Heir to the Jedi

  “You’ve given me a lot to think about. That is, if I can get us out of here.” Even if Soonta were to leave me here to go get help, she’d need to get on her speeder bike safely—and there was no guarantee she could do that. If the ghest was still waiting in the swamp, it could easily pounce before she could take off. We needed to remove the threat before either of us tried to mount the speeder bike. I withdrew my own lightsaber from my belt, walked forward to the edge of the island, one weapon in each hand, and turned them both on. I crouched to minimize myself as a target as I advanced, holding the lightsabers parallel to the ground and angled to protect each side of me so that I was at the base of a triangle. The ghest would have to be extremely fast and agile to take me out without getting cut. The problem was it had looked like it might actually be that fast and agile.

  The dark water gave no sign of the ghest’s whereabouts, only a promise that it hid a food chain within its depths and I was not at the top of it. Just stepping near the water made me feel like something’s lunch.

  Insects and birds and amphibians continued to drone and chirp and croak, heedless of my problems, but their noise existed on another level than auditory. When I stretched out with my feelings and tried to locate the ghest through the Force, all I got was an overwhelming sense of the life surrounding me—nothing so specific as a single bird or fish or predator. I knew that many of the creatures were hungry and wanted to eat other creatures, but there was no sense that a certain one wished to eat me.

  There I stood, shifting my weight a bit and moving slightly to look alive, lightsabers humming, for five full minutes.

  “Maybe it’s moved on,” I finally said. “How about you try taking the remaining speeder back—I’ll guard you as you get on—and come back to pick me up?”

  Soonta said, “I suppose—” and then the ghest erupted from the swamp on my left, a flash of movement faster than I could track. By reflex I whipped the blade in my left hand toward it while simultaneously falling backward and swinging a fraction later with my right hand as well. Both swings connected, but the ghest connected, too. Its head got above and through my awkward defenses and it sank its teeth into the soft tissue between my left shoulder and my neck. It didn’t bite through or try to move up to my throat, however; by the time we hit the ground, its head and shoulders weren’t connected to the rest of the body. The swing I’d taken with my lightsaber had shorn through entirely, leaving me alive but with a dead ghest’s teeth buried in my flesh.

  Soonta rushed over to help. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’ll live. I think.”

  “Most people don’t survive being attacked, so that was well done.”

  The soggy head affixed to my body didn’t make me feel like a winner. “Ugh. It wasn’t really a skill thing. More like panicked reflexes and really good weapons. You were right, there’s no way I would have gotten off a blaster shot in time.” I thumbed off the lightsabers and shook a little bit from adrenaline and the thought of how close I’d come to death. A couple of centimeters more and the ghest would have had my throat, and I would have bled out regardless.

  The ghest’s jaw hadn’t locked up, so prying it loose was more painful than difficult. “We need to get you to the infirmary,” Soonta said, tossing the head into the swamp before helping me to my feet. The ghest’s long serpentine body trailed off into the water, a greenish log that ended in blood on the rock. “The sooner the better. Limping into town doubled up on the speeder will be a bit faster than going back for another one and returning.”

  She took holos of the damaged speeder and the ghest’s body with her datapad before we left. “I need to explain what happened if I don’t want to have my pay docked.”

  We crowded onto the remaining speeder; I wrapped my right arm around Soonta’s waist and did my best to deal with her personal pungency. I knew that later I’d look back on the experience and count it as a good one on the whole, because there was no telling what I could learn from Huulik’s lightsaber, but at the time, feeling weak and light-headed from blood loss, foul smells, and excessive humidity, I thought that was the worst speeder ride ever.

  ONCE I WAS PATCHED UP and back in my room in Toopil, I was too wired to sleep and could think of no better use of my time than to take a closer look at Soonta’s gift.

  Doing my best to relax and leave myself open to the Force, I activated Huulik’s lightsaber and marveled again at how the hilt didn’t feel quite right; even though I’d wiped it down with a damp cloth and removed all hints of debris, it still seemed to want to escape my grip with a slippery, viscous surface tension that was absent from my own lightsaber. Was it a function of Rodian versus human manufacture? Or was my lightsaber better suited to me because it had been constructed by my father?

  The blade was not pure light, of course: It was energy from the same sort of power cell that fueled blasters, given form by passing through a kyber crystal as superheated plasma that arced at the top and returned to the hilt. It didn’t give off heat until it touched something solid; the rest of the time its power was contained by a force field. I knew that much but very little else. I wanted to see how it worked—how it was constructed. I had never dared take apart my lightsaber for fear that I wouldn’t be able to put it back together again, but Soonta had given me Huulik’s lightsaber to learn something if I could, so I was going to risk it.

  I deactivated it and inspected the hilt closely. There were no screws or switches or any of the usual markers of assembly. Except for the button to turn it on and the dial that adjusted its strength, it appeared to be a solid artifact, as if it had been shaped that way in nature. Perhaps the barrel was a solid piece, albeit hollow, that had been slipped over the rest of the assembly. And perhaps the key to opening it wasn’t visible with the eyes.

  My room had a basic desk and chair, and I seated myself at it and placed the lightsaber on the desk, emitter pointed away from me for safety. As before, I kept myself open to the Force, but now I tried to focus on the lightsaber and feel the Force inherent in it. Closing my eyes, I explored the top of the hilt right below the emitter with my fingers, searching for any tactile clues. The surface retained that same strange slick feeling, but I detected nothing unusual at the top, or around the button or dial, or even on the rest of the hilt. When I ran my finger fully around the base, however, clockwise and then counterclockwise, eyes still closed and trying to feel the Force, a snick announced the appearance of a fissure lengthwise down the hilt; after another soft click, the casing popped free, revealing yet another metal sheath, one that looked more like mine and had visible screws. Artoo unscrewed them for me and I was able to lift off one half of the sheath and reveal the innards.

  The power cell at the base was insulated and held no interest for me. Above that was a platform for the primary focusing crystal that gave the lightsaber its color. Two additional crystals floated above it, balanced so precariously on mounting ridges that they could easily be disturbed—and they had been. They lay askew, and I feared I must have done that in the process of disassembling it. The lightsaber wouldn’t work properly now, even if I put it back together; without proper focusing there was no telling what would happen if I tried to turn it on. It might explode. And aligning those crystals by hand would be impossible—I sensed that it had to be done with the Force, and only through the Force would I know whether it was aligned properly or not. They were wafer-thin slices of crystal, too, a beautiful clear amethyst, and might scratch or cloud with handling. Moving them precisely with the Force would ensure that they remained pristine.

  The lightsaber’s construction confirmed for me what I had already suspected: Far from being merely a feeling of interconnectedness that could guide your actions or a method of tricking the weak-willed, the Force could be used to manipulate solid objects. However, the skill required to construct a lightsaber—or even put this one back together—was a parsec or five beyond my current abilities.

  I had Artoo take holo stills of the lightsaber as I decon
structed the rest of it for future study, and then I thought I should work on those Force abilities if I ever wanted to reassemble it or make my own.

  Obi-Wan had never addressed telekinesis with me. It was likely that I wasn’t strong enough to begin training in such an advanced field of study. That didn’t mean I shouldn’t try. I could begin with something small and harmless. At the far corner of the desk, there were a few sad vegetables lounging on a plate left over from lunch. I imagined that the cranker root, especially, looked unhappy where it was and wouldn’t mind moving a tiny bit. The humblest of Rodian vegetables, it sat, steamed and soggy, in a puddle of oil on a ceramic plate. Its outlook would be vastly improved if it escaped the valley of the plate, say, and moved to the crest along the edge, where it could enjoy the fabulous vista of the desk and the tumbled remains of Huulik’s lightsaber.

  Before I began, I gave myself permission to fail. It was to be my first try, after all, and there was no use in getting upset or even angry at myself if I didn’t succeed right away. Obi-Wan said the man who killed my father, Darth Vader, had been seduced by the dark side of the Force. I assumed he was referring to darker emotions like fear, anger, and guilt, but his word choice puzzled me—I would never think of dark emotions as being seductive, with an agenda to consciously corrupt someone. To me they were emotions triggered by events that were felt intensely and then faded away, not natural states of being. But Obi-Wan probably knew what he was talking about and I didn’t think I could risk ignoring the warning of Vader’s example. That meant I needed to be extremely cautious since I didn’t have anyone around to train me. The cranker root looked thoroughly nonthreatening. I hadn’t read the histories of those “seduced” by the dark side, but I doubted that any of them had been corrupted by a vegetable of questionable nutritional value. This had to be safe.

  I pulled the plate nearer to me so that it filled my vision on the desk. The cranker root lay inert, jaundiced and phlegmatic in the yellow light of the room’s filtered glow panel. Its weight was negligible. It should be a simple matter to use the Force to move it off the plate, especially since conditions were optimal.

  The first step—the only step I really knew—was to clear my mind and reach out to the Force. So simple to say but not so easy in practice. Sometimes it just kind of happened for me, but whenever I actually told myself to clear my mind, the words sort of hung around in my consciousness, an image of white letters on a green screen: CLEAR YOUR MIND. That didn’t help. Thinking THAT MEANS YOU didn’t help, either. Sending in more thoughts to clear out the old ones from my brain cycled through the same problem again. How did the Jedi do this reliably and on cue?

  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 li
ke 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.