Into the Void: Star Wars (Dawn of the Jedi) (7 page)

The drink she was sipping now had been recommended by Tre—a local wine, made from
deep-sea grapes and fortified with swing dust from some of the air mines at Kalimahr’s
north pole. It was incredibly strong, but she used a gentle Force flow to make sure
the potent drink did not impede her senses. She might enjoy such taverns, but she
had been attacked in places like these. And she had also killed in them.

“Master Dam-Powl vouches for you,” Lanoree said.

Tre Sana’s eyes glimmered with humor. “Oh, I doubt that.”

“Well, she says to watch you. And that I should kill you the first moment you display
any hint of betrayal.” Lanoree looked around the tavern but probed for Tre’s reaction.
Strange. She felt nothing. She turned back to him and said, “But Dam-Powl assures
me you don’t have a traitorous bone in your body.”

Tre raised his brows and his lekku, resting now over his shoulders, performed a gentle,
almost sensuous touch along their tips.

“Good,” Lanoree said, smiling. “Then let’s take a meal and at the same time share
some information.”

“The sea beef is very good here,” Tre said. He raised a hand and caught the attention
of the barman. A wave and a click of his fingers, and the barman nodded back, grinning.

Lanoree probed outward and touched the barman’s mind. She took a startled breath—she
could never really prepare for experiencing another’s thoughts, as the first rush
was always overwhelming—but she quickly filtered out the random, the violent, the
sick and disgusting, and narrowed to what she sought.
Tre so cool so calm so red sitting there with her that Je’daii and he’d be lucky,
she’d eat him alive
. She broke away and stared at Tre until he averted his yellow eyes. But she said
nothing. She knew she was attractive, and if he
was
thinking of her that way, there was no real harm.

“I’ll be very open with you,” Lanoree said, “very honest. That’s a good way to begin,
for both of us. There’s something about you I can’t read, but I don’t need the Force
to understand people. You’re haughty and superior. Maybe that’s just you, but right
now I think it’s because you think you have me at a disadvantage. Perhaps because
Dam-Powl has told you most, if not all, of what I know and why I’m here.”

Tre blinked softly, his lekku touching in gentle acknowledgment.

“And so, you know whom I seek. You’ll know that he’s my brother. I have rumors and
stories told in taverns, secondhand information from sources I can’t verify and don’t
trust. And the sum of all the information I have gives me virtually nothing to go
on. I don’t even know what planet he’s on right now.”

“You can’t”—he waved his fingers, raised his arms up and down—“
Force
his location?”

Lanoree glared at Tre. His childish display did not warrant a response.

“Master Dam-Powl sent me to you and said you might be able to help. I hope so. Because
I don’t know how much more of this piss I can take.” Lanoree emptied her glass in
one swallow.

“And now I’ll be very open with you, too,” Tre said, suddenly serious. “Along with
talk of your brother, I hear rumors of Gree technology.”

Lanoree inclined her head, raised an eyebrow.

“I don’t mean the hypergate. Anyone with half a mind knows of the theories about the
Old City being of Gree origin.” Tre leaned in closer, glancing around. “I mean what
drives
the hypergate.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, but already she was thinking of what the Masters had
told her back on Tython.
Dark matter
 …

“I mean there are whispers of design plans. Tech details.” Tre shrugged. “Blueprints.
And all Gree.”

Lanoree leaned back in shock. Gree? Really? So little was known about that ancient
people. There were theories that the Gree had once inhabited the Old City on Tython,
but theorists were split as to whether the Gree had built it themselves. Though the
Gree were long gone from the galaxy, it was suggested by some that the Old City was
even
more
ancient. Lanoree had met a man on Tython—not a Je’daii but someone allied to them
in outlook—who had spent his life researching the Gree and their legacy, and even
what he knew could be relayed in little more than an hour of talk. And now this mysterious
Twi’lek who, if what Dam-Powl had told her was true, undertook criminal activities,
was claiming that Dal had found something the Gree had left behind.

“Blueprints?” she asked.

“Only what I’ve heard. More wine?”

Lanoree bristled. He was toying with her. Playing a Je’daii Ranger as he would a weak-minded
petty criminal looking to muscle in on some nefarious deal. She leaned back in her
chair and feigned tiredness, but behind her drooping eyelids she felt the Force flow,
stirring
her senses, boosting them, and she probed outward once again to touch Tre’s mind.

But he was closed to her.

Tre’s eyes went wide, and for a moment he looked unaccountably sad, shoulders dropping
and lekku slumping down exhausted.
He looks like a battered pet
, Lanoree thought. She wasn’t sure where the image came from, but she had grown to
trust her first impressions. The Force resided in her subconscious, too, and sometimes
it spoke.

He would not meet her gaze, staring instead into his half-empty glass.

She sensed around the fringes of his mind but could not get in, and it was something
she was not used to. Some species were very hard to read—the Cathars’ minds worked
in a very different way, thinking in symbols and abstracts rather than words and images—but
usually she could at least touch another’s mind, whether human or alien.

Tre’s had a wall. It seemed to encircle his consciousness, and her efforts rebounded
from it, almost hinting that there was no mind at all. Yet she knew that was not the
case. Tre was very much his own person, intelligent and alert, harboring desires and
aims, and she could see that he knew himself well. Very well.

“Tre, what’s been done to you?” she asked, because she sensed that he wanted to talk.
The feeling was nothing to do with the Force; it was merely the empathy of one sentient
being for another.

“Just another slave spy used by the Je’daii.”

“You’re altered,” she said, realizing the startling truth. “Genetic?”

“Deep and permanent.”

“No Je’daii would do that,” she said.

“Ha!” Tre spat. A few people nearby glanced around at his outburst, and he stared
them down, red and ferocious when he wanted to be. They went back to their drinks.

“But it’s …” Lanoree said, but she did not finish her sentence.
Forbidden
, she was going to say. But she had that ongoing alchemy experiment on her ship, and
she knew that some Je’daii would frown on that. What was considered forbidden to some
was exploration to others.

“I’m Dam-Powl’s toy,” Tre Sana said, quieter now. “There are promises made to me.”
He sat up straighter, proud. “And they’ll be kept! Money. A new identity. An estate
on a Ska Goran city ship.” He nodded firmly but his lekku writhed, displaying uncertainty
and vulnerability.

Lanoree wasn’t sure what to make of him, and the fact that he was closed to her gentle
probings unsettled her. But she could also not help admiring Dam-Powl’s work. Whatever
subtle genetic adaptations she had performed, whatever strange alchemies kept Tre’s
mind purely his own but made him very obviously hers, were perhaps immoral, yet startlingly
brilliant.

“And you’ll get all that,” Lanoree said. “Master Dam-Powl is a Je’daii of her word.”

Their food arrived. Tre started eating immediately, chewing and swallowing with barely
a pause. He seemed ravenous.

“The Gree,” Lanoree asked. “The blueprints. I need to know more.”

“And now you’re here, we
can
know more,” Tre said, spitting half-chewed meat across the table. Some of it landed
on Lanoree’s plate.

“When?”

“I need to find someone,” he said. “Someone who’s not easy to find. But … on my own.
A Ranger will attract attention. You know the saying, ‘When a Ranger comes calling,
trouble quickly follows.’ Well, so, they hear of you with me and they’ll melt away.
Maybe for a long time. So leave it to me, meet me here at dusk. I’ll know where they
are by then.”

“Who is this person?”

“A rich Kalimahr. A dealer in swing dust and other air spices. And a Stargazer.”

“That word again,” Lanoree said.

Tre wiped his mouth and took a drink. “Not one that many know. Don’t use it too freely.”
He nodded down at Lanoree’s plate. “You going to eat that?”

“No. Help yourself.”

Tre pulled her plate across to him and started eating. It was as if every bite was
his first.

“So, here, at dusk,” Lanoree said.

“Hmmm.” He nodded without looking up from the food. He exuded indifference, yet he
had called himself a slave. A conflicted character, complex, troubled. Exactly who
she would not want guiding her during her investigations.

“Fine,” she said. As she stood to leave, she saw faces turning away from her, and
she walked to the doorway in a bubble of silence broken only by awed whispers of
Ranger!
and
Je’daii!
and darker mutterings of
trouble
. She hoped the old saying Tre had reminded her of could be put to rest on Kalimahr.

But hope alters nothing.

And soon after leaving Susco’s Tavern Lanoree knew that she was being followed again.

“The first day is always the worst,” the human Master Ter’cay says as he leads Lanoree
and Dal toward the surface. “The Silent Desert can be an unsettling place.”

We know
, Lanoree thought.
We know for sure
.

They climb up through the vast cavern.

It’s more like a city than a temple
, Lanoree thinks, and Ter’cay glances back at her.

Listen when I’m talking, or you’ll learn nothing
, he speaks in her mind. He’s not angry. More amused, if anything. Her surprise at
how easily he silently communicates is obviously evident in her expression. Force
telepathy is well-known to her, but such control and command must have taken many
years of meditation and study to master.

Ter’cay laughs aloud, and Lanoree smiles sidelong at Dal. He’s frowning. He didn’t
hear a thing.

She is still stunned at the size and scope of Qigong. She’s heard all about it, of
course, from her parents and from those Journeyers venturing through Bodhi Temple
after having visited Qigong previously on their travels. Their talk is always of the
temple first—its incredible size, the complexity of its caverns and tunnels, the strength
of the Force in this natural nexus—and then inevitably they will finish with stories
of the Silent Desert.

A haunting place. Almost unnatural.

She and Dal have already spent days crossing the desert to Qigong and encountering
some of its dangers. But she senses that their real experience of those strange sands
has only just begun.

“It’s cool down here,” Ter’cay says. “Sometimes the sands are hot enough to melt your
shoes and a slightest breeze will blister your skin. But that’s usually later in the
day. Down here we’re protected from the sun, and the climate is controlled by six
conditioners. There’s one over there.” They are crossing a wide cavern bounded on
three sides with sheer walls, each of them speckled with ledges and stairwells, people
bustling all about. Ter’cay points at the fourth side of the plaza, and there stands
a huge machine, the height of thirty people, with curved protuberances that flex and
bulge like something biological, not mechanical. It steams, groans; and moisture speckles
its surface and pools around its base.

“That’s a machine?” Dal asks.

Of sorts
, Ter’cay sends. He glances at Lanoree, raises an eyebrow, then speaks the words aloud.

He expects Dal to be hearing all this
, Lanoree thinks. Her brother seems unaware, enrapt as he is with the giant conditioner.

“Of sorts?” Lanoree asks.

“Many of its inner working are … grown at Anil Kesh.”

“So it’s alive?”

“Far from it.” Ter’cay turns and strides across the cavern floor, and they have to
hurry to catch up.

When we reach the surface, all will fall silent
, Ter’cay says in Lanoree’s mind.
But silence is subjective. You and I can communicate as we are now, and this is the
first lesson. Force telepathy is a talent that some Journeyers already have when they
arrive here; but those who don’t, pick it up quite quickly
. He glances back over his shoulder at her, grim faced.
It’s a fundamental talent. Not like farsight, or using the Force to cast illusion.
If you flow with the Force, then so can your words and thoughts. But your brother …

He shrugs as they continue walking.

“He’s …” Lanoree begins, but Dal looks at her. She coughs, pretending to have swallowed
some dust. Then she tries to speak without words.

Her mother had taught her the basics. Sometimes her father touched her mind when it
was late and they were tired, giving her a bedtime tale. Now was Lanoree’s chance
to use those lessons.