Fate Of The Jedi_ Outcast Part 17

The judge pressed a b.u.t.ton on her bench. A musical note like a nautical s.h.i.+p's warning bell sounded through the chamber; it was just loud enough to be painful to those with normal hearing. As the shouts continued, she pressed it again and again, each time creating a louder tone, until all the chamber was silent, most of those present covering their ears or tympanic membranes.

The judge glanced around the chamber, her expression cool. "Would everyone who desires a month in jail on a charge of contempt of court please speak up?"

No one spoke. Few were even daring enough to lower their hands from their ears.

The judge gestured for everyone to sit. All did except those who, like Jaina, had found no empty seats.

"To continue, he will be detained through carbonite imprisonment until such time as a treatment for his condition, based on evaluation of his test data, can be determined. He will be brought out of carbonite stasis at intervals, as new and relevant tests, as well as periodic mental evaluations, are ordered. He will be brought out not less often than twice per standard year regardless of test and evaluation concerns.

"That concludes this hearing." Her movements brisk, perhaps irritated, she rose. The advocates and onlookers did, as well. When she was gone, voices erupted again, this time the press hurling questions at the advocates, the Jedi, and the Horns.

Jaina ignored the heartfelt but irrelevant complaints of the Jedi around her. She watched Corran and Mirax Horn embracing in their shared misery, watched as the forbidding stare of Master Saba Sebatyne kept the members of the press from approaching them, watched as Nawara Ven sat again at his table, slumped in temporary defeat, shoulders knotted in frustration and anger.

And she was struck by a sense of foreboding. They're all killers They're all killers, she thought. Jedi and combat pilots and smugglers, killers all, who waged war for the New Republic or who killed to stop the Yuuzhan Vong. The government is turning this situation into a war, and the people they're offending, beneath the surface, are killers. Myself included. This can't end well Jedi and combat pilots and smugglers, killers all, who waged war for the New Republic or who killed to stop the Yuuzhan Vong. The government is turning this situation into a war, and the people they're offending, beneath the surface, are killers. Myself included. This can't end well.

UNEXPLORED DEPTHS, KESSEL.

The speeder plummeted into darkness. The underside almost immediately slammed into a slab of rock angled at about forty-five degrees to their descent. The repulsors, overrevving themselves to compensate, bounced the speeder away from the slab and flipped it. In the beams of the headlights, Han saw rocks seemingly spin around him as the speeder rolled.

He clicked the repulsors off the standard setting and brought them up toward full strength, trying to slow the speeder's descent and eventually hover. Then Leia shouted something he didn't understand. She was staring upward and he could feel more than see the immense shelf of rock falling into the shaft after them.

He killed the repulsors and fired the thrusters, rocketing the speeder straight down the shaft. In the spare second he had before further action was required, he flipped the repulsors to collision reduction, a forward projection that would reduce the severity of the crash when they hit.

They entered a huge cavern-or perhaps a tunnel, for it was of an almost constant diameter, more than a hundred meters, and there were faint glows to the right and left. He flipped over to normal flight mode and rolled to starboard. The sensors screamed that a collision with the floor was imminent- He'd almost managed to pull out of the dive when the front portions of the speeder smashed into the stone floor. They hit at an oblique angle, a lifesaving circ.u.mstance. The impact was powerful, slamming the two of them forward in their restraints, but the speeder continued forward, bouncing like a flat stone being skipped across a pond.

The repulsors kicked off. The speeder hit again, jarring Han's spine, and bounced up again in Kessel's low gravity. Then it hit a third time and stayed down, skidding forward for another forty meters or more.

They stopped, but the thundering noise of descending stone didn't. Well behind them, an avalanche of rocks, boulders, and billowing dust poured out of the ceiling, creating an enormous hill directly beneath the hole through which they had fallen.

Hurried but detached, Han went through his emergency checklist. Leia: unhurt, unstrapping herself, checking for her lightsaber. Himself: minor pains in neck and arms, nothing significant. Control board: dark. Sensors: off. Odors: recycled air, nothing toxic. No sign that the recyclers were still functioning.

He let out his breath for the first time since the floor had dropped away. He unstrapped. "Be ready to run in case more of the ceiling drops."

She gave him a look no other person could have interpreted-half appreciation for his concern, half aggravation that he was telling her things she was already prepared to do.

The air around them dimmed as the outer edges of the dust cloud rolled over them. But the noise of the avalanche diminished. A few moments later, it was reduced to the sound of an occasional rock tumbling onto the mound, and stony grumbling as the mound itself settled.

Carefully, quietly, Han and Leia emerged from the speeder. There was no pop of the atmosphere seal breaking as they did so; the speeder's frame must have twisted, ruining seal integrity, during their crash.

Leia found a powerful glow lamp in the jumble of equipment in the backseat. She snapped it on and played it toward the cavern ceiling. Though weak at this range, the beam showed that the hole in the ceiling was no more; it was plugged by jagged chunks of stone, some of them weighing dozens or hundreds of tons.

"Great," Han said. He moved to the front of the speeder and opened the engine compartment.

"Hey, any landing you can walk away from is a good one," Leia said.

He offered a derisive snort. "That's survivor talk. A pilot says, any landing you can't fly fly away from is a failure." away from is a failure."

"You did all right."

"I know I did. It was this archaic piece of junk that let us down." He shook his head over the state of the engine and slammed the compartment closed. Then he gave the side of the speeder a savage kick.

"That good."

"Yeah. I hope you like walking, lady."

"Han, you may have noticed, in the distance, some light sources?"

"Probably phosph.o.r.escent lures of an infinite number of giant carnivorous tunnel beetles."

She laughed at him, then began pulling equipment from the backseat. "Let's gear up for a hike."

Half an hour later, they looked out over a new and different world.

It was the source of the light they had seen down the tunnel past the mound of fallen stone; Leia had judged it to be closer, so they had headed in that direction. The walk had been easy. Though they had all but emptied the gear from the speeder and Han had taken turret gun grenades besides, in Kessel's gravity the sixty or so kilos of gear he was packing was a comparatively comfortable load.

The approach to the point where lofting tunnel met vast cavern was a rise; Han and Leia had to clamber up a steep climb of stone some three meters high before they could look into the cavern beyond.

The size of a city, the cavern was lined with great blocks of manufactured equipment, each block the size of a human habitation; some were as large as three-level houses, some the size of ten-story apartment buildings, and all were thick with colored lights, some constant, some blinking regularly or intermittently. The faces of the equipment blocks were broken down into rectangles of different colors of metal, but at this distance Han could not tell whether they were merely decorative touches or if the rectangles were access hatches.

In addition to the indicators on the equipment, there was light from above and below. The ceiling of the chamber had patches of greenish material, possibly organic, that exuded a soft blue-green glow. The floor was bare of equipment and was littered, though not thickly, with greenish round-capped fungi, some of which stood taller than Han. Light from all these sources blended together into the dim, pale glow Han and Leia had seen from so far away.

The vista of machinery, fungi, and cavern walls went on as far as the eye could see-kilometers at least.

Leia reached over and gently pressed up on Han's jaw under his breath mask, closing his mouth. "Lando has no idea what he's sitting on, does he?"

Han shook his head. "If all of this shut down tomorrow, just the sc.r.a.p value would make him a richer man. But what's it for?"

"Let's find out." Hitching up her pack, she walked down into the cavern.

They divided their duties naturally and without discussion. Leia investigated the machinery. Han kept his eye out for predatory life-forms.

Within a few minutes' walk, they reached the first bank of machinery on the right-hand sloping wall of the cavern. First in their path was a cabinet-like structure the size of a warehouse. Its panels, mostly black, gleamed with what looked like thousands of small rectangular lights.

Leia put her hands on her hips and stared up at the thing. "Where to start?"

"Something's powering it. If it doesn't have some sort of internal reactor, there's probably a series of cables entering it somewhere. And unless it's doing whatever it does in isolation, it's receiving or sending data-by cable, by broadcast, somehow."

At nearly ground level, a bogey emerged from the face of the machine. It hovered there, a few meters from Han and Leia, and emitted a faint chittering noise, like a whole colony of curious insects.

"Or maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about," Han said.

CITY OF DOR'SHAN, DORIN.

Fresh from the Jade Shadow Jade Shadow's sanisteam and dressed in a clean robe, Ben joined his father in the main cabin. Dinner consisted of prepackaged meals heated in the yacht's tiny pulse oven, but Ben was all right with that; the nerf loaf, tuber mash, and seasoned greens in the individual compartments of the tray reminded him of food from home-bad food from home.

"So," his father said. "What did you learn today?"

"A little bit about the difference between the way skinny limbs with dense, leather muscles move compared with human arms and legs. That's about it. Oh, and you know that thing where the sages decide that it's time to die, and they just will themselves to do it?"

Luke nodded.

"One of the Baran Do Masters has decided to do that. Charsae Saal, the senior combat instructor. He worked with Tistura Paan and me today."

"Did you talk to him about it?"

Ben nodded. "I didn't, you know, just blurt it out, Why have you decided to die? Why have you decided to die? or anything like that. But Tistura Paan had some questions about his ceremony tomorrow. She was pretty sad. She was his special student. He gave her a datacard with his memoirs and instruction manuals on it. He'd just finished it." or anything like that. But Tistura Paan had some questions about his ceremony tomorrow. She was pretty sad. She was his special student. He gave her a datacard with his memoirs and instruction manuals on it. He'd just finished it."

"What did you ask him?"

"Well, I said that from the human perspective, it was always sad when a good person died, when he took his knowledge with him. He said he was leaving his knowledge behind. I asked if he had family, and he said he would be seeing them again someday, by which I took it he meant they were already dead."

"He plans to die tomorrow. tomorrow."

Ben nodded.

Luke frowned.

"What?"

"Turn of phrase." But Luke said no more on the subject.

"What did you learn today, Dad?"

"I learned to make a ball float at a constant alt.i.tude, but not to make it be still."

"You had an exciting day."

"I also learned that there's something about Jacen's visit here, or about the former Master of the sages, that Tila Mong doesn't want me to know. That was probably the hidden thought I kept feeling last night."

"Once you've figured out the scanner-blanking technique and you've pried all of Tila Mong's secrets out, where are we going next?"

Luke shrugged. "We'll have to take that as we come to it."

UNEXPLORED DEPTHS, KESSEL.

HAN WATCHED L LEIA AS, UNAFRAID, SHE APPROACHED THE BOGEY. UNLIKE the previous one, this creature did not retreat at her approach, but hung in the air as if watching her. the previous one, this creature did not retreat at her approach, but hung in the air as if watching her.

She came within a meter of it and still it did not move, though its chittering grew louder and the lights within it swirled even faster.

"Leia, be careful ... careful ..." Torn between a need to know what was happening with his wife and an equally strong need to know they were not being crept up on, Han kept switching his attention from the tableau with the bogey to the surrounding machinery and field of fungi.

"I don't sense any hostile intent. Or, for that matter, any life." Leia raised a hand as if to touch the bogey.

Her hand penetrated its outer boundaries. Colorful lights swirled around her fingers as if they were the center of some new maelstrom. Leia's hair rose, standing on end, and a crackling noise joined the chittering Han heard. "Leia, keep talking."

"It's all right, I'm not hurt." There was some strain to her voice, as if she were making an effort of exertion or concentration. "It's ... it's ..."

"What?" Han heard a note that was almost a yelp in his voice.

"A datacard." She swayed backward, almost falling, and the action broke her contact with the bogey. Abruptly, it zoomed away, straight up.

Han put a hand on Leia's shoulder to steady her. He watched the bogey ascend. Several moments later, it hit the ceiling and vanished into the rock there. Han breathed a sigh of relief.

Leia straightened, shaking her head to clear it. "That was ... interesting."

"What did you mean, it was a datacard?"

"That was what it reminded me of. I think that was something like its function. I could sense a reservoir of energy within it, and the ability to communicate, and a big store of data ... fresh data. From this device, I think." She gestured at the building-sized cabinet. "I saw a three-dimensional pattern of, I don't know what to call them, intensities intensities. Thousands. Millions. It had a mission, an intent to go somewhere and deliver the data. There was something else, too. A sense of futility."

"You got a lot out of that contact."

"Its whole purpose is communication. Not with me, not with anything like us. It helped a lot that I was trying to do what it was meant to do. I need to find another one. A lot more of them. Learn more from each one." Energetic again, she set off at a brisk walk along the row of immense cabinets, holding her right arm out as she did as if to wave more bogeys out of the machines she pa.s.sed.

Han shook his head and followed.

Han saw things on that walk, some of which were fascinating and some of which he'd prefer not to have seen.

There was animal life in the cavern, moving among the fungi. He cataloged at least two different species of centipede-like creatures, one about a meter long and green, the other about two meters long and a dangerous-looking red and yellow. Both species had vicious-looking stingers at their tail ends. He saw the larger centipedes attack, sting, and eat the smaller ones.

He also saw small avian things, like miniature hawk-bats, swoop upon both species of centipedes and s.n.a.t.c.h things from their backs. Only when he drew out his macrobinoculars and trained them on one of those flying attacks did he realize that the avian was taking young centipedes riding on the backs of the older ones.

The fungi were also prey to animal life. Some looked chewed on around the periphery of their caps. But others had defenses. When a green centipede went crawling across the cap of one of the fungi, the cap collapsed, rolling up on itself and trapping the centipede within. That fungus did not unroll in all the time it took Han to walk out of sight of it, and he did not care to think about the digestive processes now going on within it. He just vowed not to touch any fungus caps as he pa.s.sed them.

Two kilometers into the hike, he saw the energy spider. He stopped abruptly, the air leaving his lungs. Leia must have sensed his distress; she turned to look at him, then followed his gaze.

Seventy meters away, its body the size of an airspeeder, it rose from within a tall clump of fungi, gla.s.sy and transparent, at least fifteen legs on a side, formidable pincers up front.

Its head swiveled as it surveyed its surroundings. Slowly, so as not to attract attention, Han slid the slugthrowing rifle off his shoulder strap, lowering it to the ground, and put his hands on the grenade launcher. He'd start with a decoy grenade; if that didn't work, he'd switch to high explosives, then go to the rifle if the spider got nearer.

The spider took a couple of steps in Han's direction, clambering up on an especially large fungus as if to get some alt.i.tude to see better.

Then it settled down on the fungus cap. The skin of the fungus beneath its body began to turn black, withering away.

"It's eating fungus," Leia said. "That's not very aggressive. You You do that." do that."

"It's different." Now that his initial burst of panic was subsiding, Han could see that there were differences between this creature and the energy spider he had seen, the ones he had read about in Nien Nunb's communiques. Instead of being blue, with little flares of light glistening within its transparisteel-like skin, this one was more of a crimson color. Its legs were not festooned with all the claws and blades the spice spiders possessed.

And, of course, it was not charging at him.

"A related species. Maybe herbivorous." Leia remained irritatingly unafraid.

"Maybe omnivorous omnivorous, and willing to add a couple of humans to its snack list." Han reshouldered his rifle. "C'mon, let's get out of here. Maybe it's an out-of-sight, out-of-mind predator."

"All right."