Star Wars - Gathering Shadows - The Origin of the Black Curs - Unpublished (4 page)

“I had a fiancé myself,” she said.

“What was his name?”

“Krul.”

She said it the way she had said Morgan’s name.

Harkness didn’t think he should say anything else after that. He felt embarrassed at having told Jai so much about himself. Even after four years in the Alliance, among people he trusted without question, he had not told anyone about Chessa. To those who had known her, he never talked about what she meant to him.

The silence seemed to fill up all around him like some invisible snow, and he thought about the absolute last time he had seen Chessa. Pasty, bleeding. Not even a person, really. Some dead people looked like they were sleeping; Chessa’s expression was frozen, her eyes staring up at the docking bay ceiling, surprised and horrified. He shook that image away and pictured her alive and healthy. Then he pictured her lying in a dark cell with a bloody nose and nothing to live for.

At that moment, Harkness came across a part of himself that he did not like to acknowledge, and his stomach tightened. It was the part that had already begun to dissolve the security of his prison, and his sense of unparalleled freedom. It was the entire reason the interrogation officers had seen fit to beat him. He had yet again discovered, to his dismay, the part of himself that wanted to survive. Whole. Undefeated.

Harkness sighed heavily. Well, it was cozy while it lasted. He shut his eyes and took a few deep breaths, willing his body to heal itself, willing the pain to stop. It wasn’t that he had any flair for manipulating the Force or anything like that; he just knew that the reason he had survived all the injuries and setbacks and impossible missions that had marked his military career was because he had willed it. And that was why he wasn’t going to die in this cold, rank little cell. Just by wanting to heal, willing himself to live, he’d find some way to save himself from whatever the Imperials had planned for him.

Saving Jai, on the other hand—that was the part he feared he couldn’t do anything about.

“Radlin?” said the taller of the guards, thoughtfully giving the E-Web a final wipe and sticking the rag in his back pocket. His voice echoed off the mountainside. “Radlin, I’m bored.”

“I guessed,” said Radlin, still sitting and waggling his foot.

“I mean really bored. Really really. What are we even here for? There’s no more Rebels.”

Radlin said. “It’s procedure. Procedure is this thing you do where you follow orders so you get that promotion thing we talked about?”

“I’m just saying we should think up something to do.”

“You’re just all antsy ’cause that merc guy showed up looking for the Rebels.”

“You’re just all mad ’cause we weren’t the ones who caught him. Look, Rad, let’s just go hunting or something. Pick off some more of those Walking Dead Rebels.”

Behind a nearby tree, Tru’eb caught his breath when he heard them mention the Walking Dead. But it was too late—right on cue, Platt came stumbling up the hill toward the guards. She was trying to imitate the Sullustan’s jerky walk and his glazed expression, but her steps were exaggerated and her tongue was hanging out of her mouth. Tru’eb put a hand to his face and shook his head.

Nevertheless, Radlin leaped up, knocked over his chair and stumbled backwards. When the tall one turned around and saw Platt, he visibly tensed, but he gave a terse, macho laugh. “Radlin, you want this one?”

Platt stopped when the guards’ ledge was at her chest-level. “Excuse me, gentlemen,” she said, clasping her hands behind her back. “Is this the way to the spice mines of Kessel?”

Radlin gave a shriek and opened fire.

“Honestly, Platt,” Tru’eb said, as Platt put on Radlin’s camouflage jacket, “I don’t know how you talked me into that. You know there’s nothing more dangerous than a blaster being handled by someone in a panic.”

“Yeah, but there’s nobody more fun to pick off than somebody in a panic, either.” Platt surveyed the area. “You think there’s any more patrols roaming around?”

“Yes. So let’s be quick about this.”

The dugout was actually situated in front of a deep, man-made fissure that ran straight through the cliff and out the other side. Tru’eb and Platt were pleased to discover that this end of the fissure gave way to a relatively flat area of the forest.

For twenty minutes they made their way over fallen trees and scrub and large rocks. Platt was becoming increasingly nervous. From what she had seen, this end of Zelos didn’t really have dusk; the sun just seemed to wink out in the evening. Moreover, the fog was still thick enough that she could see no more than two meters in front of her at a time.

“What are we even going to do,” she said, stepping in front of Tru’eb and walking backwards, “if we don’t find the garrison before nightfall I don’t think that cheap survival shelter has another nights worth of—”

Tru’eb stopped. “Just a moment,” he said. “Do you hear that?”

“No. What?”

“Almost a rumbling noise.”

“I didn’t—” Platt said, and then the ground underneath her disappeared.

She felt herself falling, tried to scream through a dry mouth and clenched lungs, felt a violent surge of blind panic shooting through her entire body—and then a yanking sensation through her right arm as she stopped and dangled where she was. Tru’eb had her by the wrist.

“What… what was… what just happened?” she said when Tru’eb had hauled her back up and she was on her knees on solid ground. “Did I just fall off the… how come I didn’t see… Tru’eb, what happened?”

Tru’eb didn’t answer; he was staring over her shoulder, awed. Platt turned around just in time to see a black TIE fighter come
whooshing
up out of the ground about four meters in front of them.

Both of them fell back in a shower of dirt and leaves, the deafening sound of the TIE roaring overhead, and Platt thought the sheer momentum of the thing might blast her into the mountainside. Then, just as abruptly, everything went quiet.

They looked up. The TIE fighter sailed just above tree-level and then disappeared.

When the pounding in Platt’s head subsided, she looked at what she had stepped off of. The ground ahead looked like an overgrown clearing. But now Platt saw that she had walked right off the edge of a sheer rock face that descended hundreds, perhaps even thousands of meters.

Tru’eb was next to her, staring into the gorge. It was impossible to make out the bottom of the valley, a dark well with layers of fog drifting above it. Plunging down into the darkness, the cliff wall was a marbled gray with steplike ridges naturally chiseled into it. There were also outcroppings along the way, so heavily overgrown that the plants and trees hung precariously out over the valley: and waterfalls poured out of the rock face in a number of places. After several dozen meters everything disappeared into a bluish-gray soup.

Far below, winking on and off through the fog, there was a small blue light. And another, and another, and a hundred, neatly lined up. Platt shut her eyes and then looked again.

“Running lights,” she said. amazed. “But it’s too dark to make out the garrison.”

“Hence, the Valley of Umbra,” Tru’eb said.

“Yeah, I get it. Look at the waterfalls. Twenty credits says that’s a leaky aqueduct.”

“Look there,” Tru’eb said. “Do you see that? There, and over there—all around.”

Platt looked. Weaving in and out of the cliff was a series of metal ladders and walkways, probably leading to maintenance ducts hidden in the rock face.

Tru’eb took her macros. “Six hundred meters down.” He looked up. “And the distance across is twice that. I suppose we can safely say we know where Harkness is.”

Mist oozed up over the edge of the valley. Platt wasn’t sure whether she should be excited or appalled at knowing where Harkness was.

“There must be a turbolift or a flatbed loader leading down,” Tru’eb said. “You have code cylinders in that uniform, correct?”

“Yes, but I’m not keen on explaining why we’re not at our post. Or why one of us grew head-tails and fangs and the other decided he was much freer as a woman.”

Tru’eb shrugged. “Then it’s straight down.”

“How?”

“We’ll take the maintenance ladder wells. They must eventually lead all the way to the bottom.”

“Suppose somebody’s working on them, genius?”

“Why would they? They have repulsors.”

“Yes, but I’m trying to delay this as long as possible.” She looked at him. “I really don’t want to go down there.”

“But you will.”

“But I will.” She sighed and slid down on her belly, wedged her foot into the cliff face and hoisted herself down. The nearest ladder was about five meters below, according to the macros, but it wasn’t hard to get a foothold on the crags. Before long the two smugglers were standing on a solid, grassy boulder that jutted out over the valley. One of the rusty maintenance ladders, dripping with moisture, stuck out of the rock face nearby.

“I’ll go first,” said Tru’eb, dusting up his hands with dirt and taking a step toward the ladder.

Platt grabbed his shoulder. “Tru’eb.”

“Yes, Platt.”

“Why are we doing this?”

“Harkness is our friend.”

“So what? We have lots of friends.”

Tru’eb stepped onto the ladder. “No, we don’t.”

Before Morgan had died, Jai had experienced several incidents in which she had forgotten who she was.

The most prominent of them had happened about eighteen months ago, when she led a five-man Infiltrator team to Bevell Three on a supposedly well-planned assignment. They were supposed to capture four Imperial agents, but somebody had tipped off the Empire; a squadron of TIE bombers appeared out of nowhere and razed the area. Everybody fell, except for Jai, who walked away without even a bruise. As usual, she got everybody out. But for the first and only time in her SpecForces career, she didn’t get somebody out alive; Leong, the team’s comm specialist, died en route to the medical frigate.

Jai went through the next week completely numb, not responding much to anything or having any sort of recognizable emotion. High Command promoted her to master sergeant and she didn’t object, even though she knew it was a propaganda tool. No Infiltrator assignment should ever have garnered that much attention, but this one had, and on her watch. Still, she accepted the promotion and went on about her routine business.

Then, one day, rummaging through her locker, she found one of Leong’s gloves and her heart shattered into a million pieces.

Now, lying on the floor in the dark, Jai recalled that moment with a great deal of distance. As if it had happened to somebody else. The memory was vivid, and she could access the sounds and smells and visions of the time with clarity. No matter how hard she tried, however, she couldn’t access the emotion.

What would Leong say if he could see that Jai had let the Imperials take her? Surely he’d be disappointed. But after two months of feeling nothing, suddenly there had been an onslaught of pain, rage, fear, shame—every bit of which was preferable to numbness. For a couple of blissful days, her brain had been so ravaged by the interrogation that she had forgotten to be numb. And now she was back in the same old rut, wishing the pain across her back, the dried blood on her face, the memory of the Imperial soldier swinging the butt of his blaster rifle at her face, any of it would jar her back into emotion.