Cilghal switched the monitor off. "That"s true." Her voice sounded reflective. "Perhaps you should explain for the others."
"Jacen could do that. Deliberately, as a Force technique. He did it once during the Killik crisis."
"Is it a technique you know, Master Skywalker?"
Luke shook his head. "I a.s.sume it was something he picked up during his wanderings among all the Force groups he visited." He turned his attention to the Horns. "But where did Valin learn it?"
Corran shook his head. "He"s never mentioned it. And I"d expect him to, just for fun. "Look what I can do that my old man can"t," that sort of thing." He glanced at his daughter. "Jysella is more of a confidante. She may know."
Jysella looked from her father to Luke. "Valin and I knew Jacen, of course. But he was a few years older than Valin, and that makes a big difference when you"re an adolescent. Jacen was out fighting the war against the Yuuzhan Vong while Valin and I were stuck in the Maw, at Shelter, for the last half of the war. We didn"t see him at all during the years he spent wandering, and not much after that."
Luke frowned. It didn"t sound like the sort of relationship in which Jacen would teach Valin an obscure Force technique. "And how about Valin and Seff?"
Jysella shook her head, causing her brown hair to sway. "They weren"t close. We all studied together at Shelter and afterward, but once we were apprenticed, following our respective Masters around, hardly ever. Occasionally one or the other of us would encounter him on missions. We were acquaintances, colleagues, but we weren"t social buddies."
Luke heaved a sigh. "But the similarities are too striking to be a coincidence. Seff also knew an obscure Force technique we can"t account for. Another one that Jacen exhibited, a Force-based paralysis. There"s just too much missing in what we know about Jacen"s travels, even his thought processes. Whether or not it has any bearing on Valin, at some point we need to fill in as many details as we can about what he was up to in the years prior to the Killik crisis."
Corran caught Cilghal"s eye. "Is there anything you can do for him? To snap him out of it?"
"Nothing at the moment. We need psychological experts to evaluate the recordings we have made of him. We need complete toxicological lab work to come back. We need to find a way to complete a brain scan ... As far as we can tell, whatever he"s doing to thwart the scanner works even when he sleeps. I wish he hadn"t awakened from Mirax"s stun bolt before we tried the scanner the first time."
She pressed another couple of switches on the control board. An opaque panel slid down in front of the window, cutting off their view of the malevolently staring Valin. Mirax started, then reluctantly turned back toward the others.
"Let"s go upstairs," Luke said. "Sit down, get some caf, and figure out what to do about this. And other problems. Ben, I want you to exercise your investigative skills and see what information you can get me on the bounty hunters we encountered today."
"Will do."
"Will he be all right, left alone?" Mirax"s tone was soft, full of pain.
"He is being watched constantly on monitors by my staff." Cilghal sounded confident, rea.s.suring. "They will also look on him personally every half hour to an hour. He is not strong enough to break through his straps, and, as you know, like his father he lacks telekinetic strength-he cannot free himself that way." She led them from the chamber.
Luke patted Corran"s back as they departed. "Did you have any trouble with the authorities?"
"We didn"t wait for them. Just threw the boy in Mirax"s speeder and came straight here ..."
Valin could sense their departure. Bright lights in the Force, somehow approximating those of his family and respected teachers, grew more distant.
He smiled to himself. They were nowhere near as smart as they thought they were, no matter how much research they may have done. They did not know all his secrets, including the one that was going to free him.
He closed his eyes and looked for other lights in the Force-tiny ones in nearby pockets and streams. Individually they did not hold much life, but their collective bioma.s.s exceeded that of all the sapient beings on Coruscant.
They were the insects, and though he had not done so in years, he remembered how to be their friend. Now he needed them to come here. He needed certain species that he could convince to crawl out of gaps in the Temple walls, march up his gurney, and consume just a small portion of one strap holding him down.
One strap, and then when his nurse came on an in-person visit, one lunge. Valin would escape and find his way to where the real people were.
A two-tone musical alarm awakened Luke. He sat up, glancing around his darkened Temple quarters, and saw his monitor lit, Cilghal"s face displayed on it. "Master Cilghal. What time is it?"
"Middle of the night. Valin Horn has escaped."
Luke sighed at the inevitability of those words. "This day ... How long ago?"
"Twenty minutes or so. His night nurse, Apprentice Romor, is not badly hurt but has a concussion."
"Do we have any leads on where Valin went?"
"Better than that. We have the tracking device I planted below his skin in the event of such an occurrence. He will begin to feel it when the local anesthetic I injected there begins to wear off, but that gives us a few hours still. Unfortunately, he seems to be spending a certain amount of time traveling through the undercity, so our signal is intermittent."
Luke rose and began putting on his white tunic. "Alert the other Masters. a.s.semble all the Jedi Knights present that the Temple can spare. Let Han and Leia know. I"ll be in the Great Hall in three minutes."
"And the Horns?"
"They don"t need to know."
SENATE BUILDING PLAZA, CORUSCANT.
SEHA SAT CROSS-LEGGED ON HARD, COLD PERMACRETE IN THE DARKNESS at the center of the plaza, glaring at the Senate Building before her. A lean girl in her early twenties, she was dressed as a Jedi, her long red hair held back in a tail by elastic bands. at the center of the plaza, glaring at the Senate Building before her. A lean girl in her early twenties, she was dressed as a Jedi, her long red hair held back in a tail by elastic bands.
She glared because nothing was happening. Senatorial aides and office workers were arriving on foot in this predawn hour, a steady trickle, and that added up to nothing. None cast a look out into the darkness where Seha waited. None looked like Valin Horn.
Beside her, stretched out full length on the permacrete, wrapped up against the chill in a full-length hooded robe, lay Master Octa Ramis. A stoutly built, muscular human woman, she lay with her eyes closed as if asleep. The pale skin of her face, surrounded as it was by dark hair and dark cloak, was all that could be seen of her from more than a couple of meters. Now she smiled, not opening her eyes. "You"re not calm, Seha."
"I know, Master."
"The less calm you are, the less alert you are."
Seha gestured at the small tracker box that rested on the permacrete before her. "I just have to watch this. It glows the same whether I"m calm or not."
"Spoken like a true, proper, lazy apprentice. Why, again, did I let you choose where we would have our stakeout?"
"Because I"ve been on a mission with Valin. I mean, Jedi Horn."
"And you brought us here because?"
Seha frowned, out of confusion rather than irritation. She had already explained her logic once. "Because if he"s thinking strangely, maybe he"s thinking like an animal. Find a nest, lick his wounds, recover. I led him to the undercity here a couple of years ago. There"s more security now, but he can find plenty of places to hide. And if he pops up here, he can use his Jedi powers to steal very good vehicles or maybe kidnap prominent politicians."
"Very good. It"s as good a reason for choosing a stakeout as any. You used your mind and your logic to lead us here. And now you"re willing to simply abandon them and watch a box because that"s just as good as thinking thinking?"
Seha sighed. As usual, there was little reward in arguing with her teacher. "No, Master." She tried to quiet her thoughts.
"Do you have a crush on him?"
Seha gave Octa a pained look. It was going to be one of those conversations, no secrets safe. "Yes, Master. Well, I did once."
"Are you embarra.s.sed by it?"
"No. I"m embarra.s.sed that I had a crush on Jacen Solo."
"Don"t be. He was a good, thoughtful Jedi for many years. And a nice-looking one. Took after his father. I had a crush on his father once upon a time."
Seha smiled. "You didn"t."
"Yes. And just think of the ch.o.r.es you"ll find yourself doing if you mention that to anyone."
"I shouldn"t allow myself to have crushes, at least on Jedi. I have a crush on Jacen Solo, he goes dark and dies. I have a crush on Valin Horn, he goes crazy."
Octa"s smile faded but did not go away entirely. "Once upon a time, I had more than a crush on a Jedi. He was tortured by the Yuuzhan Vong, then drowned in freezing water fighting them. Should I have stopped loving? Caring? Being attracted?"
"No ..."
"Then you shouldn"t, either."
The device at Seha"s feet lit up, the bulb atop it glowing with a faint pulse of amber light. The pulse intensified, faded, and then became steady.
Octa must have felt Seha"s excitement. She sat up, eyes opening, and looked at the tracker. "Well done, Seha."
"Thank you, Master."
"Call it in. Then we go looking."
Enneth Holkin, protocol aide to the honorable Denjax Teppler, coChief of State of Corellia, dismissed his driver well beyond the vehicle checkpoint that marked the closest approach civilian speeders were allowed to make to the Senate Building. He had a lot to do this morning; a longer walk would settle his mind. For security"s sake, he kept his thumb through the panic ring on his topcoat. It wouldn"t do for a Corellian functionary to be caught with a weapon at the summit, but the panic ring was perfectly legal and just as likely to save his life in case of kidnapping or a protracted encounter with a criminal.
When he was not far past the checkpoint and beginning to cross the plaza, he heard a faint noise from immediately behind, a sc.r.a.pe of leather on permacrete. He turned and saw the sole of a boot just before it cracked against his jaw.
Valin, rested and calm, looked dispa.s.sionately down at the being he"d just a.s.saulted. The man was his own approximate height and coloration, which would prove useful.
He set about relieving the unconscious man of clothes and doc.u.ment bag. He did not bother to take the curious metal ring, with a few centimeters of thin black cord dangling from it, that encircled the man"s left thumb.
More than two hundred meters away, in a claustrophobic security office deep within the Senate Building, a security station picked up an automated emergency transmission on the visiting dignitary comm band. The automated programming selected one security officer from the several on duty and threw graphics up on his monitor. Relevant data on Enneth Holkin, including his name, political affiliations, homeworld, and known a.s.sociates flickered to life on the screen. Next came a holorecording of his face and a copy of his criminal record, which consisted of stealing a dilapidated speeder bike for a joyride when he was a teenager on Corellia. Then came a coordinate listing of his current location, which was, curiously, not far away.
The security agent, a lean, balding man who, after twenty years of street work, was more than happy to earn his living behind a computer terminal, yawned and typed a tracking instruction into his keyboard.
Out on the plaza and on the exterior wall of the Senate Building, holocams traversed from their usual monitoring patterns and aimed themselves toward the tracking coordinate. As the balding agent flipped from view to view, the ultraviolet-enabled holocams all showed the same scene: a pale-skinned human male, lying faceup in one of the darkest portions of the plaza, eyes closed, wearing nothing but under-things. The readings from infrared holocams indicated that his body temperature was more or less stable, suggesting he was still alive.
The agent upped the computer system"s threat code from green to yellow, standard to alert. The security system responded by taking control of the external and internal holocam systems, noting the locations of every individual they detected, submitting faces to data banks whose usefulness had been vastly improved during the recent Galactic Alliance Guard years. Every Senator, aide, functionary, visiting politician, hired companion, janitor, driver, bodyguard, and celebrity within the scanning area was suddenly queued for high-priority identification.
Seconds later, cautionary flags began to pop up on the agent"s screen. Avedon Tiggs, actor, musician, and frequently arrested libertine, was exiting with the Senator from Commenor. Gerhold Razzik, a member of the Imperial Remnant delegation who had no business being in the Rotunda, was there, gaping like a tourist, probably recording everything he saw with a disguised holocam. Valin Horn, Jedi Knight, was on level 2, moving confidently and steadily through what should have been a secure corridor. Octa Ramis, Jedi Master, in the company of a younger woman also dressed as a Jedi, was approaching the east main entrance.
The security agent had no special instructions concerning wayward musicians or Imperial spies, but he had very new, very specific orders about Jedi.
He activated his comlink and requested the Special Operations office of the Chief of State.
"You have to let us in," Octa said.
The uniformed and helmeted security woman standing in front of the closed east entrance doors shrugged. "Actually, I don"t."
"No, really, you do." Octa made a subtle gesture with one hand and poured soothing feelings of peace and compliance into the security agent. "It"s Jedi business, very important."
The woman gave the Jedi Master a smile. Perhaps it would have been a scowl of irritation had Octa not been smothering her with dreamy goodness through the Force. "First, the doors just sealed. It"s called a lockdown. Happens all the time, nothing to worry about, nothing to see here. I"m sure the office will tell us in a minute why. Second, no, not only can I not let you in until the lockdown ends, really I don"t have to."
Exasperated, Octa turned away and returned to the side of her apprentice a few paces back. "We need another entrance. One with an appropriately weak-willed guard."
Seha"s eyes were unfocused as she stared at a blank wall of the building. "He"s moving. Looking for something. Ascending, I think."
"A vehicle. He has to be looking for an escape vehicle." Octa turned back toward the guard and raised her voice. "You, where are the hangar exits from this building?"
"That"s cla.s.sified."
"Some of them are public!"
"Everything"s cla.s.sified during a lockdown."
Octa made a strangled noise and turned back to Seha. "I hate good guards. They"re the most inconvenient things in the universe."
"Happiness. He"s elated."
"Can"t he feel you?"
"Maybe. Maybe he doesn"t care. He"s about to get away."
"Meld with me. Give me a sense of him so I can pick him out."
Seha extended herself through the Force, a tentative expression of power-she was years behind other Jedi students her age, many of whom were already Jedi Knights. But she performed the technique correctly, and Octa could feel her emotions, feel the distinctive characteristics of the living being Seha was trying to track.
It was easier for the Master. "Up about ten meters, this way." She set off at a trot northward, along the wall that would gradually curve around toward the north entrance. Seha followed.
Octa could feel decisions being made-"He"s considering two vehicles. No, he"s taking taking two vehicles. How can he take two vehicles?" two vehicles. How can he take two vehicles?"
"One inside the other?"
They found out seconds later. A hundred meters farther, they heard a tremendous shriek of metal from ahead and above. A shuttle with Kuati markings emerged from the building-through a closed portal, the impact hurling slabs of artificial stone and durasteel supports scores of meters. Pa.s.sing through the non-exit, which was too small for the shuttle"s generous girth, caused the vehicle"s upraised wings to rip clean off; they fell to either side. The shuttle, angling downward, headed toward the permacrete of the plaza. Octa could neither see nor detect a pilot in the shuttle"s c.o.c.kpit.
The shuttle"s repulsors were not the only ones to be heard. Before the building alarms cut in, their howl drowning out all other noises, Octa heard another, more familiar set of repulsors increasing in volume from within the hangar.
She put on a Force-aided burst of speed, then leapt, trying to achieve as much alt.i.tude and distance as she could. As she leapt, she shouted, "Push!"
Her apprentice, though underconfident and undertrained, was smart, and telekinesis was something she was good at. Octa felt Seha"s effort not as a blow to her back but almost as a short blast of wind, a stream of power that lofted her, propelled her.
As the gray X-wing emerged from the hangar through the ruined door, Octa slammed into the starboard side of the fuselage, her right arm scrabbling at the nose just in front of the canopy. The impact hammered her ribs.
Valin Horn, in the pilot"s seat, inappropriately dressed in businessman"s garments, looked surprised. He stared at Octa, mouth open.
Unseen, behind Octa in the distance, the ruined shuttle came down on the plaza with a noise like tons of metal and ceramic refuse being dropped by a negligent giant. The noise became a screech and sc.r.a.pe as the shuttle skidded forward, still propelled by its thrusters.