Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 06_ Vortex - Denning Troy [180]
Allana drew a big breath, then called on the Force the way her mother had taught her the last time they had rendezvoused on Shedu Maad.
“Hey!” she yelled.
Five sets of startled eyes turned to look at her. When a quick check with the glow rod revealed that no one was missing any actual limbs, Allana stepped into the middle of the group and looked up at them.
“We can work this out.”
The Barabels looked doubtful and Bazel grumbled that he wasn’t going to miss the thawing, but when Allana locked gazes with Tesar, the Barabel reluctantly thumped his newly shortened tail against the filthy permacrete.
“How?” he asked.
“You’re just worried that Barv and I will tell someone about your nest, right?” she asked. “Because you have to know we’re not going to sneak down here to try to eat your eggs.”
The Barabels exchanged glances, studied Bazel doubtfully for a moment, then finally seemed to come to a decision.
“Nobody is going to eat our eggz,” Wilyem declared. He shot a warning glare at Bazel. “This one will be here to make sure that never happenz.”
“That’s what I thought,” Allana said. When a queen sees progress, she must be quick to build on it—that’s what her mother always said about sponsoring negotiations. “So we’ve just got the secret to deal with. What if we trade?”
“Trade?” Dordi asked. “Trade what?”
“Secrets,” Allana replied. “I’ll tell you guys a big secret. That way, Barv and I will never say anything about your nest to anyone—because then you could tell everyone my secret.”
The Barabels glanced at one another for a moment, then Zal said, “This is a very big secret? As big as our nest?”
Allana smiled. “Trust me, it is. If you ever reveal it, I’m dead.”
“Dead?” Tesar repeated.
“Really dead,” Allana said. “Within a year, for sure.”
The Barabels didn’t even have to look at one another. They simply nodded, and Dordi said, “Dead is big enough.”
“Good.” Allana turned to Bazel. “Barv, are you in?”
Bazel swore on his ancestors’ tusks that he would never reveal anything he learned in that room, even to himself. The Barabels seemed to get the general idea and nodded.
“Okay, then, here goes.” Allana knew this was the biggest risk she had ever taken, but her grandpa always said that when the table looked right, you couldn’t be afraid to shove in all your chips and hope. “My name isn’t Amelia, and I’m not really a war orphan—at least not in the usual way …”
She explained her situation to the Barabels in its entirety, telling them that she was really the daughter of Jacen Solo and Queen Mother Tenel Ka.
A few minutes later, she, Bazel, and Anji were riding a lift tube up to the Jedi Temple’s infirmary level. They all smelled like something a dianoga had spit up, and Allana was fairly certain that they would both end up being thoroughly disinfected before they made it off the level. She just hoped she would be able to stall long enough to see Valin and Jysell Horn emerge from carbonite.
As they ascended, Bazel asked if her name really wasn’t Amelia?
“No, Barv, I told you—it’s Allana Solo,” she said. “But you can never tell anyone. You have to call me Amelia.”
He promised that he would, then asked whether the Solos knew her secret.
“Of course they know,” she said. “They’re part of it.”
Bazel wanted to know if he could tell them.
“Barv!” she said. “No one! You can’t even tell Yaqeel—not about anything that happened down there!”
Down where? Bazel asked.
Allana punched him in the knee, then the lift opened and they stepped out onto the infirmary level. There was already a small group gathered in a room at the end of the corridor, with Master Horn and his wife, Mirax, standing opposite each other, each next to a hovergurney bearing the carbonite pods with their frozen children. Master Cilghal and her assistant Tekli were standing between the two pods, already fiddling with the controls. Allana’s grandparents were waiting at the edges of the room,