Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 07_ Conviction - Aaron Allston [112]
“I’ll … keep my eyes open for any other sign of that.”
“Please.”
There was a musical beep from Corran’s pouch, a minor alert tone from his datapad. He pulled it out and flipped it open.
The words on the screen sent a little chill through him. “There’s news. But it’s a problem the Jedi and the Chief of State’s office have decided not to intervene in.”
“What is it?”
“The sentence is in for Tahiri Veila.” He snapped the device closed, put it back in its pouch. He lifted his gaze to meet Saba’s. “It’s to be death.”
KESLA VEIN PUMPING STATION, NAM CHORIOS
Vestara was the first to emerge, peering out from beneath the partially raised hatch to make sure no one was in sight outside, then raising the hatch and slipping out onto the dusty enclosure within the town limits of Kesla Vein. The woven durasteel-netting fence around the enclosure seemed intact—at least as intact as she and her companions had left it. Late-afternoon winds still swirled dust throughout the enclosure and beyond, and the wind and chill of the air hit her like an unexpected plunge into an icy stream.
Ben was out next, then Luke, who lowered the metal hatch and spun the heavy metal ring atop it to seal it. He gave the teenagers a look that was half rueful and half encouraging. “One more down.”
Ben’s own expression was more exasperated. “One more experienced. Dad, if I never see another underground water pumping station or one more droch, I’ll be happy.”
Vestara patted her increasingly voluminous backpack. “We still have plenty of cans of droch spray.”
“Yeah, but do we have any bottles of brain bleach?”
Luke grinned and led the way to the hole they’d cut in the fence. Keeping to back alleys where possible, they made their way through the small town to its border and out onto the crystalline sands beyond, to the hill that lay between town and the spot where they’d hidden their stolen speeder.
Kesla Vein had been an easy site to investigate. Its pumping station was completely automated, and was visited for maintenance and diagnostics only occasionally by the Oldtimer workers who managed it. There had been no sign of encampment by Abeloth or any Theran Listeners. There had been some drochs, but chiefly of the tiny variety.
On their walk back to the speeder, Vestara checked her comlink, set to receive the intermittent locator pulse broadcast by the vehicle. It came about a minute into their walk, just a couple of degrees off the course they had taken. They corrected and kept going. A few minutes later the hill, somewhat obscured by a cloud of dust flowing past like a river, came within sight. They skirted its north face and then descended into the cleft where they’d left the speeder. Visibility was better in this ravine; dust no longer driven by the wind drifted down like a thin haze, but it was nowhere near as bad as the dust clouds on the unsheltered surface above.
The speeder was still where they’d left it, some fifty meters away when they rounded a bend. But on the ridge above it, perhaps twenty meters up, was a blue airspeeder, a wide-bodied model designed for carrying entire families or a pilot and a fair amount of cargo. It was not running, and had been set down on the lip of the ravine, perhaps a meter of its front end protruding over empty air. A line descended from the winch on the front of the speeder down to within four meters of the ravine floor.
Yet there was no sign of anyone about. Ben glanced in all directions and put his hand on the hilt of his lightsaber, which was hung out of sight at the back of his belt. “Not good.”
Vestara pulled her lightsaber from its clip. With some reluctance, she opened herself to the Force—reluctance because the usual result on Nam Chorios, a paranoid sense of being watched by hundreds of aloof observers, did not give her an improved understanding of her surroundings or the probable