Exile Read online

  “Ah.” Luke looked at the device more closely. “Meaning that Alema—” The disk began vibrating in his palm. Hastily he tapped it twice, and it ceased vibrating. “Meaning that she can’t slip back out of your memory again.”

  “That’s right.”

  Mara frowned. “You know, we ought to be able to duplicate that effect with use of the Force.”

  Luke nodded. “It’s worth researching. I’d prefer a Force technique to going through something like circus-bantha obedience training. I’ll put Master Cilghal on it.” He tucked the disk into a belt pocket. “Fel, thank you. I mean that. Is there anything we can do for you?”

  “I …” At last Jag sounded uncertain. “I hesitate to ask.”

  “Don’t,” Mara said. “I mean, don’t hesitate.”

  “I don’t have anything to do,” Jag said, and his voice became curiously hollow, empty, “except chase Alema Rar until I run her to ground and make sure she can’t do any more harm. But I don’t have much in the way of resources. No transportation, little funding.” He chuckled. “So odd to be living in the private sector. In the military, they give you a mission and whatever resources they can offer, sometimes too few, sometimes too many … repeat until you retire or die. Outside the military, everything is so complicated.”

  Luke clapped him on the back. “I’ll get you resources. Starting with some quarters—”

  “No. I have a room. The address, and my comm code and frequency, are on the data card. I’d … prefer not to stay here.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll go now. I can find my way out.” With a final bow to the Jedi Masters, Jag turned—correctly, Luke noted, despite the many twists and turns their walk had taken them through, toward the Temple’s main entrance—and strode away, pulling his hood up as he walked.

  Mara watched him go and shook her head. “That’s a man with not enough to live for.”

  “He’ll bounce back,” Luke said. “He’s young.” He fingered the device Jag had given him. “C’mon. Let’s see if Cilghal is still up.”

  Returning to the Temple from a late errand, Jaina passed the lone Jedi performing guard duty at the building’s wide-open main entrance and walked into the main corridor.

  Just leaving was a man wrapped up in a dark cloak. He kept to the left side of the corridor, away from her, not even appearing to notice her. She hesitated as they came abreast of each other, his upright posture, military bearing, and the unconscious arrogance of his stride causing bells to sound in her memory.

  When he was one step past her she stopped and turned her head to look at him. “Jag?”

  He stopped, too, but did not turn. His face remained completely hidden within the folds of his hood. But it was Jag Fel’s voice that answered: “Yes?”

  “Were you just going to walk past? Not even say hello?”

  “Yes.” And then he was gone, swallowed up by the Coruscant night beyond the doors.

  GYNDINE SYSTEM TENDRANDO REFUELING AND REPAIR STATION

  Hands on hips, Han stood in the lounge of the vehicle now parked alongside the Millennium Falcon. “You have got to be kidding.”

  “If you’ll forgive me, Captain Solo,” C-3PO said, “Master Calrissian’s vocal mannerisms, though laced with humor, do not suggest that his basic thesis was in jest.”

  Han glared at the gold-toned protocol droid, then returned his attention to his surroundings.

  The lounge was, if not a thing of beauty, a testimonial to obsessive detail. The walls and ceiling were covered by thick velvety material in a dark blue that matched the deep carpet on the floor. Silver glow rod housings, polished to a dazzling level of reflectivity, protruded at tasteful intervals from the walls and ceilings. Furniture included four comfort couches, each with ceiling-mounted, semi-transparent privacy curtains that would glide into position or retract at the touch of a button. Controls for the couches’ temperature and vibration settings were mounted on silver panels inset in the velvet walls. Hanging chairs of woven plant-stalk, plated in a silvery surface, were suspended from the ceiling, gleaming tables stood nearby to bear the weight of platters of food, and a water fountain reproducing, in miniature form, a famous waterfall from the world of Naboo burbled in the center of the chamber.

  Leia, beside Han, nodded. “It’s even more crass than the Lady Luck.”

  Lando, facing them from across the room to view their first reactions to the pleasure pit, smirked. “She’s a bit like the Lady. An older model, a SoroSuub Twenty-four-hundred yacht. Her owner—her former owner—fell on hard times, and they got harder when he decided to win back his fortunes in a sabacc match I was sitting in on.” He shrugged. “We had a lot in common, including taste in luxury yachts, but not including the fact that he drinks while gambling. I won his craft and a year’s contract for his services as a salesman. He’s marketing my droids in the Outer Rim now—and conveniently, the yacht is still officially registered in his name, since I somehow haven’t found time to file the change-of-ownership documentation.”

  “What’s her name?” Leia asked.

  Lando modulated his voice to its richest, most seductive tones. “The Love Commander.” He stretched out the word love, an exercise in mockery.

  Leia looked at him as though he could not possibly be telling the truth. At his confirming nod, she put her hands over her mouth, the better to restrain any laughter that might emerge.

  Han shook his head. “I don’t want to say what I think of her as a vehicle, but as a disguise, she’s perfect.” He pulled his left arm from its sling and flexed his hand experimentally. Several weeks’ worth of medical treatments since he sustained the injury and a good night’s sleep had improved his condition somewhat, and his manner suggested he would soon be his old fighting self. “Let’s move our gear from the Falcon to the master cabin,” he told Leia.

  Lando shook his head. “No, you’re in the biggest of the guest cabins. I’m in the master cabin.”

  They both looked at him. “You’re coming along?” Leia asked.

  “After due consideration, it seems to me that you’ll be a lot more anonymous as my pilot and navigator—me being Bescat Offdurmin, holo-entertainment mogul and pleasure-seeker of the Corporate Sector—rather than the faces the authorities see whenever they establish communications with the Looooove Commander. Right?”

  “Well …” Leia considered. “That’s true. But I don’t look forward to Tendra tracking us down and killing us if we get you hurt.”

  “She’ll be glad to get me out of the home for a while. She knows how twitchy I’ve been lately.” Lando picked up his cane and twirled it theatrically. “Come on, nameless crew. Let’s get to it.”

  Han clapped C-3PO on his metal shoulder. “Goldenrod, you get the most important mission of all. You stay here and record every single thing they do to the Falcon during repairs. And try not to talk to them while you’re doing it.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  An hour later, personal possessions moved aboard and pre-flight checklists completed, Han, sitting at the navigator’s console, was a bit more favorably disposed toward the Love Commander.

  Despite the yacht’s name and pleasure-oriented mission, despite her swirly, mood-altering sky-blue-and-green exterior paint job, the vehicle wasn’t a bad choice for their current needs. At fifty meters, she was nearly twice the length of the Falcon but didn’t mass much more, having a long, sleek design with two outrigger propulsion pods, one on either side, each carrying sublight ion drive and hyperdrive components. The hyperdrives were nothing special, but the ion drives had been rebuilt and overbuilt, giving the yacht considerable speed in sublight situations.

  Nor was she unarmed, though at first glance it had appeared she was. A pop-up turret hidden beneath an artfully concealed access plate on the top hull held a turbolaser. At the bow beneath the bridge was a concussion missile port hidden behind a false dish in a sensor array. And the yacht did have shields, though the shield generator, appearing to be an auxiliary hatch, lay folded
down against the top hull when not in use and would take a few seconds to raise into position and become active.

  Now, with Leia in the pilot’s seat—at Lando’s insistence, since Han was not yet fully healed—and Lando in the oversized, preposterously comfortable captain’s chair at the rear of the command cabin, the Love Commander lifted ponderously from her berth, backed on repulsorlifts away from the Falcon, and slid stern-first into vacuum.

  “Where to, navigator?” Lando asked, activating his chair’s massage vibration. “Someplace interesting, I hope.”

  “Should be interesting enough.” Han finished putting their course into the nav computer. “Corellia. We’re going to zip through the exclusion zone, laughing at the Alliance picket vehicles trying to blow us up. Then we’re going to drop down to the planet’s surface, determine whether Prime Minister Dur Gejjen was acting alone when he ordered the hit on Tenel Ka—which probably means beating a confession out of him—and then deciding whether to forgive him or kidnap him and his co-conspirators and bring them to justice.”

  “Oh,” Lando asked. “What do we do on day two?”

  Despite himself, Han snorted, amused. “We’ll figure something out.”

  “Well, wake me when we get there, whatever-your-name-is.”

  EMPTY SPACE ENGINE COMPARTMENT OF THE DURACRUD

  Captain Uran Lavint lay on the grimy durasteel deck, half propped up against an almost equally grimy wall, and waited to die. Her tools lay scattered on the deck, along with the deck plates she had pulled up—plates that gave her access to the various components of Duracrud’s hyper-drive.

  The only sounds to be heard were her own breathing and the distant, rhythmic noises made by the ship’s life-support system. There were no lights on in the ship except here—mechanics’ glow rods magnetically clamped to offer light to the hyperdrive compartment—and on the bridge, where status lights should still be winking in their various colors.

  Lavint knew it would take her a long time to die. The Duracrud would continue to provide breathable air for weeks. The stores of food and water would run out first, in a few days. She’d have plenty of time to record and transmit a few final messages. One would denounce Jacen Solo for his treachery. One would confirm that her will, on file with an advocate’s office on remote Tatooine, did accurately record her final wishes. She might even record a final speech, something to put her life into perspective.

  Then she’d die of thirst, or, if she chose to end her suffering faster, she could shoot herself or step out an air lock.

  But one thing she could be sure of: given the remote, untraveled nature of the spot she’d chosen for her first hyperspace jump, no cargo vessel or fast-moving courier would ever chance upon her … and her last transmissions, traveling at the speed of light, would take eight years to reach the nearest star.

  She was as alone and doomed as anyone in the universe could be.

  “Delicious, isn’t it?” The voice was female, and came from outside the meager light provided by Lavint’s glow rods.

  Lavint jerked upright. She grabbed for her blaster, then remembered it was with her holster belt in her cabin—she’d left it there when collecting her tools. “Who’s there?”

  “Your suffering, we mean,” the voice continued. “You suffer like a child who cries herself to sleep each night, knowing that her parents will never, ever understand. How long has it been since you were that child?”

  Lavint rose on shaky legs and began to edge her way back to the door out of this compartment. At the door she could turn on the overhead glow rods and see who was tormenting her.

  But she almost didn’t want to turn on those lights. What if there was no one in the compartment with her? What if recognition of her fate had driven her crazy, and she was doomed to spend her last few days hearing voices?

  As if reading her mind, the voice in the darkness laughed.

  Lavint reached the doorway, found the light control by touch, and activated it. The overheads came on, bright, blinding her—

  And then, as her eyes adjusted, she saw her visitor. And she knew she was not crazy, because her accumulated experiences and neuroses would never concoct a being like the one she saw.

  Her visitor was a blue Twi’lek woman of no unusual size. She was dressed in a dark traveler’s robe and black clothes. Her features were pretty, but she had obviously been the victim of catastrophe at some point in her life. Her left shoulder was lower than her right, with her left arm hanging in such a way that Lavint suspected it was non-functional, and her right head-tail had been severed at about the halfway point.

  And now, as she stepped forward, she limped.

  This was no monster in the night or phantom of the imagination. Lavint stared, incredulous. “Who are you?”

  “We are Alema.”

  “Alema. And what are you doing here?”

  “We are a stowaway.”

  Lavint stared at Alema for a few moments more, and then it happened. The laugh came bubbling up out of her like a high-pressure sanispray stream. The laugh became a painful howl. It shook her and it kept coming.

  Dizzied, Lavint bent over to rest her hands on her knees and rested her backside against the bulkhead; otherwise she would have fallen. Finally her laughter trailed away, leaving her throat hoarse, her body weary.

  Alema’s expression did not change, except to become slightly curious. “Why do you laugh?”

  “Because you’re the worst stowaway in the galaxy, in history.” Lavint straightened. “Because you picked the worst possible ship to stow away on. The Hero of the Galactic Alliance sabotaged my hyperdrive.”

  “We know this. We watched his agents do it.”

  That snapped Lavint out of her manic mood. “You watched it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And got on board anyway.”

  “Yes.” Alema smiled. “No, we do not wish to die. We stowed away after making sure of what the agents had done … and after acquiring the parts needed to repair the drive.”

  Lavint took an involuntary step forward. “You can fix it?”

  “Yes. Though we will only fix it if you are dead. But if you and we come to terms, you will live and you will repair the drive.”

  Lavint had to parse that statement. Alema’s use of we to refer to herself caused her sentences to jump through flaming hoops like a carnival bantha. “You mean, if we come to terms, I make the repairs and we both get out of here. If we don’t come to terms, you presumably kill me and then you make the repairs and you get out of here.”

  Alema’s smile broadened. “Good. Yes.”

  “What are your terms?”

  “You help us find the parents of that Hero of the Galactic Empire. You act as a public face for us in that search. You do not reveal our presence to the authorities. You do not attack or unnecessarily endanger us. You are one of the smugglers, yes? You use your knowledge of smuggling to help in this search.” She furrowed her brow for a moment, then relaxed. “You treat us as an esteemed paying passenger.”

  “And once you’ve found the Solos?”

  “You will have fulfilled your obligation.”

  Lavint considered her options. She’d always admired Han Solo, and this woman’s obvious need to stay out of public sight didn’t argue well for what her intentions were when she found him. Lavint could ask, but then she’d have to decide whether she was willing to object, and ruin this deal, if Alema’s intentions were hostile.

  Well, if they were, she could admire Han Solo as a unique piece of galactic history. “I agree.”

  “Good. We will find the replacement components where we have hidden them. We will even hand them to you as you effect repairs.”

  “Much obliged.”

  chapter six

  CORONET, CORELLIA

  The crowd seated in the assembly hall, mostly holonews professionals, applauded, but more courteously than enthusiastically.

  That was all right, Wedge decided. He wasn’t here to be validated. He just wanted brevity.
>
  With a glance at Prime Minister Dur Gejjen to his left and Admiral Delpin to his right, Wedge leaned in over the lectern to conclude his speech. “The reorganization of any military force works best if it synthesizes mature experience with youthful innovation, mature patience with youthful energy. I like to think that in this time of crisis I’ve been able to provide the experience and patience. And I have every confidence that Admiral Delpin offers the innovation and energy to finish the job. Corellia’s armed forces are in good hands.”

  He stepped back as the questions started.

  Gejjen took his place. “Admiral Antilles and I will be taking our leave of you, but Admiral Delpin will be making some introductory remarks and then taking questions. Thank you.” He nodded to Wedge, and together the two of them made their way to the end of the stage and the comparative privacy it offered.

  The applause increased, and out of the corner of his eye Wedge saw a few of the news professionals rise to their feet for him. Then he and Gejjen were in the darker, cooler backstage area.

  Not that Wedge could relax. Not yet.

  Gejjen gave him a close look. “You’re sweating.”

  “Hot under those lights.”

  They passed through the doors leading out of the backstage area. The CorSec guards waiting there—Gejjen’s bodyguards, a tiny uniformed woman who moved like a dancer, and a YVH battle droid—fell in step behind them. “So what will you do now that you’re a civilian again?” Gejjen asked.

  Get assassinated, Wedge thought. Maybe you personally won’t have anything to do with it, even in thought or intent, but someone in your government will. “Back to my memoirs. Maybe give my daughter some flying lessons.”

  “That’s Myri, correct? Congratulations on her recent graduation. I understand Corellian Intelligence has made her an employment offer.”

  Wedge nodded. “So has the Galactic Alliance Intelligence Service, a bit more covertly.”

  Gejjen almost missed a step as he walked. He looked sharply at Wedge. “You’re joking.”