Heir to the Jedi (25 page)

“He’s not unconscious from drinking,” the Gotal said, gesturing at his horns with a thumb. “I can tell. He’s been stunned. And you stunned him.”

Nonplussed, Nakari said, “Whatever, friend. He still needs to be taken home. You want to come along?”

“No, I want you to let him go and tell me where the Givin woman is.”

“What are you talking about?” Nakari asked, exasperation in every word. But she lifted Migg’s arm and ducked her head to obey at least the first part of it, while with her right hand, hidden behind Migg, she pulled out her blaster.

She never got a shot off, though. Moving far faster than I expected, the Gotal’s left leg whipped out in a straight kick aimed at the side of Nakari’s midsection, and it knocked the blaster out of her hand just as she was squeezing it between her body and Migg’s to target the Gotal. As she staggered backward, Migg’s entire weight dragged on my left side, and without replanting his foot, our attacker cocked his leg back at the knee, pivoted slightly, and kicked at my face. He connected and I supposed I should be grateful he hadn’t stepped into the kick: My nose remained unbroken and I kept my teeth, but the impact dropped me—and Migg—to the ground.

Nakari lunged forward, weaponless, and I heard more than saw blows being traded, smacks of fists on flesh, and grunts of pain and exertion. Rolling over and pushing myself onto unsteady feet, I managed to stand just as Nakari fell, her legs swept out from under her by the Gotal. He wasn’t in immediate kicking distance this time—he’d have to reset and take a few steps to get into range—and I remembered that I had a blaster. Couldn’t remember if I had set it to stun, though. He had a blaster, too, and he was remembering that at the same time I was.

R2-D2 had an arm capable of delivering an electric shock, and the Gotal never saw the strike coming from behind, having forgotten about the random droid he’d passed in the alley and probably never expecting a droid to get involved. He screamed and clutched at his horns, which due to their electric sensitivity made such shocks doubly painful, and collapsed twitching to the ground until he subsided, carried off into oblivion for a while.

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Thanks, Artoo.” I wasn’t sure I would have beaten him to the draw.

“You all right?” Nakari asked, rising and knocking dust from her pants.

“I’m a bit woozy and I think I’ll be bruised and sore, but otherwise okay. You?”

“Some bruises for sure. That,” she said, pointing at the Gotal, “is a dangerous individual. Coming at us like that barehanded, with complete confidence? Crazy.”

“He had good reason to be confident. We weren’t doing so well.”

“We have to take him with us. You heard him ask about the Givin.”

“Yes, you’re right. The story will be the same to any passerby—we just have two drunk friends we’re escorting from the cantina back to our hotel.”

We lugged Migg and the Gotal up the alley to the cantina entrance, making sure our hoods were back in place, and Artoo summoned a droid taxi to take us back to the hotel. We got a few stares, but no one wanted to make our business theirs. Since it was only a short distance to the hotel, we were able to get our captives up to my room and stretched out on the large bed before they began to stir. Nakari promptly stunned them again.

“We need something to bind them,” she said. “And a guard.”

“Right. Be back soon.”

The hotel concierge was a silver protocol droid to which someone had hilariously applied a fake mustache. I made sure to keep my hood lowered to prevent him scanning my face for later download and pitched my voice higher than normal to ask his help.

“Say, do people around here enjoy mountain climbing?”

The droid whirred and clicked before answering. “Absolutely, sir, it is quite the popular pastime in Tonekh. Would you like some directions to nearby cliffs?”

“No, I know where I want to climb, but I’m a little low on
supplies. Might you know where I can find ropes, rock hammers, that kind of thing?”

“Certainly, sir.” He gave me the address of a specialty vendor, and I hired one more taxi to take me there. The rope I bought wouldn’t be foolproof binding, of course, but I could hardly ask the concierge where to buy stun cuffs without raising suspicion. I bought four coils along with some lunch and returned to find our prisoners conscious but lying very still, since Nakari and Artoo both had weapons pointed at them.

“What did I miss?” I asked.

“Nothing. I told them to be quiet until you got back or I’d stun them again.”

“Great. I’m here now. Hello,” I said to the Gotal, “we haven’t been formally introduced. Who might you be?”

The Gotal said, “You have made a huge mistake. I’m not some info sleek to be rolled over.”

“Do tell.”

“I’m an agent of the New Order. When I don’t report in, the Empire will come looking for me, and when they do they’ll find you.”

“I don’t think you’re all that important,” Nakari said. “We know all the Imperial agents in the area, and I don’t remember seeing a Gotal on the list.” That was a lie so casually told that I almost believed it myself.

The Gotal sneered at her. “I’m not with fleet security. I’m with the ISB.”

Nakari narrowed her eyes at him and then looked at me, her cool mask of control slipping into uncertainty. “The ISB list we have isn’t sorted by species. He might be telling the truth.”

I shrugged, playing along with this charade of lists. “It’s possible.”

“What’s your name?” Nakari asked.

“Barrisk Favvin.”

“That’s the name you use with the ISB?”

“Yes. And the ISB is waiting for my report. Let me go and I’ll make sure they treat you well once you are captured.”

Ignoring him, Nakari turned to me and said, “Will you check his name against our list?”

“Sure thing,” I replied, and exited the room to go visit Drusil across the hall. Instead of trying to remember the equation she’d given me earlier, I just knocked and said, “I foiled your plan,” and she let me enter.

“Luke Skywalker. Your face is contused. Did you not capture Migg Birkhit?”

“We did. We also have a Gotal in my room who claims to be an ISB agent. Caught him trying to meet up with Migg. His name is Barrisk Favvin. Any way to figure out if he’s an informant?”

“Let us see.” Moving to her custom hardware, Drusil tapped a series of commands at her keyboard and stared at the results. She repeated the process several times before finally saying, “Yes, he is. Dispatched to meet with Migg Birkhit and investigate his claims, which means they saw that message after all. His orders are to report as soon as he knows anything.”

“So he’s not supposed to report on a schedule?”

“I’m in his personal files and looking at the orders from his superior. There is nothing about a schedule here.”

So he had lied about that. “That’s perfect. We can just hold on to him and the Empire won’t pursue it. But keep monitoring that account. If you get any queries on his progress, tell the Empire that Birkhit is currently unavailable and you—or he—will report as soon as you have solid information one way or the other.”

“Should we not simply say that Birkhit’s information is faulty?”

“No, because then the ISB will reassign Barrisk and we want them to think he’s occupied for a couple of days. We are just
delaying them, so we tell them that Favvin is following leads or confirming suspicions, but nothing specific.”

“Understood.”

Returning to my room, I let Nakari know that Favvin was indeed ISB but we didn’t have to worry about scheduled reports. “Basically we can hold on to him here.”

“So you
are
the fugitives!” he said. “Where’s the Givin?”

“Elsewhere,” Nakari said, and then she stunned them both so that we could bind them easily. We tied up their wrists and ankles and enjoyed lunch together while we waited for them to wake up again. I recruited Artoo to be their sentry, since I didn’t especially want to spend any length of time in the same room with an ISB agent, and neither did Nakari. I had no desire to kill him, but it didn’t seem wise to let him see or hear anything more about us than absolutely necessary, and we didn’t want to listen to an endless stream of threats and Imperial propaganda, either.

Hotel rooms aren’t ideal prisons, but knotted ropes can make decent restraints and a tireless droid capable of delivering electric shocks makes a pretty good guard.

“Don’t complain too loudly, guys,” Nakari told them when they woke to find themselves bound. “You each get a soft bed, we’ll bring you food, and you can watch whatever entertainment holos you want. Try to move from the bed or call for help and the droid will knock you out. If you need to use the bathroom, tell the droid and he will contact us via comm. Behave and you’ll be alive and free in a few days. And if you want a beating at the end to make it look to your superiors like you didn’t enjoy yourselves, I’ll be happy to administer one.” She smiled winningly. “All you have to do is ask.”

THERE WAS A TIME WHEN
I thought of war as an exciting prospect and maybe even desirable—compared with the unrelenting dullness of my early life on Tatooine, almost anything else was attractive. But I have discovered since then that there is precious little comfort to be had by anyone during war; the constant stress and loss of friends is like getting lost in the dunes of my homeworld, slowly drying up the tissues of your life until all that remains is a crispy shell of a person. But sometimes—I should say, very rarely, but it happens—you encounter a range of rocks in the sand, and hidden away somewhere among the crags is a spring nestled in a crevice, a lifesaving oasis that is all the sweeter for its unexpected appearance.

Nakari was like that.

After isolating the threat represented by Migg Birkhit and Barrisk Favvin, we had an afternoon and evening of free time until the new engine arrived the next day, and Nakari surprised
me by inviting me to relax in her room, a suite with a couch and table and a holoprojector. I accepted, and an afternoon of trading stories about the desert extended into a dinner of room-service pahzik meat, which was in my opinion tastier than nerf and a significant point in Kupoh’s favor. At some point about halfway through the meal she laughed about something and her smile was so charming that I forgot not to stare and she caught me again—she literally had to snap me out of it.

“Hey.”
Snap
. “Hey.”
Snap
.

“What?”

“If you’re looking for your food, Luke, it’s down there in front of you,” she said, pointing with her fork.

“Sorry,” I said, dropping my head and feeling the heat rush into my face, trying to think of a time when I’d felt more embarrassed and coming up with nothing.

She chuckled softly. “You’re not what I expected, you know,” she said, and waited until I looked up. Seeing my raised eyebrow, she reassured me with a nod. “That’s a good thing. You weren’t what I pictured from the very first moment we met on the
Patience
.”

“You had a mental picture of me before we met?”

“Well, yeah! You hear about someone blowing up the Death Star—someone painted as a hero of the Alliance—and you think,
That kid’s head is probably so swelled it has its own gravity by now
. Or you think someone like that is all about duty and righteousness and wears super-tight underwear. No sense of humor, you know. Because when they prop up someone as a hero they’re not promoting you as a real person: You’re this ideal of political zealotry.”

Simultaneously amused and horrified, I said, “So in your head I was a stuck-up ideologue with no room in my shorts?”

She gave an embarrassed laugh. “Maybe something like that, yeah.”

“Wow. I’ve never been so glad to defy expectations.”

“I’m glad to be proven wrong.”

Thinking of the aftermath of Yavin, I sighed, dinner forgotten. “If I’m honest, though, I probably did let it go to my head for a while.”

“Ah, so I just caught you at a good time?”

“Kind of. I mean, have you ever looked back at who you were two years ago or even six months ago and shook your head at how stupid you were back then?”

Her expression brightened in recognition. “Yeah! I know that feeling. And you want to go back in time, armed with what you know now, and tell her how it is.”

“Exactly! Two years ago I thought I’d never escape Tatooine and I complained about everything.” I grimaced at the memory of how I’d behaved. “I’d definitely have some things to tell that kid now. And then everything changed. I met a Jedi, joined the Rebellion, and almost instantly had this tremendous success. I saved a princess and blew up a superweapon, got a medal from the same princess, fireworks in my honor and everything. That could turn your head into a planet really fast.”

“Mm-hmm.”

I thought that was just a polite noise and my cue to continue, but Nakari drummed her fingers on the table to stop me and then asked a dangerous question couched in a coo. “Tell me, Luke, am I mistaken in thinking you have feelings for that princess? Because I thought I heard a note of yearning there.”

My eyes shifted to her face and found hers waiting, studying my expression carefully. After a couple seconds of terror, I remembered a widely held policy about honesty and how it was probably for the best.