a readout of prisoner names. “Calling up a prisoner roster now.”

  I glanced at the list and tapped a name. “That’s her.”

  “Holding cell 02021020.”

  I nodded and ran down the corridor. “Here it is.” I reached the door, shot the lock and watched the door retract amid a shower of sparks. I took all three steps in a leap, then stopped just inside the doorway.

  There she was, just lying there, as Exar Kun had shown me. The little grey device on her forehead flickered with green and red lights, and the silver light from above bathed her in a radiance that left her skin almost pure white. It reflected true from her black hair. She looked perfect and asleep and I felt my throat tighten. You are incredibly beautiful, Mirax, and you’ve been away far too long.

  Luke squeezed past me and leaned over by her face. “Don’t think this is what’s keeping her under. Feels like a Jedi hibernation trance. Normally a person can’t be placed in one against her will, but if this device broke down her resistance, it might have been possible.”

  I nodded. “I’ve had experience with machines breaking down resistance.” I set my lightsaber and blaster down on her bier. “Take the gadget off, let her wake up.”

  Luke pulled the device away and smashed it against the wall. “It’ll take a bit more than that to wake her up.” He reached his hand toward her forehead. “There’s a Jedi technique used.…”

  I grabbed his wrist. “Know of it. Read about it in my grandfather’s notes.” I smiled at him. “She’s my wife, I’d like to help. You bring her out of it, and I’ll let her know she’s been missed.”

  Luke nodded and waited for me to come around on Mirax’s other side. “Ready?”

  “Let’s do it.” I gave him a nod, then leaned down and kissed my wife on the lips.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Mirax’s brown eyes blinked open and she began to smile. She reached up with her right hand, grabbed a fistful of my tunic and pulled me back down, covering her mouth with mine. We kissed with the urgency of lost love found, heart�
�s pain eased. I stroked her hair and she kept me close, then we both had to come up for air.

  Pulling back so I could see all of her face, I smiled. “Hi.”

  “Hi, yourself. You’re pretty cute.” She smiled back up at me, sending a jolt through me from head to toe and back again. “Of course, if my husband finds out you kissed me like that, you’ll be in big trouble.”

  Luke burst out laughing. “Her, I like.”

  I kissed her on the tip of her nose. “You remember Luke Skywalker, right?”

  “I do indeed. Good to see you again, though I could have hoped for better circumstances.” Mirax sat up, swung her legs over the edge of the bier and stretched. “I don’t even want to know where this rock is, I just want to know you have a plan for getting us off it.”

  The distant whine of blasters accompanied Elegos’ entry into the detention cell. “Ooryl has them cut off at the stair landing. We better move before they bring up reinforcements.”

  Mirax cocked her head at the Caamasi. “A Caamasi?”

  “Elegos A’kla, Trustant of the Caamasi community at Kerilt.” I looked at her. “He’s been taking good care of me.”

  She laughed and threw Elegos a salute. “You have my thanks and sympathies. Taking care of him can be quite a chore.”

  Elegos shrugged. “Not really, you have him well trained.”

  “Still leaves dirty clothes lying about, though, right?”

  I cleared my throat. “We can have this discussion later. Any chance we can make it back to the spaceport from here?”

  Elegos shook his head. “Not likely.”

  Mirax hefted the blaster carbine I’d left on the bier. “Then we go to the top of the big tower. They have a landing pad there—that’s how they brought me in after they separated me from the Skate. We steal some speeder bikes or a shuttle and make a dash for your ship.”

  Luke nodded. “It’s a plan.”

  Mirax pointed at the door. “Let’s move, then.”

  The Jedi Master looked at me. “Notice any resemblance between her and Mara?”

  I shivered. “Now that you mention it … let’s make sure they never get together, okay?”

  “Right.”

  From the far end of the corridor, Ooryl was filling the stairwell with a hail of laser bolts, stippling the wall behind the first landing with little fires. Two stormtroopers lay tangled on the stairs, and others kept peeking around the edge. They snapped their heads back when Ooryl fired at them. Stretching out my senses, I could feel a knot of them waiting on the stairs and toward that end of the corridor above us.

  I smiled. “I’ve got a piece of a plan. Mirax, the blaster, please.” I pointed at the ceiling. “Elegos, if you can boost me up there.”

  Luke held a hand out. “Permit me.” With a simple gesture I rose toward the ceiling as steadily as if standing on a stone platform.

  I ignited my lightsaber and cored a circle in the ceiling above me, then shoved it out of the way as Luke pushed me all the way up through it. Taking a step forward, I brought the blaster carbine up and lashed the stream of blue energy darts back and forth over the crowd of armor-shelled warriors clogging the corridor’s end. Their armor deflected some shots and ablated to lessen the power of others—reducing them from stunning to something that just dazed the soldiers, but I had such clean shots at them that they were at my mercy.

  Elegos came up through the hole next and blazed away with his blaster. His blue bolts struck befuddled targets, enveloping them in a collapsing sphere of blue that dropped them easily. Trapped as they were, they were not really a fighting force, just targets waiting to be shot. I scythed my fire over them and together we finished them off.

  Ooryl came up the stairs, but Mirax and Luke took the quicker route to the corridor. Mirax took the blaster back from me, appropriated a powerpack from Ooryl and kissed him on the cheek. She turned and pointed back away from the stairs. “Along here there’s a corridor that goes over to the main building. Landing pad’s on the top.”

  Luke led the way. “Need to be careful. The stormtroopers we can pick out with the Force, but the Jensaarai, they’re more difficult.”

  “Difficult, that’s an understatement.” Mirax tossed the blaster’s old powerpack aside and jammed the new one home. “Their leader, this woman they call the Saarai-kaar, somehow thinks holding me is preventing her family from being destroyed. When she spoke to me, when she fed me—and I know I was sleeping for a long time between meals—she would speak in past and present and future. She said a Halcyon was her doom or destiny, but wouldn’t go into details. It was confusing, but I never thought she was insane.”

  Luke shook his head. “She probably didn’t understand it any better than you did, or than Keiran—Corran—did when he lost contact with you. He didn’t have the mental framework in place to make it make sense.”

  “I’m still not sure I do.”

  “No, but neither do the Jensaarai.” Luke frowned. “They have training, but it’s skewed and things have been added. It’s not an independent Force tradition like the Dathomiri witches, but it’s unlike anything else I know of.” He shrugged. “That’s not saying much.”

  “You!” The shouted words came angry, though the speakers in the comm unit at the hallway juncture couldn’t quite produce all the outrage they were meant to convey. I glanced to my left and saw a hologram of Tavira standing there, just shy of life-size, her hands on her hips. “You were the Jedi at Courkrus.”

  I nodded. “At your service.” Shifting my lightsaber to my left hand, I gestured with my right to Luke and Mirax. “I’d like to introduce Luke Skywalker, Jedi Master, and Mirax Terrik and … but, wait, we’re on our way up to see you. Introductions are so much nicer in person.”

  “How dare you!”

  “Oh, I dare.” I pointed to the sky. “New Republic will be here in no time. The days of the Invidious are over.”

  “Never!”

  I laughed. “By the way, the month’s not up, but the answer is no.”

  “Arrgghhh! When I get my hands on you …”

  “In your dreams, deary.” Mirax shot the comm unit. “Empire’s been dead for years, and still she relies on those limping Imperial threats. ‘When I get my hands on you!’ Get with the times, woman.…”

  “I like your Mirax a whole bunch, Corran.” Luke smiled. “And you’re right, she and Mara should never meet.”

  We picked up the pace, racing into the main building and began working our way up. The staircase that wound around the inside of the building’s tall atrium had a thick enough balustrade to provide some cover, of which we took advantage, as did those individuals trying to stop us. Blaster bolts, red and blue, whined and streaked, ricocheted and smoked as they burned into white marble pillars or black wall tiles. The stairs’ gradual slope meant they wound around endlessly, it seemed, but was not sufficient to slow us down that much. They didn’t have landings per se, so no easy points to defend, and our opponents had to put up with one unbelievably annoying problem: two of their targets bore these archaic weapons and were swatting blaster bolts out of the air. Luke was even able to redirect his at our enemies, knocking them down or making them break cover long enough for Ooryl, Elegos or Mirax to shoot them from a flanking position.

  As we climbed toward the building’s upper reaches, we felt a tremor course through it. “A shuttle’s going up.”

  Elegos frowned. “Tavira must be running.”

  Ooryl and I exchanged glances. “That, or someone else is off carrying orders for her.” I tried to push my senses to see if I could find Tavira in the shuttle or still in the building above us, but I got nothing. “Something is blocking me.”

  Luke nodded, “Me, too. The Jensaarai.”

  “Must be.”

  We pushed on, clearing the last length of corridor, then topped several steps that opened onto the foyer of a grand chamber. This has been the Imperial Governor’s audience chamber and clearly designed to impress. While the space itself was square in constr
uction the inner design was circular, from the arrangements of the twisted basalt pillars holding up the ceiling, to the designs worked into both the floor and ceiling. At the far side, opposite our stairs, another set of stairs led up to an observation deck where transparisteel made up the walls. Through the viewports we could see the gas giant, its ring, and a bright light heading outbound.

  Halfway up those stairs, on a broad landing, sat a massive red granite desk and built into the front of it a cushioned chair made of the same stone. I found it easy to imagine the governor working at the desk, then moving around forward to sit in judgment over any issues brought before him. Elevated and imperial, he would have ruled as the sole, unopposable authority on Susevfi. All around the room, almost like courtiers waiting for a ruling, odd bits of fine furnishings, casks of credits, small chests of jewels and stacks of antiquities added a crude but opulent display of conspicuous wealth that smacked of Tavira.

  Yet, all this, which I took in with a glance, faded to insignificance compared to the six creatures standing in the open central part of the floor. One, a woman wearing a grey cloak, with streaks of matching grey in her long brown hair, stood in the center. A mask hid her face, but unlike the others, it had not been fashioned after an animal, but instead showed a young woman, beautiful and smiling. The fire flashing in the blue eyes behind the mask, however, suggested the tall woman was anything but smiling underneath.

  Arrayed behind her in an arc, five of the Jensaarai waited in their grey cloaks, their hoods up. The light flashing down from recessed glow panels above cast long shadows over their masks, but I caught details reptilian, insectoid and mammalian. The rightmost figure I had seen on the Invidious bridge with Tavira. The others, who were generally smaller, radiated little hints of anxiety.