Heir to the Jedi (6 page)

Meditating and getting to a quiet place when alone was somehow much different from feeling the Force in combat or while piloting or practicing against drones. When I opened myself to the Force in those situations, it was more of an instinctive process, and I felt guided and warned in an almost effortless way, perhaps owing to a combat-ready state of action and reaction where there is no time for thought, and a profound sense of personal danger.

The cranker root represented the opposite of danger. Maybe that was my problem—I needed pressure to push my abilities, to switch me into a nonthinking instinctive mode. But even if that were true, I couldn’t settle for such a standard. I had to be able to do this on my own, by conscious effort—or would it be an unconscious effort if I managed to clear my mind?

CLEAR YOUR MIND,
I told myself again. The words remained stubbornly uncleared and began to blink insistently for my attention. That wasn’t working.

I sighed, and that gave me the idea of focusing on my breathing. Each breath quieted the roiling of my thoughts a bit more. The three blinking words that annoyed and mocked me gradually faded as my lungs filled and emptied and the rhythm of it took over. The Force swirled through and around me, eddies of energy that I could sense and feel but had yet to push or control. Stretching out through the Force, eyes closed, I located the plate, a cold ceramic disk. I found the cranker root, dead now, but a thing sensed as fundamentally distinct from the plate. That was a beginning. But now what? If I merely imagined the cranker moving, would it happen? What if I—

Laneet Chekkoo burst in. “Forgive me, friend Skywalker, but there is dire trouble. The Empire has issued a planetwide alert for a ship matching yours, and if you do not leave right away you may be discovered here.”

“What? Can’t we just hide it in the smugglers’ bay?”

“The chance of being seen by spies is too great. We’re trying to prevent the ones we know about from investigating the spaceport, but we can’t hold them forever and there are probably others we don’t know about. If you’re seen here, we want you to be seen leaving. We can smuggle goods to the Alliance, but we can’t openly defy the Grand Protector or the Empire now.”

“All right, I understand. Just a moment.” I collected the pieces of Huulik’s lightsaber and placed them in a small bag. “Come on, Artoo,” I said. “We have to run and hide again.”

WE TOOK A LONGER ROUTE
back to the fleet, a circuitous path that involved forging a new hyperspace lane between Kirdo and Orto Plutonia—but only after scanning the ship for tracers and spyware. Without immediate pressure and with the luxury of time, Artoo minimized the inherent risk of traveling along unknown hyperspace lanes in conjunction with the nav computer of the
Desert Jewel
.

Admiral Ackbar and Princess Leia surprised me by taking a shuttle over from the command ship
Redemption
to the
Promise
where the
Desert Jewel
was being kept. They wanted to see me right away, and they arrived in the captain’s quarters with C-3PO whirring behind them. The protocol droid looked like he had recently enjoyed an oil bath and a shine, and he was almost jubilant to see R2-D2.

“It was a somewhat successful trip,” I said. “Artoo has the full catalog of Rodian weapons—”

“Excellent,” Ackbar wheezed, waving that away as unimportant. I noticed the Mon Calamari often cut off or disregarded any talk that didn’t immediately advance his current goal. “But we’re more interested in what happened to you in the Llanic system.”

How had they heard about that? “I never could make that stop on Llanic,” I said. “There was this ship in trouble and I couldn’t stand to see it destroyed by TIE fighters, so I helped it escape. I know it was stupid and compromised the mission and maybe the safety of the fleet, and I apologize for that.”

“We’ll send someone else to Llanic, Luke,” Leia said. Her long dark hair was braided in a queue that fell down her back, and she wore a practical, casual outfit of pants, tunic, and boots. “And don’t worry—helping that ship the way you did was vital. It carried information that could change things for us.”

“It did?”

“There was a Kupohan spy on that ship who delivered some vital intelligence. Apparently, there’s a Givin woman newly arrived on Denon who can, if reports are accurate, slice almost anything. She’s a cryptographic genius who makes intuitive leaps that droids can’t and customizes her own hardware. The Empire is keeping her in a sort of luxurious imprisonment there, trying to convince her to apply her skills to slice through our codes and those of other groups they’re monitoring. She’s been given freedom to move on the planet, but she’s guarded around the clock. Through a Kupohan contact on Denon she smuggled out a message entirely in mathematics that took Threepio most of a day to figure out. She says she’ll work for us against the Empire if we can get her family to Omereth and then take her there to join them.”

“Where’s Omereth?”

“Out past Hutt Space,” Ackbar answered. “It’s a water-based planet with a few archipelagos. I’ve seen holos. Looks delightful,
but it has little to offer most species in the galaxy besides fish, so it’s practically uninhabited.”

“No sentient water species there?”

“Only those daredevils that like to visit from other planets, I’m told. The problem is that many of the native fish are quite large and hungry. Makes for dangerous swimming. Not the kind of ocean I’d like to swim in.”

“Luke, we can have Major Derlin and his crew take care of relocating the family,” Leia said, “but we’d like you to snatch the cryptologist from Denon and fly her to Omereth.”

“Why me?”

“You’re one of the best pilots we have, and it’s going to take some skillful flying to get her out of there. Once the Empire realizes she’s been taken, they’ll be anxious to reacquire her. We know this because the pursuit of the Kupohans was relentless. If not for your interference, they wouldn’t have made it.”

“Are you sure about that? There were only two TIEs on its tail and I took them out easily. I mean, one of them swung around to attack and then deliberately broke off and gave me a free shot. What if this is a setup?”

“I don’t think it is,” Ackbar said. “The Kupohan ship’s shields were almost exhausted and the TIEs would have destroyed it in the next couple of minutes. They couldn’t have known you’d show up at that time. They were genuinely doing their best to eliminate the Kupohans and seal their security breach.”

“We still don’t have the
Millennium Falcon
available,” Leia continued, “so I think, when you consider that you need a very fast ship with room at least for a passenger and a droid, the
Desert Jewel
might be our best option.”

“She’s a wanted ship now,” I reminded her, but Leia shrugged it off.

“The
Millennium Falcon
is wanted everywhere. We just change the transponder codes and it’s fine.”

“But the
Jewel
is virtually unarmed,” I pointed out. “That’s a serious drawback if we’re going to face significant Imperial interference. We need to be able to defend ourselves. That ship’s not ready for this kind of mission without upgrades.”

Leia exchanged an uncertain glance with Admiral Ackbar. “Upgrading weapons on such a custom ship might be difficult,” Ackbar said, consonants slipping and vowels bubbling as his voice, accustomed to water, struggled in the dry air of the ship.

“Why?”

“The Alliance is low on money. We’re having trouble maintaining the fleet we have, much less upgrading it. However, there’s some time before you need to go. The Kupohans need a couple of weeks to establish the Givin’s routine and search for weaknesses in her security so that they can give you the best chance of success. If you can find the resources to upgrade the ship by then, by all means, do so.”

Something didn’t add up. “You just had me go on a trip to see the Rodians about purchasing weapons and now you’re saying you can’t pay for weapons?”

“We’ll have money eventually, Luke,” Leia assured me, “but we’re not sure when. Expecting a rebellion to have reliable cash flow is like—” She paused to grasp for an apt comparison, then finished: “—expecting Han Solo to behave rationally.” She turned her head to the droids. “Threepio, you enjoy calculating these sorts of things. What’s more likely, reliable cash flow for the Alliance or Han behaving rationally?”

“While both have very little chance of occurring, Princess, reliable cash flow is far more likely.”

She frowned. “That’s what I thought.”

It occurred to me that Leia might be feeling some resentment at Han being away trying to help himself instead of helping the Alliance. I wouldn’t say a thing about that to him, of course: He would interpret it to mean that she missed him. Speaking of missing people …

“Is Nakari Kelen back from that training mission on the surface?” I asked.

“Yes,” Ackbar replied. “Why?”

“Well, she might be able to solve the funding problem. Unless I’m mistaken, her dad is practically made of funding.”

“We know about that, but according to her, the use of his ship is all he’s willing to consider right now.”

“He might change his mind if Nakari’s directly involved. Can I have her go along on this? I could use someone to watch my back anyway, and she must be competent with that slug gun if you’re having her train the rest of the troops.”

“You’re right, she’s more than competent. I don’t have any objections,” Ackbar said.

“Great.” I felt a surge of something like victory and then wondered why. The obvious answer was that I had become smitten after a single brief meeting with her, but I hoped that wasn’t it. I didn’t truly know her, after all. All I knew was that I had seen enough to want to learn more, and if I wished she would turn out to be as truly likable as she seemed at first, who could blame me for that? Hoping neither my voice nor expression betrayed any of my feelings, I said, “Threepio, would you mind asking Nakari Kelen to join us? She ought to be on the ship somewhere.”

“Certainly, Master Luke.”

I’m not sure that my voice remained neutral there. Leia’s eyes narrowed and she pursed her lips together as if to ask a question, but I forestalled that by diving into a description of the Chekkoo smuggling bay and their shadow business operations underneath Utheel Outfitters. When the rebellion refilled its coffers again, they’d find an excellent supplier on Rodia.

Nakari had a wide grin for me when she joined us. She wasn’t decked out for the field this time; she wore flats instead of boots and had no weapons. “Thanks for bringing my ship back in good shape,” she said.

“No problem,” I replied. We briefed her quickly on what we wanted to do. “Do you think your father might upgrade your ship to take part in a mission like that?” I asked.

She shook her head. “He doesn’t spend money on anything unless it will benefit his business somehow. The only reason I was allowed to fly the
Desert Jewel
in the first place was for scouting missions to new planets and to go hunt rare beasties with some kind of biological oddity his labs could exploit. I upgraded most of the ship, but he helped me get the hyperdrive. A faster ship meant a faster turnaround time and a potential edge on his competitors.”

“Oh.” That was disappointing but understandable. I couldn’t think of how arming the ship to fight off the Empire would help his biolabs.

“We might be able to earn his gratitude, however,” she mused. “You said we have a couple of weeks, right?”

“Yes. There’s some give to the schedule because we’re waiting on more intelligence.”

“Well, he lost contact with a collection crew recently and desperately wants a salvage run.”

“What’s a collection crew?”

“Basically they’re hunters and gatherers. Four or five people who go to various planets to collect specimens for the labs.” She deepened her voice and tucked her chin against her neck, presumably imitating her father. ‘Go, my minions, and fetch me three hundred Yathik acid slugs!’ ” Her voice and posture returned to normal. “That kind of thing.”

I was amused by her impression and cracked a smile, but I didn’t laugh because Admiral Ackbar blinked his giant eyes and seemed impatient. “Okay, got it.”

“So one of Dad’s scouts made a discovery recently on this moon orbiting a planet in the Deep Core, and when Dad got the news, he sent a full crew out—his best one. Hasn’t heard from them in a couple of weeks, and he wants to know if his collection
crew is still there, and, if so, whether anything can be salvaged—especially if there are any living or dead crew and critters on the ship. He’ll pay handsomely for any news of it.”

“Why doesn’t he simply send someone else to go check it out?”

“It’s a new discovery, as I said, and he’d prefer to keep it quiet. Industrial espionage is huge in his business. Crews can make a lot of cash on the side tipping off his competitors. He knows firsthand because he pays bribes to the crews of his competitors, as well. He was hoping I could go by myself because he doesn’t really trust anyone else, but I told him I was serving the Alliance now and I am. And the other thing is, the hyperspace lanes to this system aren’t well established yet, and being in the Deep Core with all those mass shadows makes it even more risky. So he needs someone who’s not only loyal but also willing to take a leap. The nav computers on the
Jewel
are pretty good, but I don’t know if they’re
that
good.”