The tapcaf doors sighed apart again, admitting more threadbare factory workers and a gust of humid night air scented with the smoky exhaust of obsolete ground speeders. The old woman had been spot-on with her forecast of rain. Hallena didn’t ask why a day would make a difference. She waited to be told.
“Varti,” Merish said suddenly, craning her neck. “Look, it’s Varti.”
A small, bald man who looked close to retirement wove his way through the drinkers and headed for the table. Hallena thought his scalp was simply shiny, but as he moved under the overhead lights, she could see that his dark skin was tattooed with white designs from ear to what had been his hairline. If there was one lasting impression that she would take from this place, beyond its grime and casual brutality, it was the sense of inversion, of a negative holoimage, the expected areas of light and dark reversed.
Well, that’s remarkably apt… because I really can’t see any clear black and white in this situation.
Varti smiled at her, looking a little puzzled. He cocked his head slightly to one side. In the street outside, klaxons screamed as more than one police speeder ripped past. Several men at the bar paused to look out the windows.
“I don’t remember you, Orla,” he said, holding out a thin, veined hand to Hallena. “But then Nuth is only memories itself now, and memories are fragile things.”
Oh stang… steady, now. Don’t blow it.
“I would have thought I’d have remembered you, too,” she said, indicating his intricate white tattoos.
“I had hair back then.”
The sound of traffic outside was becoming deafening, and Hallena found it hard to hear him. Merish just took another pull at her ale. Shil turned his head slowly to look at her and smiled, as if there were some wonderful joke they were about to share that excluded everyone else in the place, and Hallena took it as something romantic, nothing more.
“I’m used to a bit of quiet.” Hallena was now into her stride as surly, disturbed Orla Taman, making statements to get answers. “Where’s all that traffic going?”
Shil turned his gaze from Merish.
“Toward change,” he said. “They’re heading for the power station, I expect, if things are going to schedule.” He cocked his head. “Isn’t it a lovely sound?”
And then all the lights went out. The bar was plunged into darkness.
Hallena’s hand was on her hold-out blaster even before she thought about it. A loud cheer went up from the tapcaf crowd: in the second or two it took her eyes to adjust to the scant light from a couple of oil burners smoking gently to kill bugs, she saw glistening, metallic movement and heard the shunk-shunk of safety catches being drawn. A constellation of blaster charge lights winked into life, red, blue, green, amber.
Ambush.
Shil chuckled. More vehicle klaxons screamed outside the doors, their sound falling in pitch as they sped past. Hallena could feel the vibration as the downdrafts shook the walls.
Ambush…
The tapcaf flooded with light again, this time the ghostly green of a generator-powered emergency system.
Every drinker in the bar had a blaster rifle drawn, and some had a sidearm, too. They didn’t look scared. They looked elated. The entire tapcaf was silent, like an army awaiting orders.
Ambush…
“Revolution,” said Shil. He had a blaster rifle in his hand now, and so did Merish. “Now it begins. Now it begins, brothers and sisters. Now we take back what’s ours.”
The cheer was deafening. It drowned out the convoy of emergency speeders streaking through the city. Hallena drew her blaster automatically, and had no choice but to follow the flow.
The revolutionaries of Athar had mobilized. She’d landed in the middle of a coup.
As she joined the crowd streaming through the doors into the night, she felt exhilarated, but she wasn’t sure that it was for the right reasons.
Chapter Three
But Master Altis doesn’t subscribe to those views about family. Does that place him on the dark side? What about the Jedi who founded our Order? They didn’t ban attachment. Does that mean everything we are today is built on a foundation of darkness? Why did we decide it was suddenly a bad thing? And are there other Force-users on the light side? I’ve never met any. Surely they exist?
—PADAWAN BAGAR NEI-LEIT, asking questions in philosophy class at the Jedi Temple
Bridge of the Cargo Vessel Wookiee Gunner,
Outer Rim
“Master Altis?”
“Yes, I feel it, too, my dear.”
Jedi Master Djinn Altis stood at the command console and closed his eyes to concentrate on the welter of sensations in the Force. Sometimes he sensed light dying somewhere behind his eyes, tiny short-lived flashes like subatomic particles; sometimes the lights lived longer and turned into great shimmering ribbons of color that wove and tangled into infinity. Now, though, the sensation was like microscopic pellets of hail hitting his scalp just under the skin, melting into cold water that ran down inside his spinal canal.
He recognized it as the collective distress and anger of a world tipping over into conflict. This was how the Force spoke to him, its unique voice, its tone different for every Force-user who listened.
The melting-hail effect was starting to become a common sensation in this war.
“We don’t have to sit out this war.” Callista Masana slid into the navigator’s seat and checked the screen in front of her as if some crisis might be visible on the plot. She put both hands on the transparisteel plate that covered the display, eyes closed, as if she were communing with the computer system. She seemed to be as attuned with inanimate objects as she’d been with the tsaelkes on her parents’ farm. “Is there nothing we can do?”
“We’re doing it, Calli. Humanitarian relief.” There were hundreds of tons of supplies—food, medicine, water purifiers, tents—in the ship’s hold, bound for Yarille. “Someone has to. A war’s not solely about fighting.”
“You’ve never said if you think we should take up arms or not, Master. One day soon, we may have to do just that.”
“I’m not a pacifist. I’ll meet force with force when I have to.”
“The definition of a pacifist,” Callista said, easing herself out of the seat again, “is someone who knows the depth of violence inside them, understands that there’s no going back once it’s unleashed, and so chooses to never let it loose.”
“I never said pacifists lacked courage or aggression. Actually, you’ve just defined the philosophy of many militarists—that force is there not to be used.”
“But what’s a deterrent worth if you know it’ll never be unleashed?”
“And there, my dear, is the line. The pacifist says—I will not add fuel to this fire, even though I may want to because it may consume the world, and someone has to say… stop.” Altis tapped the lightsaber hanging from his belt. “A pacifist would not carry this because he would not want the temptation of using it. The Jedi… the Jedi, then, is not a pacifist because he chooses to stop the fire by violence, on the basis that fewer will suffer that way. The difference is vast—do ends ever justify means? That’s our constant dilemma.”
“And we’re at war. It’s not theoretical now.”
“It never is. The choice is always with us, demanding to be made with every action we take, even in peacetime.” Boots clattered down the passageway, and Geith stuck his head through the hatch. “Forget the disturbance in the Force for a while and get something to eat. We have heavy work ahead of us when we reach Yarille.”
Geith wandered onto the bridge and put his arm around Callista’s shoulders. They made a very charming couple. The fact that they were a couple, nothing remarkable in this Jedi sect, was a quiet embarrassment that the rest of the Jedi Order tried hard to ignore.
Attachment leads to suffering. Suffering leads to fear. Fear leads to anger…
The trap of passion. The fast track to the dark side.
Very well, Master Yoda. What about th
e trap of abstraction? Compassion—compassion is an act, not an idea.
“I missed a good debate, Master.” No, Geith was just a decent young man with Force powers who happened to love a girl very much like him. There wasn’t the slightest hint of darkness in him, only this comfortable sense of an orb of warm light, like a sunset at the end of a still day. “If the means are morally unacceptable, then the ends must be unjustifiable.”
“And what does that mean in real terms? Will you know it when the decision has to be made?” Altis feared the disconnection with reality that he felt he saw in the Jedi Order. The theory was laudable, the lesson repeated faithfully, but it had to be applied with each breath, each step; to crush an insect carelessly or step to one side, to return fire or call for peace talks. Do it. Don’t just say it. “Show me the next time you have to face that choice. Call me to witness it.”
Callista and Geith leaned against each other like trees that had grown together over the years, oddly old and permanent for a moment.
“You think we should overthrow the Republic, then?” Geith said. “Yes, Master, we should. Shouldn’t we?”
“Explain.”
“The excuse of ‘they started it’ might be fine for children, and self-defense is reasonable, but…”
“Go on.”
“The army. Anyone with a scrap of honesty can see it’s wrong to breed human beings and make them fight. We have no moral authority. We’ve already lost what we’re supposed to be fighting for in this war. Even if the Republic wins.”
Geith, like Callista, had known his parents before he became a Jedi. He’d been orphaned, but he remembered them, and that attachment—love, let’s call it what it is, love, any kind of love you care to name—felt good and secure. Callista—she’d been an adult working on her parents’ farm when she became Altis’s second Padawan. It was unheard of, in the Jedi Temple at least. She knew her own mind.
I prefer my Padawans to enter the Order with open eyes. An act of conscious choice, not habit or coercion or someone else’s decisions.
There was no way—even if he wanted to—that Altis could make Callista and Geith believe that attachment was the seed of a darkness that would engulf them.
And this is why the orthodox Jedi way is to begin with infants. They know no better.
“So… how do we deal with a war we can’t avoid?” Altis asked at last.
“We pick our battles,” Geith said. “We fight, but on our own terms. Not that the rest of the Order wants our help anyway.”
Altis had offered to help the war effort. He had been… unspecific. Yoda had been gracious, noncommittal… and distant.
But it’s not about my relations with the Jedi Order. It’s about my duty to living beings. I don’t need anyone’s permission to do that.
“It might not be their decision to make,” Altis said. “Now go eat.” He shooed the two away. “Fetch me some mealbread when you come back, please.”
Altis felt the icy water trickle through his spinal canal again. He settled down in the pilot’s seat, folded his arms, and let the navigation screen blur into slight defocus as he meditated. Yarille was a yellow dot in the top left corner at this range, and on the right-hand margin the Fath system was just visible.
Sometimes, when he did this, he wasn’t immediately sure what he was seeing for a moment—the traces on the screen itself or some visual manifestation of his state of trance. He drifted for a moment at that point between perfect awareness of his surroundings and complete detachment from the physical world. Throughout the ship, members of the sect—male and female, adult and child, families and individuals, Jedi and non-Jedi alike—seemed to pause as well.
The ice wouldn’t leave him alone.
Lights danced.
Altis snapped out of his trance and hit the range control on the scanner. The region of space covered by the sensors magnified a hundredfold to give him much more detail, and he saw a small cloud of enemy transponder traces appear right on top of the Fath system. He adjusted again, and the Separatist ships were moving on JanFathal.
Altis knew with Force certainty that Wookiee Gunner would need to be there, and soon.
He hit the hazard alarm on the console. A shipful of Jedi didn’t need the alert.
But Altis sounded it anyway.
Ops Room,
Republic Assault Ship Leveler
“Captain? Sir!”
The lieutenant swung around fast in his seat. He almost collided with Rex as he sidestepped a technician whose legs were poking out from underneath a partly dismantled sensor console.
MERIONES. Rex noted the name tag on his gray working rig. “What’s the problem, Lieutenant?”
The ops room was cluttered with techs trying to trace a faulty wire that had left six sensor screens in a bank of fifteen completely dead. The fascia was unbolted and propped upright on the deck, leaning against the console.
“I meant—Captain Pellaeon, sir.” Meriones paused for a breath. “But look at the scan. That’s a lot more Sep ships, sir, I’m sure of it.”
Rex leaned over the flickering screen and gave it a heavy thump with the heel of his hand. The image stabilized for a moment; yes, there was now a cluster of ship icons in the Fath region, but no transponder IDs. The sensor should have generated an enemy code and superimposed it on the plot.
“Garbage,” Rex muttered, thumping the screen’s housing again.
The Sullustan civilian technician working at the rear of it muttered mild annoyance, and Rex gave him an apologetic smile. When civvie contractors went space-side with a ship post-refit to iron out problems, they knew they weren’t safe at home in the yards anymore; they were on the front line with the grunts. Rex admired their willingness to live—or die—by the quality of their workmanship.
“I was going to do that myself.” The Sullustan went on testing wires. Then he picked up a small rubber-headed mallet. “Got a special tool for it…”
“But is it Seps?” Meriones asked.
Pellaeon walked into the ops room and came to have a look. “Yes,” he said. “It is.”
“It’s a few hours’ transit time,” Rex said. “Once we find out what they’re doing.”
“Now do the rest of the math.” Pellaeon’s eyes flickered as if he was reading the screen. The image shook and distorted. “One of us, seven of them, and we’re not firing on all drives yet.”
The Sullustan’s voice drifted up from behind the console. “Drives are fine…”
“I was speaking figuratively.”
“I can’t patch into ship tactical data yet,” Rex said, “but we’re a day closer to Fath than any other vessel if HQ needs any surveillance.”
Pellaeon walked over to the nearest comm console, glared at it as if willing it to be in better shape than the rest of the kit in the room, and hit the key.
“Leveler to Fleet,” he said. “Fleet, this is Pellaeon.”
“Go ahead, sir.”
“We’re picking up Sep vessels in the Fath sector. Out of our range, but we’ll continue to observe.”
“Copy that, Leveler. Are you fully operational?”
“No, Fleet, we are not. Stand by, out.”
Rex’s detachment of clones were the only troops on the ship apart from Leveler’s crew. There were no land forces embarked; this was just working-up, a sortie to evaluate the state of readiness of the ship, a test drive. Leveler wasn’t intended to fight—not yet.
So all she could do was observe.
Pellaeon seemed to be chewing something over. He raised his personal comlink to his lips. “Number One, take us in a little closer to Fath until we get in transponder range. Then we’ll deploy an observation droid. Nice and steady.”
“Very good, sir.”
Rex decided to get ready for a little more than a sightseeing trip anyway. If push came to shove, Leveler had operational—if not combat-tested—concussion missiles. She was never intended to land, just to bombard targets from orbit or deploy landing craft to insert ground troops
. He and his men weren’t going to need to slug it out in classic infantry style.
Even so, Rex liked to be ready.
“Just popping back to the messdeck, Captain,” he said, heading for the passageway.
Coric was showing the new boys the schematics of the new targeting arrays when Rex walked into the compartment. The troopers were all minus helmets, looking earnest, black hair meticulously trimmed. Rex suddenly regretted his novelty haircut and decided to shave it off when he got a chance. He didn’t want to be that different from his lads. It was a dumb fad anyway, rather undignified for an officer. And they were Torrent Company, 501st Legion, the elite within the elite, the backbone of the infantry—Anakin Skywalker’s own.
Ahsoka was sitting on one of the bunks against the port bulkhead, knees drawn up to her chin, arms clasped around her legs. She had that far-away look again; the one that said she was tuning in to something distant that Force-users alone could sense. Well, at least she doesn’t have faulty wiring. That’s something. Rex folded down a seat and joined his troopers. They all looked at him.
“Sep vessels clustering around Fath,” Rex said. “We’re going to hang around in stealth mode and keep an eye on them. Not much else we can do at the moment. Some critical systems are down, and anyway, there’s just one of us.”
“Never stopped us before,” said Coric.
“If there was a fight worth having, Pellaeon would be right on it, believe me.”
Joc glanced at Hil. “Is it true he keeps getting passed over on promotion boards because he likes the ladies too much?”
“You’re in this tub five minutes and already you’re listening to gossip.”
“Sorry, sir.” Joc paused. “But why has an officer’s personal business got anything to do with his promotion? Unless he likes Sep females, of course. I can see that would be a bit of a problem.”
Rex had to admire Joc’s persistence. And that unblinking naïveté might well have been a dry sense of humor emerging.
“It’s conduct unbecoming to an officer,” Rex said. “They’re supposed to be squeaky clean and upstanding.”