Heir to the Jedi (18 page)

Scoured, bandaged, and finally presentable, I rejoined Nakari in the cockpit with a few minutes to spare before entering the Exodeen system. She smiled as she took in my fresh clothes and damp hair.

“Bet that feels better,” she said.

“Unbelievably so.”

“I’ll do the same after the next jump.”

“Intercom still on?” I asked as I strapped into the pilot’s seat. “Can Drusil hear me?”

“I hear you,” Drusil’s voice said.

“Great. I wanted to ask you why the Empire and Alliance are so interested in you specifically as a cryptographer. What sets you apart from others?”

“What interests the Alliance is that I have written some slicing programs that will easily cut through low-level routine Imperial encryption, which I will hand over as soon as I’m reunited with my family. I can also slice through some of the higher-level codes when supplied with sufficient time.”

“Begging your pardon, but how do we know that, exactly?”

“Did not the Kupohans assure you of my capabilities?”

“They assured the decision makers in the Alliance, and they believed the Kupohans well enough to send us to get you. But it’s a fact that the Alliance has yet to see any proof that you can do all that you claim. It isn’t that I doubt you; it’s just that I prefer to confirm your abilities.”

“What would you suggest?”

The stars snapped into focus as we exited hyperspace into the Exodeen system. Our scanners immediately detected the presence of several Imperial ships, including a heavy cruiser and a Star Destroyer. Their images were a few minutes old, owing to the speed of light, and they wouldn’t see us for a few minutes yet.

“Calculate the jump for Nanth’ri, Artoo!” I said, and after he chirped acknowledgment, I added to Drusil, “Perhaps you can pick up some Imperial communication here and decrypt it for us while we wait?”

“If it’s low-level communication, certainly. If you will scan the system for some of their communications while I set up my hardware, we will see what can be accomplished.”

“Your hardware is in that sack you brought with you?”

“Yes. A datapad I assembled myself with associated couplers for interfacing with most alien dataports. It is … unique.” A note of unmistakable pride crept into the Givin’s voice, which still sounded as if it were being muffled by a mouthful of something chewy.

Nakari’s right hand shot forward and switched off the intercom. Her eyebrows tracked upward on her face as she waggled her head, muttering, “Well, aren’t we special?”

I laughed. “We really should find something for her as a test. It’d be good to know we’re not getting conned here.”

Nakari’s fingers flipped a couple more switches and turned a knob. After a few seconds of white noise, a stream of unintelligible syllables filled the cockpit and she reestablished the intercom link with the starboard living quarters so that Drusil could hear it.

“Ah! Just a moment,” Drusil said. “Calibrating … feed established. Decryption running.” The babble paused for perhaps thirty seconds before starting up again in a short burst, most likely a standard receipt of the prior transmission. Drusil’s voice spoke into the silence. “Success! The Empire has transmitted orders through their HoloNet originating from Denon. We missed the beginning of the transmission, so I must begin reading in midsentence:… 
small custom ship, inbound from Denon, search for two humans, one Givin, one droid, highest priority, report sighting immediately to ISB, bounty offered for capture, do not destroy
. And then what follows is simply an acknowledgment.”

“Thanks, Drusil,” Nakari said. “Please hold a moment.” She flicked off the intercom so that she could talk to me privately. “You know she could have just made that up, right?”

“Yeah, I know. That’s going to be difficult to test. We would have to keep going toward the planet, let the Imperials spot us, and then see if they chase us.”

“We’d get away easily,” Nakari pointed out, “but then they
would have a sighting to report and a good idea of where we’re headed. Right now they’ve broadcast that everywhere and don’t have any idea where to concentrate their forces. If we give them a clue we could run into a whole lot of trouble ahead. Is it worth it to stick around here just to confirm that she can decrypt standard orders?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“They’re going to know we were here soon because we can’t conceal the reflected light of our entry, but if we leave now we can prevent them from getting a deep scan and confirming three life-forms aboard—assuming that her decryption is true and they’re looking for us. And note that if it
is
true, the Empire knows about your specific involvement after you got out of the sewer. They’ve definitely seen security footage from somewhere.”

“Agreed. I don’t like the idea of sticking around anywhere until we drop her off at Omereth. I’m curious to know if she’s for real, but it’s really not our job to determine if she’s telling the truth or not. We’re just a lightly armed taxi service now.”

Nakari winced. “Can we call it a
heavily
armed taxi service? I like the sound of that better.”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

“No argument, huh? That’s nice.” She turned the intercom back on.

“Artoo, can we jump?” I asked. “Let’s go if you’re ready.”

JUMPING,
came the reply, and once we were safely in hyperspace Nakari unbuckled and rose from her seat, imitating her father as she headed aft. “Pilot! Refreshment is in order! Fly responsibly in my absence!” She trailed a finger along my shoulder as she passed by, and I couldn’t suppress the grin her touch inspired. I liked her and was starting to think maybe she liked me back.

Nothing I could do about it now, however. Flirting on a mission
is one of the best ways to ensure mission failure—and most likely romantic failure. I’d seen Han Solo get in trouble too many times while he was trying to charm Leia to doubt it, and he hadn’t exactly won her good graces yet.

We had five planets to skip over before we got to Nanth’ri and decided which way to go from there. We could swing to the galactic north, which had the benefit of being a shorter transit route to Omereth but the drawback of more Imperial worlds, or dart south for a short distance and then east again, traversing Hutt Space and avoiding the Empire while risking who knew what in the seedy side of the galaxy. One thing was more likely near Hutt Space: bounty hunters. If the Empire had rebroadcast that message about a bounty on our heads on unencrypted channels, we’d have all sorts of beings on the lookout for us who didn’t need to abide by Imperial protocols and procedures. They also didn’t need to do all the other things Empire forces needed to do—patrol vast areas of space and guard against the Alliance, police smugglers, and so on. Bounty hunters could devote 100 percent of their attention to finding us. Thinking about that made me nervous, but I’d rather face a single bounty hunter’s ship than the heavy firepower the Imperial fleet could bring to bear. Turning south was probably a better decision.

“Artoo, when we get to Nanth’ri, begin calculating a jump that will take us through Hutt Space. If you can do a jump all the way across it without stopping, that would probably be best.”

The droid’s agreement showed up on my holoscreen as Drusil’s voice came through the intercom. “Would you like my assistance in calculating these jumps? It should not be terribly taxing—indeed, I would find it refreshing.”

I searched for a diplomatic way to say no. If, by some awful chance, Drusil was in truth an Imperial spy and this was all an elaborate sting, then the coordinates she fed us might lead directly to an Imperial fleet position. And I wasn’t sure I wanted
to trust the ship’s navigation to calculations done in someone’s head, anyway. What if she forgot to carry the one or something like that?

“Thanks, Drusil, but Artoo’s already wired in and familiar with the ship specs, so I’d like to have him take lead. Perhaps you could check his work, though?” I winced, hoping she would not take my reply as a slight on her abilities.

“That would be fine,” she said, and then a silence settled over the cockpit. Presumably both Artoo and Drusil were lost in pure math and had nothing more to say. With Nakari gone for a while, I had nothing to do except remain in the pilot’s seat in case something went wrong.

It was an ideal opportunity to meditate and see if I could strengthen my bond with the Force. When I’d first felt the Force on the
Millennium Falcon
, it had been the barest tickle of a presence in my consciousness and in the air around me that wasn’t attributable to my five senses. Since then I had reached out to the Force on numerous occasions, and each time it grew marginally easier to make that contact and feel the Force swirl and coalesce around me, a not-quite-tangible but very real sensation, sort of like exercising and discovering over time that the same routine requires less effort because your strength and endurance have increased.

I didn’t have any goal in mind other than increasing my awareness of the Force; there were no vegetables or other objects to nudge around in the cockpit, anyway, and I figured a greater grasp of the Force would help me perform such tasks more quickly later on, and perhaps allow me to move larger objects, or accomplish any number of other Jedi exercises.

The streaming starlines of hyperspace were excellent for clearing my mind. No distractions, just visual white noise. I remembered training with the remote, wearing a helmet with the blast shield down and feeling the Force as a power within and without that worked with me and yet was not me. That had been
a twinge, a tiny awakening of a new part of my mind, like a half-glimpsed dawn through sleep-encrusted eyes. I knew I wasn’t fully awake yet; I think part of me wanted to go back to sleep. But the dawn comes whether you sleep through it or not, and I think the Force might be like that—always there, but unseen until you make the effort.

My breathing slowed and deepened, and soon I became aware that there were others breathing on the ship. Drusil was nearest, sitting in an attitude of prayer or perhaps meditation like myself, attempting to soothe away her worries. Perhaps the activity of her mind was pure math. Farther back and to the left, Nakari felt happy, though I didn’t know about what. Her breath was uneven and sort of purred—was she humming to herself? I couldn’t hear that to confirm it, of course, but I felt through the Force that it must be true.

And what about … beyond the ship? There was nothing else breathing nearby, that’s for sure. But I knew the Force could tell me of things beyond my immediate surroundings. Ben had shown me that. When the Death Star destroyed Alderaan, he had felt it, even in hyperspace, when we were still light-years away. I wondered if I could sense anything outside hyperspace.

I opened myself more—or perhaps I should say that I lost myself more, let go of my five senses and focused only on what the Force could show me. Nanth’ri waited ahead, and around it … some kind of danger? Anger? No, nothing so personal. More like antagonism. Aggression. But I couldn’t see who was feeling such things, or against whom they were directed.

Artoo’s warning bleep was a sharp tug on my hearing that broke my trance. I blinked and saw his words stream in the holofeed:
ONE MINUTE TO ARRIVAL IN NANTH’
RI SYSTEM.

Nakari returned and took her seat as I acknowledged Artoo. I remembered feeling through the Force that she had been happy and humming about something, and now I tried to confirm visually that she was in a good mood. She had pulled her
curly hair back into a ponytail and I admired what that did for her profile, the line of her neck, and—uh-oh, she caught me. When my eyes came back to her face, one eyebrow and a corner of her mouth were quirked up as if to ask,
What are you looking at?
That sent me into a brief panic—if I admitted I thought she was beautiful that would be flirting, badly, but if I said nothing I’d look slow-witted.

I cleared my throat and said, “I wonder if the Jedi had any secret tricks to keep them from feeling awkward.”

Amused, she asked, “Didn’t Ben Kenobi have anything to say on the subject?”

“Well, he kept telling me to ‘trust my feelings,’ and I trust that I feel awkward right now. Sorry about, you know. Staring.”

Nakari snorted. “Relax, Luke. You’re not the first man I’ve caught in the act—and this isn’t the first time I’ve caught you, either. It’s just the first time I let you know you’re a little obvious.”

I winced. “Is it possible to be a
little
obvious?”

“No. I was trying to be nice. You were obvious.”

I was grateful that we dropped into the Nanth’ri system a moment later, because it drew our attention to something else. An alarm pinged in my brain—
danger, there
—and without thinking, I banked the ship tightly to starboard and accelerated, even as a small fleet of ships appeared on our scanners that decidedly weren’t Imperial. It wasn’t the Alliance, either, so why were there more than twenty ships flying below us to port in a loose formation? Most of them were small fighter craft escorting a large cruiser capable of docking them all. Some of those fighters on the trailing edge of the formation were close enough to engage us if they wanted, and within seconds they demonstrated that they wanted that very much. The others turned to pursue, as well, but they would never have time to get involved unless I flew at them; my quick assessment was that I only had about five to worry about, but if I had waited those extra few seconds for
them to appear on the screen, and then assessed the information before acting, I would have flown closer and drawn within range of a few additional ships.

Throwing up the deflector shields, I accelerated even more, to about three-quarters full, and their first shots never landed, but Nakari still saw the bolts zip past the cockpit and realized belatedly that we were under attack.

“Whoa, who’s firing at us?”

“Most likely pirates,” I said. “Right now they probably just think our ship is slick and carrying something valuable. When they find out we’re traveling without any goods, though …”

“They’ll take the ship and sell us into slavery. Or ransom us to my father.”