Read Fate of the Jedi: Backlash Online
Authors: Aaron Allston
“I have some. I’m fine.”
“We’re about to have a meeting of the chiefs, subchiefs, and their favorite Jedi representatives. I’ll give you a report when we’re done.”
The gathering of chiefs did not take long. Its events had apparently been scripted by Kaminne and Tasander. Each summoned a priest of her or his clan. With the priests presiding, the subchiefs, Ben, Dyon, and Vestara as witnesses, Tasander and Kaminne wed in a short, simple ceremony.
At the request of the two, Ben lowered the Jedi standard that still flew over the hill. Tasander and Kaminne raised a new one, just painted by Dyon. It showed a radiant sun in gold; small, beneath it, were the black base of a broken column and a green fern leaf.
Tasander called out, loud enough for all those on the hilltop and below it to hear, “With this ceremony, I disband the Broken Columns Clan, which I myself founded ten years ago. I am now Tasander Dest of the Bright Sun Clan. Should any former Broken Column wish not to live as a Bright Sun, he may come to me, found the Broken Columns anew, and go forth, leaving us forever.”
Kaminne made a similar declaration for the Raining Leaves. She continued, “The conclave and the games that brought us together are over. We are at war, Bright Sun against the Nightsisters who have come against us. Last night, we learned how to drive them into retreat. Now we will learn how to destroy them.”
Tasander called, “Uninjured scouts and hunters to the southwest lip. That’s all.”
But it wasn’t all, because, with the formal ceremonies and announcements complete, clan members surged forward to congratulate the newly wedded couple. Kaminne and Tasander’s façades of stern chiefly mannerisms broke as they received embraces, backslaps, impromptu gifts. To Ben’s eye, no one seemed to be approaching them for permission to carry on the Broken Columns or Raining Leaves clan elsewhere.
“Well done, Ben.”
Ben jumped. He turned to see his father standing behind him. “You shouldn’t sneak up on a Jedi.”
“Well, only a Jedi should sneak up on a Jedi.”
“And
well done
may not be appropriate. All I did was point out where their tactics were disastrously bad. They came up with tactics that worked, Tasander especially.” Then Ben gave his father a good look and laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“At least you’re dirty now.” He stopped. “Wait a second, should you even be here?”
Luke gestured at the Bright Sun standard. “This is no longer a Jedi camp. No reason for me not to.”
“True. And I guess I’m out of a job as a landlord.”
Luke accompanied Ben back to the southwest lip, and together they looked over the rain forest canopy below. “We’re not done here—the Nightsisters are dark side Force-users, they may have been in contact with our Sith girl, and that makes this whole mess Jedi business—but we need to be thinking ahead. Such as how we either convince Olianne to hand Vestara over to us, or convince Vestara to come with us. And how we convince Vestara to tell us about her Sith, or at least isolate her so she can’t get the information about the dark side power in the Maw back to her people, when we don’t have a legal leg to stand on.”
Ben nodded. “Try this. I go on a walk with Vestara into the forest. I mention that I have a datacard with the access codes for
Jade Shadow
on it. I turn my back on her. When she tries to put a knife into me, you jump out of the shadows and stop her. Then we’ve got her on attempted murder.”
“I suspect she’s far too bright to fall for a holodrama tactic as transparent as that.”
“Yeah, I know.” Ben kicked a loose rock over the edge, watched it clatter its way down to join the rockfall of the night before. “So we’re back to figuring out what she’s really doing here. Once we can make it clear that she can’t accomplish that—or, let’s hope not, once we figure out that she’s succeeded, or even help her succeed—she’ll be content to leave.”
“So what’s she after, Ben? You’ve now had several opportunities to talk to her.”
“She gave you no clues when she helped you last night?”
“Unless her helping me was itself a clue. Why would a Sith want the Grand Master of the Jedi to survive?”
Ben shook his head. “I doubt that she wants you to survive. You killed her mistress. Our whole Order stands as an inevitable enemy to her kind. At best, she saved your life because she wants to kill you herself, not watch you die at the hands of savages.”
“That’s probably it. Vestara’s first goal: deliver Luke Skywalker into the hands of her people. But what’s goal number two?”
Ben sighed. “She made comments about admiring these people. I think she meant the Dathomiri in general. And, really, it makes sense. The Dathomiri may be nature-loving stay-at-homes, but I don’t think there’s a higher percentage of Force-sensitives among any population in the galaxy. That, and its isolation means new Force techniques, new ways of looking at things. We really need to get a new Jedi facility operating here, Dad.”
“You’re right.” Luke frowned. “It was awfully easy for us to discover where Vestara’s yacht was. I mean, Amelia’s a clever girl … but should she have been able to find that ship?”
Ben shrugged. “But we know no message large enough to contain the Maw navigational data Vestara had acquired was transmitted off-world. So she’s got to be thinking about how she gets offworld to join her people. And that means a ship. The only ships she could be confident would be on hand are her stolen yacht and
Jade Shadow
. And she’s made no effort to get back to either one.” Ben blinked as a new thought settled into place, an unpleasant one. “Unless …”
“Say it.”
“She’s shown no sense of urgency. Zero. None. Her time spent with the clans here feels an awful lot like a delaying tactic.”
“Meaning?”
“She has no intention of returning to the spaceport for either ship. Because the Sith are coming here for her.”
Luke gave an approving nod. “So when she got to Dathomir in the first place, she staged an approach that looked like it might end in a crash landing. But she really just landed.”
“She sneaked into the spaceport, no harder for a Sith to do than a Jedi, and she struck a deal with the best mechanic in port. Here, take my ship, it’s all yours. My asking price …”
“Is just enough credits to send off a hypercomm message. Very short, easy to encrypt and conceal, comparatively inexpensive to
bounce around a number of comm stations to conceal its destination from investigators, and small enough that it couldn’t contain the Maw navigational data.”
Ben smacked himself in the forehead. “Because if only she has the nav data, the Sith
have
to come for her. She remains valuable. Good tactics for dealing with the Sith, even when you
are
Sith. So then she runs off into the rain forest to act as a diversion, to keep us away from the spaceport and Monarg.”
“In the meantime, she really gets a good look at the Dathomiri and likes what she sees. She may even run into the Nightsisters first, as you speculated. So she could have been playing the Nightsisters against the Raining Leaves.”
Ben looked around and spotted Vestara. She was seated with Kaminne and Olianne, and was holding Halliava’s daughter, Ara, in her lap. They were chatting, laughing. Had they been dressed in modern clothes and surrounded by the trappings of a tapcaf, they could have been a gathering of family members anywhere in the galaxy. “Dad, if we’re guessing right, time could be very, very short.”
“I know. When the hunters and scouts move out, we need to have someone watching Vestara. Preferably both of us, trading off, so if she detects one of us, she may lose that sense when we switch.”
Ben kicked another rock and watched it fall. “Blast it. I was almost starting to like her.”
Halliava, trainer of scouts for the former Raining Leaves, was naturally among those who assembled to enter the forest and search it for signs of the Nightsisters. Vestara was not. After a quick, private consultation, Luke and Ben decided to enter the forest and shadow Halliava while Dyon, remaining on the hilltop, would keep a surreptitious eye on Vestara. “But don’t forget,” Luke told Dyon, “you’re no safer on the bare hilltop than we are in the forest. Remember the example of Tribeless Sha. Danger is everywhere.”
A bare minute after Halliava and other Dathomiri scouts and hunters entered the forest verge, so did the Skywalkers. Initially they chose an angle that would theoretically carry them away from Halliava, but, once concealed by trees, they vectored toward her.
* * *
For Vestara, the problem was a simple one to solve. She waited until the Skywalkers were gone and until Dyon was distracted. He was often distracted; curious clan members had questions for the offworlder, and, clearly a lonely bachelor, he had eyes for many of the ladies of the clans. Vestara contrived to perform tasks near the lip of the east face, and when Dyon and others were listening to an announcement from Firen, the senior subchief still present, Vestara dropped over the lip of the hill crest.
It was no suicide jump, of course. She plummeted several meters, landing lightly on the first ledge down. A flick of her finger and an exertion in the Force caused the sentry on this hill facing to look around for the source of a phantom noise and miss seeing the rest of her descent. Soon enough, she made her way into the verge of trees, out of sight.
She would have to be just as careful here as under the eyes of the Bright Sun members. The forest now teemed with hunters and scouts and Nightsisters and Jedi, all intent on doing harm to one another. Vestara was, in theory, allied with any and all of them, but traps and sudden surprises made accidents not just possible but potentially deadly.
She headed for the spot Halliava had told her about, a place where a small creek passed beside a naturally occurring cross-shaped stone, and waited for Halliava, who might be some time shaking her pursuers.
It was not too lengthy a wait. Half an hour passed, and then, with stealth suited to a trained Sith, Halliava appeared from behind a draping fern frond. She moved forward to embrace Vestara. For the first time, her true emotions showed; she looked worried and chastened. “The Sisters will listen more closely to you next time.
I
will listen. We have suffered a serious setback.”
Vestara gave her a raised-brow,
I’m sorry I was right
expression. “You could not know what the Jedi were capable of. I barely knew. But you have not lost. Far from it. The common Dathomiri still fear the Nightsisters. They have simply been heartened by surviving last night’s assault. Today they’ll add up the numbers they’ve lost, they’ll
begin telling stories of the Nightsisters from days gone by, and they’ll become afraid again.”
“Yes.” Halliava sat on the cross-shaped stone. “But the Jedi. They are very skilled, very powerful. For men, anyway. I barely lost them as they tracked me. They might find me again, so we must hurry.”
“Did you bring my things?”
“Of course.” From the pouch hanging at her belt, Halliava withdrew two items, each wrapped in cloth to keep it from making noise. She unrolled each in turn and handed it to Vestara. The first was her lightsaber; the second, a comm-equipped data tablet similar to a data-pad.
Vestara took the data tablet and keyed in a security code. Her hopes were not high; every day since she had caught Halliava in secret conference with a fellow Nightsister, she had conceived more details for the Dathomir stage of her actions, and had approached the Witch with her hastily spun offer and explanation, she had checked her comm device for word from her kind. It had not come.
But today there was a blinking icon on the interface, an icon meaning that an encrypted message had arrived.
Vestara did not let excitement show on her face, did not let it speed up her actions. She simply keyed in the decryption code and held the device before her.
The tablet screen resolved into an image: a human woman in Sith robes, a woman unknown to her, with sharp, angular features, black hair, and an almost savage aspect to her expression. Vestara nearly laughed. The Sith woman had clearly been picked because she was closest to media depictions of the Witches of Dathomir; all she needed to do was tousle her hair and put on animal skins to be suitable as a Nightsister. Well, that, and spray on some false tan; she was very pale.
The woman spoke. “Vestara, greetings. We have received your initial communication and your follow-up reports with great interest. Of course we would be delighted to aid your new sisters in their quest. The weapons you have requested have been assembled, and we have chosen a worthy Sith Saber to trade for a Nightsister that each group may benefit from the new knowledge brought to it. We are in the Dathomir system and await your instructions.” The screen faded.
Halliava had heard the message, and her eyes were wide. “They’re here.”
Vestara smiled at her. “They’re here, and the Jedi and the Bright Sun Clan will burn like dry leaves in a fire under the weapons they’re bringing you.”
“What do we need to do?”
“We need to choose a landing field for the Sith shuttles. A broad meadow or a flat beach, something like that. It should be at least a couple of kilometers from the Bright Sun hill so our enemies can’t bear witness to their landing. I need to go there and transmit the location with my device, so they know exactly where to come. Then, tonight, at the time we’ve told them, we show up to collect our rewards.”
The smile that crossed Halliava’s face was one of relief and victory. “I know just the place. Let’s go.”
Some time after he realized that he could no longer find Vestara anywhere in camp, Dyon spotted her again—carefully ascending the southwest approach, a waterskin at either end of a pole carried across her shoulders. After she made it across the hill crest, he approached her. “Replenishing our water stores?”
“No, hunting lizards.” Then one of the skins she carried caught her eye and she gave a little gasp. “Why, it
is
water!”
“Clearly, sarcasm is a universal constant among teenage girls.”
“Only the worthwhile ones. Didn’t you hear the call for water bearers?”