Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 07_ Conviction - Aaron Allston [25]
This was all so obvious that only a crazy person would step blithely into the trap. Did these impostors think Valin and Jysella were crazy? Or of diminished mental capacity? It was insulting.
Or maybe he and his sister were expected to refuse the bait because it was so obvious—but if so, what then? Valin’s thoughts began to circle ever more tightly as he sought to anticipate his enemies’ anticipation of his anticipation.
Kam gave Valin a close look. “Are you all right? I felt a flash of … something.”
“Disgust.” Valin positioned his fork underneath Kam’s nose. “Here, smell this.”
“That’s all right.”
“No, really. I think it’s canned and about a million years old.” He moved the fork under Jysella’s nose. “Smell.”
She grimaced at him. “Don’t do this to me. He’s always doing this to me.”
Valin returned the fork to his plate. “A mission like that doesn’t call for two Jedi Knights. One Jedi Knight and a Kowakian monkey-lizard, maybe.”
“That’s the point.” Jysella kept her face straight. “I’m the Jedi Knight. You’re the monkey-lizard.”
Valin made a shooing gesture at her. “Send her to Corellia. Put me in charge of security at some bathing-suit charity function.”
Jysella grinned at him. “Sure. A Gamorrean charity bathing-suit function.”
Valin shuddered.
“Good point.” Kam rose. “Jysella, two hours. Valin, I’ll find something else for you to do.” He wandered to the next table, doubtless to impose a series of tasks on the Jedi Knights and apprentices there.
Valin relaxed, just a little.
He and his sister had passed another test. Jysella would go on her undemanding Corellian run and come back. The two of them would be that much more trusted, that much closer to finding their escape vector off this planet … and on to Nam Chorios.
HWEG SHUL, NAM CHORIOS
BEN DECIDED THAT HE’D NEVER SEEN A TOWN QUITE LIKE HWEG SHUL.
Not that he’d seen much more than a few meters of it at a time. The driving wind and the dust storm that blanketed the town made any comprehensive overview impossible, and the intense cold, threatening to strip heat right out of his body despite his winter cloak and insulated clothes, made him happy to scurry with Luke and Vestara from sheltered spot to sheltered spot without much time for sightseeing.
But Ben did have time to see the disparity of architecture in the town.
The majority of dwellings and businesses were built on stilts or pilings—some wood, mostly permacrete, a few of durasteel coated in corrosion-resistant ceramics. These stilts tended to be a meter and a half to two meters high, the buildings themselves permacrete or duraplast domes of various colors, their foundations, resting atop the stilts, of sand-scoured permacrete. A meter up on the stilts, on most buildings, he could see bright glow rod modules, shining even at high noon—a measure against drochs, he assumed.
The dome shapes were highly wind-resistant, but their undersides, the flat permacrete foundations, were not. An occasional wind at the correct angle and speed would sweep under these elevated buildings, making lifting surfaces of the foundations. They did not actually lift off their stilts; they were too firmly attached for that. But the contact caused a succession of shuddering booms as the wind hit underside after underside in turn. It sounded like a city being strafed.
These, his father had told him, were the Newcomers’ buildings.
Less numerous and far older were the dwellings and businesses of the Oldtimers. Often built with angled walls or even with trapezoidal shapes to keep the winds from hammering them constantly at right angles,