Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 06_ Vortex - Denning Troy [103]
Luke crossed to the portmaster’s desk and cleared his throat.
The Pydyrian barely raised his head. “You would be Luke Skywalker? The Luke Skywalker?”
“That’s right,” Luke said. Although his face might not be well known on Pydyr, his name most certainly was. Decades earlier, he and Leia had helped free the Almanian system from the tyrant warlord who had been on the verge of pushing the Pydyrian species into extinction. “I’m looking for my wife’s star yacht, the Jade Shadow.”
The portmaster nodded. “So you have said. As I told you over the comm, nothing by that name has landed here.” He used a slender hand with three long fingers to tap a command into a datapad on his desk, then turned the screen toward Luke. “Please look. You have just killed yourself for nothing.”
“I doubt that.” Luke peered down and found the spaceport traffic log on the screen. Though there were only fifty entries on the first screen, they went back nearly a month, and none of them was a Horizon-class space yacht. “The Shadow may not have landed in your spaceport, but I’ve already found all the evidence I need to prove the thief landed on Pydyr.”
“As you walked across the landing pad?” the portmaster scoffed. He rocked back on his haunches and looked Luke directly in the eye. “You Jedi are good.”
“Not that good,” Luke said. He put a touch of Force behind his words, using it to plant the lie he intended to tell more deeply in the portmaster’s mind. “You see, she’s the carrier.”
“The carrier?”
Luke pointed at the portmaster’s sore-covered face. “Of the Weeping Pox,” he said, making up his own name for the illusory disease. As much as he disliked lying, it was sometimes a necessity for any Jedi—and right now, his best option was to use the illusion, not fight it. “The thief is immune to this disease herself, but she’s the one spreading it.”
“Spreading it?” the comm officer echoed, coming alert. “Someone is causing this plague intentionally?”
“We don’t know her motivations,” Luke said, turning to the comm officer. “Perhaps she’s just frightened. But we need to stop her.”
The comm officer’s eyes shrank to angry beads. “You should have stopped her before Pydyr.”
“We haven’t had much cooperation.” Luke spread his hands. “I’m afraid she’s proven very adept at persuading people to hide her.”
The comm officer’s gaze shifted toward the portmaster, either urging his superior to reveal what they knew—or seeking permission to do it himself.
“And that’s a very unfortunate thing,” Luke continued. “Because the longer it takes us to get her into a lab, the more beings will die.”
“The lab?” the comm officer asked. “You think you can cure this?”
“That’s what the scientists tell me,” Luke replied. “If they can figure out why she’s immune, they can replicate it.”
The officer’s eyes went back to the portmaster. “Najee, we must tell him.”
“You already have, you fool,” the portmaster answered.
“And he did the right thing.” Luke fixed his gaze on the portmaster—Najee—and put an edge in his voice. “It’s not just Pydyrian lives that are at stake. Where will I find her?”
Najee shrugged. “Who can know? We tracked her ship to the … to the seashore, well outside the city.”
“Near a certain temple,” Luke suggested. He watched the Pydyrian’s expression sink and knew that he had guessed correctly—that he had been guessing correctly since the Emiax entered the Almanian system. Abeloth had come here to find the Fallanassi, a secretive order of women who were also known as Adepts of the White Current. “Najee, I know that the Fallanassi make their home here, and I have every reason to suspect the thief intends to hide among them. If I’m correct, their lives are in great danger.”
“You are correct,” the comm officer interrupted. “The Jade Shadow approached under its own transponder code and—”
“Sanar!” Najee hissed. “The High Lady asked us not to speak of this.”
“You remain silent if you wish.” Sanar