Shield of Lies Read online

  “A date? No.”

  “Could you tell how long it had been there? Maybe scribing fades with time, or something like that—”

  “No—not if it’s done well. I can’t tell you when the message was left—except that I’m sure it was left before the Fallanassi left Lucazec. Why?”

  “I’m wondering how two Imperial agents could hide for so long in a place where everyone knows everyone else and nothing changes very quickly,” Luke said. “I’m wondering why they would.”

  “Why—because they still want us—want the White Current as a weapon.”

  “But why would they think anyone would be coming back there? Why would they be expecting you?”

  She was quiet for a time. “I’ve been asking questions for a long time, trying to find the circle,” she said. “I haven’t always been as careful as I should have been, either in what I asked or who I asked.”

  “Who did you tell that you were planning to go to Lucazec?”

  “Only you,” she said. “But I tried sending messages to the circle, to Wialu. I talked to the customs and immigration office on Lucazec. I applied for every starliner job posted on Carratos, hoping to get a working passage. I checked open ticket prices constantly, every time new rates were posted.”

  “So people started to know who you were, and something about what you were interested in.”

  “More than that,” she said. “I made rather a pest of myself. I hung around the spaceport dives when a ship came in, hoping the crews might know something. I found ways of getting passenger lists. I talked to everyone I could who might know anything.” Her smile was full of regret. “It wasn’t until later that I thought to be more discreet.”

  “The people you’d been left with—”

  “I didn’t get any help from them,” she said. “They forbade me to speak to them about the circle, and punished me for looking on my own.”

  “They must have been afraid for you—maybe for themselves, too. They were supposed to hide you, weren’t they? And you refused to stay hidden.”

  “It’s easier to understand than it is to forgive,” she said. “They kept me from being where I belonged. I can’t forgive that until I find the circle again. If I never do, I don’t think I can ever forgive her.”

  “Her?”

  “Talsava,” she said. “My guardian on Carratos. But if I start talking about her now, I’ll never get to sleep.”

  “All right,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “You didn’t know,” said Akanah. “I’ll tell you about it, sometime.”

  “When you’re ready.”

  He thought that had ended the conversation. He heard Akanah changing position and pictured her lying on her side, her head on her folded arms. He was surprised when she spoke his name.

  “What?”

  “What do you think the chances are that someone will be looking for us on Teyr?”

  “Greater than zero,” Luke said. “But we’ll be careful. Go to sleep, now.”

  She did not argue or answer, and Luke lapsed into silence as well, wondering why he felt as though none of his questions had been answered, and the most important ones had never been asked at all.

  Where Lucazec was rustic, Teyr was bureaucratic.

  Located near the juncture of three busy spaceways and wearing a spectacular four-thousand-kilometer-long canyon like a dueling scar, Teyr was one of the New Republic’s boom worlds. Most of the boom was in visitors and vacationers. Fearing unbridled growth, Teyr’s leaders purposefully discouraged would-be immigrants with a maze of regulations, a series of successively higher application hurdles, and a determinedly officious Citizen Services Corps. The unofficial tourism motto was “Come see spectacular Teyr Rift. Then go home.”

  While still inbound, Luke and Akanah were offered the unattractive choice of parking their craft at one of the vast orbital parking areas and shuttling down to the surface, or paying four times as much in landing fees to bring the skiff down at a spaceport of Teyr’s choosing.

  “I don’t like the idea of being down there and having to depend on third parties to get back to our ship up here,” Luke said. “If someone should decide they want to delay our departure, I like our chances better if we don’t have to jump quite so high.”

  “But I don’t have that kind of money, Luke,” said Akanah. “You know that.”

  “I think Li Stonn is good for it,” Luke said. He flashed a wry smile that disappeared behind his illusion of age, then tapped the comm key. “Teyr Flight Control, this is Mud Sloth—I’d like to request landing authorization.”

  “Copy, Mud Sloth, your queue number is alpha-three-nine, confirm.”

  “Confirm, alpha-three-nine,” Luke said. “Could you tell me, is there any chance that we could possibly put down at Turos Noth? We’re going to be meeting some friends—”

  “Landing sites are allocated on a space-available basis according to standard protocols. Ground transportation is available at all spaceports. The Rift Skyrail connects all spaceports with all major population centers and with visitor centers, trailheads, and resort destinations in the Rift Territory. Monitor this channel for further landing instructions. This is Teyr Flight Control, end transmission.”

  Luke and Akanah exchanged bemused looks.

  “They wouldn’t have dared give Luke Skywalker number thirty-nine,” she said.

  “Too bad he couldn’t join us for this trip,” Luke said, allowing his disguise to dissolve.

  “I wonder how many times a shift they have to recite that,” Akanah said.

  “I don’t think they care,” said Luke, then explained, “It was a droid. I couldn’t touch it.” He nodded past Akanah. “Are any of the stuffed koba left? I think we might have time to eat before the skids get dirty.”

  As Luke had suspected, there was more than enough time. Following directions from Flight Control, Mud Sloth joined a long queue of yachts and liners in a high orbit over Teyr. Six full revolutions later, they were still there, though most of the ships in front of them—and several behind them as well—had already made their descent and been replaced by newer arrivals.

  “Nice view,” Akanah said. “Do you think they’ll ever let us any closer?”

  “No,” said Luke. “I knew we should have told them we had eighty-two paying customers aboard, all eager to start shopping.”

  “Eighty-two?” she said, raising an eyebrow skeptically.

  “Ewoks,” Luke said, shrugging. “You should see the way they live. It’s nothing like in the holos. Twenty-four to a room, stacked in layers, boy, girl, boy, girl—”

  “You’ve been in space too long,” she said, with a disapproving frown. “Maybe we didn’t hear our call.”

  “—Queue number alpha-eight-one, proceed to approach—”

  “Eighty-one!” Akanah exclaimed indignantly. “Why is everyone going before us?”

  “Because whatever kind of priority list they’re using, they put people who own Verpine Adventurers at the bottom of it,” Luke said.

  “Will you please stop making jokes?”

  “Sometimes there’s no other recourse,” said Luke. “What happened to your implacable calm?”

  “This is making me crazy,” Akanah said.

  “I can tell.”

  “Can’t we just disguise ourselves as some other ship and take its landing instructions?”

  “There’s a little problem about two objects occupying the same space at the same time.”

  “Luke—”

  The tone of her voice made him look toward her. He saw anguish on her face, anxiety in her pleading eyes. “Do you think they might be holding us up here until they can get everything ready to grab us, or follow us?” Please do something! her expression cried.

  “No,” Luke said, and reached across to touch her hand. “Teyr runs the shuttles themselves, and the space-lines have contracts with Teyr for priority landing access. They get to go first—we get to wait for an opening. It’s all right—they’re treating us the way we
want them to. No special treatment, no special notice. They’ll get around to us soon. They want our money, too.”

  “—Queue number alpha-three-nine, proceed to approach corridor for landing at Prye Folas—”

  “There—see?” He squeezed her hand reassuringly, then moved his own hands back to the flight controls.

  Relief was evident on her face. “Prye Folas—that’s good. It’s a long way from the Rift, but that doesn’t matter to us—it’s only one stop east of Turos Noth.”

  “I’m glad someone studied their geography,” Luke said. “Snug up those straps, Lady Anna. Did you know that most crashes take place within sixty seconds of liftoff or touchdown?”

  She frowned crossly at him. “Did you need to tell me?”

  “I think I did,” Luke said, firing the braking thrusters to drop the skiff out of her parking orbit. “You seem to need something to worry about—I thought it might as well be something real.” He looked sideways at her and grinned. “One way or another, we’ll be on the ground in ten minutes.”

  “You think this is helping, don’t you?”

  “It’s just my way of saying, relax—”

  “I can’t,” she said with a nervous sigh. “I’ve been waiting too long. I have too much at stake.”

  Luke nodded understandingly. “In that case, I promise to try for the soft landing.”

  For just a moment, he thought Akanah was going to punch him.

  Luke’s landing at Prye Folas was better than soft. It was flawlessly smooth, the kind pilots call a first kiss.

  It also put Mud Sloth right back in a line—this time, the long taxi line leading to the vast field of open-air tie-down berths. Teyr’s exorbitant landing fee didn’t buy “Li Stonn” a spot in a docking bay, or even secure covered stowage, for his ship.

  “One good storm, and the shipbuilding trade has a record year next year,” Luke said, surveying the expansive, and expensive, assortment of vessels.

  When the tow droid finally reached the assigned berth and backed Mud Sloth into its space, its port wing nestled under the thrustpods of a big Toltax Starstream, the port manager’s official voice—another droid—came over the open channel.

  “Welcome to Prye Folas. In order to help ensure the safety of all visitors to Teyr, port regulations forbid occupancy of vessels in tie-down berths,” the droid said. “Please remove whatever personal articles you will need during your stay and seal your vessel, then wait for the arrival shuttle. In order to help ensure the safety of your vessel, access to this parking area is limited to arriving and departing visitors. This area is patrolled by port security. Thank you for including Teyr in your travel plans—”

  “I’m ready,” Akanah said impatiently.

  Luke powered down the skiff’s primary bus. “Let me grab my bag and put on my face.”

  The arrival shuttle, a low-riding, slow-moving landspeeder, was piloted by still another late-model droid. Akanah and Luke caught two of the last three open seats, and the third was taken by the Elomin who emerged from the airspeeder parked across the towpath from Mud Sloth. When the shuttle was full, it rose several meters above the ground and sped off in the direction of the terminal. An empty shuttle immediately moved in to take its place.

  “Quite an operation, don’t you think, dear?” Luke said. The voice of “Li Stonn” had a little tremble, a little added huskiness. “When you see this many droids, you know someone’s doing well.”

  Akanah seemed inhibited by the other travelers close around them—the Elomin, immediately to her right, towered over her by more than a head. She answered only with a glance and a polite smile.

  Luke patted her hand reassuringly. “I know, you don’t like open landspeeders. But we’re almost there,” he said. “Look—you can see the track for the Rift Skyrail. The guidebook said it’s the fastest aboveground train in five sectors—”

  The last hurdle was Arrival Screening—another line, a droid greeter, an IRR screening for their bags, a discreet security sweep of their persons, and three questions from a human examiner who had much the same demeanor as the district censor on Lucazec.

  “How long do you plan to stay on Teyr?”

  “We’re not sure, are we, dear?” Luke asked. “How long does it take to really see the Rift at its best? Our reservation is only for three days, but we’re hoping that we can extend it now that we’re here.”

  “Three days,” the examiner repeated. “Are you now, or have you recently been, infected with any transmissible class B or class C agent?”

  “No, no,” Luke/Li said, smiling at Akanah. “We’re fit as can be. I just hate to travel when I’m sick, don’t you?”

  “Do you have in your possession any lethal weapons, proscribed drugs, unlicensed technology, or other articles in violation of the General Visitor Agreement?”

  “Oh, gracious, no,” Luke said. “We’re here to have fun.”

  The examiner passed two traveler’s aid cards through an encoder. “Welcome to Teyr,” he said, handing the cards to Akanah. “Enjoy your stay with us.”

  Between the Prye Folas spaceport terminal and the Skyrail station was the broad green expanse of Welcome Park. Luke and Akanah stopped at the first open bench they spotted, tucking their bags protectively behind their feet.

  “I think we’re finally officially here,” Luke said. “How are you doing?”

  “It’s not what I expected,” said Akanah, looking around.

  Luke held out a palm. “Let’s see that,” he said, nodding toward the traveler’s aid cards Akanah still clutched in her hand.

  Distractedly, Akanah handed one of the cards to Luke, who began to study it. The card had a tiny display screen that took up half of one side, with some universal-symbol command keys below. On the back was a line drawing of the structure that stood at the center of the park—a ring of more than a hundred small kiosks surrounding a two-story-high carousel display.

  “I have to go do a Li Stonn thing,” said Luke. “Stay here—I’ll be right back.”

  When Luke got closer to the structure, he could see that the band at the top of the carousel said “Visitor Information Center” in Basic and several other common languages.

  There were short lines of people waiting at every kiosk for a chance to select their areas of interest and have that information transferred to the cards, where they could browse it at their leisure. While they waited, most looked up at the carousel display, which was offering colorful one-minute documentaries on the geology of the Rift, the building of the Skyrail, and the shopping opportunities in Prye Folas.

  “Pickpocket’s paradise,” Luke muttered, and turned away.

  Just then, Luke felt the momentary tickle in his senses that meant he was being watched. He scanned the park carefully as he returned to the bench where Akanah sat, but the feeling did not return, and nothing he saw raised his alarm.

  “I need to know what region we’ll—” He stopped as he saw that she was struggling against tears, her eyes faraway and forlorn. “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything’s wrong,” she said. “I just know they’re not here.”

  Luke sat down sideways beside her. “Why? You thought you’d be able to feel them, and you can’t?”

  She was not too upset to be indignant. “No—we’re not that careless, to broadcast our presence even on the Current.”

  “Then what’s the matter?”

  “I told you—everything’s wrong.” She shook her head sadly. “This isn’t our kind of world. It’s everything we’re trying not to be. It’s too crowded, too loud, too organized and artificial. If they were ever here, they won’t have stayed very long.” Bowing her head, she began to sob quietly. “It’s too late. It took me too long to get here—”

  Edging closer, Luke drew her into a comforting embrace, brushing away the worst of her despair with caressing thoughts. “You don’t know that,” he said. “It’s too soon to be giving up. Come on, where do we start?”

  Akanah rested her head on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry—I’m not doing a very good job of being invisible.”

  “No one cares,” Luke said. “No one’s watching. All these people have tunnel vision—all they can see right now are their own plans and worries and hopes. They’re all eager for confirmation that this really will be the vacation of a lifetime.”

  Raising her head, Akanah sought confirmation of his words. “On Carratos, everyone notices public tears,” she said, wiping her cheeks. “My ears expected to hear ridicule.”

  “Looks like you’ll have to do without, this time,” he said. “So where do we start? Who are we looking for?”

  “The city of Griann,” she said. “It’s in what they call the Greenbelt Region. That’s where they were taken—Jib Djalla, Novus, Tipagna, and Norika. The first three are boys,” she added. “Novus is Twi’lek, the others are human.”

  “Okay. Let’s go see what the machines can tell us about Griann,” Luke said, reaching down and shouldering both bags.

  As they stood in line for an information kiosk, Akanah’s mood seemed to brighten, as though she were absorbing some of the joyful energy around her. But Luke again felt someone’s curiosity as a sudden shiver, as if someone had lightly touched his face, trying to recognize him.

  Looking back across Welcome Park on a pretense of casual crowd-watching, Luke focused in on the tall, slender form of an Elomin male, already turning his horned face away. Luke watched his quarry move aloofly through the gathering until it disappeared behind the curve of the information center, but the Elomin never glanced his way again.

  You’re getting twitchy, Luke told himself. There’s no way that an Elomin would be working for Imperial intelligence.

  But the fact that an Elomin—perhaps this same one—had parked an airspeeder directly across from Mud Sloth would not leave his awareness. And the noise and the bustle of the crowd in the park suddenly seemed less a joyful party and more a potentially deadly distraction.

  Maybe they were holding us up for a reason, Akanah, Luke thought worriedly, patting the bulge of his lightsaber along his thigh to reassure himself that it was there.