Abyss (16 page)

“You’re saying I can
meet
Jacen beyond shadows?”

“We are saying we can help you see what Jacen saw,” the Givin rasped. “Then you will be able to look into his heart. Whether it will speak to you is not for us to decide.”

“Of course,” Luke said. “I understand.”

He knew better than to think he might actually be able to talk to Jacen, and Luke wasn’t sure he would want to if that
were
possible. But the Givin
was
promising to help him understand what had happened to Jacen—and wasn’t that the whole purpose of the journey?

When Luke did not instantly refuse the offer, Ben’s eyes grew wide. “Dad, you know they’re leading you on. Jacen’s dead, and nothing is going to change that.”

“I know.” As Luke spoke, the cold tentacle inside began to grow larger, sliding up a little higher, scratching at the lining of his stomach and esophagus as it sought to root. “But this may help me understand what happened to him.”

“Then you’ll be returning beyond shadows with us?” The woman smiled. “I’m sure you’ll find it very … enlightening.”

“
If
I decide to come along,” Luke corrected. “First, I need to know what you want from me and Ben.”

“
Want
from you, Master Skywalker?” asked the brother. “What makes you think we
want
anything?”

“How hard you’re working to get it,” Ben answered frankly. “You haven’t exactly been subtle, the way you’re dangling Jacen out there like bait.”

“Is that how you see it?” The woman’s smile vanished, and she
turned to float away. “Then I suppose there’s only one question remaining: can you resist?”

Her brother winked at Ben, then nodded to the Ortolan and turned to follow. The Givin remained where he was, floating beside the Skywalkers, patiently awaiting their decision.

“Well, whatever’s going on here, it’s happening beyond shadows.” Luke met his son’s eye. “I don’t think we’ve got a choice, Ben.”

Ben swallowed hard, but nodded. “Yeah—I just wish we knew what
beyond shadows
is.” He eyed the emaciated bodies floating around them, then said, “Maybe we should eat something first.”

“I appreciate that, Ben. But you know it’s not
we
.”

Ben lowered his brow. “Dad, I’ve got to face this, too. You can’t protect me from it.”

“I’m not protecting you, Ben—I’m giving you an order.” Luke smiled, then added, “
Someone’s
got to repair the
Shadow
.”

Now Ben looked truly frightened. “
Alone?
That could take a week!”

“Let’s hope not.” Luke looked around the chamber and wrinkled his nose. “I don’t think I want to be in here that long.”

“That’s for sure,” Ben said. “We’ll probably
never
get this stink out.”

Luke chuckled. “I can see you’ve never been stuck in a Star Destroyer trash compactor.” He floated closer to his son, then clapped both hands on Ben’s shoulders. “Now listen—
don’t
come after me. If something goes wrong, you get back to Coruscant and tell the Masters what we found here. Okay?”

Ben scowled. “What’s going to go wrong?”

“Probably nothing.” Luke glanced at the Givin, who was a little too quick to nod his reassurance. “But if something
does
, we don’t want both of us wasting away here, and nobody knowing what we found. So that’s an order.”

“Okay.” Ben nodded, but his gaze slid away. “I’ve got it.”

“You
promise
?” Luke pressed.

“Dad, I’ve
got
it.” Ben’s eyes came back to Luke’s. “There’s no sense both of us getting stuck here. I’m not an idiot. I can see that.”

Luke held Ben’s gaze for a moment, then finally nodded. “Good.” He gave Ben a hug, then said, “I’ll try to keep this short.”

“You better,” Ben said. “Just one question before you go.”

“Sure.”

Ben turned to the Givin. “How long do we have?”

The Givin tipped his head.
“Have
?”

“Before this place blows.” Ben gestured vaguely toward the control room, where the alarms could still be faintly heard. “You
have
noticed what’s going on in there, right?”

“Oh, the alarms,” the Givin said. “I forget about them. They’ve been going off for a little more than two years now.”

Ben shot Luke a worried look, then asked, “A little
more
than two years? Like twenty-seven months, maybe?”

“Yes, precisely.” The Givin nodded. “Since shortly after Centerpoint Station was destroyed, if the dates we were given are correct.”

Ben’s face fell—almost as far as Luke’s stomach sank.

“But you haven’t noticed any problems?” Ben pressed. “You’re not worried about anything?”

“What is there to worry about?” The Givin spread his bony hands.
“There is no life, there is no death …”

“Yeah, I get it,” Ben grumbled.
“There is only the Force
.”

The secret to being a great leader, Drikl Lecersen reflected, lay in the ability to recognize intelligence and ambition totally unencumbered by morality. And in the newsfop currently seated on the couch of his rented Coruscanti apartment, he had found
all
of those things in great quantity.

Javis Tyrr’s giant bright smile was a trap waiting to snap, his silky warm voice a lie in the making, his polished good looks bait on a hook. Tyrr would sell his sister for a scoop, or vibroknife his best friend for an exclusive, and a private researcher had provided evidence of both. The man was, in short, the perfect tool for a cornered predator such as Lecersen, a wounded bloodfin reduced to attacking from the safety of the shadows.

Lecersen’s reflections came to an abrupt end as the scene on the hotel suite vidwall drew to a close, with a durasteel gate dropping down to hide the departing forms of Han and Leia Solo. He watched the pair escape unscathed—as they always seemed to do, from nearly
any mess they created—and a familiar burning began to build in his stomach.

How the Solos could unabashedly ignore the same law that they insisted everyone else obey was beyond him. The sheer gall of such behavior was enough to justify destroying them, as was the memory of Han Solo holding a blaster on him aboard the
Anakin Solo
. But that wasn’t why Lecersen was doing this. This was about survival, about making certain that neither the Solos nor the Jedi were ever in a position to threaten him or the Moff Council again.

Because Jagged Fel wasn’t going to be the Head of State of the Galactic Empire forever. He wasn’t smart enough, mean enough, or ruthless enough. Sooner or later, he was going to make a mistake, and Lecersen was only one in a long line of Moffs who would be standing behind him when he did, holding a vibrodagger and ready to plunge it in.

The scene on the vidwall switched to Jaina Solo as she ducked into the crumpled Imperial limousine, ignoring the GAS captain’s repeated orders to open the gate. Lecersen paused the video, then turned to his guest, who was sprawled on the couch sipping a glass of Ryborean gax that would have cost him a month’s wages.

“Javis, my good man, I saw that live three hours ago,” he said. “You did very well making the Solos and the Jedi look bad, without mentioning the fact that there were no grounds for an arrest. But I see no reason to watch it again. You can rest assured that I consider our relationship a valuable one.”

“It’s about to get a lot more valuable.” Tyrr took a long sip of gax. “Keep going. I haven’t put everything on the air yet.”

Lecersen cocked a gray brow. “I wish you would’ve just said so. I really don’t enjoy having my time wasted.”

“
This
isn’t a waste, I promise you.” Tyrr tipped his glass up, gulping down a swallow of gax that was probably worth three hundred credits, then reached for the decanter on the serving cart. “You mind?”

“Not at all,” Lecersen said, speaking between clenched teeth. “I’ll break out the braboli next time.”

Lecersen turned back the vidwall and thumbed the remote, fast-forwarding
through the confrontation between Fel’s driver and the GAS lieutenant, then through Tyrr’s own arrival. Finally, the scene switched to a view of Jaina Solo’s face and not much else. After a moment of confusion, it grew apparent that the dark bands framing her image were a nerf-hide speeder seat on one side and a beverage cabinet on the other.

“Very impressive,” Lecersen said. “You slipped a spy droid inside Head of State Fel’s limousine.”

“
Your
spy droid,” Tyrr corrected. “This came from that little cleaning unit you set up for me.”

Jaina’s voice sounded from the vidwall speakers. Lecersen listened with only moderate interest as she thanked Fel for sheltering her and revealed that it had been her own con-artist father who had tricked the GAS commander into letting the Solos close the gate in his face. Then Fel mentioned Daala, and after a rather protracted negotiation over terms, the conversation grew very interesting very fast.

“I overheard something alarming when I was in Daala’s office yesterday,” Fel said. “She’s thinking of hiring a company of Mandalorians.”

Jaina’s exclamation of “
Mandalorians
?” was only slightly more astonished than Lecersen’s own. He turned to face a smirking Tyrr, listening in ever-growing disbelief as Jaina rattled off questions.

Then Jag confirmed, “She’s been inquiring as to how many supercommandos it might take to handle the Jedi. Exactly what she’s considering, I don’t know. But it can’t be good.”

Lecersen paused the video, then asked, “Did I really just hear Fel reveal a Galactic Alliance secret to a
Jedi
?”

Tyrr nodded. “He makes her promise not to tell anyone,” he said. “It’s kind of touching, if you’re into that doomed-love stuff.”

“Doomed leaders are more my style,” Lecersen replied.

He thumbed the remote again, then watched in growing delight as Fel reminded Jaina of her promise and made her swear not to reveal what she knew to the Jedi Council. The conversation ended an instant later, when Fel cursed and said, “Look who’s coming.”

The vidwall went dark, and Tyrr volunteered, “That’s all from the spy droid, but there’s another shot at the end of the chip that you need to see.”

Lecersen left the chip running, but asked, “Why does the limousine shot end there? Who did they see coming?”

“Me,” Tyrr said. “The situation was getting tricky, and I needed to get in and download from the spy droid.”

“How tricky?” Lecersen asked, suddenly growing worried. It wouldn’t be a
disaster
if the spy droid fell into Jedi hands—as long as the Jedi didn’t realize Tyrr was the one who had slipped it into their Temple. “I warned you not to get caught with it. If the Jedi realize you have Imperial help, your usefulness to me will come to an abrupt end.”

“Relax …” Tyrr took a long swallow from his gax, then said, “The spy droid never left the Temple—I took the download via comm wave. Now look at this. The beginning is exclusive—everyone else was busy filing their report when I caught this little gem.”

The hangar-access tunnel appeared on the vidwall again. The GAS squad was still standing outside it, the troopers looking bored, and the captain shaking his head in frustration as someone yelled at him over his headset. Then, almost so fast that Lecersen did not see it, the gate suddenly rose about a meter and dropped back down again.

The startled troopers spun around and pointed their weapons at the ground, and the GAS captain snapped something into his headset microphone. A moment later two young Jedi, a Duros female and Jenet male, rose into view and tried to walk through the middle of the squad. At least Lecersen
assumed
they were Jedi. They were dressed only in tunics and trousers, with no lightsabers hanging from their belts, so it was difficult to be certain.

“They were Jedi apprentices,” Tyrr explained.

“Were?”
Lecersen gasped. “You mean GAS—”

“No, they’re okay,” Tyrr said. “They resigned from the Order.”

“Resigned?” Lecersen echoed. “Jedi can
do
that?”

Tyrr shrugged. “Who’s going to stop them?”

Lecersen turned back to the vidwall, watching with interest as the GAS captain questioned the young pair. Although it was not possible to hear the conversation, it seemed apparent that the former Jedi were completely unintimidated. After a moment, the figures began to grow larger as Tyrr and his cam operator descended the lane.

“He ended up letting them go after we got there,” Tyrr explained.

“Nothing to hold them on?” Lecersen hazarded.

“Better,” Tyrr replied. “They claimed they resigned because they didn’t want to be party to breaking the law.”

Lecersen turned to face him. “Please tell me you got that.”

“Sorry,” Tyrr said. “But it was all efflux anyway. They just said that so GAS would be forced to let them go.”

“And you know this
how
?”

Tyrr flashed a truly self-satisfied smirk. “It’s in my interview,” he said. “I’ve got them on full holo admitting they don’t want to be Jedi anymore because they don’t like the way Daala is taking charge of the Order.”

Lecersen broke into a huge, spontaneous smile. “
Did
you now?” He stepped over to the serving tray and retrieved a glass for himself, then picked up the gax decanter and poured for them both. “Why don’t we watch that interview, and then I’ll tell you how I’m going to make you a very wealthy man.”