Crucible: Star Wars Page 18

  “Perhaps we ask questions ancillary to the first,” Craitheus suggested. “That would allow sufficient opportunity to raise the stakes and require some careful betting strategy.”

  “Then that’s the way we’ll do it,” Han said. “After all, you’re the boss around here, right?”

  “Actually,” Marvid interjected, “Craitheus and I are equal partners in all of our ventures. We make our decisions jointly.”

  “If you say so.” Again, Han glanced across the table at Gev and rolled his eyes, then looked back to Craitheus and said, “My next question is this: where are we, exactly?”

  “That can be rather difficult to answer,” Craitheus said.

  “That mean you’re folding?” Han asked.

  Craitheus glared at Han’s still unexamined hand, then finally used his pincer arm to lift his own chip-cards for a peek. Again, Han counted to three before the Columi finally laid the trio down.

  “I’ll accept the bet,” Craitheus said. “I just want to be sure you’re aware the payment may not be in the form you expect. As you know, coordinates tend to be imprecise within the Rift.”

  “How convenient,” Han said.

  “My answer will be truthful and complete,” Craitheus replied. “As will yours, I hope. My second question is this: why didn’t you mourn your son Anakin’s death as deeply as you mourned that of your Wookiee friend?”

  If the first question had been painful, this one felt like a vibrodagger sliding into Han’s gut. Anakin had died just a couple of years after Chewbacca, one of several young Jedi Knights who perished on a mission to neutralize a Yuuzhan Vong weapon. Not a day went by when Han’s heart did not ache with the loss, when he did not regret every harsh word he had ever said to his youngest son. And yet Craitheus’s question wouldn’t be easy to answer. After Chewbacca’s death, Han had sunk into despair and fled his home for a time. When Anakin died, he had not had that luxury. The loss had nearly destroyed Leia, and Han had needed to stay strong—or he would have lost Leia, too.

  Gev finally asked, “Well, Solo?”

  Han nodded. “Sure, I’ll call the bet.” He waited until Gev put her thumb on top of the deck to deal another chip-card, then said, “But no card for me. Let’s see what Craitheus does.”

  Craitheus tipped his powerbody forward in a gesture of intimidation, then said, “If you have no wish to actually play the game, Captain Solo, I am quite sure Marvid and I can learn what we wish to know through more … efficient means.”

  Han shrugged. “I’m playing by the rules,” he said. “I just have my own style. If that’s a problem for you, fold.”

  Craitheus peeked at his hand again, checking to make sure that none of the card values had shifted while they were talking, then said, “I think not. The advantage remains mine.”

  He flicked his pincer arm, and Gev dealt him a fifth chip-card.

  Han locked his chip-cards at their current values by pushing them into the stasis field in front of him, then turned to watch Craitheus. The Columi glowered at Han’s cards for perhaps a dozen heartbeats, then gathered his five cards into a fan and lifted them to study.

  Craitheus’s motions were exactly the same as before, and if there was a change of expression, Han could not recognize it on a Columi face. But this time the count reached six before Craitheus laid his chip-cards flat, and Han felt sure the value of Craitheus’s hand had just shifted.

  “So, my bet.” Han plucked at one of the lead wires attached to his chest. “Why all these electrodes and probe needles?”

  When Craitheus looked up, his eyes gleamed with comprehension. “Very clever, Captain Solo,” he said. “You have been playing me instead of your own hand.”

  “Is that your next question?” Han asked.

  “Of course not,” Craitheus replied. “That was an observation, not an inquiry. My question is this: why did you love your son Jacen less than you loved Anakin?”

  Now Craitheus was twisting the vibrodagger, trying to tear Han apart emotionally. After Jacen’s capture and torture during the war against the Yuuzhan Vong, Jacen had begun a long, slow fall to the dark side, which eventually ended with his sister, Jaina, having to hunt down and kill her own brother. The decision to give their blessing to that mission had been the most anguishing of the Solos’ lives, and even the memory of it filled Han with an acrid, churning ache that made him want to spit bile in Craitheus’s face. But Han couldn’t let the Qrephs rattle him now—not when so much depended on rattling them. Leia and Luke would be arriving soon.

  After a moment, Han nodded. “Okay, I’ll take the bet.”

  Craitheus smiled. “Excellent.”

  The Columi gestured for his next chip-card.

  And Han knew that he probably had Craitheus beat. Because Han was playing blind, the Columi would need to assume that Han’s four chip-cards gave him a mediocre hand. And since Craitheus was still trying to improve his own hand with a sixth card, it was safe to assume that the Columi had been unable to beat even a mediocre hand with five chip-cards—which almost certainly meant that Craitheus had suffered a value shift earlier and that it had been disastrous.

  As soon Craitheus’s sixth card hit the table, Han said, “I call the hand.”

  Immediately, the backs of all six of Craitheus’s chip-cards turned red, indicating that Han had caught the Columi when the value of his hand exceeded twenty-three—the maximum allowable score in sabacc.

  “Look at that,” Han said, smirking. “A bomb-out.”

  Craitheus glared at his chip-cards, then gathered them up and tossed them to Gev without revealing what he had held. Han returned his own cards without even looking, then turned to Craitheus.

  “You owe me some answers,” Han said. He continued to smirk.

  “And you shall have them,” Craitheus said. “Here is the simple answer to your second question: you are in a lounge in our laboratory on Base Prime. And, yes, you are still in the Rift.”

  “I asked for our exact location,” Han said. “Base Prime is pretty vague.”

  “As Craitheus warned you it would be,” Marvid replied. “The more complete answer is rather complicated. I doubt you will be able to comprehend it.”

  “I don’t care what you doubt,” Han said, being careful to keep his gaze on Craitheus. “My bet was with your brother, and if he thinks he’s going to back out of it now—”

  “Reneging on our agreement is the last thing I intend to do,” Craitheus said. “If I did, how could I expect you to answer my questions?”

  Han was pretty sure that Craitheus already knew the answer to his questions and was just asking them for the pleasure of being cruel, but he gave a quick nod.

  “Glad we understand each other,” Han said. “Now, how about that answer?”

  “The truth is, I can’t give you exact coordinates,” Craitheus replied. “Nobody can.”

  Han scowled, but before he could open his mouth to object, Gev said, “Don’t blow a brain vein, Solo. Craitheus is telling it to you straight. Base Prime is … well, it sort of sits in a big bubble in space.”

  “To be more precise,” Craitheus said, “Base Prime is located on a space station of unknown origin, which expands space–time around itself in a way that makes it impossible to speak of a location in terms of physical coordinates. The most that can be said is that it occupies the heart of the Chiloon Rift. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that the way to reach it is through the heart of the Chiloon Rift.”

  “Are you trying to tell me we’re sitting on some sort of black hole?” Han scoffed. “How gullible do you think I am?”

  “We didn’t say that Base Prime is located on the surface of a black hole,” Marvid said. “Quite the opposite. We said that it bends space–time outward, not inward. You are the one who suggested the false analogy.”

  “And I consider the bet paid,” Craitheus added. “If you are unhappy with my answer, Captain Solo, we can forgo the sabacc game and switch to more conventional methods of interrogation.”
<
br />   “You mean torture,” Han said.

  “Call it what you will, Captain Solo.” Craitheus spread his powerbody’s arms. “But I assure you, any chance you have of winning your freedom lies in our little sabacc game—not in any ill-advised attempts to escape on your own.”

  “Assuming you intend to honor your word,” Han replied. “And that remains to be seen. You still owe me two answers.”

  “One, actually,” Craitheus replied. “The answers to your first and third questions are the same. The game we are playing is data collection, which is why you have a network of sensors attached to your body and inserted into your brain.”

  Han’s throat went dry. “Inserted?”

  He started to reach for his head—and felt a sudden jolt of electricity shooting down his spine. His arms went numb and dropped, limp and useless, to the sides of his examination chair.

  “Forgive the neuro-restraint,” Marvid said. “But you really shouldn’t attempt to remove the probes by yourself. Some of them run all the way down into your corpus callosum.”

  “What?” Han yelled. “You’ve stuck my brain full of needles?”

  “Exactly,” Craitheus replied. “As I was about to explain, we’re using stress reactions to map your mind’s functionality and to stimulate memory retrieval. In our other subjects, it has proven to be a highly effective method of modeling.”

  “You’re making a map of my mind?” Han repeated, growing more horrified by the moment. “Why in the blazes would you do that?”

  Marvid smiled. “Is that your opening bet for the next hand?”

  Fourteen

  A tiny electric jolt stabbed through the singeing fog and bit into Luke’s shoulder. Not flinching, he lifted himself from the healing sea of the Force and came instantly awake. There were no surprises. He still lay on the floor of a stale, smoky locker room, with his sister lying in her own healing trance beside him. On his other side, R2-D2 was still standing watch. Once again, the little droid extended its charging arm and hit Luke with a tiny—but painful—jolt of current.

  “Enough, Artoo. I’m awake.”

  Luke reached up and used the adjacent bench to pull himself into a seated position. The agony of his broken ribs had faded to a dull ache and his belly wound had closed, but he had not been able to mend all of the damage he had suffered during the ScragHull’s crash. His burns felt worse than ever—hot and throbbing—and he knew he had an infection starting.

  R2-D2 softly chirped an inquiry. Luke glanced over to check his sister’s condition and cringed. So far, she had managed to close the mesh of lacerations that had torn her face before she lowered her faceplate. But her brow and cheeks remained red and covered in weeping blisters. And she had lost all her eyelashes and eyebrows, as well as a lot of the hair on the right side of her head. Even her fireproof vac suit had been half melted down its right arm and body panel, and he felt sure the flesh beneath was in much the same condition as her seared face.

  After a moment’s inspection, Luke whispered, “No, Artoo. Let her stay in her healing trance.” He kept his voice low—not to avoid disturbing her but to keep their hiding place secret. “For now.”

  Luke checked his chronometer. Nearly five hours had passed since they had blasted their way into the Ormni. When he and Leia had crawled into the half-wrecked locker room and sealed themselves in, he had not expected to have nearly that long before R2-D2 woke them. He unhooked his lightsaber from his equipment harness, then carefully rose to his feet. He winced. His burns still rubbed against his half-melted vac suit, and it felt like a vibro-sander was peeling away layers of skin. But he could stand and walk.

  Or at least hobble. He had torn some ankle ligaments during the crash, and they did not feel quite healed.

  “Okay, Artoo,” Luke said softly. “What is it?”

  R2-D2 spun on his treads and headed for the exit hatch, which the droid had evidently reopened. Beyond the threshold lay a small control room in complete disarray. Flimsies and datapads were strewn across the floor amid hard hats, breath masks, and other safety equipment. A bank of control cabinets sat across from a half-transparisteel observation wall. The viewing wall had once overlooked the vast production vault into which Luke and Leia had crashed their spyboat. Now the entire wall was a buckled wreck, so smoke-stained that it was transparent only where the explosion had ruptured it.

  And coming through the rupture was a muffled male voice.

  “… that grinder bank will be out of production for days as it is,” someone was complaining loudly. “I have three freighters still waiting to be loaded, and more on the way. This is going to cost us hundreds of millions.”

  “The production schedule is not my concern.” The second voice—also muffled—was young, female, and vaguely familiar. “My concern—and yours—is confirming the deaths of the ScragHull crew. It should never have taken this long to give me access to the crash site.”

  “Their fusion core blew,” the male replied. “So we know they’re dead. We had to send in droids to decontaminate the entire vault before it was even safe to enter.”

  “And yet … no body parts,” the female said. “No proof.”

  As the voices continued, Luke crawled into the control room, then raised his head to peer through the ruptured viewing wall. Immediately after the crash, the production vault beyond had been choked with billowing dust and flying debris. Now it was a scorched crater packed with shapeless metal and fused stone.

  In the middle of the wreckage, about thirty meters away from Luke’s hiding place and fifteen meters below, stood the two beings who were talking. The male was a Duros dressed in half-open blue coveralls over a white captain’s tunic, his noseless face drawn into an angry grimace. The female was a young human, no more than twenty, with light-brown hair and large dark-brown eyes.

  Luke’s stomach knotted in cold fury. The woman was Vestara Khai, the Sith defector who had betrayed Ben and him during the Sith occupation of Coruscant. A part of Luke still longed to make her pay for her treachery, but now was not the time. It was more important to find out how the Sith were involved in the Qrephs’ plans and to learn what had become of Han. And to do that, he and Leia had to escape alive.

  Vestara seemed to contemplate the Duros’s excuse for a moment, then finally said, “You should have sent in more droids. If those ScragHull pilots survived, they could be anywhere by now.”

  “No one could have survived this, Mistress Raine.” The Duros gestured toward the deck, where twisted shards of metal surrounded a meter-wide melt hole. “As I told you, their fusion core blew. We’re lucky we didn’t lose the entire Ormni.”

  Vestara laughed darkly.

  “I’m sure luck had nothing to do with it,” she said. “Hasn’t it occurred to you to wonder how a little two-person spyboat—moving at a relatively low velocity—managed to penetrate the hull of an asteroid crusher? They used a torpedo to clear their way. For all we know, they didn’t even crash. They could have touched down nice and soft, then blown their own fusion core to cover their escape.”

  The suggestion wasn’t far from the truth, but the Duros remained unconvinced. “That’s pretty far-fetched, mistress. And even if it were true, they would have had to survive an explosive decompression. Trust me, the ScragHull’s pilots are stardust. I see no reason to delay repairs, and since I am the captain of the Ormni—”

  “Don’t make me relieve you.” Vestara used the Force to grab the Duros by the throat and lift him off his feet. “Trust me, Captain Palis, you wouldn’t like that. Are we clear?”

  Palis’s mouth began to work without making any sound. Unable to say yes, he simply nodded.

  “Excellent,” Vestara said.

  She let him drop, then began to circle the twisted wreck of the ScragHull. After a moment, she pointed at a sagging rectangular frame a half meter taller than she was.

  “Tell me, Captain Palis, what does this look like?”

  “I believe that’s a hatch, Mistress Raine,” he said, rubbing his t
hroat. “It’s in the right place.”

  “Yes, Captain, it’s a ScragHull hatch,” Vestara said. “An open hatch.”

  Palis’s red eyes grew wide. “That isn’t possible,” he said. “It just can’t be.”

  “I assure you it can, Captain Palis. These are Jedi we’re dealing with, not …” Vestara let her sentence trail off, her head cocking as she slowly turned to scan the rest of the vault. “Wouldn’t there be an emergency air lock for crews in this area?”

  “Of course.” Palis raised his gaze to the ceiling, where ten square meters of durasteel patch had been welded over the hole opened by the ScragHull’s torpedo. “But with a hull breach that size, there would have been no time to use it. We can only hope all of those poor beings died quickly.”

  “I care nothing about them,” Vestara said. “I want to know where that air lock is.”

  She started to turn and scan the walls, and Luke knew she would be reaching out in the Force, searching for him and his sister. With Leia deep in a healing trance and Luke’s own Force presence drawn in tight, Vestara would have a hard time detecting either of them. Their hiding place was a different matter, however. Once she passed through the emergency air lock, it wouldn’t take long to find the locker room.

  Luke ducked out of sight, then turned to R2-D2 and whispered, “Can you jam the emergency air lock we used after the crash?”

  The droid gave a quiet chirp, then extended his interface arm and turned toward the nearest control cabinet.

  “Wait until they’re inside the compartment,” Luke whispered. “Then secure the hatches and fry the circuits.”

  R2-D2 replied with a barely audible tweedle and stopped in front of an interface socket. Luke gathered some of the safety equipment strewn across the floor, then returned to the locker room.

  Leia remained in her healing trance, her face a mask of tranquillity as she used the Force to repair her injuries cell by cell. Luke knelt at her side and placed the safety gear he had collected on the bench beside her, then gently shook her shoulder.