FORTY-SIX

Then a sixth silhouette appeared at the mouth of the alley and a green lightsaber sprouted in his hands.

Great, now we have the whole rainbow represented. I lifted my left hand from my blade’s hilt and waved him forward. “C’mon, pal, one more won’t make any difference.”

I wished I felt as brave as those words sounded.

The man at the alley mouth started forward. “No one need die here tonight.”

I knew that voice! Luke!

And I recognized in his warning to those I faced a directive to me. I slid to the right and blocked a red slash low right, directing the red blade away and into the brick wall. Pivoting on my left foot, I snapped a sidekick into my foe’s belly, driving her back. I discovered she wore an armored breastplate, which partially shielded her from the strength of my kick. The armor, however, didn’t stop her from catching her heels on debris and going down, temporarily taking her out of the fight.

Luke engaged Yellow and Purple as I ducked beneath a blue slash and twisted to bring my left hand up. I caught my foe on his chin with the heel of my hand. The blow shifted the mask he wore up a couple of centimeters, temporarily blinding him. A quick punch to the throat choked him, then I grabbed him by the clasp of his cloak and flung him into the alley wall. His armor clicked hard against the bricks, then he dropped back all boneless and the deadman switch on his lightsaber shut it off.

I parried Orange’s cut and caught his wrist in my left hand. I shifted my right hand up, then whipped it down and across. My lightsaber’s heavy pommel caught Orange right behind the right ear, or where the right ear would have been on a human. As Orange dropped senseless to the ground, his hood slid back and I saw he was a Rodian.

I reached down and flicked his lightsaber off, then straightened up as Luke rose above Red. From her I only got peace, a peace I found vaguely reminiscent of the peace I’d imagined surrounding Mirax when Exar Kun showed her to me. “New trick?”

Luke shut off his lightsaber and I did the same with mine, plunging the alley into darkness. “Old one, one of yours. I hit her and knocked her out. Just easing some of her pain now.”

“Nice sense of timing. If you hadn’t arrived, the five of them would have killed me, clean and quick.” I shivered. “How did you find me?”

In faint light from the street, I saw Luke’s expression sharpen. “I knew, if you had learned all you needed to learn, that I would meet you here, and that we would be allies.”

I felt a chill run down my spine. “I see.”

Luke’s voice lightened slightly. “As for the when, with that I needed some help.” He turned back up the alley. “Are we clear?”

A silhouette framed itself in the alley, prompting me to laugh. “I see no pursuit.”

“Ooryl?” I hopped over Orange’s body and ran forward. “Ooryl, what are you doing here?”

“I am a Findsman.” The Gand shrugged as if that should have explained everything. “The important thing of being a Findsman is not knowing where to look, for that is easy. It is knowing when to look. I knew the when was now, and went to Master Skywalker to tell him that. He pointed me here, and I brought him now.”

Luke waved us back into the alley. “We have to get our sleeping friends out of here. We have a ship, but I need somewhere else to keep them. They know where Mirax is.”

I nodded. “Can’t be far from here, because Tavira brought them within a day of hearing we had Jedi trouble here. Who are they?”

“I don’t know.” Luke shook his head. “We better find out and find out fast, because if we don’t, if someone learns they’ve failed in their mission, it may cost Mirax her life.”

I reached down and hefted Orange up by his belt, letting Ooryl grab Yellow and Purple. “I know where we can take them, but getting information out of them will be tough. They know how to use the Force, and I’m not sure we can break through to find out what we want to know.”

“I think I have something that can help us in that regard.” Luke gestured, allowing Red and Blue to float up into the air. “Lead on, Keiran. As Ooryl explained it to me, when is just an aperture in time, and we don’t want it to snap shut before we can get through to your wife.”

We took our five opponents back to the hotel. I called Elegos and had him meet us in the back, at the freight-lift. Ooryl left the two he’d carried to Elegos, then returned to the spaceport to fetch something for Luke. Awaiting his return we stripped our prisoners out of their armor, separated them and treated the cuts and bruises they’d earned in the fight.

When Ooryl returned he brought with him a cagelike device that had suspended inside of it a small, furred reptile. A nutrient mix flowed through a network of tubes, sustaining the creature which, if it were capable of movement, seemed singularly disinclined to show it. I did see it blink an eye, but even that movement was slower than I would have expected in a living creature.

“This is an ysalamiri, one of two I brought with me.” Luke rested a hand on the cage and looked a bit fatigued. “It is unique among living creatures—at least I don’t know of any others—in that it seems to project a field that negates the Force. On its homeworld some predators evolved with a Force sense that lets them hunt, so its negation sphere acts as camouflage.”

“Okay, that’s why I feel so weird. Thought I was just tired.” I tried to reach inside myself to tap the Force, but I got nothing. “It’s like I’m back where I started, back before the academy.”

Luke nodded. “You’re fortunate in that you spent most of your life only having a fringe sense of the Force. I’ve been involved much longer than you and in the presence of an ysalamiri, I feel lost, like a limb has been lopped off.” Luke flexed his mechanical hand. “Worse, actually.”

“How do you think this will affect our guests?”

Luke managed a smile, but that seemed to tax him. “I think they’ve been involved with the Force longer than I have. They seem to armor themselves well with it. I suspect they will feel very vulnerable.”

“Good.” I gave him a feral grin. “Just what we want if we’re going to get anything out of them. Just follow my lead.”

The Jedi Master caught hold of my shoulder. “I’ve not done anything like this before, interrogating prisoners.”

I winked at him. “ ’Sokay, I know enough for both of us. Just stay over there, by the door, and look as malevolent as you can. Keep your face straight and you really don’t need to say anything.”

“Malevolent?”

“Think Hutt, but with eyebrows.”

“Got it.”

We picked Red to be the first subject—actually, Elegos did, for reasons of his own—but I didn’t mind. Interrogating women is always tricky, mainly because they tend to be suspicious of any claims made by a man and often believe they can use their looks and wiles to fool a detective. Red, who really was a slender beauty with wavy brown hair and blue eyes, could have melted many a detective’s steel heart, but the surprise and fear twisting her face as she awakened robbed her of her beauty. The ysalamiri made me feel as if I was seeing in black and white, so for her it must have seemed as if she was blind.

When I saw her eyes flicker open, I looked back at Luke and nodded as if I’d received a telepathic message from him. “Yes, I will see what I can find out. Give her a moment to recover.”

Luke stared at me for a second, then impatiently flicked a hand in my direction.

I smiled. Quick study. Let’s hope she isn’t.

I squatted down next to the chair in which we had bound her. “Forgive me for having to restrain you like this. I wish I could make things more pleasant, but he’s rather insistent. I know you’re feeling odd right now because you have lost the use of certain senses you consider part of you. He has removed your access to them to make it easier for me to probe your mind, but I know how unpleasant that will be for you.”

She shook her head adamantly. “I will not betray my people.”

Her words came stiff and pronounced slightly oddly. Precise, that’s it. It almost seemed as if she were speaking with the same very proper diction my grandfather used. It was a datapoint—not much of one, but a point nonetheless.

“No, of course, you don’t want to do that. I don’t want you to do that, but we have to find the Invidious, and find it quickly. Leonia Tavira has to be stopped … from being able to harm anyone else.” I’d almost ended my sentence at the word stopped, but I caught a momentary hesitation of her breath, which made me add the extra phrase. “We really don’t want to see her hurt anyone else.”

“You can’t stop her.”

I glanced back at Luke, then turned to her. “He says that just because you could not stop her, does not mean we cannot. Sorry, he always makes things sound so dire, but the fact is, he’s right. I’ve been here for months, on many operations where you or another of your brethren were on the Invidious, and you never detected me. Why not? Because he was shielding me. You know you looked, you know you tried, but it wasn’t until this evening, when we wanted to trap you, that I revealed myself enough to let you find me. And you never even detected him.”

I stood and walked over to confer with Luke, letting her mull over what I’d said. I raised a finger to my lips to keep Luke silent, but frowned to get him to give me that expression. When he did look at me angrily, I recoiled. “But you can’t be so cruel. To remove her access to the Force forever isn’t going to do her or us any good. Sure, it might teach her a lesson, but so would having a bantha trample her. I don’t think she should be made an example of. It won’t make the others more tractable.”

Luke really got into his part, jabbing me hard in the chest with two fingers. I did an about face, rubbing my chest, and returned to Red’s side. “I really do think I can get him to unblock your access to the Force, I really do. You just need to tell us where Tavira keeps the Invidious. I mean, we already know you manage to keep it hidden—you’re very good at that stuff, hiding and all.”

“No, I cannot tell you. None of us will betray our people.”

I sighed and rested a hand on her shoulder. “Well, I know you’re thinking about things from your point of view, and maybe even thinking about them from Tavira’s point of view. That Star Destroyer is very powerful, and for you to be working with her, you’ve got to be afraid she’s going to turn it on your people if you betray her. I understand that. It’s crystal clear.”

I let my voice drop a bit in tone and volume as I leaned forward. “Thing of it is this, though: you didn’t get me. You didn’t get him. Tavira, when she doesn’t hear that you succeeded, will see you as having failed. And you know her—failure isn’t an accident, it’s a conspiracy. The way I see it, and I know her almost as well as you do, she’ll see herself as betrayed at this point and act. What you have to ask yourself is this: do you want to be the cause of her killing all your people, or do you want to let the guys who defeated you take their run at Tavira?”