Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 07_ Conviction - Aaron Allston [36]
“Ah.” Ben’s voice became cheerful. “Then it’s my new best friend. I want to bathe in it.”
Moments later, Sel appeared, turning the corner a block up the darkened, almost empty street. Over her jumpsuit were a fur-lined jacket and heavy boots in cu-pa hide dyed bright yellow, plus a heavy tan hooded cloak. Her features were largely hidden by a woolen veil and goggles, but she waved as she approached. “Were you outside for that?”
Luke nodded. “I see some things haven’t changed.”
Sel reached them, did not break stride, moved past, leading them onward. “Yes. Some things are eternal.”
Luke, Ben, and Vestara caught up to her, Luke falling in place to her left. “So, we have permission to see this mnemotherapy being performed?”
“Yes. The Listener-Master Taru will conduct.”
“Did the Oldtimer weapons emplacements have any sensor data that might be relevant?”
Sel nodded. “Two nights ago, someone made an adroit atmospheric insertion in a craft the size of a small shuttle. The pilot had a good fix on the Golan platforms around the planet, limiting their ability to fire on it—which they wouldn’t anyway, since it was arriving, not departing—or to get useful sensor data. The ground weapons emplacement at Bleak Point got a fuzzy image of it. The operator says it was roughly spherical, but larger than a TIE fighter.”
“Bleak Point.” Despite himself, Luke was drawn into his memories for a moment. Bleak Point was where his first trip to Nam Chorios had ended—where he’d been taken after crash-landing and persuading the tsils to destroy the craft carrying the Death Seed offworld, where he’d been reunited with Leia.
Where he’d seen Callista for the last time, waving her a farewell he did not know would be a final one. Where he’d taken a giant step toward abandonment of unhealthy attachment in his life.
For years afterward, he’d borne a diminishing sadness resulting from that good-bye, but had been certain it had been the right thing to do. Now, recently, doubts had arisen to plague him. If he had gone to her then, somehow persuaded her to leave Nam Chorios, persuaded her to follow some other road in her quest to regain her ability to connect with the Force, might she have avoided the Maw? Might she have escaped the fate that awaited her with Abeloth?
“We’re here.” Sel stopped and gestured for the others to enter a long, low, darkened Oldtimer building.
Luke snapped out of his reverie, glancing at Ben and Vestara to make sure they had not noticed his distraction. They appeared not to have. Luke followed Sel through the outer door.
In this place, there was an anteroom but no inner door. Instead, the doorway out of the antechamber was blanketed by heavy folds of woolen cloth, another insulating layer between the house interior and the subfreezing outer air.
Sel parted the blankets and led them into a chamber that might have been another pub’s taproom; its tables were of similar make and antiquity. But some of them had thin, uneven bed-mats on them, and folded blankets. There were a few chairs, and also a couple of rolling racks holding bins of old-fashioned examination instruments—directional glow rods, tongs, galvanic response meters, encephaloscanners, sonic probes. There was only one person in the chamber, an elderly man seated on one of the chairs; he waved at Sel, then went back to reading a flimsi printout.
Sel took them through a curtained, round-topped entryway at the back of the chamber. It led to a flight of stairs that looked as though they’d been cut long before from the living rock beneath Hweg Shul. Sel headed down.
Luke hesitated for just a moment. He had bad memories of stone steps leading into darkness on Nam Chorios. Leia’s memories, he knew, were even worse. But he could feel none of the consumption and waste of Force energy, as if the Force itself were rotting in a swamp, that had characterized the nests of drochs that had given