Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith #6: Sentinel (4 page)

Looking to the sun vanishing between the trees, Ori began cutting down the last of the meter-length shoots that would form their side door. It felt strange using the Jedi’s weapon, she thought. All the lightsabers the Sith on Kesh used were red, but some of the original castaways
kept captured Jedi lightsabers as trophies. She had seen a green one in the Korsin Museum. This one’s color was strange and beautiful, a brilliant blue found nowhere in nature. The only artifact of Jelph’s alien origin.

Well, not the only one
, she thought, extinguishing the lightsaber.

That’s where he was now, she knew. As usual, he had risen at dawn to trap breakfast and gather their fruit for later. While offering nothing like the gardening conditions in the lowlands, the jungle provided other means of sustenance year-round; in this latitude, she doubted she would notice when winter came. He spent the rest of his day building their shelter, before retiring, at dusk, as he always did, to keep vigil beside the device—the one part of his space vessel he hadn’t brought down to the farm. She walked there now, to the spot in the trees where Jelph sat on a stump for hours, staring at the dark metal case and fiddling with its instruments.

He hadn’t kept it from her. For the Sith, the “transmitter,” as he called it, could be as explosive a discovery as the starfighter. Jelph had kept it for what it represented: his lifeline to the outside. He’d never been able to get a message out; as he explained it, something about Kesh and its shifting magnetic field prevented such attempts. That might not be a permanent situation, but it could be centuries before it changed. Ori wondered if that same phenomenon had thwarted the castaways centuries before. All he was able to do was set the device to scan for signals from the ether, recording them for later playback. Perhaps, if some traveler came near enough, he might be able to get a message to the beyond. She now understood his trips upriver in earlier months: he came to the jungle to see what sounds he’d snared.

Normally, he heard nothing but static. But whatever Jelph had just heard had thrown him.

“I can’t go back,” he said, looking blankly at the device.

Ori looked at the flashing thing, not understanding. “What happened?”

“I caught a signal.” It took him several moments to be able to say the words. “The Jedi are at war with one another.”

“What?”

“A Jedi named Revan,” he said. “When I lived there, Revan was like us—trying to rally the Jedi against a great enemy.” Jelph swallowed, finding his mouth dry. “From the sound of it, something’s gone wrong. The Jedi Order has split. It’s at war with itself.”

Jelph replayed the recorded message for her. A fragment of a warning from a Republic admiral, it cautioned listeners that no Jedi could be trusted. The ages-old compact between Republic and Jedi had been sundered. Now there was only war.

The message ended.

Shaken, Jelph deactivated the device. “This … is
our
fault. The Covenant.”

“The Jedi sect you belonged to?”

“Yes.” He looked up in the twilight, unable to find any evening stars through the foliage. “And that’s the trouble. There aren’t supposed to
be
any Jedi sects. The Order is divided now—but we divided it first.” He shook his head. “May the Force help them all.”

He turned his gaze to the wilderness again. Ori let him sit in silence. It occurred to her that during all her days of complaining about the world she had lost, Jelph was living with the loss of a whole galaxy. And he was losing it again now.

At last, he stood and spoke. “I don’t know what to do, Ori. We kept the Tribe from discovering a way off Kesh. But I always held out hope that with the transmitter, I could make contact one day. Make contact,”
he said, looking back at her for a moment, “to get us out of this place.”

“And to warn them about my people,” Ori said.

Jelph looked away. There was no avoiding the truth. “Yes.”

Ori touched his shoulder. “It’s only fair. I tried to warn my people about you.”

“Well, it’s pointless now,” he said, stooping to lift a stone from their future front garden. “If the Jedi are divided—or, worse, if Revan or someone else has fallen to the dark side—then bringing a planetful of Sith to their attention is the worst thing I could possibly do for the galaxy.”

“You don’t know that,” she said. “You could be wrong. The Jedi could still come here and wipe everyone out.”

“Yes, I could be wrong.” Laughing to himself, he looked at her. “You know, that’s the first time anyone’s heard me say that. Maybe if I’d said it more often back home, I wouldn’t be here now.” He tossed the stone into the stream and knelt again. “I’ve lived my whole life thinking I knew what I was supposed to do. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do
now.
”

Watching him, Ori saw the look she’d seen in him in her previous visits to the farm. It was the expression he’d worn when toiling in the muck. Then he had been doing something unpleasant, but he’d been doing it because he had to do it, to keep his garden alive and his customers happy. His duty.

Duty
. The term didn’t mean the same thing to the Sith. In the Sabers, Ori had had missions she was charged to perform—but she had taken them on as personal challenges, not out of some loyalty to a higher order. The galaxy didn’t have the right to give her odd jobs. Truly free beings had lives.
Slaves
had duties.

And now Jelph was suffering, certain that he had
some
duty to perform, but unsure what it was. What service did he owe the galaxy—a galaxy that had already cast him out?

“Maybe,” Ori said, “maybe Sith philosophy has the answer for you.”

“What?”

“We’re taught to be self-centered. We don’t think
us
and
them
. It’s just
you
, versus everyone else. No one else matters.” Placing her arms around him from behind, she looked out at the dark stream, burbling quietly past on its way to feed the Marisota River. “The Sith cast me out. The Jedi cast you out. Maybe neither side deserves our help.”

“The only side worth saving,” he said, turning toward her, “is ours?”

She smiled up at him. Yes, she had been right from the beginning. He was so much more than a slave. “Give it a try, Jedi,” she said. “If I can do something selfless—then maybe it’s time for
you
to do something selfish.”

He looked at her for a long moment, a twinkle in his eye. Wordlessly, he broke the embrace and stepped over to the receiver. Uprooting it, he grinned at her. “Shall we?”

Ori watched him cradle the blinking machine for a moment before she realized what he intended. Exhaling, she stepped over and helped him carry the transmitter to the side of the stream. With one great heave, they tossed it in. Striking a shoal beneath the current, the contraption splintered noisily into shards. They watched together for a moment as bits of casing bobbed and vanished into the darkness. Then they turned back toward their house.

The cords were cut.

It was time to live.

Read on for an excerpt from
Star Wars:
Fate of the Jedi:
Conviction
by Aaron Allston
Published by Del Rey Books

Coruscant, Jedi Temple
Infirmary Level

The medical readout board on the carbonite pod flickered, then went dark, announcing that the young man just being thawed from suspended animation—Valin Horn, Jedi Knight—was dead.

Master Cilghal, preeminent physician of the Jedi Order, felt a jolt of alarm ripple through the Force. It was not her own alarm. The emotion was the natural reaction of all those gathered to see Valin and his sister Jysella rescued from an unfair, unwarranted sentence imposed not by a court of justice but by Galactic Alliance Chief of State Daala herself. Had they come to see these Jedi Knights freed and instead become witnesses to a tragedy?

But what Cilghal
didn’t
feel in the Force was the winking out of a life. Valin was still there, a diminished but intact presence in the Force.

She waved at the assembly, a calming motion. “Be still.” She did not need to exert herself through the Force. Most of those present were Jedi Masters and Jedi Knights who respected her authority. Not one of them was easily panicked, not even the little girl beside Han and Leia.

Standing between Valin’s and Jysella’s gurneys with her assistant Tekli, Cilghal concentrated on the young man lying to her right. His body still gleamed with a trace of dark fluid: all that remained of the melted carbonite that had imprisoned him. He was as still as the dead. Cilghal pressed her huge, webbed hand against his throat to check his pulse. She found it, shallow but steady.

The readout board flickered again and the lights came up in all their colors, strong, the pulse monitor flickering with Valin’s heartbeat, the encephaloscan beginning to jitter with its measurements of Valin’s brain activity.

Tekli, a Chadra-Fan, her diminutive size and glossy fur coat giving her the aspect of a plush toy instead of an experienced Jedi Knight and a physician, spun away from Valin’s gurney and toward the one beside it. On it lay Jysella Horn, slight of build, also gleaming a bit with unevaporated carbonite residue. Tekli put one palm against Jysella’s forehead and pressed the fingers of her other hand across Jysella’s wrist.

Cilghal nodded. Computerized monitors might fail, but the Force sense of a trained Jedi would not, at least not under these conditions.

Tekli glanced back at Cilghal and gave a brisk nod. All was well.

The pulse under Cilghal’s hand began to strengthen and quicken. Also good, also normal.

Cilghal moved around the head of the gurney and stood on the far side of the apparatus, a step back from Valin. When he awoke, his vision would be clouded, and perhaps his judgment as well. It would not do for him to wake with a large form standing over him, gripping his throat. Violence might result.

She caught the attention of Corran and Mirax, parents of the two patients. “That was merely an electronic
glitch.” Cilghal tried to make her tones reassuring, knowing her effort was not likely to succeed—Mon Calamari voices, suited to their larger-than-human frames, were resonant and even gravelly, an evolutionary adaptation that allowed them to be heard at greater distances in their native underwater environments. Unfortunately, they tended to sound harsh and even menacing to human ears. But she had to try. “They are fine.”

Corran, wearing green Jedi robes that matched the color of his eyes, heaved a sigh of relief. His wife, Mirax, dressed in a stylish jumpsuit in blacks and blues, smiled uncertainly as she asked, “What caused it?”

Cilghal offered a humanlike shrug. “I’ll put the monitors in for evaluation once your children are checked out as stable. I suspect these monitors haven’t been tested or serviced since Valin and Jysella were frozen.” There, that was a well-delivered lie, dismissing the monitor’s odd behavior as irrelevant.

Valin stirred. Cilghal glanced down at him. The Knight’s eyes fluttered open and tried to fix on her, but seemed to have difficulty focusing.

Cilghal looked down at him. “Valin? Can you hear me?”

“I … I …” Valin’s voice was weak, watery.

“Don’t speak. Just nod.”

He did.

“You’ve been—”

She was interrupted by a stage-whispered notification from Tekli: “Jysella is awake.”

Cilghal adjusted her angle so she could address both siblings. “You’ve been in carbonite suspension for some time. You will feel cold, shaky, and disoriented. This is all normal. You are among friends. Do you understand me?”

Valin nodded again. Jysella’s “yes” was faint, but
stronger and more controlled than Cilghal had expected.

“Your parents are here. I’ll allow them to speak to you in a moment. The Solos are here, as well.”
And little Amelia and her pet Anji, both of whom smell like they’ve been rolling in seafood shells left rotting for a week
. Cilghal had to blink over that fact. The child should have received a thorough disinfecting before being allowed in this chamber. Come to think of it, Barv also reeked. Where could a youngling and even a Jedi Knight go in the clean, austere Temple and end up smelling like that?

She set the question aside. “Bazel Warv is here, and Yaqeel Saav’etu, your friends. They can answer many questions about an ailment that afflicted the two of you just prior to your freezing.”

Jysella looked around, barely raising her head, her attention sliding across the faces of friends and loved ones, and then she looked at Valin. He must have felt her attention; he looked back. A thought, the sort of instant communication that only siblings can understand, passed between then. Then the two of them relaxed.

Jysella looked again at her parents. “Mom?”

At Cilghal’s nod, Mirax and Corran came forward, crowding into the gap between the gurneys. Tekli moved out of their way, circling around the head of Valin’s bed to rejoin Cilghal. She craned her neck to look up at the Mon Cal. “All signs good.”

Cilghal nodded. She turned to the others in the room. “All but the immediate family, please withdraw to the waiting area.”

And they did, exiting with words of encouragement and welcome.

In moments only the Horns and the medics remained with Valin and Jysella. Cilghal took a few steps to the nurse’s station and its bank of monitoring screens, giving
its more elaborate readouts a look … or pretending to. Tekli found a mist dispenser and sprayed its clean-smelling contents around the chamber, driving away reminders of Amelia’s, Anji’s, and Barv’s recent presence. Then she rejoined her superior.

If Cilghal’s predictions were correct, Valin and Jysella would be reaching full cognizance right about now, if they had not already. And if the madness that had caused them to be subjected to carbonite freezing were still in effect, their voices would be raised in moments with accusations: “What have you done with my
real
mother, my
real
father?”

That was the insanity that had visited them, the manifestation of the dark-side effect of their connection with the monster known as Abeloth. But recently, Abeloth’s power over the “mad Jedi” had been broken. They had all returned to normal—all but these young Horns, their recovery delayed by their suspended state.