Shield of Lies Read online

  But though he stayed protectively close, Luke said nothing to Akanah beyond the kind of inconsequential chatter a couple as accustomed to each other as they were to traveling might share while waiting in line. There’s something here that I still don’t understand—some question I’ve failed to ask. He shook his head in annoyance, with such vigor that Akanah noticed.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “Oh—I’ve just done it again, that’s all,” said Li Stonn. “The lines on either side are moving faster than ours. I shouldn’t ever pick. You pick the line next time, all right?”

  She slipped her hand into his. “Be patient, dear,” she said with an affectionate smile. “We’re almost there—and maybe this will be the last line we have to stand in.”

  Someone behind them chuckled deeply. “This is your first time on Teyr, isn’t it?” the stranger called out. “You haven’t seen anything yet. Wait until you get near the Rift.”

  “Oh, it’ll be worth it, I’m sure,” Akanah said brightly, tightening her grip on Luke’s hand. “I just know it will be worth the wait.”

  Chapter Six

  Luke and Akanah rode the Rift Skyrail as far as Cloud Bridge, the southernmost of the West Rim stops. That treated them to a breathtaking view of the last eighty kilometers of the Rift—one of the narrowest sections, and consequently one of the most spectacular. The elevated track was perched right on the edge of the chasm, leaping across side canyons that would have been major attractions in their own right anywhere else.

  At Cloud Bridge, Li Stonn rented a bubbleback, a local landspeeder variant popular with visitors who wanted to explore the canyon bottom. But instead of heading for the elevators at the Cloud Bridge Rift Access Point, Luke turned the bubbleback west along Flyway 120, toward the Greenbelt.

  An hour and a half at the top speed allowed on the flyway brought them to the intersection with Harvest Flyway, which Akanah’s traveler’s aid card told them was an important cargo route connecting the heart of the Greenbelt with Turos Noth. There was no speed limit on the lightly traveled cargo route, which put the agricultural city of Griann not quite two hours away at the bubbleback’s top speed.

  “Need to stretch?”

  “No,” she said, pointing behind them. “I can manage.” As “getaway” vehicles, bubblebacks featured a compact waste station and reprocessor, with a full set of standard humanoid fittings. “Do we need to refuel?”

  “No. Griann has fuel stops, I assume.”

  Akanah checked her aid card. “Yes. Though ‘local prices may vary from published visitor area rates.’ Please, let’s push on.”

  They had nearly reached Griann when Akanah finally noticed the outline of the cylinder in the right thigh pocket of Luke’s walk-arounds.

  “You brought your lightsaber?” she asked, leaning toward him.

  “Yes,” he said. “You sound surprised.”

  “How did you get it through Arrival Screening? You can’t fool a scanner with Jedi mind tricks. Can you?”

  “You can fool the person whose job it is to respond to scanner alarms,” Luke said. “But even that wasn’t necessary. Lightsabers are still the rarest weapons in the galaxy. There’s only one model of general security scanner that’s programmed to recognize them, and Teyr doesn’t use it.”

  “Then what do they think it is?”

  Luke smiled. “Most scanners misidentify a lightsaber as a type of shaver. Which I suppose it could be, in a pinch—if you were very, very good with it.”

  She settled back in her seat. “I wish you had left it in the ship.”

  “That’s asking too much,” Luke said. “I don’t carry it every minute, but I don’t like to be that far away from it. I’ve gotten in more tough spots because of not having it close enough than I ever have for carrying it.”

  Looking out her window at the gently rolling fields and the day moon that was setting over them, Akanah said, “Please remember what I asked of you—it’s important to me.”

  “I remember,” Luke said. “I hope you remember that I didn’t make you any promises.”

  “Is there that much pleasure in killing, that it becomes something difficult to give up?”

  Luke shot a hard glance across the bubbleback at her. “What makes you think I take pleasure in killing?”

  “That you won’t renounce it,” she said, turning to meet his gaze. “If I had caused a million deaths, I don’t think I could ever pick up a weapon again. I don’t understand how you can.”

  With no ready answer, Luke turned his gaze back toward the flyway ahead. It wasn’t until years after the Battle of Yavin that Luke had first become aware that the Death Star he had destroyed at Yavin had a complement—officers, crew, and support staff—of more than a million sentients.

  In retrospect, it was something he should have realized without prompting. But it took a new Battle of Yavin display at the Museum of the Republic on Coruscant to point it out to him. When Luke thought of the Death Star, he associated it with Vader and Tagge and Grand Moff Tarkin, with the stormtroopers who’d tried to kill him in its corridors and the TIE pilots who’d tried to kill him above its surface, with the superlaser gun crews who had obliterated defenseless Alderaan.

  But the signs at the massive cutaway model of the Death Star in the museum had spelled out the numbers in its table of specifications, and Luke could still recite them: 25,800 stormtroopers, 27,048 officers, 774,576 crew, 378,685 support staff—

  “One million, two hundred five thousand, one hundred nine,” Luke said quietly. “Not counting the droids.”

  The calm precision of the recitation brought a look of startled horror to her face.

  “But you have to look at both sides of the ledger,” Luke went on. “Alderaan. Obi-Wan. Captain Antilles. Dutch. Tiree. Dack. Biggs—” Luke shook his head. “Sometimes your enemies don’t give you much choice—kill them, give up, or be killed. And if you think I should have done anything other than what I did—”

  “The past is fixed, unalterable,” Akanah said. “What I care about is what you’ll do today, or tomorrow. I know your past—I know your heritage—and I have already seen you kill once. Can’t you understand how alien and abhorrent this is to me—to those who gave Nashira shelter?”

  “You don’t trust me.”

  She folded her hands on her lap, and her voice became small. “I am trying, Luke—but you don’t know how hard it is for me to trust someone who believes as you do, and who has your power.”

  Luke stole a sideways glance to catch her expression. “Are you saying you’re afraid of me—because of this?” He rested his hand over the concealed lightsaber.

  “I suppose I am,” she said. “I don’t want to be.”

  “I would never hurt you, Akanah,” Luke said. “I brought this with me in case there were any surprises waiting—not to threaten you.”

  “I move through the world without one,” she said. “Could you not do the same?”

  Luke slowly shook his head. “Not while I still call myself a Jedi. It’s more than a weapon—it’s a tool for training the mind and the body. And it’s become part of me—an extension of my will.”

  “And a way to enforce your will on others.”

  He shook his head. “Most of the discipline of the lightsaber has to do with defense.”

  “What about the rest?”

  “The rest—the rest requires that you get close to your adversary, close enough to have to look them in the eye,” Luke said. “An old-fashioned idea, and a civilizing one. If all you want is to kill quickly, efficiently and impersonally, a blaster is a much better choice—the Emperor’s stormtroopers didn’t carry lightsabers, after all.”

  “All of my nightmares are of places where there are men who want to kill ‘efficiently,’” Akanah said, turning her face back to the viewpane. “And the worst nightmare of all is to think that the only Universe that is, is such a place.”

  Griann had been laid out on the plains of Teyr with a compass and a square.
Its regularly spaced streets of regularly sized houses intersected with right-angle precision in a grid five kilometers square. At the heart of the city was a small commercial zone serving both the residents and the traffic on the Harvest Flyway. Around the boundary of the city was an enclosing wall of silos, granaries, ag domes, sheds for the autoharvesters and skyhoppers, control towers for the irrigation system, and all the other facilities necessary for servicing the fields beyond.

  “Welcome to scenic Griann,” Luke said, guiding the bubbleback into a refueling stall. “What now? Do you have a plan?”

  “I have an address,” Akanah said. “North Five, Twenty-six Down. My friend Norika lived there.”

  Luke shot her a questioning look. “I thought the children were supposed to be hiding. How did you get a lead as specific as an address?”

  “From Norika,” Akanah said. “I got one letter from her that first month, hypercommed to Carratos from a public terminal at something she called the committee office. I wrote her back, a dozen letters at least, but she never answered—I never heard from her again.”

  “Hmmm. Someone probably enforced on her the idea that ‘hiding’ means you don’t tell anyone where you are,” Luke said.

  “Or the circle came for them, and took them away.”

  Luke glanced out his window at the display on the refueling droid. “It’s been nineteen years—you may not know her even if she’s still here.”

  “I would know Nori no matter how many years have passed,” Akanah said fervently. “Wialu said we had the bond of twins. I’ve never been closer to anyone.”

  The refueling over, Luke started the repulsorlifts. “Well, let’s go find out how close we are. North Five, Number Twenty-six?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I can find that.”

  From city center to city edge, Akanah’s anticipation built until it bubbled over in nervous smiles and a restless bouncing in her seat. But when the bubbleback turned onto North 5, her face went pale, and her hand shot out and clutched Luke’s wrist tightly. A strangled noise was all that escaped her parted lips.

  Luke did not need an explanation—his eyes saw the same thing hers did. The double row of lowhouses along North 5 ended at Number 22. Where Number 24 should have been was an expanse of patchy grass. Beyond it, the grass gave way to several lots’ worth of bare, yellowish dirt. The next even-numbered lowhouse was at the corner of the next intersection, Number 38.

  “Well, I’ll—there’s no ‘there’ there,” Luke said, peering over his shoulder as he brought the bubbleback to the curb in front of Number 38.

  Popping the bubble, Akanah jumped out before the landspeeder came to a stop. She ran back down the street in a staggered gait, hugging her arms to her chest, her gaze darting from one side of the roadway to the other. Her steps slowed as she neared the lot opposite Number 25. She looked frantic and frail standing there, staring at the bare ground and the broken outline of a foundation.

  Leaping out of the landspeeder, Luke hurried after Akanah. Before he could reach her, her legs buckled under her, and she dropped to her knees in the dust-dry rain gutter.

  “No!” she screamed, her anguish stretching the single syllable into a wounded howl. “No! It’s not fair!”

  “Akanah—”

  She raised her head and turned her face toward him. Her eyes were full of pain, her cheeks streaked with tears. “I’ll never find them,” she whispered hoarsely. “What am I going to do, Luke?”

  “You’re going to keep looking. All this means is that Nori’s not here,” Luke said, crouching beside her. “You weren’t counting on that, were you?” But he saw in her eyes that she had been, and what might have been a minor disappointment was a bitter blow.

  “Something the matter, folks?” a new voice said from behind.

  Both Luke and Akanah turned their heads quickly to see a stubble-faced middle-aged man in blue-black tech coveralls approaching them from the direction of Number 27. Luke stood as the man neared, and offered Akanah a hand to help her up. She remained on her knees and took Luke’s hand to steady herself instead.

  “Is the lady having a problem?” the man asked again, a hint more suspicion in his appraising look. “Do you want to call out to Medi-Aid?”

  “No—she’s all right. She just had an ugly surprise, that’s all,” Luke said. “We’re looking for someone who used to live in Number Twenty-six.”

  “Ah,” the man said with a nod. “Po Reggis—Jiki and I live over in Twenty-seven Up. So you didn’t know, did you? You must be visitors.” He glanced down the street. “Why, sure you are, and I’m a fool for not seeing—bubbleback’s not practical in a working city.”

  “Was it the war?” Akanah asked, her voice shaky.

  “The war? No, Teyr was never bombed. Cyclone,” Reggis said. “Eight—no, nine years ago. Took out eight houses here, then skipped and hit another five over at the end of North Three. The committee used to talk about rebuilding, but there’s no demand—half the houses in the city are single-family now, Up and Down. It’s all the field droids they’ve brought in—city’s slow-dying, if you ask me.”

  Luke urged Akanah to her feet. “The people who lived here—”

  “Kritt and Fola. Good folks. Our kids played with their kids, till they all moved to Turos Noth.”

  “Kritt and Fola are in Turos Noth now?” Akanah asked, a spark of hope entering her voice.

  The spark was quickly extinguished by Po Reggis. “What? No, dead, the whole family. Sorry. Killed by the cyclone. It was the supper hour, and the weather radar failed. Fifteen dead on this street alone—I knew them all.”

  Akanah sagged against Luke. “How long have you lived here?” Luke asked.

  Reggis squinted. “Twenty-seven—no, twenty-eight years.”

  “The person we’re looking for would have moved here nineteen years ago,” Luke said. “A girl, eleven years old. Akanah?”

  “She was—dark-haired. Willowy. Her name was Norika, or Nori.”

  “I don’t know,” Reggis said. “Maybe Jiki remembers—did you say the name was Rika? Oh, Twenty-six Down. Who was it that lived there then? Trobe Saar, I think was her name.”

  “Yes!” Akanah said eagerly. “You remember her? Where did she go? Please tell me she wasn’t one of the fifteen—”

  “Sure, I remember little Rika. She was shy as a shadow. Wasn’t there very long—one season at most. The Dormand family moved into Twenty-six Down the spring I transferred to Irrigation. I’m sorry—I don’t know where they all went. That was all a long time ago, you know.”

  “Is there anyone else on the street who might know something?” Akanah asked, trying desperately to sustain hope.

  “I don’t think so,” Reggis said slowly. “Jiki and I are the last of the old crowd. I guess we’re the only ones who could take looking across and knowing what happened, what’s down there. They just collapsed everything into the holes and covered it over with dirt, you know—”

  “Thank you, Po,” Luke said. “You’ve been very kind.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t be more help. Do you want to talk to Jiki? She’ll be up from her nap soon.”

  “Yes—” Akanah started to say.

  “Thank you, no,” Luke said, steering Akanah back toward the landspeeder with firm pressure on her arm.

  She looked up at him in puzzlement. “Li—the others—maybe she remembers the others—”

  “We must have the wrong address,” Luke said, gently pressing that thought into Po Reggis’s consciousness. “We’ll try over on North Three.”

  “That’s right,” said Reggis. “There hasn’t been a Twenty-six on this block for years.”

  “I think I hear Jiki calling you,” Luke suggested.

  “Well, I need to get back—Jiki’s calling me,” Reggis said, retreating slowly. “Good luck, now.”

  “Thank you.”

  Akanah waited until the ag tech disappeared into his house, then turned on Luke with fierce indignation. “Why did you do that? He
might have been able to tell us something more.”

  “He already told us enough,” Luke said. “Norika lived here for a little while, in the underground half of the house, with a woman named Trobe Saar. And that structure is still down there—it’s just filled in. Wouldn’t she have left a marker for you here when she left? Can you read scribing through the fill?”

  “I—I don’t know.” She stepped forward, out of the street and onto the crumbly yellow dirt. “Maybe, if it’s there. Let me try.”

  Luke waited and watched as Akanah slowly walked across the buried ruin of the lowhouse several times, pausing here, crouching there, reaching out to touch a small bit of foundation protruding up from the ground. Her expression offered no encouragement, and in time she sighed deeply, shook her head, and rejoined him.

  “It’s the deaths,” she explained glumly as they returned to the bubbleback. “The Current is still tangled here. It’s as if—as if someone made a delicate sand painting, and ten minutes later a meteorite fell right in the middle of it. If there was anything here, it’s gone now.”

  “Don’t give up,” Luke said. “I’ve been thinking—a society as orderly as this one keeps records. Let’s find the committee office. I’ll bet some gray-hair there knows everything about everyone who’s ever lived in Griann.”

  The Recorder of Assignments and Transactions for the Supervisors’ Committee turned out to be completely hairless—a brand-new fat-bodied TT-40 library droid. Like all factory-fresh droids, TT-40 was long on formality and short on personality, lacking even a nickname. They found it busily moving its three spinning data probes from port to port in the U-shaped firewall switchboard that surrounded it.

  “We need some information about—” Luke began.

  “In accord with Ordinance Twenty Twenty-five, Privacy of Official Records, all requests for current records must be approved by the supervisor of your district, or, for nonresidents, by the general supervisor,” the droid pronounced.