Balance Point (21 page)

“Why is this a problem?” Jacen asked. “Don’t you want it habitable, down there?”

“We,” the vice-director said, “are content with our roots pulled free. That sphere of stone once anchored us. Its factories became places to send malcontents and gutter-grubbers. Now those citizens are returning to our well-run cities, upsetting our social balances.” He tilted his long head. “And if you restore a habitable planet, the Yuuzhan Vong could choose to move in. If they do, the blame will rest solely on SELCORE.” He shot a glance toward the Kubaz.

Jacen shifted his feet on a deep, soft carpet. “Sir, if our supply shuttles don’t get through, people will start to go hungry. We need your help. It’s urgent.”

The Duros reached for the edge of his counter. A high tone sounded. The door behind Jacen swished open. Two armed Duros stalked in.

What was this? Jacen kept his hands lowered. “Sir, I’m just asking for the chemicals we need to grow food. I have no intention of threatening you.”

“No?” the vice-director asked. “Your enabling of Centerpoint Station, our near neighbor, changed the power balance in our region. Jedi make me nervous. Especially young ones who use words like
urrrgent
. Often they don’t have the maturity to know when to back down.”

Thank you, Kyp Durron
, Jacen muttered to himself. He hoped Anakin was paying attention. “Sir, it was no Jedi who fired Centerpoint Station.”

“A new sentiment is spreading through the New Republic. Surely,” Brarun said, “you have heard the Jedi philosophy challenged.”

“I have,” Jacen admitted. “Most recently, down at Port Duggan. When I arrived.”

“Ah,” he said. “You met my sister, Ducilla.”

“An eloquent speaker,” Jacen said, though the woman’s philosophy might have come straight from the Yuuzhan Vong’s propaganda offices. On second thought, they probably never bothered with subterfuge.

Still, if Master Luke wanted information, this was going well. Now he needed to state his position. “You have nothing to fear from me, Vice-Director. You asked where I left my Jedi robes. At the moment, I have stood down from my status as a Jedi in training.”

The Duros bowed his long head and laughed bitterly. “Any Jedi whose mother is a Skywalker cannot stand down. Ever.” His red eyes glimmered. “It’s time you learned that.”

Jacen clenched his hands at his sides. “I’m learning to be my own man. Not just my mother’s son.”

This time, the four guards laughed, too.

“All right … man,” the vice-director said. “What is it you want to offer CorDuro Shipping in exchange for this missing cargo?”

“You don’t understand,” Jacen insisted. “Those supplies belong to us. They were sent by Coruscant.”

“So really,” Brarun said, “you have come here to accuse my people of robbery.”

Again, at the back of his mind, Jacen saw the galaxy tip toward darkness. He spread his hands and backtracked. “I have little to offer,” he admitted.

The Duros folded long, knobby hands on the bar-desk’s surface. “Well said, Jedi Solo. Now let me tell you some things.

“I am old enough to remember Emperor Palpatine. There was a human who could keep order. Maybe he carried some programs too far, such as trying to wipe out your kind, but I doubt that the Yuuzhan Vong would’ve stuck a tattooed toe into this galaxy if they arrived while he was in power.”

Jacen stood silently, wondering what else the Duros meant to tell him.

Brarun seemed to have forgotten the two Kubaz. “Some of our orbital cities retain drive units,” he said, “from the days when our ancestors first steered them into place. Our homes aren’t locked to Duro. We could leave and take home with us.”

In that case, Jacen wouldn’t put it past them to divert and stockpile refugee supplies, though they could not admit that publicly. “In the face of a possible invasion,” he said softly, “you do have to consider your own people first.”

The Duros raised his head, then cocked it in surprise.
“Exactly. What use would the Yuuzhan Vong have for mechanical habitats?”

Jacen straightened. At last, the Duros was listening—because instead of pushing his demands, Jacen had sympathized. “I agree,” he said. “But they destroy what they despise. There are things you don’t know about the Yuuzhan Vong. I’ve even been their prisoner. I’ve—”

“How did you get away?” Brarun demanded.

Jacen exhaled heavily. He looked down at the floor, then raised only his eyes. “My uncle came for me.” It had been spectacular. Since Master Luke was undoubtedly tracking his feelings, he sent a pulse of gratitude.

“There, you see?” Brarun drew up taller. “Anyone whose mother is a Skywalker cannot stand down from being a Jedi.”

“I’m trying,” Jacen said. “I am seriously trying to find out what I am, apart from all that.”

Brarun rubbed his gray-green thumbs together over his folded hands.

“I’ve seen terrible things,” Jacen continued. He related some of them: the slave-taking, the preoccupation with pain. “And death,” he finished. “We’ve seen them sacrifice whole shiploads of prisoners. We know it’s sacrifice, not simply elimination. I’ve spoken with a woman who was also their prisoner.” Danni Quee’s sad face flitted through his mind. He hoped she was safe, back on Coruscant. “I don’t think you’d be safe, even if you took these habitats to another world. They’d shoot to destroy your technology.”

“Is that a threat, Jedi?”

“No,” Jacen exclaimed. “I’m trying to help you, Vice-Director. To warn you, not threaten you. We have to stand together.”

“The old symbiosis dogma. Did you know that even
as your water-treatment settlement tried to become symbiotic with the Gateway dome, Gateway was trying to develop more-dependable water sources of its own and become independent of you? That was in your mother’s weekly report.” He tilted his head triumphantly. “She, a Skywalker, was not working toward symbiosis at all.”

“We
are
interdependent,” Jacen insisted. “Every settlement’s work will contribute to making the surface habitable again.” A bizarre idea drifted into his head. He wasn’t authorized to do this … but … “Vice-Director, if we settlers, the first people of a new Duro, offered to pay a tariff, a percent of all future goods, would that help ensure delivery? Say … two percent?” That seemed plenty generous.

The Duros stared over his clasped hands. Jacen held his breath. They both knew Jacen wasn’t authorized to offer this. If other settlements called this a betrayal, they’d come braying for Jacen’s blood, not the vice-director’s.

“Twenty.” Brarun waved one hand. Out one corner of his eye, Jacen saw those big human security guards relax.

“Too much.” Jacen felt increasingly awkward. His mother had authorized him to try diplomacy, but did that include giving away goods? “SELCORE negotiated with CorDuro for delivery of supplies,” Jacen insisted. “Your people are already being paid.”

“And you,” the vice-director said, “have been sent to me as a negotiator. Fascinating.” He raised a finger, beckoning one bulky aide away from the two inoffensive Kubaz. “Jedi Solo, I would like to continue these negotiations. Please consider yourself my guest, for the time being. Until I can contact your mother, and Coruscant.”

Did the Duros mean to hold him for ransom, or as a hostage? Or would Brarun really negotiate? Jacen was glad there’d been witnesses in here, though no one could
call them impartial. He couldn’t wait to tell Master Skywalker about his vision, too. Finally, he might get some help settling his mind.

“I’ll ask one condition, though.”

Brarun’s brow ridge rose. “I do not believe you are in a position to set conditions.”

“Wait. Listen. Deliver all the supplies you contracted to take groundside, as long as I’m your … guest.” His uncle would like that, even if Anakin was too young to understand.

“You have no way of checking that, Jedi.”

“Don’t I?” Jacen looked hard into the Duros’ large eyes. In fact, he didn’t. But Brarun didn’t know that. “You must help us hold back the Yuuzhan Vong. If we can’t maintain a strong front against them, they’ll pick us off, one system at a time. They’re already doing it.”

“We’ve heard that story,” the Duros said, but he waved the second guard forward. “Escort young Solo to my guest room,” he said. “Stay with him—outside, in the hallway. I will speak with him later.”

Jacen glanced toward the brown wall screen on his way out.
Hope you got what you wanted, Uncle Luke
, he thought, knowing his uncle would recognize only an unspoken query.

One Kubaz barely nodded. The other turned away.

Mara dropped her datapad on a console as she reentered the rental unit. A quick check of both rooms confirmed that they were empty, and her practiced eye saw no sign that anyone else had entered.

Sporting her new disguise around Bburru, she’d had no trouble finding a Duros willing to talk, especially when she explained that she was afraid she’d wake up one morning to find Kuat pocked with refugee camps.

The Duros merchant talked freely, sensing a potential
convert. She recorded his philosophy on her datapad, pressing harder and deeper for clarification on doctrinal points. Finally, convinced by her eagerness, he promised to forward her the very latest “word of wisdom,” which should arrive in two days.

At that point, her ear for intelligence pricked. How, she asked casually, could he know so exactly?

He shrugged. That was always the day it arrived.

Mara thanked him regally, departing with more information than he knew he’d given out.

Without bothering to lose her costume, she sat down at the rental room’s data port and plugged in her pad. Minutes later, thanks to codes Ghent developed years ago for Talon Karrde, she was deep into Bburru’s communications bureau.

Dozens of broadcasts “always” arrived on that day of the week. Out of those, she narrowed her possibilities to three that came from outsystem and one that arrived from the surface, an official report from SELCORE’s Gateway dome, where research was conducted. SELCORE in its wisdom still tried to keep the Duros duly impressed with the detoxification process.

That source, she could check quickly. She keyed up the most recent broadcast. On the surface, it was nothing more than a series of progress reports: two toxic swamps seeded with reclamation organisms. Three enclosures drained and plowed for planting. Small mammals loosed on the grass prairie; that experiment hadn’t turned out so well—half died, and the other half showed no eagerness to nest and breed.

She carried one of Ghent’s decoding programs in her datapad. It was the matter of a minute to copy the transmission and run the program. She waited while it applied various codes to the program, coming up with only gibberish …

Until it hit pay dirt. Her hair tail fell over her face as she leaned into the datapad. One of the dirtdown scientists had used an old Rhommamoolian military code.

Mara remembered the passionate, even illogical antagonism of the Rhommamoolians’ slain spiritual leader, Nom Anor. Toward the end of this text, she even spotted some of the exact phrases that Duros orator had used at Duggan Station.

She pushed away, tilting her chin to let the hair tail settle behind her head. Someone down at Gateway—a Duros, or someone else with reason to make trouble in the Duro system—had connections to Rhommamool, where she’d already heard this kind of rhetoric.

The
Jade Shadow
had belonged to a spice merchant before Lando’s refit droids installed its camouflaged armament. It would pass as a noblewoman’s runner. As Kuati nobility, she ought to have at least one servant, but she couldn’t always get what she wanted.

She left Luke a message with R2-D2.

Han’s head and shoulders glimmered over a holoprojector in one of the Gateway admin building’s offices. “Sounds exactly like Randa, crashing the comm office that way,” he said. “Threaten him if you have to. He respects you.”

“He used to,” Jaina said, “for a while.” She shook her head. Now she just wished the Hutt would leave her alone.

“Guess we shouldn’t have let him sleep in our control shed. I shouldn’t’ve even brought him along.”

Jaina shrugged. “No, you did the right thing.”

“Well, go warn him he’s headed for permanent lockup, and then keep an eye on him. Keep him out of Leia’s way. Somebody tried to sabotage her mining laser last night.”

“Then I’ll stay out of her way, too.” Jaina pulled her soft, SELCORE-blue cap low, warmly covering her ears, and went out.

She found Randa’s tent quickly. Blubbering noises filtered through its blue walls.

She pulled open the flap. Randa sat on his sleeping mat, holding a leathery ball in one little hand. He twitched that hand, as if to hide it—then thrust it forward, more forcefully. His blubbering and moaning shut off.

“Take it,” he ordered. “I expected Ambassador Organa Solo, or her security people.”

Jaina recognized the villip. Her stomach wrenched. Randa, a spy? No wonder he’d been hanging out in the communication centers!

“How long have you been working for them?” she demanded, holding herself ready to fend off an attack.

“I am not,” the Hutt growled. “I asked to speak with them, hoping to negotiate on behalf of my people. They rebuffed me—”

“When?” Jaina took another step forward. “When did you contact them?”

“Yesterday.”

“Only once?”

“I swear it by my—”

“Oh. Right, I believe you,” she said, loading her voice with sarcasm. “So that’s why you tried to warn Senator Shesh there were Yuuzhan Vong on the way. Because you somehow found a villip, somewhere inside Gateway dome.”

“The senator assured me that reinforcements will arrive shortly.”

Jaina worked the tip of her thumb with one fingernail. If Jacen was right, if Shesh wasn’t to be trusted, then the
woman would
not
lobby to send reinforcements. She might even report Randa to the Yuuzhan Vong.

“I made an error,” the Hutt assured her. “Truly I did. But I have repaired it, now—”

“Do you think anyone will believe that? Give me that.”

Jaina snatched the leathery villip. That brought her momentarily chest-to-belly with the Hutt, close enough to catch a whiff of his fetid body odor. Clutching the stiff villip under one arm, she stalked out of the shelter and hustled toward the gray admin building.